Description: The Poor Bugger's Tool--the title taking its name from the veiled reference to Roger Casement in Joyce's Ulysses--draws on writings by Wilde, Synge, Joyce, Jamie O'Neill, and Patrick McCabe to consider how each deploys queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation and put forward anti-imperialist critiques.
Review Quotes: "This book is original, intelligent, and persuasively argued. Mullen is a wonderful close reader of literary language and textual moments. The Poor Bugger's Tool contributes substantially to recent work in queer studies, Irish studies, modernism, and postcolonial studies." --Marjorie Howes, author of Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History
"A beautiful, assured exploration of the production of queer value in twentieth-century Irish literature and culture. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the history of sexuality, and Marxism, Mullen argues persuasively for the power of affect and aesthetics in the remaking of capitalist social relations." --Heather Love, author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History"Patrick Mullen's new book succeeds in performing several important moves at once. It forces the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality to engage more directly with theorizations of late captalism. It also brings out the sexuality latent in Michael Hardt's concept of 'affective labor.' And it achieves both moves--essential to thinking beyond the sexuality/economy divide that stubbornly persists within critical theory--by showing how Irish writers queered the hegemony of British colonial aesthetics." --Nancy Armstrong, author of How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900"The Poor Bugger's Tool brings varied and sophisticated literary and cultural theory to bear upon the project of Irish Studies, without forsaking the attention to historical detail that has dominated the field over the last 20 years. Mullen elaborates how the response that certain signature specimens of Irish modernism pose to the distinctive historical pressures animating them at once demand and reward a new theoretical synthesis, one that combines the insights of contemporary queer and affect theory with the structural implications of Marxist axiology." --Joseph Valente, author of The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922