James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and ‘the Jew’ in Modernist Europe

Representations of “the Jew” have long been a topic of interest in Joyce studies. Neil Davison argues that Joyce’s lifelong encounter with pseudo-scientific, religious, and political discourse about “the Jew” forms a unifying component of his career. He offers new biographical material, and presents a detailed reading of Ulysses to show how Joyce confronts the controversy of “race,” the psychology of internalized stereotype, and the contradictions of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism.