James Joyce’s Modernist Dublin: Leopold Bloom and the Critical Eye of Ulysses’ Outsider

Abstract

This paper analyses the ways in which Leopold Bloom critiques Dublin city life from his position as the excluded outsider figure of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Consideration will be given to Bloom’s engagement with Dublin and its transformation into a cosmopolitan city, its effect on Irish identity and consciousness, and its relationship with the Catholic Church. Finally, an attempt will be made to situate the ruminations of Ulysses’ hero within a wider context of a distinct Irish modernist movement that, as Ronan McDonald suggests, offered an “outright hostile response to essentialist ideas of […] Ireland or Irishness” as was previously “advanced by the Irish revival at the fin-de-siècle” (178). The prevailing question at hand, then, is this: how does Bloom’s critique of a modernising Dublin, from the position of the cultural outsider, coincide with the wider concerns of an Irish modernist movement that was responding to ideas laid out by their nationalist forebearers?