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On the fifth page of Joyce's 1917 subject notebook, we find a list of authors
and titles from English literature that has not been completely transcribed. 12
Once fully understood, the list is discovered to be a chronologically backwards
selection (from the nineteenth to the fourteenth century) of authors and titles
from Edmund Gosse's A Short History of Modern English Literature. 13 This work also
proved useful for the linguistic evolution of the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, as
is clear from a letter by Joyce on that episode, in which he refers to "a choppy
Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton-Browne." 14 He gets this verdict from Gosse,
who likens Thomas Browne to Robert Burton, referring to the former's "abrupt
transitions," and claiming that there is "muchmore that is his own, in relation
to parts adapted from the ancients, than in Burton." 15 Let us examine Joyce's list
of notes from this book exactly as it is written:

Peacock (Thomas Love): Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey
Galt (John): Annals of the Parish
Shelley (Mrs): Frankenstein
Ferrier (Miss): Marriage
Brunton (Mary): Selfcontrol, Discipline
Hallam (Henry): View of Middle Ages
Crabbe (Geo): Borough
(Thos): Fudge Family in Paris
Burney (Frances): Evelina, Cecilia
Edgeworth (Maria): Castle Rackrent
Burke: Letter to a Noble Lord
Sterne: Tristram Shandy

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Berkeley: Siris: Hylas & Philonous
Mandeville: Fable of the Bees
Pope: Essay on Criticism
Southerne: Comedies
Wycherley: Plain Dealer
Temple Sir William
Crashaw (Richard): Vaughan
Browne: Burton
Fuller (Holy War) wit
Carew (Thos) coarse
Donne ( John): Green (Robert)
Tallis: Giles Farnaby
Sidney: Wilson (Art of Rhetoric)
Lyly: Sir Thomas Wyatt: Skelton
Will. Dunbar: Ballad to Our Lady, Uplands Mouse & Burgess Mouse
James I: The King's Quair
Langland: Harrowing of Hell, Piers Plowman

With only one exception (see below), all of the information on this list appears in
Gosse's book. That the work by Gosse is Joyce's source, and not George Saints-
bury's A Short History of English Literature, which also appears to have been among
the sources for "Oxen of the Sun," 16 is confirmed by the shared misspellings of
the two Scottish poems cited in the third-to-last line: Robert Henryson's "Tale of
the Upland Mouse and the Burgess Mouse" and William Dunbar's "A Ballad of
Our Lady." 17 Joycedid not catch the errors, and alsointroduced an interpolation
of his own, "Giles Farnaby," of whom he must have been remindedby Gosse's
mention of Farnaby's predecessor, the composer Thomas Tallis. 18 Further sup-
port for the source is found in Joyce's uniquenotes "Fuller (Holy War) wit/Carew
(Thos) coarse," which are taken straight from Gosse:

Carew invented a species of love-poetry which exactly suited the temper of the time.
It was a continuation of the old Elizabethan pastoral, but more personal, more ar-
dent, more coarse, and more virile ... [Fuller's] activitybetween 1639, when he pub-
lished the Holy War, and 1661, when he died, was prodigious … Without endorsing
the extravagant praise of Coleridge, we must acknowledge that the wit of Fuller was
amazing, if he produced too many examples of it in forms a little too desultory for
modern tastes. 19

These unique errors and details confirm that Joyce's source for this genealogy
of English literature was indeed Gosse, who had been reluctantly persuaded
by Yeats to help Joyce receive a grant in 1915, although he later became more
critical, denouncing the author of Ulysses as "a sort of Marquis de Sade." 20 It is
rather ironic, then, that Gosse's book was used in its composition, when he was
still considered an ally by Joyce. Some of the titles on this list may have been

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known to Joyce only indirectly through such literary histories, having never ac
tually been tracked down, since he customarily compiled bibliographies in his
notebooks that he never used. 21 Other lists, however, do seem to have been of
books intended for purchase, since they contain exact editions with prices, such
as the seven titles in Joyce's early commonplace book, 22 but we do not know if
they were in fact ever bought.

[ 11. ]

Thomas Gaspey, Englische Konversations-Grammatik zum Schul- und Privatunterricht: Schlüs-
sel, 2nd ed., ed. H. Runge (Heidelberg: J. Groos, 1897). The most recent edition of this book
was the fourth edition, which had been published in 1906.

[ 12. ]

James Joyce, "II.i.1. Notebook," Joyce Papers 2002, Department of Manuscripts,
National Library of Ireland, MS 36,639/3, p. 5. This book list was mostly transcribed by Wim
Van Mierlo, "The Subject Notebook: A Nexus in the Composition History of Ulysses—A Pre-
liminary Analysis," Genetic Joyce Studies 7 (2007), 9; Danis Rose (ed.), James Joyce: The Dublin
Ulysses Papers, 6 vols., rev. ed. (East Lansing: House of Breathings, 2012), 3: 23–26. As Rose
demonstrates (3: 25), Van Mierlo's "Up Tails All" for line 37 should instead be "Tallis." Neither
identifies "Vaughan" (line 32), "Browne: Burton" (line 33), which Van Mierlo finds "illegible"
(9), or "Uplands Mouse & Burgess Mouse" (line 40).

[ 13. ]

Edmund Gosse, A Short History of Modern English Literature (London: W. Heinemann,
1897), 331,327–328, 325, 318–319, 295, 291,244, 229, 225, 208, 195, 191,183, 156, 152–153,
146, 135, 97, 89, 86, 64, 80, 67, 57, 51,48, 38, 10. The reverse order of the list may be explained
by the book having been marked as Joyce read, and then the notes recorded as he flipped
backwards through his markings.

[ 14. ]

Letters of James Joyce, 3 vols., ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (New York:
Viking Press, 1957–1966), 1: 139.

[ 15. ]

Gosse, A Short History, p. 153.

[ 16. ]

A copy of this book survives from the Trieste library; see Gillespie, James Joyce's Trieste
Library, p. 199.On Joyce and Saintsbury, see also Michael Gooch, "Saintsbury's Anglo-Saxon
in Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun,'" Journal of Modern Literature 22 (1998–1999), 401–404.

[ 17. ]

Gosse, A Short History, pp. 48, 51 respectively.

[ 18. ]

Ibid., p. 89.

[ 19. ]

Ibid., pp. 146, 152–153.

[ 20. ]

Bowker, James Joyce, pp. 220–222, 332.