The various innuendoes about male love at the time when it was a clause of critical offence are prevailing in James Joyce's Ulysses. Dublin, without exception, was one of the European cities which were obsessed with the social purity ideologies. Joyce suggests Irish nationalism's emphasis on strong masculinity as a phase of such national proclivity in particular. Accordingly, Leopold Bloom, a Jew, belongs to a countertype to a masculine stereotype. Lots of critics discussed homosexuality in Ulysses in relation with the main stream culture: gender or national ideologies are juxtaposed with it. However this study reverses those widely shared approaches: it aims to understand the various expressions concerning the theme of love between males mainly from Leopold Bloom's stand. Bloom would be a character who “live[s] round the corner” (U.16.1112) as he says. Dublin males see him not only as an effeminate man but also a homosexual. “A Jew is a homosexual” (Mosse 83) was a tell-tale antisemitic belief during those eras. Even equanimous Bloom becomes chapfallen from time to time, albeit he overcomes it. Ultimately the exuberant euphemisms about homoerotic relationship between men which are focus of Bloom's ethnic anxiety mirror the Dublin men's passivity in interiorization of the dominant cultural values of that time.

In Love and Summer, William Trevor, an Irish Protestant by birth and upbringing, endeavors to unravel the complicated problem of Ireland's historic conflicts tormenting and dividing Irish people. The current event is linked to the past ones: Ellie's affair with Florian is compared and interconnected with Miss Conulty's affair with an Englishman and the sexual misconduct of the St. Johns, an Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy family. Ellie's relationship with Florian can be seen as an example of how Catholic women have been historically ill-used by Protestant men. Like James Joyce, for Trevor “the brutalism of love and politics were interconnected.” The story of sexual conquest reminds us of British's of Ireland. By scrutinizing the relationship between two communities, Catholic and Protestant, Trevor has a chance to reflect on the cruel history of colonization and to offer a literary ground for reconciliation. Interestingly the catastrophe which might be caused by Ellie's affair could be avoided by the help of Orpen Wren, an aged Protestant. Irrespective of the religious differences, people are depicted as good and kind. Ultimately Trevor suggests that, with such people, history of division and conflicts will not be repeated in Ireland.

This study aims to examine posthuman aesthetics in Virginia Woolf's novels, The Waves and Orlando, based on agential realism which is a posthumanist performative account proposed by new materialism feminist Karen Barad. The lives of Bernard and Orlando in these novels personify the ontology of agential realism. Woolf presents new kinds of bodily aesthetics emerging from relational ontology and ontological inseparability such as the body of viscous porosity, and of brittlestar constantly changing its bodily boundaries through intra-acting with the environment. The Waves and Orlando are abundant with aesthetics of phenomena, of diffraction, and of entanglements, in all of which human and nonhuman agencies are inseparably entangled and dynamically intra-acting. Woolf makes persons, things, and events emerge only as phenomena, not distinct entities. As Bernard in The Waves says he is made and remade continually, human subjects and human bodies are iteratively reconfigured through the material-discursive practices. Orlando's gender-changing, four-century-long life dramatizes the idea that subject, temporality and spatiality are intra-actively produced. This embodies Woolf's optimistic posthuman vision in accord with Barad's belief that humans are part of the world in its open-ended becoming, the future is radically open, and the past and the future are iteratively reconfigured through one another.

This essay explores how light and music are deployed in Joyce's “Araby” and its film adaptation Araby by Dennis Courtney. In Joyce's short story, both light and music are utilized in order to heighten the boy's enchantment with Mangan's sister and his subsequent disillusion. The lights that illuminate her on the stairs, for example, blind the boy to her real person and desire, causing him to perceive her only as an object for his own desire. Meanwhile, references to music in “Araby” reveal how the boy interacts with the world. According to Hass, music in Dubliners not only helps define the reality, but also has the characters transcend reality and reveal themselves. Jok, on the other hand, explores music and musicality within Joyce's language. In adapting “Araby” into his short film, Courtney seems to be aware of the role of light and music. This essay thus argues that he skillfully adopts such cinematic techniques as lighting, music, and other sound effects in order to deliver and enhance the theme of the story, thereby narrating how the boy romanticizes his love, experiences discord with reality, and ultimately faces the moment of disillusionment more effectively than any storytelling does.