The Irish Ulysses

Maria Tymoczko

In a radical new reading of Ulysses, the author explores James Joyce's twentieth-century epic as a work of Irish literature, arguing that previous criticism has distorted our understanding of Ulysses by focusing on Joyce's English and Continental literary source alone. Challenging conventional views that Joyce rejected the agendas of Irish cultural nationalists and the Irish literary revival, Tymoczko demonstrates that Ulysses "translates" Irish imagery, myth, genres, and literary modes into English. Her argument is supported by extensive research showing that Joyce was exceptionally well informed about Irish literature through popular culture, his study of the Irish language, and his specialized reading. For the first time, Joyce emerges as an author caught between the English and Irish literary traditions: one who like later post-colonial writers, remakes English-language literature with his own country's rich literary heritage. The author's exacting scholarship makes The Irish "Ulysses" required reading for Joyce scholars, while the theoretical implications of her argument - for such issues as canon formation, the constitutive role of criticism in literary reception, and the interface of literary cultures - will make this an important book for literary theorists. This is a work of scholarship that will change our understanding of one of the century's greatest writers.