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The epic of the Irish nation state : history and genre in James Joyce's Ulysses

This study examines Ulysses as a response to the Irish Literary Revival's expectation that a native epic would crown Ireland's literary achievements and to the country's imminent independence under the Sinn Fein. / Ulysses thematizes the compositional imperatives which Virgil's Aeneid made canonical for the national epic. This perspective reconfigures the legacy of Stephen Dedalus' heroic stance in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Arthur Griffith's arguments in The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland (1904) through which Sinn Fein won national prominence. / Through Stephen's encounter with Leopold Bloom, Ulysses substitutes its own account of the origin and future of the modern Irish polity. The "Telemachiad" redefines Stephen the epic poet as an epic character. Bloom's family history, including the characterization of Milly, supplants Griffith's founding myth with a more comprehensive historical vision. Through this concern with the genre and history, Ulysses reconstitutes the national epic's traditional discursive domain.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.39443
Date January 1992
CreatorsUngar, Andras
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageDoctor of Philosophy (Department of English.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 001317719, proquestno: NN80443, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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