This thesis analyzes three novels by James Joyce, Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, concentrating on the appearance of the word "soul" in each in order to argue that Joyce's use of the concept sheds light on three central concerns of his fiction: aesthetics, religion, and nationalism. Proposing that "soul" operates in Joyce's texts as a differend, a term coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard to describe words whose meanings span irreconcilable discourses, it argues that while the soul plainly has religious, and specifically Catholic, connotations, Joyce adopts historically romantic and aesthetic senses of the word to form a hybrid definition. As a point of entry into the larger complexities of Joyce, this thesis situates Joyce's consistent effort to fashion a new idiom that brings together disparate, even conflicting, meanings of the word to form a distinctly Joycean sense of the soul.
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