Earle’s chapter considers the implications of the early appearance of Joyce’s writings in pulp fiction outlets. Building on his previous work, Recovering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (2009), the chapter considers the significance of the after-life of Joycean texts, circulating as pulp fiction in the popular sphere, reflecting on the broader stakes of modernism as an organizational or conceptual category. The dispute over the “high” or “low” nature of Joyce’s oeuvre allows us to examine not just the vexed relationship between modernism and mass culture but also the nature of popular outlets. What does their publication of Joyce tell us about the values underpinning pulp magazines? The chapter considers how criticism tends to “cherry pick” Joyce, and how his work lends itself to this type of piecemeal exploration (for better or worse). In other words, the manifestations of popular Joyce consisted of very specific pieces of writing, and the dynamics that made them available for such remediation were definitely not true of other pieces. This observation points to the importance of celebrating the fragmentary nature of modernism, illustrating a new modernist studies that resists cohesive understandings of modernism.

All of the historicising of literary modernism in recent decades has brought scholars of literature to a point where the application of a simple test is warranted. We should ask, that is, whether the historical phenomena that made literary modernism what it was also extensively shaped the majority of literary practice delivered in a realist mode. The ‘modernismists’ amongst us must face an uncomfortable possibility: if modernism’s major causes can be found shaping the rest of the literary production of the period which we associate with modernism – that is, those works not commonly deemed modernist – then any intrinsic justification for categorising certain works as ‘modernist’ has disappeared. This chapter looks in detail at the impact of one of the established causes of literary modernism – the shift from individualism to collectivism in European politics during the late nineteenth century – on realist writing, to test the easy assumption that literary modernism was unique in being influenced by collectivist politics. It shows that the distinctiveness, self-consciousness, and sensitivity to the surrounding world that is conventionally ascribed to modernism is, at least, overstated.

The introduction begins by articulating the volume’s two main aims: to offer a rich account of the origins of the new modernist studies (part 1) and to suggest possible new paths of inquiry for the field in the near future (part 2). The introduction then surveys key features of the new modernist studies; examines ongoing debates over what the term “modernism” can encompass; and considers the position of modernist studies vis-à-vis recent critiques of contextualist scholarship. Throughout, it recurs to the strong institutional grounding by which the new modernist studies has been shaped. It also highlights how the collection’s individual chapters speak to the new modernist studies’ intersections with other areas of inquiry; to the continuing importance of examining modernist works in relation to non-, anti-, or not quite modernist ones; and to the value of working close analysis of textual intricacies together with elaboration of historical and cultural contexts.