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The article discusses highlights of Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium, held at the Trinity Long Room in Dublin, Ireland on May 5-7, 2022. Topics included the literary works of authors Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, influence of non-human entities on conceptions and constructions of the human, modernism and the politics of punitive child removal, and modern Irish art.

George Sand's Indiana and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth share a guiding interest in the function of appearances that--considered within the context of literary realism's development--can be seen as contributing to the gradually dominating trope of exteriority in which fictional characters' identities and actions are ineluctably determined and defined by such external forces as society, language, aesthetics, and commerce. The failure of Sand's Raymon de Ramière and Wharton's Lily Bart to realize themselves as independently empowered individuals exemplifies literary realism's reassessment, closely tied to the rise of sociology as a discipline, of the longstanding, romantic tradition of a person's potential to be a selfdetermining entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine how light skin, especially among Indian women, has powerful social capital, this essay exhumes the politics of colorism and female identity that is palpably present in both cultural and literary discourses of the twentieth century. It aims to uphold three goals: one, by engaging with anthropological and historical readings, establish the prevalence of colorism in colonial and postcolonial India; two, by highlighting epidermal hierarchies within popular Indian culture, address how skin color has inevitably governed women's personal and professional lives; and three, by harnessing the subversive potential in select works of twentieth century Indian writers--Santa Chatterjee, Munshi Premchand, K. Saraswathi Amma, Kamala Markandaya, and Arundhati Roy--who hail from various cultural and geographic backgrounds, demonstrate how the supremacy of light skin is a pan-Indian phenomenon that needs to be resisted. Finally, this essay argues that the hegemony of light skin, which continues to adversely affect Indian women's self-esteem, must be both confronted and quashed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]