Introduction

New modes of inquiry emerged in the last decade as the postcolonial paradigm, which largely defined Irish Studies in the 1990s, came under scrutiny. In particular, women's studies, ecocriticism, and queer theory have come to provide complementary representations of labour and poverty in Ulysses which disintegrate category distinctions like human and nonhuman. This argument does not deny the influence of the metropolis, but it does suggest that the interaction with nonhuman others has just as great an impact on an urban novel like Ulysses as the ideologies of an urban intelligentsia. His conclusion is that the organs of the Gilbert schema, posited as symbolic of particular episodes in the novel, represent a union of human with nonhuman animal. To support this conclusion, he draws from his research on the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, the body responsible for running Dublin Zoo in the Phoenix Park since 1831.

Adam Putz

Dr. Adam Putz is Conservation Assistant at Mississippi Valley Conservancy in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He also teaches introductory courses in literary studies and academic writing at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. His monograph, published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2013 and entitled The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867-1922, interrogates the ways in which the cultural politics that obtained in Dublin between the Fenian and Easter risings shaped the Shakespeares of Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Since completing this project, his research agenda has expanded to include environmental approaches to literature. In 2012, Putz participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities' Summer Seminar on 'James Joyce's Ulysses: Texts and Contexts' at Trinity College, Dublin.