One major project of Joyce scholarship since the late 1970s has been to reexamine the misogynistic reputation of Joyce's writings, to reevaluate both his images of female characters and his use of the feminine. Using the theoretical lenses of Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, and Irigaray, a number of Joyce scholars have come to view Joyce as a kind of protofeminist who battles phallogocentrism and a largely male canon with a nonlinear, subversively opaque, and feminine writing.

This book provides a much-needed critique of the Joyce that has emerged out of these studies, a Joyce newly garbed in feminist clothing. While Sheffield's study shares a common presupposition of these recent interpretations, it challenges the idea that the move Joyce makes with this alignment is one that puts him on the side of woman.

Sheffield contends that Joyce is not expressing his solidarity with woman or "womanly thought" in opposition to a masculine literary and philosophical tradition, but rather relying on ancient stereotypes to personify a dangerously "other" form of writing.