James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality: Postcritical and Postsecular Reading in Dubliners and Ulysses

This study reads James Joyce’s Dubliners and principally, Ulysses, through studies of hospitality, particularly the hospitality articulated in the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan. It traces the origins of the novel, in part, to the physical attacks on Joyce in 1904 Dublin and 1907 Rome, and shows how those incidents, combined with his interest in this parable, which he incorporated into both his short story Grace and throughout Ulysses, especially in its last four episodes, led him to develop a rich theory of hospitality. Richard Rankin Russell demonstrates that Joyce finally sought to make us more charitable readers through his explorations and depictions of Samaritan hospitality.