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BOOK REVIEWS problems present themselves with the other plays in the edition, nor is selection a problem, although she might well have included When the Moon Has Set since the earlier one-volume edition from Oxford contains it. Saddlemyer's select bibliography contains numerous items which should prove more than adequate for the average reader, and her biographical chronology is detailed. As I remarked in an earlier review of the edition of Pinero plays (39:1, 116-19), Oxford's book-pricing policy continues to amaze: $45 for the slim hardback Synge edition borders on extortion (interestingly, one library I know has found it cheaper to rebind the paper version!). The paperback is three dollars more expensive than the much bigger Barrie edition. Presumably the Oxford bean counters have an eye to the academic market and foresee that the Synge book will be widely adopted in the classroom, which it certainly deserves to be. Hopefully, the seven or so dollars for Barrie in paperback will tempt some curious readers to explore that whimsical dramatist whom HoUindale has also served very well. J. P. Wearing ___________ University of Arizona Joyce, Justice, Difference Joseph Valente. James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiii + 282 pp. $49.95 JOSEPH VALENTE'S thought-provoking, complicated book necessarily devotes more pages to the theory developed to explain Joyce than to the Joyce texts themselves. But in no way do the proportions represent an imbalance. The approach, while it embodies refinements on the theories of, among others, Lyotard, Deleuze, Bhaba, Said, Guattari , Derrida, Kristeva, and a host of post-Lacanians, makes wholly original applications to jurisprudence theory. There is no way in this short review to begin to describe the complexities involved in Valente's approach to the subject. The first chapter, "Justice unbound," alone is more than worth the price of the book. Valente provides a descriptive analysis of the evolution of the judicial system and its relationship to law/authority, a system that attempted to embrace the whole body politic, while at the same time permitting specific clarification of differences, from Divine Right monarchies to changes appropriate to evolving popular constituencies. The accommodations are met by drawing authority from the law's own 507 ELT 39:4 1996 evolving precedents, each further modifying some sort of mythic originary grounding in divine or innate justice. Valente then goes into the creation of judicial inequalities through "special rights," like legal access to libraries for the disabled to avoid passive discrimination, and such concepts as social contracts, and the resulting differences between individuals and collectives, with all their singular rights and privileges, tracing the way in which their dependence on difference is due to shifting consensus, and how the authority of the social contract is a fiction in itself, ultimately based on cultural circumstances influencing its inception. Valente details how the covenant of gender expectations was reinvented in the late nineteenth century and how feminism subsequently rearticulated these new gender principles in the act of affirming them, viewing each new alteration as a "double inscription of justice, its production as 'writing' in the Derridean sense: '[W]riting [that] both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke [and thus] escapes the pertinence or authority of truth.'" The process brings about a "counterfactual logic: the way its descriptive aspect, the respect for what it is, and its prescriptive aspect, the projection of what should be, both inform and contaminate one another" (19). This definition of justice as "the ethics of the double inscription" influences the history of modern feminism and its split into those who base their claims for modern women on old patriarchal precedents and those who eschew such precepts as inherently flawed. Valente goes on to trace the articulation of justice between genders as intertwined with the relationship between the colonizers and the subalterns in the ascription of masculine attributes to the former and feminine attributes to the latter, leading to the feminization of Ireland, the Irish, and Celts generally. In Valente's view this gendered dichotomy rendered Joyce the beneficiary of both colonial masculinized bias against limitations of freedom from sexual...

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