There are many kinds of modernism - one has only to think of the differences between Picasso and Kandinsky, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, or Joyce and Kafka to appreciate this. The number of books and articles devoted to attempts at defining the term is huge. In what follows I wish to see Joyce's relationship to what is often loosely called the 'modernist movement' in a fairly simple way. First of all I look at his becoming 'modernist' in the most obvious sense - that is, by moving beyond his nineteenth-century predecessors. I then sketch his relationships to others who had diversely managed the same feat, and thus opened up an extraordinary avant-garde market-place of competing styles. Joyce made a contribution to this critical moment so great that he posed an acute problem to his successors: after Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, what types of expression in writing could possibly remain undiscovered?

Modernist artists at the beginning of the century were to a large degree moved to this unprecedented freedom and confidence in stylistic experiment by what they saw as radically new ideas, current in that period, concerning consciousness, time, and the nature of knowledge, which were to be found in the work of Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, Einstein, Croce, Weber, and others. And these ideas contested in a dramatic manner the beliefs of the older generation.