Joyce, James.

24mo (118 x 119mm.), first edition, presentation copy inscribed by Joyce to Ernst Robert Curtius on the half-title in the year after publication ("To | E.R.C. | J.J. | Paris | Xmas '28"), errata slip at the end, original pale green boards printed in dark green, preserved in quarter morocco case and slipcase, spine and hinges repaired, some slight discolouration along the spine

Slocum & Cahoon A24

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A rare presentation copy of the first edition of Joyce's collection of poems, inscribed to "the first critic in Germany to recognize the importance of James Joyce" (T.S. Eliot).

The recipient is the eminent European critic and scholar Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), a keen advocate of Joyce in his native Germany, his principal work being James Joyce und sein Ulysses (Zurich, 1929). Joyce later visited Professor Curtius in Bonn when returning from Denmark in September 1936, hoping to enlist the same degree of support he showed for Ulysses for the author's new work, eventually entitled Finnegans Wake (see Richard Ellmann, ed., Letters of James Joyce, Volume 3, 1966, p.388). Curtius is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, a study of the continuity of European literature from Homer to Goethe, which introduced the concept of the topos in the study of literary commonplaces. 

"No name is more representatively that of the European man of letters, than the name of Ernst Robert Curtius. I have... my own personal debt of gratitude to acknowledge to Curtius, for translating, and introducing, The Waste Land. Curtius was also, I think, the first critic in Germany to recognize the importance of James Joyce..." (T.S. Eliot, Freundesgabe für Ernst Robert Curtius zum 14. April 1956, ed. by Max Rychner and Walter Boehlich, Berne, 1956).