Conclusion

Abstract

Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature, Dowden’s Mind and Art, and Yeats’s early essays represent critical projects that commemorate and resurrect multiple Shakespeares. Joyce’s use of the Shakespearean text in Ulysses emerges as an engagement with extant criticism that underscores the instability of those binary oppositions upon which Arnold, Dowden, and Yeats predicated their projects. By redeploying anecdote to write a history of representations in which Shakespeare features against a colourful Elizabethan backdrop, Stephen renegotiates the terms that had come to mediate the relationship between the colonial reading subject and its object in Dublin during the Celtic Revival. In this way, Joyce offers Stephen as a response to the crisis of authenticity undermining much contemporary biography and criticism. This Shakespeare marks the point where the discourse of literary history ends and that of the literary as such starts. Therefore, appropriation emerges from Ulysses as a mode of engaging the Shakespearean text that sees the study of the literary reconnected with transformative political and social thought.KeywordsSocial ThoughtBinary OppositionCritical ProjectSpiritual ExerciseHoly GhostThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.