‘The same androgynous figures are to be found in many masterpices of the Irish Revival - in Shaw’s Bluntschli and Dauphin, two sensitive men brave enough to admit their fears; in Synge’s Christy Mahon, whose daintiness of speech and patent narcissism appeal to the robust countrywomen who fall in love with him; even in Yeats’s adoption of the female voice as he wrote the “Crazy Jane” poems. While nationalists, addicted to a militarist ideal, sought in emulations of Cúchulainn to purge themselves of the last degrading traces of Celtic feminitiy, these male writers happily embraced the female dimension, the anima, as one basis for liebration. Ulysses’ celebration of Bloom as a new woman man is the fullest elaboration of that utopian moment. (lxvii)

‘the sincere nationalist asks writers to hold a miror up to Cathleen Ní Houlihan’s face; authentic liberationist wistfully observes that the cracked looking-glass, which is all he has been left by the coloniser, renders not a single but a multiple self.’ (p.lxxviii.); ‘For Joyce, as for Wilde and Synge, art was not just surface but symbol, a process whereby the real took on the epihanic contours of the magical.’ (lxxxix)

‘[…] Ulysses is an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin, 56 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.’ (p.lxxxx).