Romances of the White Man’s Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880–1936 by Jeremy Wells (review)
Artist as a Young Man returns to the figure of Parnell, who "serve[d] to denaturalize the manly ideal for Joyce," by providing an extended close reading of the Christmas Day argument (190). Valente devotes an entire subsection to "Counterparts" from Dubliners that traces the same logic of exclusion evidenced in the double bind of manliness in the metrocolonial double bind by focusing on three (failed) tests of Farrington's manliness. The "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses dominates the final section of the chapter. Instead of interrogating Irish cultural and political nationalism, Valente views the encounter between Bloom and the Citizen as Joyce's most deliberate critique of the post-Victorian manliness and "its complex effect on the exacerbation of ethnic antagonisms among the colonized" (220). Joseph Valente's The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 will provide a significant contribution to the field of Irish literary and gender studies because its cogent and insightful analysis both reasserts a fundamental social environment that influenced the period of the Irish Literary Revival and, by doing such, produces a new map for reading some of the foundational texts of twentiethcentury Irish literature.