The Joyce menagerie : animal imagery in the first three novels

If James Joyce l:ad written novels with largely rural settings, like many written by Lawrence and Faulkner, it would not be particularly unusual to find many references to animals and birds. However, Joyce\u27s novels take place in Dublin, which certainly is not the ideal habitat for large numbers of animals; and yet the number of references to animals and birds in his novels is astounding. The brief portion of Stephen Hero contains nearly fifty primary references, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has ninety-four, and there are more than eight hundred in Ulysses. Not only is the total number of animal references surprising, but the variety is also. For example, Joyce mentions zebras, roes, baboons, hares, elephants, badgers, and plovers, plus many species that are more exotic than these