2025/09/08 by Casey Lawrence · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Library Science and Information Systems
paper · doi:10.16995/olh.23416
openalex publication_date 2025/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/09/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In James Joyce's Ulysses, both the ‘Cyclops’ episode and the parodic legal proceedings of ‘Circe’ treat sexual deviance as anti-Irish—a feminised foreign invader threatening the heterosexist, hypermasculine Irish Nationalism espoused by the Citizen. Oscar Wilde is a subtextual figure in the court of public opinion that convenes at Kiernan’s Pub and Leopold Bloom’s sexual harassment trial, hovering on the periphery of the collective consciousness that characterises both episodes. Due to his engagement with various legal cases, Joyce’s novel may act as an archive of a historical moment of change—a queer slippage between 1904 and 1922. The contrast between men like the Citizen, whose insularity perpetuates and eroticises Irish martyrdom, and men like Bloom, whose Otherness makes him a target of homophobia and racial bigotry, demonstrates the shifting cultural values of turn-of-the-century Ireland and looks outward toward its contemporary readers with a sly wink.