Challenging characterisations of Joyce and Yeats as polar opposites, Alistair Cormack shows that Joyce and Yeats independently challenged a linearity and materialism they identified with empire and celebrated Ireland as destabilising the accepted forms of thought and the accepted means of narrating the nation. Thus, Cormack argues, 'unreadable' modernist works such as Finnegans Wake and A Vision must be understood as attempts to reconceptualise history in a literally postcolonial period.