Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in "Ulysses".(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in "Ulysses". By Andrew Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. viii + 306 pages.

The critical examination of James Joyce's Ulysses proceeds in ever wider circles, from close scrutiny of the text to broader contexts of culture and history. Original criticism was tied tightly to the text, a hunt for mythic parallels and symbols within the encyclopedic novel; poststructuralism found a dense and writerly text particularly congenial. Further studies--feminism and gender, material culture, colonialism and Irish nationalism--placed the novel in wider play with forces around and beyond the words on the page. Andrew Gibson's perceptive work continues with this trajectory by closely examining Ulysses and its concern with Irish culture "as shaped and determined by English cultural nationalism" particularly that nationalism of the period 1880 until 1913, when, at late Empire, England was most concerned with projecting a strong image (13). He does so by careful and subtle reading of the pressures and influences of a dominant British culture on the creation and expression of Joyce's text, thus engaging the wider cultural view while at the same time maintaining the same close reading that can be found in earlier Joyce criticism. Gibson deftly combines many of these threads--notably Nationalism, colonialism, and cultural commodity--in subtle readings to offer some new understanding of Joyce's liberation from these issues as what constitutes his revenge.

Ulysses, as a complex novel, presents two problems to any critical treatment. First, its high degree of detail assures that it will make specific and exact references to cultural artifacts, values, and historical postures, these all leading to the possibility of an intelligent reading of the larger issues Gibson examines. However, its intense stylistic...

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