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This chapter concludes the examination of the school question by tracing the secularization of the concept of nonsectarianism. It discusses the ongoing Protestant-Catholic conflict over Bible reading and parochial school funding, the events surrounding the Blaine Amendment (an attempt to resolve the school question through constitutional amendment), and the subsequent decline in Bible reading in schools in the closing decades of the century. It ends with an examination of the leading Bible reading legal cases to demonstrate how judicial attitudes toward legal secularization had evolved by the end of the nineteenth century.

The starting point for this chapter is Antonio Benítez‐Rojo's concept of the ‘path of words’ to explain the repetition of motifs in travel writers who undertake the same journeys. This repetitive path of words is an important route for the introduction of classical motifs into modern Caribbean literature. The chapter studies the constant return to Greece in Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950), and contrasts Fermor's neo‐Hellenic analogies with J. A. Froude's notorious Homeric analogy in The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1887). One of the legacies of these travel accounts is that the Caribbean is represented as an accident of Greece, a curious ‘other’ Mediterranean. Since both Froude and Fermor's accounts appeal to Homer's Odyssey as a legitimizing text for their travel accounts, the second section explores Derek Walcott's fashioning of a New World Odyssey that writes back to Froude and Fermor, and shares tropes with other responses to The Odyssey in the Caribbean.

This chapter examines the collective spaces invoked in James Joyce's career-long obsession with dramatic form—from the epiphanies he wrote as a teenager through his 1918 play Exiles to the closet drama of the Nighttown (or “Circe”) episode of Ulysses. Joyce's experiments with theatrical form constitute a running commentary on his interest in the “depths” of the psyche. The different conceptions of theatrical space embedded in the idea of epiphany lend a dual valence to this keystone of Joycean aesthetics. If, on the one hand, epiphany imagines a humiliating theater of psychic exposure, on the other it gestures toward a perverse collective space where such exposures would lose their policing force. These isolating and collectivist impulses are both visible in Joyce's play Exiles, which follows Ibsenesque naturalism in its representation of psychic motivation but allows its characters to mount a notable collective resistance to the diagnostic imperative structuring their stage existence.

This chapter focuses on book 2 of Paradise Lost. In book 2, Milton continues the story of the demilitarization of the fallen angels and of his epic more generally when he bases all of its action around the figure of Ulysses, the hero of eloquence and fraud, whose own epic comes in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The chapter demonstrates that the Odyssey, imitated and parodied in Satan's voyage through Chaos to God's newly created universe in the book's last section, is just one of the classical stories about the career of Ulysses that Milton evokes as models for its different episodes. The various parts of book 2 are held together by this pattern of allusion, as well as by the Odyssean figures of Scylla and Charybdis, the emblem of bad choices, or of loss of choice itself.

This chapter develops the earlier discussions of life‐writings by fictional narrators to consider sustained acts of creative impersonation: works entirely (or almost entirely) presented as written by imaginary authors. It discusses Fernando Pessoa's practice of heteronymity. In this context a surprising reading of Joyce's Portrait is proposed, building on the presence in the work of Stephen Dedalus' writings (poem, journal etc.), to suggest that the entire book might be read as not just a case of free indirect style, with Joyce rendering Stephen's consciousness, but as possibly Joyce's impersonation of the autobiographical book Stephen might have written. Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno is proposed as a comparable example of a fictionally authored self‐portrait.

This introduction argues that Alfred Tennyson’s conception of “rapt oration” is critical to the understanding of a quartet of his major dramatic monologues, “St. Simeon Stylites,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” and “Tiresias,” all drafted after the death in 1833 of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, though published over the course of the ensuing half-century. An examination of a variety of Tennyson’s works, in particular In Memoriam, establishes “rapt oration” as a state in which both speaker and listener are “transported” by the speaker’s oratorical prowess. A desire for rapture, characterized by both personal and political transformation, motivates the speech and actions of each of Tennyson’s speakers in these dramatic monologues. This introduction additionally argues that these dramatic monologues should be considered in the context of nineteenth-century rapture theology, reform politics, classical scholarship (in particular theories on Homer), and sexological theory, as well as in the context of Tennyson’s relationships with a range of contemporaries, including Thomas Carlyle, William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, and Heinrich Schliemann.

Chapter Four engages in a detailed reading of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” described as the prototypical Victorian dramatic monologue. The first section, “The Character of the Homeric Statesman,” establishes the monologue’s persistent stress on the importance of the knowledge of Tennyson’s Ulysses, examining the poem’s many sources, and a youthful epistolary debate between William Gladstone and Arthur Henry Hallam on Ulysses’ responsibility for the ruin of Troy. The second section, “Ulysses and the Rapture of Troy,” explores the political implications of the character of Ulysses, suggesting that his powerful resonance with his immediate audience within the monologue, as well as with the wider British public, is due to the illusion of a democratic ideal of equality conjured by his monologue. Ulysses’ desire is to effect a “rapture” of his audience, just as he formerly effected the “rapture” of Troy, illuminating the destruction of the fabled city as the monologue’s subtext.

