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This article re-considers the language of racial stereotype that is at the forefront of the "Cyclops" episode in Ulysses. Critics have long characterized the conflict between Leopold Bloom and the Citizen in terms of how each character defines the Irish nation. According to these readings, Bloom's cosmopolitanism stands against the Citizen's xenophobic nationalism. But the latter's reliance on the language of racial stereotype—most evident in the anti-Semitic insults he hurls at Bloom—betrays the decidedly non-local basis of his rhetoric. Indeed, this essay reveals the extent to which the Citizen's conceptualization of the Irish nation actually appropriates the language of Jewish nationalism, a discourse that circulated throughout Britain during the turn of the twentieth century.

The key setting in William Gibson's speculative "Bridge" trilogy (1993-1999) is a massive shantytown on the site of the Bay Area Bridge near San Francisco. This article argues that the novels, and their characterization of the shanty space in particular, offer crucial insight into the way late capitalism produces—and then hides from view—vulnerable life. The novels are particularly useful for clarifying recent debates about precarity as imagined by Isabell Lorey and Judith Butler. As these sources explain, precariousness denotes to the essential vulnerability and inter-dependency that defines social life; precarity, in contrast, describes the socio-economic stratification that leaves certain segments of the population more exposed to this vulnerability than others. Gibson's Bridge novels contribute to this discussion by providing a space, in the form of the massive shantytown, for imagining how we might begin to disentangle vulnerability from the weaponized form of precarity associated with late capitalism. Ultimately, this account offers a new reading of Gibson's fiction by stressing how it imagines an inclusive social model in the context of neoliberal dystopia. For scholars interested in how literature accounts for precarity, the Bridge series reflects speculative fiction's capacity for illustrating precarity's past, present, and future.

This essay departs from recent work on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath—which has focused largely on its problematic racial politics—by framing the text's portrayal of migrancy around the question of state governance. Steinbeck's novel and The Harvest Gypsies, its nonfiction predecessor, refigure vagrancy into a fantasy involving a mobile class of workers. In doing so, Steinbeck offers an explicit roadmap for a government desperate to move families across the country to where their labor is needed. Ultimately, this reading puts the novel into dialogue with state policies that extend beyond New Deal era.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the "tramp" embodied the most extreme aspects of the boom-and-bust economy in the US. More than any other writer of his day, the ethnographer Josiah Flynt assisted both the public and government officials in visualizing the lives of tramps with the intent of rehabilitating this population. The key text in this effort, Flynt's Tramping with Tramps (1899) hinges on a comparison between US and European vagrancy. For reform-minded authors like Flynt, tramping in Europe provides a point of comparison for evaluating key areas of concern in the US—namely, the problem of idleness among sectors of the American population. The depiction of tramping abroad in Flynt's work—as well as in accounts by writers like Mark Twain—ultimately reflects the international nexus shaping both the discourse surrounding vagrancy as well as antitramp legislation.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the "tramp" embodied the most extreme aspects of the boom-and-bust economy in the US. More than any other writer of his day, the ethnographer Josiah Flynt assisted both the public and government officials in visualizing the lives of tramps with the intent of rehabilitating this population. The key text in this effort, Flynt's Tramping with Tramps (1899) hinges on a comparison between US and European vagrancy. For reform-minded authors like Flynt, tramping in Europe provides a point of comparison for evaluating key areas of concern in the US—namely, the problem of idleness among sectors of the American population. The depiction of tramping abroad in Flynt's work—as well as in accounts by writers like Mark Twain—ultimately reflects the international nexus shaping both the discourse surrounding vagrancy as well as antitramp legislation.

Scholars in literature departments and the social sciences share a broadly similar interest in understanding human development, societal norms, and political institutions. However, although literature scholars are likely to reference sources or concepts from the social sciences in their published work, the line of influence is much less likely to appear the other way around. This unequal engagement provides the occasion for this paper, which seeks to clarify the ways social scientists might draw influence from literary fiction in the development of their own work as academics: selecting research topics, teaching, and drawing inspiration for projects. A qualitative survey sent to 13,784 social science researchers at 25 different universities asked participants to describe the influence, if any, reading works of literary fiction plays in their academic work or development. The 875 responses to this survey provide numerous insights into the nature of interdisciplinary engagement between these disciplines. First, the survey reveals a skepticism among early-career researchers regarding literature's social insights compared to their more senior colleagues. Second, a significant number of respondents recognized literary fiction as playing some part in shaping their research interests and expanding their comprehension of subjects relevant to their academic scholarship. Finally, the survey generated a list of literary fiction authors and texts that respondents acknowledged as especially useful for understanding topics relevant to the study of the social sciences. Taken together, the results of the survey provide a fuller account of how researchers engage with literary fiction than can be found in the pages of academic journals, where strict disciplinary conventions might discourage out-of-the-field engagement.