Ulysses Hibernatus

The article focuses on the presence of classical epic topoi in two novels by a contemporary Irish writer, Brendan Kennelly. The microcosm of the Irish village represented in The Crooked Cross (1963), with its oral tradition, its folkloric and legendary material, supplies a fertile soil of cultural, literary and stylistic interrelations suggesting an interesting underlying cross-cultural communication. The description of the short sea voyage from Ireland to England in "The Florentines" (1967), reminds the reader of Ireland’s own traditional Odyssey: one of the chief types of ancient Irish literature, shared by other orally-based literatures, is in fact the imram or voluntary sea expedition story. A comparison between Joyce’s Ulysses and Kennelly’s novels has emphasized in both the authors the presence of an autochthonous Irish literary culture mingling with some classic epic topoi. My research has been guided by two seminal contemporary studies: Simon James’s investigation on the identity of the Celts and their supposed presence on the British and Irish territory.