Each of James Joyce's major works appeared in a year defined by armed conflict in Ireland or continental Europe: Dubliners in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the same year as the 1916 Easter Rising; Ulysses in February 1922, two months after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a few months before the outbreak of the Irish Civil War; and Finnegans Wake in 1939, as Joyce complained that the German army's westward advances upstaged the novel's release. In Joyce and Militarism, Greg Winston considers these masterworks in light of the longstanding shadows that military culture and ideology cast over the society in which the writer lived and wrote. The first book-length study of its kind, this articulate volume offers original and interesting insights into Joyce's response to the military presence in everything from education and athletics to prostitution and public space.

This book offers an exploration of how Joyce uses militaristic ideologies in dealing with such topics as education, athletics, and family life.

This is the first volume of a two volume work entitled The British Army on Bloomsday. It contains a history of the British Army through 1904 with an emphasis on Ireland and Irish history. Includes extensive, detailed material on commissioned and enlisted life during the Late-Victorian Era (especially for Irish soldiers), the Irish Militia, the armies of the British East India Company, and a description of the British Army of 1904. The book's subject matter is viewed through the lens of James Joyce's Ulysses with multiple references to material in the novel. The book gives the serious Ulysses reader full background information on the military events and characters that appear throughout Joyce's groundbreaking and most popular novel. While this volume focuses on the British Army, the second volume, The British Army in Ulysses, narrows in on the novel. The chapters on Molly Bloom and her father, Major Tweedy, present new findings that will likely provoke controversy among Joyceans.

 This is the second volume of a two-volume work entitled The British Army on Bloomsday. It contains detailed explanations of the military allusions in James Joyce’s groundbreaking novel, Ulysses, as well as an in-depth look at the two principal, fictional military characters: Major Brian Tweedy and his daughter, Marion (Molly Bloom). Also included are chapters on the minor military characters and personages that appear in the novel, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (Tweedy’s old regiment), Gibraltar of the nineteenth century, and the British Army in Ireland on Bloomsday. The appendices contain period photographs of 1880s Gibraltar (where Molly Bloom spent her formative years) and barracks and other army facilities in Late-Victorian Dublin. While the first volume focuses on the British Army, this volume, The British Army in Ulysses, narrows in on the novel. The chapters on Molly Bloom and Major Tweedy present new findings that will likely provoke controversy among Joyceans. From the Introduction: James Joyce spent a good deal of his youth, and all his university years, in a British Army garrison city: Dublin. Throughout that period, 4,500 to 5,500 soldiers were quartered in that city of 250,000 residents. Barracks and former barracks were situated all over “dear, dirty Dublin” and probably one-in-eleven of the young men out in town during the evening and late afternoon was in uniform. The British Army was a major part of Dublin life and so it appears throughout Ulysses in characters, places, and references to wars and battles. Additionally, Joyce worked on Ulysses between 1912 and 1922. During that period, two wars were fought in the Balkans in 1913, and a "Great War" raged throughout Europe from 1914 through 1918. These conflicts, particularly the Great War, certainly influenced Joyce and his writing. As noted by Greg Winston in Joyce and Militarism, “it is not surprising that in Joyce's writings the martial element is frequent and ubiquitous.”

This book sheds light on how the text and physical design of James Joyce’s two most challenging works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, reflect changes that transformed Europe between World War I and II.

A forgotten historical figure and his influence on the writing of James Joyce In this book, Neil Davison argues that Albert Altman (1853‒1903), a Dublin-based businessman and Irish nationalist, influenced James Joyce’s creation of the character of Leopold Bloom, as well as Ulysses’s broader themes surrounding race, nationalism, and empire. Using extensive archival research, Davison reveals parallels between the lives of Altman and Bloom, including how the experience of double marginalization—which Altman felt as both a Jew in Ireland and an Irishman in the British Empire—is a major idea explored in Joyce’s work. Altman, a successful salt and coal merchant, was involved in municipal politics over issues of Home Rule and labor, and frequently appeared in the press over the two decades of Joyce’s youth. His prominence, Davison shows, made him a familiar name in the Home Rule circles with which Joyce and his father most identified. The book concludes by tracing the influence of Altman’s career on the Dubliners story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” as well as throughout the whole of Ulysses. Through Altman’s biography, Davison recovers a forgotten life story that illuminates Irish and Jewish identity and culture in Joyce’s Dublin. A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

The Ireland of Ulysses was still a part of Britain. This book is the first comprehensive, historical study of Joyce's great novel in the context of Anglo-Irish political and cultural relations in the period 1880-1920. The first forty years of Joyce's life also witnessed the emergence of what historians now call English cultural nationalism. This formation was perceptible in a wide range of different discourses. Ulysses engages with many of them. In doing so, it resists, transforms, and works to transcend the effects of British rule in Ireland. The novel was written in the years leading up to Irish independence. It is powered by both a will to freedom and a will to justice. But the two do not always coincide, and Joyce does not place his art in the service of any existing political cause. His struggle for independence has its own distinctive mode. The result is a unique work of liberation - and revenge.