By placing Joyce's writing back into the context of nineteenth-century moving image media, I have provided an explanation for the paradox that his cinematicity seemed ahead of screen practice itself in the views of directors and theorists. I have demonstrated how Joyce's eye and imagination were so profoundly shaped by the late Victorian visual culture which film remediated that he was able to achieve what Bazin called ‘ultracinematographic’ effects. This explains Joyce's extraordinary receptiveness to projected film when it arrived, and as pioneers began developing its capacities by synthesising the diverse characteristics of its predecessors. Thus Joyce was instrumental in extending classical ekphrasis into the modernity of moving photographic images, broadcasting and telecommunications. Hence I have addressed the deficit in scholarship before the cinematograph on Joyce's cinematic Modernism,

We have seen how pre-filmic optical toys such as the kaleidoscope, stereoscope, zoëtrope and phenakistoscope, which exploited the ‘persistence of vision effect’, are central to how Joyce presented vision and consciousness in terms of technologically produced moving images. His fiction reveals a profound understanding that cinematicity was never solely inherent to the apparatus and institution that became known as cinema in the twentieth century, but was a set of evolving characteristics shared across a whole inter-medial ecology. Moreover, Joyce's ekphrastic experiments tell us much about how such cinematic forms interacted and shaped the media-cultural imaginary of his historical moment and after. My research confirms that his literary method was imaginatively primed and nourished through the connective tissue of a visual culture imbued with a sense of things to come. Alongside optical toys, Joyce references shadowgraphy, magic lanterns, panoramas and dioramas, instantaneous photographic analysis, as well as film peepshows. His fiction reflects how these media influenced, overlapped and continued to coexist with projected film for some time; and he emulates and critiques their effects in its pages, with a flair for ekphrastic cinematicity surpassing other Modernists.

The mutoscope, which mechanised the flipbook principle, is the only device for watching moving photographic pictures named in Ulysses, albeit what we commonly call cinema was nearly a quarter of a century old by its publication. By choosing this device rather than projected film shows, Joyce both looked into cinema's future and backwards into its prehistory in animated images.