Ulysses--En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes Paperback - 1999

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Groundbreaking perspectives on the controversial modern epic

Perhaps no literary work of the twentieth century has caused more controversy than James Joyce's Ulysses. The book America wanted to burn has instead earned a place as one of the most complex and most studied volumes of fiction. In this collection of essays each of the eighteen contributors offers new commentary on one of the episodes in Ulysses. Throughout Ulysses--En-Gendered Perspectives the common critical concern is with varying articulations of "femininities" and "masculinities" in Joyce's modernist epic. Each contributor attends to the extensive and various markings of gender in Ulysses and examines the ways in which such markings generate and en-gender other meanings.

Gender is treated as a form of overwriting, in senses that include both excess and layering. Here the differentiations of "masculine" and "feminine," their definitions and elaborations, are approached in multiple ways and in changing contexts. Familial roles, labor assignments, perceptual modes, colonialist categories, sexualities, ethnicities, ways of knowing and learning, scents, tastes, and eating habits are but a few of the cultural phenomena the scholars explore.

Ulysses--En-Gendered Perspectives affords insight into Joyce's masterpiece from the present-day perspective of gender issues and is responsive as well to other influential trends such as historicism, psychoanalysis, and culture critique.

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