Recent advances in Joyce Studies have been marked by the confluence and integration of new approaches and methodologies, namely, petroculture studies, animal studies, sound studies, ecomedia studies, ecofeminism, and the blue and energy humanities. This trend signals the radical novelty of emerging scholarship grounded in the twenty-first century in terms of methods, discourses, and practices, as well as its attention to contemporary readers of Joyce vis-à-vis Joyce’s original audience. The research draws on historicised readings of James Joyce, Mulk Raj Anand, Rashid Jahan, and Wajida Tabassum to examine the complex conditions of modernist experimentation in the ex-colonial metropolis and the peripheries. After Joyce advances new interpretive frameworks that expand received ideas of the medical and carceral imaginaries at work in Joyce Studies. In the first instance, the research brings into focus metaphors of contamination across socio-political and nationalist twentieth-century contexts to demonstrate how transnational modernist prose beyond the fin-de-siècle narrates experiences of contagion and containment. In the second instance, the research probes into ideological factors (such as the circumscription of reproduction and child-bearing) leading to the incarceration of women within the home in the turn of the century against the broader comparative contexts of the growing emphasis on women’s duties within the domestic sphere in Ireland and India. In the third instance, the research documents catalytic modernist exchanges and modes of circulation, enabling readers to envision Joyce’s impact not only one-dimensionally but disruptively and even reciprocally in decolonial contexts.