Overview

This study aims to supply the first contextually precise account of the male gender anxieties and ambivalences haunting the culture of Irish nationalism in the period between the Act of Union and the founding of the Irish Free State. To this end, Joseph Valente focuses upon the Victorian ethos of manliness or manhood, the specific moral and political logic of which proved crucial to both the translation of British rule into British hegemony and the expression of Irish rebellion as Irish psychomachia. The influential operation of this ideological construct is traced through a wide variety of contexts, including the career of Ireland's dominant Parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell; the institutions of Irish Revivalism--cultural, educational, journalistic, and literary; the writings of both canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Gregory, and Joyce) and subcanonical authors (James Stephens, Patrick Pearse, Lennox Robinson); and major political movements of the time, including suffragism, Sinn Fein, Na Fianna E Éireann, and the Volunteers. The construct of manliness remains very much alive today, underpinning the neo-imperialist marriage of ruthless aggression and the sanctities of duty, honor, and sacrifice. Mapping its earlier colonial and postcolonial formations can help us to understand its continuing geopolitical appeal and danger.

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Reviews

The Myth of Manliness is a work of exemplary scholarship and astute analysis. Fluently written and beautifully presented, it marks an original and very significant contribution to the study of Irish culture in this remarkably formative period. --Modernism/Modernity A significant contribution to the field of Irish literary and gender studies... A new map for reading some of the foundational texts of twentieth-century Irish literature. --Modern Fiction Studies Required reading for all interested in gender studies in both Irish and postcolonial contexts, and a landmark in the field of masculinity studies, Valente's book is a major, and lasting intervention. --Irish University Review This book's strengths are undoubted, and are mainly in the perspicacious double-bind of manliness that is in evidence in spheres political, cultural and literary; its power is thus immeasurable. --Irish Studies Review Joseph Valente's densely argued, path-breaking study of the cultural dynamics of manliness in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ireland and England deserves to be as widely read and discussed as his earlier seminal work on the queer dimensions of Joyce's writing... Rewarding and challenging. Valente's path-breaking contribution to understanding Joyce and his cultural context engages, in a committed, extraordinarily rewarding way. --James Joyce Quarterly Gender identity and its formation have ... become dominant critical and theoretical problems in Irish Studies. Joseph Valente's new book, The Myth of Manliness, explores the vital importance of masculinity for our understanding of these problems, especially in a nationalist framework. --Irish Literary Supplement

""This is undoubtedly a pioneering study. It discusses constructions of Irish manhood in one of the most decisive periods of Irish nationalist mobilization with a degree of ingenuity, authority, and commitment that is simply unmatched in the field."" Joe Cleary, author of Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland

This is undoubtedly a pioneering study. It discusses constructions of Irish manhood in one of the most decisive periods of Irish nationalist mobilization with a degree of ingenuity, authority, and commitment that is simply unmatched in the field. Joe Cleary, author of Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland

Author Information

Joseph Valente, a professor of English at the University at Buffalo, is the author of Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood and other works.

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