Sinn Féin and Ulysses

This chapter offers a composite portrait of Sinn Féin from the dual perspectives of Robert Mitchell Henry, Professor of Latin at Queen’s University, Belfast, and James Joyce. Like other Irish classicists, such as Eric Robertson Dodds and Benjamin Farrington, Henry supported Irish independence and appears to have been a member of the Irish Volunteers. His book The Evolution of Sinn Féin is infused with ironies of Tacitean piquancy, and inverts parallels between the British and Roman empires to critique British colonialism. Meanwhile, Episode 12 of Joyce’s Ulysses presents the Sinn Féiner ‘Citizen’ (Cyclops/Cusack) alongside what is argued to be a thinly veiled parody of the controversial Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer, author of the first English translation of the medieval Irish Odyssey, the Merugud Uilix Maicc Leirtis—a work of which Joyce was surely aware. The result is a satire of narrow-minded nationalism as well as of the British Empire.