When James Joyce left Ireland to ‘forge in the smithy of [his] soul the created conscience of [his] race’, he meant to escape the provincialism of the people he felt were holding him back as well as to separate the full sense of his heritage from the Empire that had brought its influence to bear on Ireland. The famous ‘tundish’ scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reveals this interplay of influences between coloniser and the colonised. In the midst of a discussion on aesthetics with the dean – an ‘English convert’ and ‘a poor Englishman in Ireland’ – Stephen Dedalus reflects upon the cultural impact of language after the dean uses the word ‘funnel’ instead of the term, ‘tundish’:

Recognising the ‘nets flung at [the soul] to hold it back from flight’, Stephen – and by extension Joyce – attempts to escape these nets: ‘nationality, language, and religion’.