The joke may have been lost somewhat when Joyce first suggested that his work would keep the professors busy for hundreds of years, but now perhaps it is starting to wear a little thin. Generations of readers have been faced with the difficulty – perhaps even the impossibility – of ‘saying something new’ about Joyce. This problem is structured into Joyce's writing, not only its play on the apparent exhaustion of the English language, but in its engagement with the question of reception. If reading Joyce is also reading in the conditions of his contemporary readers, then the historicity of reception itself becomes a feature of the text. It is in the rewriting of contextual modes of reading and of specific responses that the intimacy of cultural politics to questions of style, language and form can most clearly be seen. The emerging picture of Joyce's work as firmly enmeshed within varying contemporary social discourses (of nationhood, postcolonisation, gender, religious censorship, etc.) is underpinned by showing the extent to which the act of reading was itself a political issue in Joyce's Ireland. His depiction of specific readers and acts of reception allows an analysis of the social conditions in which reading occurs – conditions influenced by forms of national expectation, religious presumption and state formation – as well as a recognition of the very textuality of reading and its resistance to archival capture.