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Joseph Valente, ed. Quare Joyce. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998. xi + 297 pp.
It is hard to imagine a more vigorous, productive encounter between queer or sexuality studies and the work of a canonical author than the one found in this collection of thirteen essays. In covering the span of James Joyce's work from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, the contributors evaluate homosexual or otherwise "queer" issues in his texts from several crucial historical contexts:they include Joyce's response to the legacy of OscarWildeand nineteenth-century Hellenism (considered by Garry Leonard, Margot Norris, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joseph Valente);Joyce's intimate reliance on the lesbian urban culture formed by his publishing contacts such as Natalie Barney in Paris (Christy Burns, Colleen Lamos); twentieth-century medical and psychiatric theories of both deviant sexuality and disease (Tim Dean, Marian Eide); the relevance of contemporaneous attitudes about gender "inversion" and identity (Jennifer Levine, Vicki Mahaffey); and the connections between "perverse" sexuality and Ireland's problematic status as English colony (Gregory Castle, Robert Caserio). The aim, as Valente notes in his introduction, is to offer not just another "layer" of interpretive meaning to Joyce's oeuvre, but instead "a whole other creative and critical history for Joyce's writing."
In invoking the Irish word quare's equivocal semantic register - in its philological link to "square," while also meaning "odd" or "queer"...