A Stanford University professor who sued James Joyce‘s estate for the right to quote excerpts from FINNEGANS WAKE and letters between the author and his daughter will be able to use the material after agreeing to settle the case, reports the AP. As part of an agreement reached this week, the Joyce estate said it would not sue scholar Carol Schloss for copyright infringement if the books, manuscripts and other documents she wants to cite both in print and on a Web site were only made available in the United States. “Our client got exactly what she asked for in her complaint, and more,” said Anthony Falzone, who directs the Fair Use Project at Stanford’s Law School.
The dispute involved Shloss’ research for LUCIA JOYCE: TO DANCE IN THEIR WAKE, a 2003 book in which she suggested that James Joyce’s mentally ill daughter was the muse behind FINNEGANS WAKE. To support her theory, Shloss relied on Lucia Joyce‘s medical records, European archives that contained records on her life and Joyce’s papers in university collections. The estate challenged Schloss’ authority to quote or footnote the material, however, saying she would be infringing on its ownership of Joyce’s image.
“When we are squeezed between the aggression of literary estates and the apprehensions of publishers, something very important is lost,” Schloss said in a statement. “I fought not just for Lucia and Joyce, whose words had to be taken out of my book, but for the freedom to consider what happened to them and for the freedom of others to respond to my ideas.”