James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is a remarkable piece of experimental prose fiction. It is at once the quintessential novel, recapturing the energies of the nascent form – its improvisations, self-consciousness and playfulness particularly – precisely at moment when the form itself is at its most jaded and dissipated. It is also, of course, the anti-novel, superbly critiquing and exploding the polite form as it stands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is clear, too, that despite the desire of many critics to narrowly situate Ulysses exclusively within a European context, this piece of writing could only have been produced during the period of the Irish Literary Revival. The cultural and political fluidity of that period created a unique cultural space, allowing a genius such as Joyce to discover the means of expressing his personal and artistic concerns with the themes of father–son relations, betrayal, love and the civic responsibilities of life in the modern city. A contemporary Irish reviewer of the novel, in critically dismissing Ulysses, noted that it was, ‘an attempted Clerkenwell explosion in the well-guarded, well-built, classical prison of English literature’. Certainly James Joyce wrote Ulysses for a reason and not simply, in some version of decadent aesthetics, because he could.