Wandering rocks: island politics in the offshore locales of James Joyce

This article addresses the representation of islands within the fiction of the 20th Century writer James Joyce. It is argued that Joyce reveals how islands and concepts of islandness can be made to serve varying political, historical, and literary ends. Writing in the immediate aftermath of Irish independence and partition, Joyce used the island settings of the Aran Islands and the Isle of Man in order to comment on the implications of those recent historical developments. While contemporary writers like Yeats and Synge valued the Aran Islands for their inculcation of traditional Irish values, Joyce rejected that vision as parochial and outmoded. Instead, Joyce drew attention to important comparisons and contrasts between Ireland and the Isle of Man. In Ulysses (1922) Joyce contrasted Ireland's long and bloody struggle for independence with Man, whose legislature, the House of Keys, presented a dramatic counterexample of legitimate Home Rule. For both Joyce and his characters, Man was associated with familiar island stereotypes, including self-sufficiency and wholeness.