In this book Andrew Gibson argues that the aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses are responses to the colonial history of Ireland and the colonial politics of Irish culture. The arrival of this book is a welcome occasion. Andrew Gibson combines a wealth of knowledge and research - about the particularities of English and Irish cultural politics between 1880 and 1920 - with an admirable sensitivity to the Joycean text. The book has much to do with what postcolonial theory calls 'hybridity' and 'mimicry', but is also densely and precisely historicized. Like the simultaneously meticulous, informed, and irreverent Joyce he describes, Gibson is scrupulous about historical particularity and cunning in his application of it. Joyce's Revenge immerses itself in a broad range of specific cultural discourses on subjects from nationalist politics to medical debates to the politics of street names, the politics of Shakespeare and bardolatry, Protestant-Catholic relations, Jewishness, Irish historiography, women's journals, and astronomy. The result is an important new study that will alter the ways we read Ulysses.