Professor Peter Kuch speaks about this recent book on divorce in Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloom’s “Divorce, not now” and Molly’s “suppose I divorced him”—whether whim, wish, fantasy, or conviction—reflect a forgotten Irish practice of petitioning the English courts for divorce that Professor Kuch uncovers in his reappraisal of marriage in Ulysses.

 Peter Kuch is the inaugural Eamon Cleary Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He has published widely on Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Irish theatre, Irish and Australian film, literary theory  and Irish/Australian history.