Gender & Joyce

ELT 42 : 1 1999 ones, of a much larger picture. Sailer's attempt to integrate these materials and interpret that picture in terms of major issues in Irish culture, in critical theory, and in cultural studies is no more successful when one rereads her preface and introduction after reading the essays in the collection . Sailer's construction of a theoretical context for these essays is too complicated and convoluted, while her conflation of "representation" and "identity" marks a fundamental error in her perspective. Her introductory essay, which unintentionally resembles a parody of critical theories , creates a critical vacuum rather than a cogent integrated context for the essays. However, the substantive insights in the essays themselves make this collection a worthy contribution to Irish Studies. The essays provide important new perspectives on a broad range of specific periods and subjects in Irish Studies, many of which relate to gender, class, and nationality, but "Representing Ireland" is an appropriate title only in the general descriptive way that a conference title encompasses a wide array of separate papers. A great deal of work, both theoretical and practical, needs to be done on the vast topic of "Representing Ireland" before the grand meta-narrative that Sailer attempts in her preface and introduction can be written. Mary Helen Thuente Indiana University-Purdue University Gender & Joyce Jolanta W Wawrzycka and Marlena G. Corcoran, eds. Gender in Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. xiii + 198 pp. $49.95 DOING A REVIEW οι Gender in Joyce appealed to me, as it offered the attractive prospect of assessing where gender studies had taken Joyce in recent years. From its establishment in the early 1980s with Women in Joyce, the ground-breaking collection edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (1982), feminist study of Joyce quickly diversified . By 1987, when I published my second Joycean feminist study (James Joyce) for a feminist readings series, it was possible to map an array of feminist approaches, ranging from conscious, materialist, contextual studies to unconscious registers of post-structural language and myth, with divisions between the French and the Anglo-Americans, between gyno-critics and those who worked on male as well as female writers . Feminist critics of Joyce began with thematic, character-centered and new historical analyses, adding to this language-centered French feminisms, Derridean and Lacanian paradigms, and by the early nineties increased sensitivity to performance and discourse theory, much of 102 book Reviews this derived from cultural and film studies. Feminist Joyceans have more recently become allied to post-colonial and queer theory, and they have problematized Joyce's writing of the feminine. Margot Norris goes through much of this history in an introduction that is most interesting for its sensitivity to the continental male feminism that is a part of Joyce's rich feminist context. Indeed, this was an important concern of her recent book, Joyce's Web, but it did not seem to represent the drift of the volume in hand. When I sought for the "new direction in work on Joyce" promised in the preface of Gender in Joyce, I was somewhat disappointed. I am not arguing that earlier approaches should be abandoned in favor of the newest fad; indeed, having a sense of feminist history and the options provided over the years complements Joyce's own evasive multiplicities. But a great deal of what we encounter in this slim, expensive hardback has been around for some time. Indeed, the papers upon which the essays are based were first delivered at the 1990 Miami Joyce Conference. Probably due to circumstances out of their control, the editors experienced difficulty moving from conference to volume in a timely manner. This is a familiar pattern to Joyceans; the volumes for the 1990 Joyce Symposium held in Monaco in mid-1990 appeared in mid-1998. Six of the ten essays in Gender in Joyce, and even its introduction, have been published in one form or another elsewhere. In many cases, these pieces became part of the proverbial longer work, and it is a testimony to the power of feminist analysis that it has become integral to studies such as Garry Leonard's outstanding Lacanian analysis, Reading "Dubliners" Again (1993) and Mark Osteen...