Joyce’s Northern Ireland

Abstract

My purpose is to study the fiction of James Joyce written prior to the partition of Ireland — Dubliners through to Ulysses — in order to discover his incisive and subtle witness to northern and southern Ireland’s progressive polarization. Joyce’s first forty years, from 1882 to 1922, intersected with the late colonial Irish period that culminated in the Irish Free State and the nascent British province of Northern Ireland. Ulysses, his second novel, ventured forth to find its public at precisely the same time as the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, debated, and ratified. Joyce was fully aware of how the deep familial ties and divisions slivering Ireland remained both strong and far from practical resolution. Close study of Joyce’s Northern Ireland reveals a tenuous, ancient general Irish identity on the brink of its destruction.