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In Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, Margot Gayle Backus charts the rise of the newspaper sex scandal across the fin de siècle British archipelago and explores its impact on the work of James Joyce, a towering figure of literary modernism.
Based largely on archival research, the first three chapters trace the legal, social, and economic forces that fueled an upsurge in sex scandal over the course of the Irish Home Rule debates during James Joyce’s childhood. The remaining chapters examine Joyce’s use of scandal in his work throughout his career, beginning with his earliest known poem, “Et Tu, Healy,” written when he was nine years old to express outrage over the politically disastrous Parnell scandal.
Backus’s readings of Joyce’s essays in a Trieste newspaper, the Dubliners short stories, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses show Joyce’s increasingly intricate employment of scandal conventions, ingeniously twisted so as to disable scandal’s reifying effects. Scandal Work pursues a sequence of politically motivated sex scandals, which it derives from Joyce's work. It situates Joyce within an alternative history of the New Journalism’s emergence in response to the Irish Land Wars and the Home Rule debates, from the Phoenix Park murders and the first Dublin Castle scandal to “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” and the Oscar Wilde scandal. Her voluminous scholarship encompasses historical materials on Victorian and early twentieth-century sex scandals, Irish politics, and newspaper evolution as well as providing significant new readings of Joyce’s texts.
“The book presents a powerful reading of Joyce’s engagement with the culture of journalistic scandal at the fin-de-siècle.” —James Joyce Quarterly
Margot Gayle Backus is associate professor of English at the University of Houston. She is the author of The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: James Joyce and the Political Sex Scandal: “The Cracked Lookingglass of a Servant”
1. Unorthodox Methods in the Home Rule Newspaper Wars: Irish Nationalism, Phoenix Park, and the Fall of Parnell
2. Investigative, Fabricated, and Self-Incriminating Scandal Work: From “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” to the Oscar Wilde Trials
3. James Joyce’s Early Scandal Work: “Never Write about the Extraordinary”
4. Reinventing the Scandal Fragment: “Smiling at Wild(e) Irish”
5. The Protracted Labor of the New Journalist Sex Scandal: “Lodged in the Room of Infinite Possibilities”
6. James Joyce’s Self-Protective Self-Exposure: Confessing in a Foreign Language
7. (Re)Fusing Sentimentalism and Scandal: “Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich”
8. Dublin’s Tabloid Unconscious: “A Hairshirt of Purely Irish Manufacture”
Coda: Jamming the Imperial Circuitry: “The Readiest Channel Nowadays”
Notes
Bibliography
Index