Chapter 9 focuses on the relationship between the evolving grand strategy and military strategy in the American Civil War (1861–5). Williamson Murray emphasizes the symbiotic relationship between Abraham Lincoln's grand strategy—aimed at the preservation of the Union with its form of government—and Ulysses S. Grant's ability to execute the military expression of that strategy through effective generalship, selection of capable subordinates, and decisive combat. Murray argues that two main factors explain why it took the North four years to defeat the Southern states. First, the vast size of the theatre of operations posed great logistical challenges. Second, enormous popular enthusiasm for their respective causes led both sides to insist on holding out to the bitter end, despite huge casualties and suffering. Ultimately, Lincoln's grand strategy succeeded because the verdict that ‘the United States is a country’, singular rather than plural, was never seriously challenged again.

The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely hybridized blend of nostalgia and modernity. The chapter investigates how the commodified authentic became a critical modernist tool, analyzing key moments concerning advertising, authenticity, and shopping in works by D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The chapter concludes by exploring how the commodified authentic remains a powerful marketing technique and cultural strategy.

James Joyce apparently had ample reason to see analogies between the progress of his health and his avant-garde novel. Both troubled him exceedingly in the years from 1917 to 1922. However, Joyce's statement also hints at another parallel between Ulysses and his physical condition. Joyce suggests that both his ocular troubles and his book are “complicated” and therefore elude analytical or diagnostic certainty. This book is an attempt to do a bit of diagnosing. Its focus is on Joyce's obsession with health, debility, and medicine — topics and subjects that crop up everywhere in his writing. Hence, while Joyce's physical body repeatedly made the acquaintance of the doctor's surgical knife and the question of his health remained “in the doctor's hands,” the book dissects, analyzes, and examines Joyce's textual corpus in search for medical references and intertexts. However, it is an exploration of Joyce's aesthetics as well as a sociohistorical analysis.

The general arrangement of the Ulysses was typical of any modern pelagic whaling factory. Their level of production, which also partly determined how personnel were paid, classed the ships. Modern pelagic factory ships were generally divided into five classes according to their capacity to produce a certain amount of oil. The classification was determined and agreed upon by the owners of the ships and the Norwegian whaling unions. The classification of the factories was supposed to be as theoretically correct as it could possibly be, but this often did not work out in practice. Some of those divergences were so extensive that factors other than oil production were needed to be observed by the unions and the owners when the designation of a factory ship was considered.

Railroad financing through the Civil War, 1840–70. The attraction of railroads as the first major infrastructure investment; scandals involving financiers; major panic following dissolution of Bank of the U.S.; development of early investment banks; scandals during Civil War including those surrounding U. S. Grant, Jay Gould, and NYSE; raising bonds during Civil War.

This chapter examines Joyce’s inscription of Roger Casement in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. In particular, it argues that Joyce figures through Casement both a complex critique of British imperialism that avoids the pitfalls of reactionary nationalism and a progressive model of national affiliation and belonging. The chapter suggests that Casement’s homoerotic writings and his “Speech from the Dock” are important, if oblique, references for Joyce, who glimpses in them a progressive worldview.

This chapter examines Joyce's Ulysses, as an object generated out of imperial cartographies of the internal colony of Ireland. It begins with a critical examination of the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey of Ireland undertaken by the British military, the first comprehensive cartographic survey of a colonial territory. Moving to Joyce's novel, the chapter shows how Ulysses uses the imperial map of a bounded, objectified colony to emphasize the tensions between the map as a tool of imperial possession and the map as a canvas for the creation of an emergent communal identity. Ultimately, Joyce creates a world that is anti-topographical, subverting the mimeticism of the novel's early chapters with a formalism that denies the possibility of his novel having any kind of stable spatial ground. Such anti-representational formalism extends to the political vision of the novel, which is not necessary nationalist (as some recent critics have argued) but radically anti-national in its suspicion of any static spatial representation of culture.

This chapter focuses on Joyce and ‘the Irish question’. The aims of Irish eloquence were recurring features of political debate, partly as a result of the Act of Union that saw Irish politicians enter Westminster in 1801. Born in year that clôture was implemented (1882), Joyce is the last writer who had persistent recourse to the styles of Victorian oratory in his work. Indeed, the closure was itself instituted to combat Irish obstructionism in the Commons, and the loquacious tactics had a key part to play in the erosion of parliamentary autonomy at the end of the century. The chapter considers Joyce's early work and ends with a sustained focus on Ulysses (1922), thinking through the implications of the writer's choice to structure his masterpiece around the figure of the most renowned orator in the classical literary tradition.

James Joyce described his book in many ways, including some of what we can reasonably take to be his favorite characterizations within the book itself. One that occurs relatively late suggests that it is a gift, a “beautiful crossmess parzel”. Overtly hostile readers might focus on the “mess”, but a more benign reaction would take Joyce simply to have set a gigantic puzzle, a lifetime's worth of the most ingenious, taxing, and witty cryptic crosswords. There is an obvious way to think of the Wake that gives it more credit. By solving these individual puzzles, a large mosaic within which significant patterns and insights emerge. However, this chapter argues that until one has some general conception of how the book was to be conceived, there is little hope that individual passages can be puzzled out in ways that allow for integration.