IT was a lovely Joycean moment. Joyce scholars yesterday handed over grubby banknotes with Joyce's portrait on them to purchase copies of a book on their literary hero who in life was a tenor, in death commemorated on a tenner.

The book, James Joyce's Ireland, was written by David Pierce who offered signed copies at a knock down price at the fourth day of the James Joyce Annual Summer School at Newman College in Dublin.

Pierce, principal lecturer in English at the University College of Ripon and York St John in York, is also the author of Yeats's World Ireland, England And The Poetic Imagination.

In his lecture, "Yeats and Joyce A Daintical Pair of Accomplasses!", Pierce confessed that while he had spent a long time exploring the links between the two writers, he never felt "yes I've got it". "It seems like parallel lines that never meet."

Pierce outlined Joyce's literary debt to Yeat writing in the 1890s, the meetings and correspondence between the two men, Joyce's attacks on Yeats's work and Yeats's protective attitude to Joyce.

Evoking memories of his childhood summers spent on his grandparents' farm in Liscannor, Co Clare, Pierce explained how his "personal route into" Joyce and Yeats came from "inside the culture".

He said his book on Joyce was "celebratory" while his book on Yeats was "more suspicious". It placed Yeats in an "English context" which had often been neglected. He contrasted the life of Yeats, who mingled in fashionable upper middle class English circles and was married to a middle class Englishwoman, with Joyce, whose work was influenced by his wife, an uneducated woman from the west of Ireland. "One looked west while the other looked east," he said.

While researching Yeats in September 1993, Pierce said he came across a letter from his wife, George Yeats, in Dublin written to her husband living in England in February 1923. In the letter, George advised her husband that for the sake of his reputation he should not consider cutting his links with Ireland.

Pierce said that the discovery of this manuscript altered his perception of Yeats.

"I wanted to go and tell everyone but then I thought this is a secret, then I thought this will skew the view we have of Yeats. George Yeats had her antennae out, she knew the Republican view and was aware of the difficulty for Yeats if he had decided to return to England," he said.

It was doubtful, said Pierce, that Yeats would have received the Nobel Prize for Literature in November 1923 had he remained in England. Yet he admired the fact that Yeats's "incredibly moving" poetry conveyed the mood of the Civil War period in Ireland despite the fact that Yeats was physically detached from it.

In the second morning session Pierce introduced Geert Lernout, the director of the James Joyce Centre in Antwerp which he described as "one of the whirlpools' of activities in Joyce studies".

Lernout, author of The French Joyce and a book in Dutch called James Joyce Writer, gave a talk on "James Joyce as a Reader", which both explored how reading was a pervasive thematic concern in Joyce's work and examined Joyce's own reading habits during the 17 years he spent working on his last book, Finnegans Wake.

Lernout concentrated on the "by and large unexplored field" of Joyce's 60 Finnegans Wake notebooks which genetic criticism has explored. He outlined the important contribution that close study of these notebooks could make to several different schools of literary criticism.

Genetic critics, he explained, are not interested in the writer as a person they want to see the writer precisely in his capacity as a writer. "A piece of genetic criticism is not a whodunit but a how did he or she do it," he said.

Genetic scholars draw on working procedures and "avant text" materials such as drafts, schemes, manuscripts and page proofs as well as diaries, letters and witness accounts, to glean information about the work that is inaccessible by other means.

Lernout gave many examples of the low culture references in one notebook for Finnegans Wake which were gleaned from The Irish Times which Joyce read while living in Paris.