In correspondence and conversation, James Joyce kept himself aloof from his age, and denigrated recent art and thought at almost every opportunity. 'In the last two hundred years, ' he declared, 'we haven't had a great thinker.' This book reveals that in spite of his protestations Joyce was profoundly influenced by one of the major figures of nineteenth-century culture, the composer Richard Wagner. Timothy Martin documents Joyce's exposure to Wagner's operas, and defines a pervasive Wagnerian presence in his work, identifying scores of allusions. Wagner emerges as an important source in the development of literary modernism, and - alongside Flaubert and Ibsen - as one of Joyce's most important influences from the previous century. The revisionary impact of this empirical study in cultural history was to present Joyce as far more a child of the nineteenth century than he wished to acknowledge, much more than Joyce's students historically recognised