Humanities

Throughout her oeuvre, Mary Lavin (1912–1996) engages with the nuances of “celibate moments” within masculine life cycles. This periodic sexlessness is often expressed through the complexities of strained or upended marital unions, as in “A Happy Death”, as well as the homosocial and fraternal relationships depicted in “The Joy Ride” and “The Becker Wives.” Within these overlooked narrative spaces, we can consider the relational implications of sexlessness, singleness and marital struggle on interpersonal relationships and the intimacies of masculine sexual identity in post-independent Ireland. In Lavin’s work, the short story is not a conclusive form, and celibacy is not always a permanent practice or observed behaviour. Instead, celibacy can be transient, often silent but equally charged with generative or destructive potential. This article will theorise male celibacy as part of Lavin’s commitment to silence and restraint and include this as part of her refusal of conventional romantic closures. Celibacy in this case takes on a significant positionality within interpersonal characterisations, not merely as a passive symptom of unhappiness or a given consequence of marital decline or spousal death, but as an active and at times frustrated response to hegemonic expectation. To conceive of masculine celibacy in these works, this article considers how celibacy functions within domestic short fiction and Lavin’s conceptualisation of everyday estranged intimacies.

This article examines some postcolonial dimensions of a global literary movement in the twenty-first century called Neo-Decadence. It begins by highlighting the artistic and political preoccupations of the movement within the context of the century’s turn toward authoritarianism and late capitalism amidst an increasingly hyper-digital landscape. Then, it examines two short stories set in Iran and Peru in order to stress the emergence of what the article calls the Neo-Decadent “Real” (an anti-realism that bears witness to our century’s late capitalist and digital saturations); Fugitive Aestheticism (an aestheticism that, in emphasizing taste, touch, and smell, escapes permanent or totalizing capitalist capture); and Neo-Decadent Sexuality (queer circuits of desire that play with the consumptive impulses of late capitalism). In the process, it demonstrates how Neo-Decadence overlaps with, but also departs from, fin de siècle European decadence. It concludes by examining how Neo-Decadence might expand our on-going understanding of decadence more broadly, as well as the movement’s limitations with respect to its relationship to academia, the environment, and women.

This study explores water as memory and as method in African thought. It shows how rivers, rain, and oceans act not only as sources of life but also as teachers who carry a story, restore balance, and reveal moral truth. Drawing from Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, southern African, Kenyan and Afro-Atlantic traditions, this paper presents water as archive and as oracle, holding the past while speaking to the present. This article develops the idea of hydro epistemology, understood here as a way of knowing through flow, renewal, and relationship. In this framework, knowledge is created through ritual engagement with water, transmitted through oral memory and ecological observation, tested against environmental response and revised when conditions change. Water is treated as a witness, mediator and guide, rather than a passive resource. By setting these traditions alongside global discussions on water governance, nature-based ecological care and decolonial environmental ethics, this paper argues that African water imagination offers more than symbolism. It proposes a practical philosophy in which caring for water and caring for life are the same act. To listen to water is to remember, to restore and to recover a way of living that renews both people and land.