This essay briefly compares James Joyce's and Mo Yan's epic novels, particularly Ulysses and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and examines the way the Chinese writer's works evoke the Irish author's in writing style and theme. Despite the apparent distance in time and place between them, the two authors share the experience of living under social and political repression. Joyce's Ireland, as a British colony, was stricken with ideological conflicts between colonialism, nationalism, and Catholicism, which were exacerbated by tragedies such as the Great Famine of the 1840s. Similarly, Mo Yan's China has suffered revolutionary projects imposed by the Communist Party, leading to violent histories such as the Great Famine of the 1960s and the one-child policy. As writers of oppressed nations, Joyce and Mo Yan both address the subject of reincarnation in their epics written in the style of a cyclic narrative, employing magical realism to help the narrative delve deeper into reality. Such writing style, along with an evasive tone of the narrative, suggests the authors' uncertain, ambivalent attitude toward their oppressive reality. As represented by their protagonists in conflict between individual and national rights and freedoms, Joyce and Mo Yan can be said to embrace the complex reality of colonial Ireland and socialist China, respectively. Resisting and simultaneously acknowledging the responsibility to their own nations suffering tragic histories, the Irish and the Chinese authors may well be recognized as postcolonial and postsocialist writers, respectively.

This study attempts to re-evaluate James Joyce and his works by Elaine Showalter's gynocritics. He has been stigmatized as a feminist or anti-feminist but there are problems in this contrary evaluation. According to Showalter's gynocritics, female literature has been changed as other subcultures has and it has gone through three phases: feminine phase, feminist phase, and female phase. Specifically, Eveline in “Eveline” and Maria in “Clay” are the women in the first phase, feminine phase, where women conform to and reproduce the patriarchal ideology. They try to gain men's prestiges such as money, mobility and power by marriage or fantasies about it. These seemingly paralyzed and passive women have been the grounds which make James Joyce an anti-feminist, but they are the results which he tried to make with sympathy and compassion as a plain record of women at that time in Ireland. Through this lens, we can evaluate James Joyce by gynocritics in a new way, out of a black and white contrary way of judgement, and shed the new light on his attitudes towards women and women in his works.

On the surface, Reading in the Dark looks like a memoir or autobiography of an anonymous speaker narrating his family history through chasing the truth of his eldest uncle Eddie's death. However, this style is a kind of a political fiction which hides the political intention of the writer, Seamus Deane; the style makes readers realize the fact that British colonialism is a fundamental cause of silence, tragedy, and death in an Irish Catholic community in Derry, Northern Ireland. First person narrator plays a role in causing that optical illusion for readers and critics to misunderstand this book as a non-political one. To avoid that kind of illusion, we should not only analyze this book itself, but also consider the role of the writer of this book, who gives clues which help us discover a hidden or veiled function of the book.
The hidden function of Reading in the Dark is a propaganda for Irish Catholics' reality in Northern Ireland and justification of this ethnic group's resistance against British colonialism like the IRA. Deane, a poet, a literary critic, and one of Irish Catholics from Northern Ireland, has been trying to build the identity of Ireland based on Irish nationalism. His main concern is the independence of Ireland from British colonialism and the reunification between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. To achieve this, he uses Irish literature to identify who the Irish are and what Irish literature is. In addition, it is a tool to give an Irish Catholic common group memory and strongly criticize revisionism as a cause of weakening Irish nationalism. The first person narrator in Reading in the Dark tries to make readers witness lots of tragic happenings caused by British colonialism among Irish Catholics through his narration, for they would probably empathize the Irish's present through this planned meeting at least. Thus, Reading in the Dark is a work that hides a political function Deane wants to get from Irish literature.

Writing Between the Acts under the threat of an impending war, Virginia Woolf attempts to reconfigure the present time for a new plot against the seeming inevitability of war through her reflections on people's individual and collective identities (re)constructed through their performance of daily routines and roles. The novel examines how violence within the patriarchal system entangled with the violence of war is choking the interval time between the two wars in a deadlock. Looking into representations of British history through the pageant's ironic performance, the novel questions the vision of historical unity as provided in the nationalist historical discourse. The play in the pageant historicizes the present time and exposes the fictional nature of the conventions. Attentive to the repressed desires and silenced possibilities of main characters and to the outsiders, those marginalized in the nationalist historical discourse, Woolf explores the possibilities for “a new plot” with a “different song and different conclusion.” In the ending, those words Giles and Isa spoke but untold to the reader invite the reader to fill the silence.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of Hogarth Press and publishing in Virginia Woolf as writer and public intellectual. Hogarth Press contributed to Woolf's development as modernist writer and social thinker who rejects patriarchy, war, imperialism and fascism. The selections of the publishing titles by Woolf as publisher reflect Woolf's thoughts as writer. As public intellectual, Woolf's own political and ethical agenda is to expand cultural democracy. The writer and publisher Woolf is also the educator who promotes “cultural literacy” by creating and teaching new method of reading and writing.
The Press started initially as private venture to distract Virginia physically from over-extended concentration on writing and intellectual labour. The press offered her creative freedom to write innovative works without publisher's interventions and offered her intellectual networks and economic freedom also. Equally importantly, the Press made social contributions as the center of new discourses, publishing modernist writings and political writings with socio-political critiques of patriarchy, imperialism, faascism, and war. It functioned as a political and artistic haven for writers from the Empire's periphery such as C. L. R James. The press helped British psychoanalysis take roots in England by publishing entire translations of Freud and other psychoanalysts.
The Press materializes the vision of Outsiders' Society in Three Guineas. It is alternative space in which private and public spaces meet and cross, a heterotopia.

To facilitate the understanding of Ulysses, Joyce produced two schemas for his novel highlighting the Homeric correspondences. When the novel was finally published in 1922, however, Joyce expunged the Homeric titles from each chapter, and in 1937 he told Nabokov that he regretted his emphasizing of Homer to promote Ulysses. Therefore, it is necessary to check if the Homeric correspondences Joyce offered make sense by scrupulously analyzing one of eighteen episodes, “Telemachus” in this article. The Homeric correspondences encourage us to discern between good and bad in “Telemachus,” but Stephen and Mulligan are depicted with multiple identities and cannot be easily defined as good or bad. When Mulligan deprives Stephen of his residence, he is a usurper just like Antinous. However, he also plays the role of Athene, who gives priceless advice to Telemachus. The Homeric correspondences cannot explain the multiple identities of characters Joyce has created in his work. Though Joyce uses Homer in Ulysses, he does not confine the character's identity to the Homeric correspondences. He encourages the readers to read beyond them and find both multiple perspectives and characters with multi-faceted identities.