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In March 2006 the National Library of Ireland acquired a small but significant tranche of Joyce manuscripts that hailed from the earliest phases of the composition and conceptualization of Finnegans Wake. The manuscripts fit within the already well-known series of Irish-themed vignettes that Joyce wrote in 1923 (Tristan and Isolde, Roderick O’Conor, St Patrick, St Kevin). Most of the new drafts were completely unanticipated and thus their appearance forced significant revisions upon our under...

In this essay, I look at Garryowen—the dog known to all men and a "bloody mangy mongrel" ( U 12.119-20)—in terms of hybridity and then examine how such an issue redounds to the question of the construction of national identity in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses . I begin by looking at Dr. James W. Redfield's Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances between Man and Animals , which considers national identity from an animalistic perspective. Ignoring any possibility of hybridity, Redfield unequivocally identifies the Irish with dogs. While Joyce was apparently ignorant of this work, his treatment of dogs in Ulysses functions as a corrective, of sorts, to Redfield's bizarre assertions in that it champions the hybrid and even the mongrel.

I n 1925, the renowned French critic Louis Gillet wrote a fiercely negative review of Ulysses for the Revue des deux mondes. A few years later, he came to be somewhat embarrassed by this essay. He blamed his initial negativity on various factors, such as his incomplete knowledge of Joyce at the time and his excessive reliance upon Edmund Gosse's opinions, which he had solicited in a letter.1 In his review, Gillet derides Ulysses as a cruel, but hollow, joke. Joyce's way is the farceur's way and Ulysses is merely a childish joke levelled at the expense of an exalted literary tradition.