‘Circe’ and the Irish Literary Theatre

Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy in Finnegans Wake : An Annotated List

“…In this respect theosophy, like the race discourses with which it can be closely identified, demonstrated key qualities of the modern -the faddist instinct, the capacity for trickery and sensationalism and, perhaps above all for Joyce, the irrationality and the turn that contemporaneity had taken away from the egalitarian instincts of a once progressive order. The point being not to deny the importance of the Irish context -clearly the involvement of the Dublin crowd with theosophy was central to Joyce's analysis of Irish revivalism as a faddist and conservative culture 12 -but, rather, to recognise that Joyce's engagement with theosophy was also part of a bigger and more complex engagement with modernity and the 'enlightenment project'. It is against this wider backdrop that theosophy becomes of particular importance to the Wake.…”