Bloomsday Singapore 2026

This Bloomsday, we focus on James Joyce as a Romance Writer.

Irish writer James Joyce is renowned for his vivid depictions of early twentieth-century Dublin and for his formal experiments that revolutionised the novel. He is also notorious for his candid explorations of human sexuality. But it seems almost unfathomable to label Joyce a writer of romance – even though Ulysses appears to embrace the fundamental promise of romance fiction by offering its characters a “happily ever after.” The novel's conclusion does, after all, suggest a marital reconciliation and end with the word “yes.”

What if we take Joyce’s attention to romance more seriously? In this talk, Professor Paige Reynolds explores the how and why Joyce engages in his prose with romance fiction and its tropes – and she will move forward to the present day to consider why Irish contemporary writers such as Mary Costello, Naoise Dolan, Eimear McBride, and Sally Rooney have so frequently returned to Joyce’s experiments in their considerations of modern-day love and romance.

---

About the speaker:
Paige Reynolds is Stephen J. Prior Professor of Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. She is author of Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford UP, 2023) and Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge UP, 2007), editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2016) and The New Irish Studies (CUP, 2020), and co-editor with Eric Falci of Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020 (CUP, 2020). In 2025, she curated the exhibition "Happy Ever After: Falling in Love with Irish Romance Fiction" for the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) in Dublin.

About the moderator:
Cheryl Julia Lee is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University and co-coordinator of the Singapore Studies Research Cluster at NTU. Her research interests lie in Singaporean literature and culture, and her work has been published in Science Fiction Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Textual Practice, among others. Her debut poetry collection, We Were Always Eating Expired Things, was nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize.