Joyce and the Anglo-Irish is a controversial new reading of the pre-Wake fictions. Joining ranks with a number of recent studies that insist on the importance of historical contexts for understanding James Joyce, Len Platt's account has a particular focus on issues of class and culture. The Joyce that emerges from this radical reappraisal is a Catholic writer who assaults the Protestant makers of Ireland's traditional literary landscape. Far from being indifferent to the Irish Literary Revival, the James Joyce of Platt's book attacks and ridicules these revivalist writers and intellectuals who were claiming to construct the Irisih nation. Examining the aesthetics and politics of revivalist culture, Len Platt's research produces a James Joyce who makes a crucial intervention in the cultural politics of nationalism. The Joyce enterprise thus becomes centrally concerned both with a disposal of the essentialist culture produced by the tradition of Samuel Ferguson, Standish O'Grady and W.B. Yeats, and a redefining of the 'uncreated conscience' of the race.

Introduces the work of James Joyce, the literary, historical and political contexts in which he wrote and his critical reception up to the present day.

Explores James Joyce's work as a response to developments in British and European history.

Anglo-Irish Modernism and the Maternal argues that a focus on the construction of mother-figures in Irish culture illuminates the extraordinary achievement of the Irish modernists. Essentially, the seminal Irish modernists - Moore, Joyce, Synge, Yeats and O'Casey - resisted those mother-figures sanctioned by cultural discourses, re-writing her in order to elude her. In this, they not only re-constituted language and representation, they accessed and re-figured their own creative selves.

First published in 1979, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, through the works of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, J. M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey, documents the complex spectrum of political, social and other pressures that helped fashion modern Ireland. At least three sets of cultural assumptions coexisted in Ireland during the years between 1890 and 1930, -- English, Irish and Anglo-Irish, each united by a common language but divided by considerable tensions and strain. The question of Irish identity forms the central theme of the study, and illustrates how it was a major, even obsessive concern for these writers. Subsidiary and interwoven themes constantly recur. Themes such as the concepts of the peasant and the hero, political nationalism, the meaning of Ireland’s history and the validity of her cultural traditions. Rather than use the literature concerned as merely endorsing evidence for a sociological or political thesis, this study allows its major themes and issues to emerge and develop from direct and close study of the work of the writers. This book will be of interest to students of literature and history.