Allusion, aesthetics, and nationalism in James Joyce's Dubliners

Joyce's Dubliners is complex work responding to the political and social realities of post-Parnell Ireland. Centring on middle class Ireland, Dubliners scrutinizes the culture of a decayed Anglo-Ireland, and a resurgent Catholic middle-class nationalism, and finds a complex formation of related ideologies: aesthetic, political, and religious. Responding to the thematics of these discourses, Joyce judges the nationalist mythology of cultural revival, preserving and replicating the structure of the very culture its seeks to displace, unsuited to modernity. Allusions are a central component of Joyce's critique of these institutional structures. The act of alluding, Joyce recognizes, is a means of cultural production and of social and political control. Dubliners is not merely mimetic; Joyce's stories are radically intertextual. This practice serves a comprehensive genealogical project outlining those cultural forms and institution