James Joyce and the Irish Revolution
The Easter Rising as Modern Event
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- $47.99
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- $47.99
Publisher Description
A provocative history of Ulysses and the Easter Rising as harbingers of decolonization.
When revolutionaries seized Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising, they looked back to unrequited pasts to point the way toward radical futures—transforming the Celtic Twilight into the electric light of modern Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. For Luke Gibbons, the short-lived rebellion converted the Irish renaissance into the beginning of a global decolonial movement. James Joyce and the Irish Revolution maps connections between modernists and radicals, tracing not only Joyce’s projection of Ireland onto the world stage, but also how revolutionary leaders like Ernie O’Malley turned to Ulysses to make sense of their shattered worlds. Coinciding with the centenary of both Ulysses and Irish independence, this book challenges received narratives about the rebellion and the novel that left Ireland changed, changed utterly.
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"The formal breakthroughs in Ulysses lie in its capturing forces that were eddying in Irish society" in 1904, contends Gibbons (Joyce's Ghosts), an Irish studies professor at Maynooth University, Ireland, in this abstruse study. Gibbons examines how the aesthetic innovations in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) reflect the political turmoil of Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence (1919–1921), arguing that the failure of English politicians and generals to see the warning signs leading up to the Rising inspired Joyce to include a gratuitous level of detail in his novel based on the belief that it's impossible to distinguish between what is and isn't important from the perspective of the present. Some arguments stretch credulity, as when Gibbons suggests Joyce's "dislocated narratives" in which multiple plots play out simultaneously resemble the Irish Volunteers' tactic of splitting up and advancing through Dublin in "irregular zigzag patterns to prevent" becoming easy shelling targets during the Rising. The results are hit or miss, with some eye-opening insights dragged down by dubious connections and opaque prose ("Time and space were recast themselves as the city opened itself up... to transverse pathways, relating disparate spaces through ‘connections that intensify differences' "). Only Joyce scholars need apply. Photos.
