SOURCE: O'Connor, Theresa. “Demythologizing Nationalism: Joyce's Dialogized Grail Myth.” In Joyce in Context, edited by Vincent J. Cheng and Timothy Martin, pp. 100-21. Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, O' Connor proposes that throughout Ulysses, James Joyce juxtaposes the quest for regeneration via male sacrifice with a search for regeneration through maternal love.

Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious.

(U [Ulysses] 8.729 30)

“For many centuries,” Conor Cruise O'Brien observed in a recent article on nationalist ideology, “the grand legitimizer of hatred in our culture was called Religion. Then after the great surfeit of the Wars of Religion, the power of religion to legitimize war and persecution began to fade and the cult of Nationalism took its place … Henceforward, it was in the name of the nation that men would be most likely to feel it legitimate to hate and kill...