Eight months before her announcement as Britain’s first female Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Mrs Schofield’s GCSE’ was first published on the front page of the Guardian for Saturday, 6 September 2008 amid considerable notoriety. Under the broad banner-headline, ‘Poet’s rhyming riposte leaves Mrs Schofield “gobsmacked”’, Ester Addley reported on the attempt by Pat Schofield, an examiner in Leicestershire, to have the Academic Qualifications Authority (AQA) remove an anthology of poetry from its GCSE (General Certificate, Secondary Education) curriculum because one of its selections, Duffy’s dramatic monologue ‘Education for Leisure’, ‘supposedly glorified knife crime’. Duffy’s ‘riposte’ to the censorship advocated by Schofield comprises another dramatic monologue in the ‘thrown voice’ of an examiner who, in an opening octave, sets a sequence of tightly interlaced quotations from Shakespearean drama and questions about the import of literal and metaphorical ‘knife crimes’:

Benedict Anderson has maintained that notions of nationhood and constructions of nationalism derive from a mode of collective imagination. Anderson contends that ‘a nation’ comprises an ‘imagined political community’ in the sense that its constituent members will never know or come into direct contact with the vast majority of their imagined or virtual associates. However, ideologically they commune with one another, indeed among themselves alone, in a manner that constitutes the communal framework for the sense of nationhood. The material basis for this imagined national unity of consciousness, according to Anderson, is a consequence of ‘print-capitalism’. Accessible, mass-market script enables the creation and maintenance of exchange and ongoing communication among people who will never meet one another in person. However, this bourgeois and distinctly state-oriented construction of ‘nation’, nationhood and nationalism neglects local, linguistic, ironic and playful constructions of nationality in the interests of fore-grounding proto-imperial representations of a national imaginary. Joyce would dissent.

Joyce's political writings, moreover, provide some of the more telling instances of his attitudes toward nationalism, socialism and empire and point toward the constellations of these political aspirations in his more revered literary works. A quotation in Irish-American dialect of 1890s Chicago and from a world of literary journalism well known to Joyce the literary author and political journalist, though, affords a starting-point: