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.

Don DeLillo’s fiction has long catalogued American fear and dread surrounding the future. While a select few texts, most memorably Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007), foreground a sense of narrative and cultural possibility, the future is often depicted as a lament. That sense of future vision is evident in his latest text – at the time of writing – Zero K (2016), which explores environmental decline and a shift from Underworld’s ideal of a democratic collective to a neoliberal embrace of necropolitics. Using both ecocriticism and a range of prior DeLillo scholarship, this chapter reads Zero K as a prescient warning of political upheaval and loss, and thus anticipates how hope and renewal can be located even in DeLillo’s late period writings.

In an article on football in DeLillo’s work written for The New Yorker, Jake Nivens   discusses how the sport became “fertile material for [DeLillo's] career-long investigation of language”. The shared prominence of football within End Zone (1972) and The Silence (2020) is telling, but DeLillo’s interest in sport in general extends throughout much of his work. As Nivens suggests, language is key to how this theme develops – however, analysing sports in DeLillo’s writing more broadly may enable discussion of other aspects of his work.

Many existing studies of sport in DeLillo’s writing focus on particular depictions within particular texts. For example, the role of football in End Zone has been the subject of much critical investigation. Similarly, baseball plays a pivotal role in Underworld (1997) –most famously in its semi-autonomous prologue. Building on these studies, this chapter provides a broad overview of DeLillo’s writing on sports, tracing the ways it provides a unique corpus of work within his oeuvre. It traces the development of this theme as it oscillates in importance throughout his career, exploring the commercial and critical responses it has been subject to.

The period between 1900 and 1920 witnessed several important developments in the production and dissemination of wartime propaganda. Most important among these developments were the rise of the popular press, the expansion of mass literacy, and the increasing centralisation of propaganda efforts as a responsibilty of central government. This chapter traces the development of propaganda methods and of literature’s complicated entanglement with propaganda from the Boer War to the aftermath of the First World War. It describes how a number of major writers – Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells – came to play important roles in the British state’s wartime communications, and how the culture of ‘suspicious reading’ encouraged by the prevalence of propaganda shaped post-war debates about the truth-telling capacities of the literary realism with which those writers were closely associated.

Representations of conflict in the early twentieth century respond both to the impact of mass industrial warfare, particularly in the First World War, and the development of mass culture following the Education Acts of the late nineteenth century. Concomitant with the development of literary modernism, the need to represent radically new forms of physical and mental experience reshaped war writing; a hundred years later, that influence persists. This chapter argues that war writing must be understood not simply as a response to individual conflicts; rather, the memory, expectation, and fear of war was a pervasive presence that continually shaped much of the period’s writing even in times of apparent peace, and supported a lucrative literary market in jingoistic literature, popular invasion fiction, and memoirs of wartime trauma. This chapter traces the lasting influence of the period’s major conflicts on its literary writing – particularly its prose – and concludes with a discussion of several post-war texts, published in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, which point towards the disenchanted and often angry tone of the 1928–30 War Books Boom.

Following the catastrophe of the First World War, which many saw as the result of nationalist rivalries, the immediate postwar period was dominated by concerns regarding European decadence and by dreams of a united Europe that would be able to regain its geopolitical power in a new global landscape increasingly dominated by the United States of America and by Russia. The French writer Paul Valéry set the agenda by arguing for a genuinely “European spirit” that had arisen out of the confluence of classical antiquity and Christianity. He was followed in this endeavor to champion a distinctly European spirit by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Hermann von Keyserling. Chapter 6 charts the development of this idea of a European spirit, as well as the various plans for a politically united Europe, most notably as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s proposals for what he termed “Pan-Europe.” The chapter reveals the cultural supremacism that taints many of these attempts to identify a European spirit, as well as emphasis placed on the need for European to re-establish its geopolitical and geo-cultural influence.

In the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Europe faced a dramatic economic downturn and mass unemployment. Visions of a peaceful cosmopolitan Europe were soon replaced by ever more extreme nationalist visions, which reached their most appalling incarnation in the racist-nationalist ideology of the Nazis. The 1930s also saw continued attempts to champion and defend a European spirit, by, among others, Julien Benda, Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. However, the distinction between such efforts and the nationalist view of Europe grew ever weaker, and following the outbreak of the Second World War, and particularly after the German invasion of Russia in 1941, it was the Nazis who were appealing to the idea of European civilization as threatened by the Asiatic. The non-European was, for them, incarnated by the Jews and by the Russians. As Chapter 7 seeks to demonstrate, no simple opposition between the cosmopolitan and the nationalist view of Europe stands up to scrutiny, since both were rooted in ideas of Euro-supremacism and the cosmopolitan view almost always took one national culture as its model.

The prevailing paradigm of modern art in Brazil still revolves around the Modern Art Week of 1922, in São Paulo, and the self-professed avant-gardes that derived from that event. What came immediately before it is usually relegated to a limbo status, as neither modern nor non-modern. The introduction casts doubt upon the widely accepted category pre-modernism, questioning its validity as a historical construct. Evidence demonstrates that alternate modernisms existed in the Brazilian context prior to 1922. Chief among these is a variant of modernism linked to the rising urban culture of music, dance, theatre, humour, graphics and cinema in Rio de Janeiro. The relative lack of scholarly interest in mass culture has led to a tendency to overstate the impact of erudite expressions in literature, fine art and architecture. Other arenas of cultural production have been systematically overlooked, including ones to which Afro-Brazilian artists made important contributions. This skewed perspective subtly elides how elite practitioners often appropriated subaltern identities to reinforce their own claims to modernity, vis-à-vis their European counterparts. The book proposes to examine the conflicts between primitivism and nationalism, modernism and archaism. Rethinking these tensions in the Brazilian context helps make sense of divergent models of modernism elsewhere.

Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional expanse. To examine the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible, this chapter first looks at two manifestations of its duality and then analyzes mass culture, folk culture, and alternative culture as three major spheres of popular culture. After confirming its plurality, we turn at the end to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.

Chapter 3 analyses the cultural politics of protest in the 1960s. It examines the transformed understanding of high culture created by a mass market for paperback books.The chapter challenges the idea that the protest movements of the 1960s had their origins in a particular set of intellectual texts – often summarised as Mao, Marx, Marcuse. It traces the history of mass-circulation books in the 1960s and their perceived challenge to the organisation of high culture. I argue that the protest movements of the 1960s first promoted open access to high culture, then attempted to recast the meaning of high culture and developed a critique of commodification. I argue that this transformation did not democratise knowledge as expected, but it did contribute to the desacralisation of high culture and an old regime of elite culture.