James Joyce and the Problem of Justice
Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference

The first full-length study of James Joyce to subject his work to ethical and political analysis.

Joseph Valente (Author)

9780521473699, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 July 1995

298 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

"This landmark study provides a theory of social values subtle and complex enough to show the rich development of Joyce's vision. The theories of Gilles Deleuze serve Valente's innovative argument that Ulysses moves beyond the representational style of ots first half, which is geared to masculine values, into counter-representational styles in the second half that spring from feminine resistance. The idea that the changing styles of the second half enact the beginning of woman, which then aims at the production of new combinations, provides a striking new perspective....Valente's dense, coherent book is one of the best Joyce studies of the 1990s." Journal of Modern Literature

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.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Preface
1. Justice unbound
2. Joyce's sexual differend
3. Dread desire: imperialist abjection in Giacomo Joyce
4. Between/beyond men: male feminism and homosociality in Exiles
5. Joyce's siren song: 'Becoming-Woman' in Ulysses
Epilogue: trial and mock trial on Joyce
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]