Although he finds some answers in the contemporary literature of women's liberation, it is perhaps surprisingly the leading male writers of the period 1890 to 1920 who provide more answers about the New Man. The problem faced by these writers was acute how to create a woman who was both imperious and admirable, a man who was at once passive and exemplary. The boyish girls of Shakespeare's comedies had been unfailingly charming, but his womanly men had been exposed as public failures or moral weaklings.

Declan Kiberd is the author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, which was awarded the Irish Times Literature Prize and is one of the most influential works on Irish culture published in recent years.

His Irish Classics, published in 2000, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Prize and won the prestigious Lannan Prize in the USA. He is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin.