Joyce's Revenge History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Ulysses [Hardcover]

This eminently learned book transforms our understanding of Joyce'sUlyssesby placing the novel firmly in the historical context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. Gibson argues thatUlyssesis a great work of liberation that also takes a complex form of revenge on the colonizer's culture.

Introduction
1. `Patiens Ingemiscit': Stephen Dedalus, Ireland and History
2. `Only A Foreigner Would Do': Leopold Bloom, Ireland and Jews
3. `Gentle Will is Being Roughly Handled': Scylla and Charybdis
4. `A Look Around': Wandering Rocks
5. `History, All That': Sirens , Cyclops
6. `Waking Up in Ireland': Nausicaa
7. `An Irish Bull in an English Chinashop': Oxen of the Sun
8. `Strangers in My House, Bad Manners to Them!': Circe
9. `Mingle Mangle or Gallimaufry': Eumaeus
10. `An Aberration of the Light of Reason': Ithaca
11. `The End of All Resistance': Penenlope
Bibliography
Index

This thought-provoking study makes a significant and highly original contribution to scholarship onUlysses.... A particular strength of this book is the way in which it seeks to interpret the aesthetic ofUlyssesas a whole, rather than focusing on a few key features or episodes. --Times LiterarySupplement

Joyce's Revengemakes a significant and distinctive contribution to Joyce studies, and it deserves a wide readership.... The author is impressively well read in English and Irish cultural history, and the book identifies and explores an aspect of this history about which most Joyceans, perhaps, know less than they might.... The sheer number of distinct contexts that Gibson has developed forUlysses, all subsumed by the controlling theme of English nationalism, is extremely impressive. Among the books on Joyce I've studied recently this is perhaps the most absorbing 'rel£*