| dc.description.abstract | Nationalism saw a tremendous rise in Ireland during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, culminating in the Easter Rising and the formation of the Irish Free State. James Joyce's reading and interpretation of historical texts and events before and up to his lifetime were inherently influenced by nationalism. The development of Irish nationalism in its various forms is critical to any comprehensive understanding of Joyce's engagement with history. Joyce was ultimately skeptical of nationalist interpretations of history, considering them skewed, inaccurate, and at times deleterious to Ireland. This skepticism aligned with his general wariness of nationalism itself. Although he was critical of the various strains of nationalism during his lifetime, his writings demonstrate both a reprimand and an interpolation, both intentional and unwitting, of nationalist historiography. The Citizen of the Cyclops episode in Ulysses exemplifies some of the worst aspects of Irish nationalism, yet he is just one of the several characters in Joyce's work who demonstrate a tainted understanding of Irish history. The Gaelic-Catholic sectarian cultural nationalism of the likes of Michael Cusack and David Patrick D. P. Moran, the optimistic political republican nationalism of Arthur Griffith, and the socialist nationalism of James Connolly and Roger Casement are just some of the strains of Irish nationalism prevalent in Joyce's time, yet they represent some of the most prominent manifestations that Joyce engages. Drawing from a number of historiographical and theoretical methodologies and analyzing the deluge of historical materials during this time, I interrogate these nationalist historiographies as evident in Joyce's work. The Great Famine, Laudabiliter, the 1798 Rebellion, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the Phoenix Park Murders, the Second Boer War, the Brehon laws, the Irish Revival, the Gaelic League, Zionism, and seventeenth-through-twentieth century inter-European migration are just some of the historical topics and events examined in my dissertation. Employing a broadly subaltern historiographical critique derived from the work of scholars such as David Lloyd and Seamus Deane, as well as engaging distinguished Joycean scholars such as Emer Nolan, James Fairhall, Andrew Gibson, Robert Spoo, and Anne Fogarty, this study examines the multifaceted and even frustrating historiography in Joyce's work, primarily though not exclusively Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and his various articles and lectures from his early life collected in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. | en |
