Wilde and paradoxes

When Haines asks whether Stephen's Shakespeare theory is "some paradox," and Mulligan says that "We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes," they are referring to something that had been all the rage in bohemian England and Ireland in the 1880s and 90s, but whose star was fading in 1904. Telemachus has already alluded to one of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxes, the sayings about Caliban from The Picture of Dorian Gray.

John Hunt 2011