Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State

Ungar argues that Joyce’s Ulysses is the Irish national epic - a new national epic written at the moment a new nation, the Irish Free State, was being founded, and one that evades the potential constraints of the epic tradition in order to draw attention instead to what Ungar calls
the change required in Ireland’s too formulaic self-definition.
This is the first full-length study of how Ireland’s accession to political sovereignty figures in the compositional design of Ulysses. Ungar explores the parallel between the program of Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith and the meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, with their dreams of self-expression and continuity. He reads the work as a fable of the new kinds of remembering, relations among ancestors, and
epic rhyming
that are required to imagine a new national entity, and he delineates the features of this fable by carefully wrought close readings of key moments in the novel. In the process he succeeds in uniting an older, eminently distinguished brand of Joyce criticism with the insights of the younger generation of critics. Ungar adds a wealth of valuable new detail to the relation of Joyce’s Ireland and Leopold Bloom’s Hungary, which is central to his argument, and ingeniously links Molly Bloom to Stephen Dedalus’s focus on the issue of national identity.