EXILES

Joyce wrote Exiles after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and before as a continuation of the theme of the return of the thinker, the free artist, to his native land to ""forge the uncreated conscience of his race"". At once meriting and necessitating an analysis of the convoluted and ultimately still confused trends of emotion experienced by the typically Joycian characters, the story of this play concerns the return of a writer, Richard Rowan, to Ireland from abroad; the struggles of his journalist friend, Robert, who is in love with Richard's wife and who is disgusted with the old morality of which he is a product; and the atrophy of Beatrice, who had stimulated Richard's writing through an eight years' correspondence, when she finds she cannot give wholly of herself to anything. Two questions, unanswered, are posed -- how will man break successfully with tradition and still be at peace with his soul? How will he free himself and his fellows from bonds inherent in love and friendship as they are now known? It is a clear, deep thought-provoking play, devoid of the obscurities of Joyce's earlier and later works and only as complex as the problems with which it is concerned.... Appended with an enlightening collection of the author's own notes, Exiles is now being printed in a limited first edition of 1500 copies.