ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses works by two major twentieth-century writers: the Irish novelist James Joyce and the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. In Joyce's fiction and Walcott's poetry, the very idea of temporal linearity is called into question. As a result, every event becomes, for them, a much more ambiguous, less stable, less determinate, and less conclusive affair than it might otherwise appear. The book describes a relationship is traced between the role played by time in Ulysses and what is here called Joyce's polytheism, that is, his sense of the world as inhabited by a multiplicity of centres of meaning or 'gods'. It explores the nonlinear temporality of Finnegans Wake is shown to be closely connected with the novel's highly idiosyncratic treatment of life, death, and immortality.
