"Christmas Yet To Come": Hospitality, Futurity, the Carol, and "The Dead"

This essay reads Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and James Joyce's "The Dead" in light of their shared concerns with hospitality. By portraying Scrooge's ethical regeneration as both guest and host, the Carol renews the openness of a future in which one can still intervene for the good in others' lives. Partly through its echoes of Dickens's story, "The Dead" critically engages the ethics of limitless welcome in the context of colonial occupation; that engagement produces an ethical relation to a future political form the story both demands and awaits but declines to portray.