The essays in this volume cover the period from about 1880 to 1930, during which modernity as a form of social and cultural life feeds into the beginnings of modernism as a cultural form. What has been called ‘the new modernist studies’ has essentially been concerned with locating modernism, now defined more broadly than in the past, in relation to other aspects of the culture of modernity. The journal Modernism/Modernity, established in 1994 and now the official journal of the Modernist Studies Association, originally announced its aim as being to ‘convey some sense of the grand ambition and scope of artists and intellectuals of the first half of this century’. It currently describes itself as ‘Concentrating on the period extending roughly from 1860 to the present’, and the journal covers a very wide range of themes in the literary and cultural spheres.

In their recent discussions of ‘the new modernist studies’, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have emphasized the ‘expansion’ of the field. While they stress the global dimension of expansion, there are also other dimensions which should be considered. One is temporal, in that ‘the new modernist studies’ is more open to the prehistory of modernism in the late nineteenth century. More importantly, perhaps, there is also an intrinsic dimension which recognizes something like the same duality which Baudelaire had identified in modernity: the combination of solidity and fragmentation which enables us to use the term ‘modernist’ both for a high-rise building and for Joyce’s prose. Some of the essays in this volume are explicitly concerned with the modernist writing and culture of the early twentieth century; others with longer-term affinities and continuities. As Michael Levenson has suggested, ‘The agon of modernism was not a collision between novelty and tradition but a contest of novelties, a struggle to define the trajectory of the new.’