It is a minor historical irony that Joyce spent some of his time in exile teaching English for a living. Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. Irish nationalism certainly took an interest in the pre-modern: one 18th-century Irish scholar argued that Irish was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. In his distaste for cultural nationalism, Joyce was also ferociously dismissive of the Irish Literary Revival. Released from the constraints of realism, writers like Joyce were free to be as outlandish and exotic as they wished.