Joyce's Ulysses as national epic: epic mimesis and the political history of the nation state

Abstract

Ungar argues that Joyce's Ulysses is Irish national - a new national written at moment a new nation, Irish Free State, was being founded, and one that evades potential constraints of tradition in order to draw attention instead to what Ungar calls the change required in Ireland's too formulaic self-definition. This is first full-length study of how Ireland's accession to political sovereignty figures in compositional design of Ulysses. Ungar explores parallel between program of Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith and meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, with their dreams of self-expression and continuity. He reads work as a fable of new kinds of remembering, relations among ancestors, and epic rhyming that are required to imagine a new national entity, and he delineates features of this fable by carefully wrought close readings of key moments in novel. In process he succeeds in uniting an older, eminently distinguished brand of Joyce criticism with insights of younger generation of critics. Ungar adds a wealth of valuable new detail to relation of Joyce's Ireland and Leopold Bloom's Hungary, which is central to his argument, and ingeniously links Molly Bloom to Stephen Dedalus's focus on issue of national identity.