Scholars contributing to the New Modernist studies have turned their attention increasingly to the relationship between literary production and the mass media, particularly to their mutual preoccupation with shaping reading audiences and manipulating public opinion. With Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Backus offers an important addition to this larger project by addressing the novelist's writing as an archive constructed in response to the modern genre of the sex scandal, which emerged in newspaper journalism during the late nineteenth century and continued to influence communal sentiment through the course of his career. The book also contributes something new to the immense critical literature on Joyce, not just by tracing his lifelong attention to scandal journalism as a form of politically charged speech act, but also by adeptly demonstrating its importance to his own representations of sexual and national identities. In the process, the distinctive study advances both Irish studies and British studies by recounting, in great detail, the emergence of particular scandal logic in the Home Rule newspaper wars, which spread across the Atlantic archipelago to propel the growth of print capitalism in Dublin and London alike. This is not to suggest, however, that the book reaffirms the timeworn modernist distinctions between high and low, art and commodity. Rather, Backus's study demonstrates the complex ways in which Joyce's writing works against these binary divisions by deploying rhetorical strategies for expressing dangerous or dissenting positions within a discursive environment defined in no small part by the threatening influence of scandal.

The basic contention here is that scandal produces a kind of social rift that dramatically undermines the credibility of its object while significantly bolstering the credibility of the journalist, his publication, and its reading audience or political constituency. The story of how this logic took shape is a fascinating one, which begins with the threat to nationalist integrity produced by the Phoenix Park murders in 1882, when members of the Irish Nationalist Invincibles assassinated the newly appointed British chief secretary and his undersecretary, causing a general backlash against what were perceived as terrorist activities. The new scandal logic took its definitive form shortly thereafter in indictments made by Irish National Party MPs Timothy Healy and William O'Brien, who used the pages of United Ireland to accuse British officers in Dublin Castle of homosexual activities. The subsequent sex scandals involving Charles Stewart Parnell and Oscar Wilde have received extensive scholarly attention, but Backus's account sheds new light on the discursive context in which these destructive clashes between the private and the public took place. Although Joyce's interest in Parnell and Wilde has also been well documented, Backus mines his early writing, especially the newspaper articles he wrote while living in Trieste, for further evidence of his response to the harmful effects of scandal. One of the key insights that issues from this scholarly effort is that Joyce used the force of scandal “homeopathically,” deploying powerful rhetorical strategies to ward off the menace of scandal as it worked to transform Irish subjects into chastened objects. In this view, Joyce's writing counters the use of sensational details, or “scandal fragments,” by demonstrating their incomplete and decontextualized status and thus rendering their authority to condemn impotent, since the information they provide is revealed as partial and incomplete. This claim cogently recontextualizes Joyce's own verbal virtuosity, now seen as the only means of resistance available to Irish subjects overwhelmed by the representational authority of British print capitalism.

The vital test case for this thesis must be, of course, his masterpiece of verbal virtuosity, Ulysses, and Backus dedicates the second half of her study to examining the trope of scandal in the novel. Again, this focus yields a number of compelling insights into Joyce's rhetorical strategies, exposing his negotiation of private details and journalistic practices as a means to rectify the balance of representational authority on the archipelago. Backus's forceful argument thus helps to push the study of Joyce's modernist writing past the dichotomy of literature and commodity, moving rather toward an understanding of the arts of mass persuasion that increasingly defined cultural production in the early decades of the twentieth century. In response to a series of scandalous charges, Joyce's protagonist Stephen Dedalus adopts the figure of Wilde and his “cracked looking glass” of Irish art as confederates in his intellectual dissent, allowing Joyce himself assert the right of self-representation on behalf of Ireland's oppressed and outcast. In writing the novel, moreover, Joyce employs the language of scandal homeopathically through elaborate representational strategies that seek to avoid the effects of scandal precisely by providing coded details to slyly expose his own scandalous behavior. Like his other protagonist, Leopold Bloom, he plays with the conventions of self-expression so that “he will be understood by none but voluntary conspirators in the co-creation of meanings that are unspeakable within the conventions of public discourse” (170). In this way, Bloom exemplifies the possibility of setting right damage done by distortive lens of British print capitalism, as he transforms the ethical categories it routinely employs and offers a radically different image of humanity.

Ultimately, for Backus, this is the significance of Joyce's novel: to deploy its own scandal work in an effort to mend the “cracked looking glass” of Irish art, if only to provide a glimpse of an alternative moral vision in his “nicely polished mirror.” As I have suggested, the study is admirable for a number of reasons, perhaps most of all because it offers us a theory of scandal as “a specialized, potent, destructive, and constitutive speech act of modernity” (8). At times, the book risks overstating the hold scandal had on Joyce's imagination, claiming, for instance, that “every detail of Bloom's private life” can be understood in relation to “the nightmare world of sex scandal,” or stressing the scandalous quality of Buck Mulligan's or Mr. Deasy's speech, while largely ignoring other personal agendas, political motives, and discursive contexts (202). Of course, this is the kind of risk run by many Joyce scholars (indeed, many contributors to the New Modernist studies) who practice their own kind of scandal work by unsettling long held critical orthodoxies, which the Joyce industry has, to some degree, reified or commodified. But what Backus's study offers to the scholarship far outweighs any of these objections. For it provides a richly detailed account of one of our most thoroughly studied modernist writers, which contributes something new to our understanding of his verbal art, not simply as a aesthetic form opposed to low or the commodified, but as an intricate example of communication and dissemination, a powerful, if elusive, instance of the art of mass persuasion.