Joyce and the Anglo-Irish

Book excerpt: 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.