James Joyce's fiction constantly engages with an Ireland whose present and past is marked by the long struggle to achieve full independence from Britain. Semicolonial Joyce is the first collection of essays to address the importance of Ireland's colonial situation in understanding Joyce's work. The volume brings together leading commentators on the Irish dimension of Joyce's writing, such as Vincent J. Cheng, Seamus Deane, Enda Duffy, Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, and Emer Nolan, to present a range of voices rather than a single position on a topic which has had a major impact on Joyce criticism in recent years. Contributors explore Joyce's ambivalent and shifting response to Irish nationalism and reconsider his writing in the context of the history of Western colonialism. The essays both draw on and question the achievements of postcolonial theory, and provide fresh insights into Joyce's resourceful engagement with political issues that remain highly topical today.