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Even though the Irish child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic
Church have appeared steadily in the media, many children remain in
peril. In The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature, Joseph
Valente and Margot Gayle Backus examine modern cultural responses
to child sex abuse in Ireland. Using descriptions of these scandals
found in newspapers, historiographical analysis, and 20th- and
21st-century literature, Valente and Backus expose a public sphere
ardently committed to Irish children's souls and piously oblivious
to their physical welfare. They offer historically contextualized
and psychoanalytically informed readings of scandal narratives by
nine notable modern Irish authors who actively, pointedly, and
persistently question Ireland's responsibilities regarding its
children. Through close, critical readings, a more nuanced and
troubling account emerges of how Ireland's postcolonial heritage
has served to enable such abuse. The Child Sex Scandal and Modern
Irish Literature refines the debates on why so many Irish children
were lost by offering insight into the lived experience of both the
children and those who failed them.
This is the first full-length study of James Joyce to subject his
work to ethical and political analysis. It addresses important
issues in contemporary literary and cultural studies surrounding
problems of justice, as well as discussions of gender,
homosociality and the colonial condition. Valente uses an original
theory and psychology of justice through which to explore both the
well-known and the more obscure of Joyce's works. He traces the
remarkable formal and stylistic evolution that defined Joyce's
career, and his progressive attempt to negotiate the context of
social difference in racial, colonial, class and sexual terms. By
analysing Joyce's verbal strategies within both the
psychobiographical and sociohistorical contexts, Valente unlocks
the politics of Joyce's unconscious and reveals the legacy of
Western political thought.
This is the first full-length study of James Joyce to subject his
work to ethical and political analysis. It addresses important
issues in contemporary literary and cultural studies surrounding
problems of justice, as well as discussions of gender,
homosociality and the colonial condition. Valente uses an original
theory and psychology of justice through which to explore both the
well-known and the more obscure of Joyce's works. He traces the
remarkable formal and stylistic evolution that defined Joyce's
career, and his progressive attempt to negotiate the context of
social difference in racial, colonial, class and sexual terms. By
analysing Joyce's verbal strategies within both the
psychobiographical and sociohistorical contexts, Valente unlocks
the politics of Joyce's unconscious and reveals the legacy of
Western political thought.
Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in
the humanities and social sciences often harbor a distrust of
traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and
unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and
policing. "Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle" questions these
assumptions by examining, for the first time, in so sustained a
manner, the rise of a select number of academic disciplines in a
historical perspective.
This collection of twelve essays focuses on the late Victorian
era in Great Britain but also on Germany, France, and America in
the same formative period. The contributors--James Buzard, Lauren
M. E. Goodlad, Liah Greenfeld, John Guillory, Simon Joyce, Henrika
Kuklick, Christopher Lane, Jeff Nunokawa, Arkady Plotnitsky, Ivan
Strenski, Athena Vrettos, and Gauri Viswanathan--examine the
genealogy of various fields including English, sociology,
economics, psychology, and quantum physics. Together with the
editors' cogent introduction, they challenge the story of
disciplinary formation as solely one of consolidation, constraint,
and ideological justification.
Addressing a broad range of issues--disciplinary formations,
disciplinarity and professionalism, disciplines of the self,
discipline and the state, and current disciplinary debates--the
book aims to dislodge what the editors call the "comfortable
pessimism" that too readily assimilates disciplines to techniques
of management or control. It advances considerably the effort to
more fully comprehend the complex legacy of the human
sciences."
In "Yeats and Afterwords," contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's
powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex
literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned
himself at various historical endpoints--of Romanticism, of the
Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization
itself--and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics
of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and
loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant
throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over
time, depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By
tracking these vicissitudes, the volume offers new ways of thinking
about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements.
"Yeats and Afterwords" proceeds in three stages, involving
past-pastness, present-pastness, and future-pastness. The first,
"The Last Romantics," examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and
verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express
the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The
essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources
and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively
neglected by scholars. The second section, "Yeats and Afterwords,"
looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments, insights, and
styles to critical negation, crafting his own afterwords in various
ways. The last section, "Yeats's Aftertimes," explores how, thanks
to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention, his style of
belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats
is a towering figure in literary history, hard to follow and harder
to avoid, and later writers often found themselves producing words
that were, in some sense, his afterwords.
"This is a groundbreaking collection that will have a major impact
on Yeats studies and will be useful for scholars working more
broadly in Irish and modernist studies." --Rob Doggett, SUNY
Geneseo
The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating
body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the
movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly
work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring
previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and
international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends
to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified
endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast,
The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by
interpreting the Revival through the concept of "complexity," a
theory recently developed in the information and biological
sciences. Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival's
various components operated as parts of a network but without any
overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival's elements
can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single
objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this
volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on
what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity,
political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and
well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the
Revival's individual parts involved conflict and cooperation,
difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this
combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence
within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes
capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.
The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating
body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the
movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly
work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring
previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and
international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends
to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified
endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast,
The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by
interpreting the Revival through the concept of "complexity," a
theory recently developed in the information and biological
sciences. Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival's
various components operated as parts of a network but without any
overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival's elements
can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single
objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this
volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on
what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity,
political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and
well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the
Revival's individual parts involved conflict and cooperation,
difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this
combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence
within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes
capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.
Dracula's Crypt unearths the Irish roots of Bram Stoker's gothic
masterpiece, offering a fresh interpretation of the author's
relationship to his novel and to the politics of blood that
consumes its characters. An ingenious reappraisal of a classic
text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic
commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity. Probing
psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's
background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's
viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine
vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic
heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's
theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology
at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism. In the light of
Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen
as a doppelganger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the
blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign
invader. Stoker also confronts gender ideals and their
implications, exposing the "inner vampire" in men like Jonathan
Harker who dominate and absorb the women who become their wives.
Ultimately, Valente argues, the novel celebrates a feminine
heroism, personified by Mina Harker, that upholds an ethos of
social connectivity against the prevailing obsession with blood as
a vehicle of identity. Revealing a profound and heretofore
unrecognized ethical and political message, Dracula's Crypt
maintains that the real threat delineated in Dracula is not racial
degeneration but the destructive force of racialized anxiety
itself. Stoker's novel emerges as a powerful critique of the very
anxieties it has previously been taken to express: anxieties
concerning the decline of the British empire, the deterioration of
Anglo-Saxon culture, and the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race.
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