In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

"...a first-rate and much-needed model for work on the genre for years to come...While thus offering a highly original reading of modernism, Daly's book is nonetheless at its most impressive when tracing the intricate ideological maneuvers of the only apparently thin-whitted romances of Stoker and his peers...Daly both sets a new standard for work on this genre and requires that those working elsewhere-on domestic fiction, modernism, the history of the middle classes-reconsider it." Victorian Studies

"I nonetheless find The Spectale of Intimacy a stimulating and satisfying book... One of the satisfying qualities of The Spectale of Intimacy is that it preserves a nice balance between the general and the specific enough but not too much of either- that nicely replicates the very method of their exploration of the relationship between the public and the private in Victorian society." Studies in the Novel