Might an IRA bomb and Joyce’sUlysseshave anything in common? How might an IRA terrorist readUlysses?Or how might a victim of terrorism read the novel, given the opportunity? How can Irish people generally read the novel? Could it be placed at the heart of an Irish national literature? As it has always been seen in some sense as an exception among the masterpieces of patriarchal modernism, could this be because it stage–manages a different kind of intervention within the realities of nation, race, class, even gender? Could its difference make it the representative text, even the...

Posted on walls throughout Ireland in late 1920, at the moment when James Joyce was writing the central episodes ofUlyssesin Paris, this government notice described for potential informers how they might pass important information to British officials (Figure I).¹ The notice’s lively imaginative quality is striking in at least two ways. First, it ingeniously overcomes obstacles by inventing elaborateformalprocedures. The perceived threat — that the mail will be intercepted — is to be circumvented by placing a message in an envelope within an outer envelope, all to be sent to one address and thence forwarded to another. This...

Why did Yeats begin “Easter 1916” as a flaneur poem? It is striking that the opening stanza of “Easter 1916” (let us disregard class) might have been spoken by Leopold Bloom. It is not only the timidity of the political outlook (“For England may keep faith ...?” [CP 179]), the willingness to lapse into the well–worn and prosaic (“When all is done and said” [CP 179]) or even the hint of an advertising slogan in the famous refrain (“A terrible beauty is born” (CP 178]), all of which would have been amply worthy of Bloom’s heart and mind; it...

This photograph of “An Irishman with a lump on his neck” (from theDublin Journal of Medical Science60, 1875)¹ is horrifying not because the man’s deformity is displayed, but because the medical record is cast in the genre of the formal Victorian portrait (Figure 3). The image comes from the pioneering phase of medical photography, before the genre was sufficiently conscious of its utility to emphasize it with connotations of the scientific, by draping the patient or suggesting a stark, decontaminating minimalism. The usefulness of the photograph as medical evidence is at odds with such features as the sitter’s...

First, two scenes from the violence that has occurred since 1969 in Northern Ireland. One is of a young woman, shaven-headed, tarred and feathered, tied to the railings of a church; the other, of a young (male) poet who contemplates her. The tarred and feathered woman, punished for keeping company with a British soldier, stands as one of the most terrifying images of the victim in the Northern Irish fighting. The tar splashed on her skin makes a public spectacle of the moment violence touches the human body. That she is a woman, in an economy of guerrilla violence which,...

“Members of Cumann na mBan, Irishwomen’s Council, waving encouragement to Mountjoy prisoners over top of prison wall”: this, one of the most singular photographs¹ from the archive of the revolutionary years in Dublin, was taken in 1921, when Joyce was working on the closing episodes ofUlysses,including “Penelope,” in Paris (Figure 5). The incident shown occurred outside Mountjoy prison, only a short distance north of Eccles Street, and not far from the house in Phisborough where James Joyce’s mother died in 1903. The photograph epitomizes the ambivalence of the roles played by women both in the revolution itself and...