Slightly more than halfway through the marvelous James Joyce and the Act of Reception, John Nash notes that “any history of reception must recognise its limitations” (102), a deceptively straightforward acknowledgement of the long-standing, perhaps intractable, question of the relation of authors, texts, and readers. The interpretation of Joyce's works represents a particularly thorny instantiation of this question in literary criticism and theory, one in which limitations are often invoked, consistently forgotten, frequently acted out, routinely recouched, erratically examined, yet rarely seized. This circumstance has less to do with any individual reading or set of readings than with the institutional conditions of Joyce's ongoing reception and is less the by-product of difficulty than of a vibrant critical field. If this reflection appears to mourn the loss of (a somehow) auratic scholarship in the age of critical reproducibility, then herein lies one of the principal attributes of Nash's book: through an elegant handling of close textual attention, archival research, and theoretical acumen, it powerfully argues that Joyce's engagement with the reception of his works, as a condition of their production, constitutes an exploration of the delimitation between the auratic and the reproducible. While this argument bears importantly on Joyce's process of composition (as demonstrated by evidence in his letters, books in his personal library, and the “anarchive” of his working notebooks), it bears as equally importantly on today's readers of Joyce, who come to his texts not only through a vast critical heritage, but crucially through the responses of past readers inscribed by Joyce into the texts themselves.

Against the privileging of a future audience that may one day read Joyce's “unreadable” texts, either as “current” readers still learning to be his contemporaries (Richard Ellmann) or as an appeal to deferred and indefinite readers (Jacques Derrida), Nash contends that Joyce's rewriting of past scenes of frustrated reading and contested reception signals a refusal precisely of such privileging: “Nowhere in Joyce's work is there a model of an ‘ideal reader’. … Indeed, his refusal to embrace a future or ideal audience, while rewriting his contemporary readers, could be thought of as a component of his rejection of any idealised or postulated political elite while at the same time denying the legitimacy of the status quo” (6–7). This claim is bound to raise hackles, for it destabilizes one of the focal enabling devices of the Joyce industry; yet in Nash's lucid explication, Joyce's refusal of audience becomes an acute political examination of the historical and material conditions that authorize and constrain the possibility of reading. As a “more gloomy affair” than critical strategies keyed to the future, the scenes of reading in Joyce's fiction “implore the necessity of a context from which, nonetheless, they have been irrevocably split,” a historical situation in which “the historical has been ‘lost’ even while it still casts its determining influence” (166). As a consequence, Nash convincingly demonstrates that Joyce's investigation of sites of reading in his works functions as a critique of the limitations of specific material contexts of reception: “Joyce's concern with the very real ‘failures’ of reception amounts to a fictional reworking of the failures of history” (171). Rather than learning to be Joyce's contemporaries, we are invited to learn of the disabling social conditions of their readings and, in this way, to learn of the historicity of the social conditions of our own acts of reception, their limitations notwithstanding.

This invitation critically returns us to the proverbial matter of Ireland. As the field of modernist literary studies has sought in the past decade to materialize some of the theoretical insights of an earlier critical phase, many of which in fact “entered” modernist studies through consideration of Joyce's works, Ireland has increasingly come to mark an imperative material site of modernity's doing and undoing. Nash's book beautifully situates Joyce's “unreadability” as both response to and manifestation of the “inevitably faltering practice of reading in particular circumstances” (170) in Ireland during the first four decades of the past century. This turn suggestively undercuts conventional understandings of Irish modernism as dependent on an exilic break with the social conditions of the island, a critical narrative that operates as the slow boat to universalism. Disembarking at Joyce's fraught literary—and political—relations with actual readers in Ireland, such as W. B. Yeats and John Eglinton, Nash works through Joyce's texts in four interleaved chapters: the first and fourth (on Dubliners and Finnegans Wake) examine Joyce's refusal of a national audience, while the second and third (on Portrait, Ulysses, and “Work in Progress”) consider educational institutions and debates about the common reader. Every chapter offers fresh and, at times, stunning readings of the works—the first chapter's contextualization of the “halting” and “provincial” readings that greeted Dubliners within the Revivalist project of creating a national audience, for example, is terrific—yet it is the third chapter (“Exhaustion: Ulysses, ‘Work in Progress’ and the Ordinary Reader”) that is the book's conceptual center. Marshaling archival evidence of subscription notices for the first edition of Ulysses and of the compositional transition from Ulysses to “Work in Progress,” Nash provocatively argues that a notion of competence obtains in Joyce's later writings exactly at the point where exhaustion becomes productive. Reading through earlier readers, later readers become competent only when they learn to identify the past social conditions of those earlier readers. Exhaustion is rendered productive through the historicization of these inscribed acts of reception.

Quibbles with this book arise primarily from wanting more of it. An example is in Nash's tantalizing reading of the gramophone recording of Anna Livia Plurabelle, which he rightly takes to represent a “combination of an auratic humanism and technological reproducibility” (126): one is left wondering how, then, to read the numerous radiophonic allusions in Finnegans Wake, as a further, if somewhat distinct, examination of the limits of reception, particularly given that the call sign of the Irish wireless station was 2RN (or “to Erin”). Yet this example epitomizes the productive qualities of this extremely important study, one that deserves a wide reception, indeed.