By examining names and naming patterns from Stephen Hero through Finnegans Wake, Culleton not only discusses what they reveal about Joyce's thought and practice as a writer, but explores their historical, literary, and cultural implications, stressing that naming is not only a creative act but a political and patriarchal impulse as well. Following Joyce's example of continually raising larger questions, Culleton considers the function names have in modern aesthetics and in life and what names reveal about the people that bear them.
Both serious and playful, Culleton's study demonstrates how Joyce's onomastic bravado is tied to his aesthetics and grounded in the Irish literary tradition of magic, creation, power, and rhetorical one-upmanship.
