This chapter provides an institutional history of the new modernist studies by attending to the stated goals of significant actors within the shifting matrix of what has counted as modernist studies in the United States over the last quarter century and by tracking the institutional effects of these actors. It relies in part on a method not often used in literary studies: questionnaires were distributed to past Modernist Studies Association presidents, editors of book series, editors of Modernism/modernity, and acquisitions editors. It draws also on both rigorous and relatively casual forms of quantitative analysis. This blended approach is intended to provide a more complete account of the new modernist studies than has previously been offered and a new way to begin answering some fundamental questions: How much influence has the movement had? Where have its effects been felt and how can they be measured? Is new modernist studies more than a brand?

This essay argues that invisibility is a missing keyword and concept in modernist studies. Taking off from the observation that modernism begins and ends with two novels about invisible men, (The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells, 1897; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, 1952), it shows that invisibility offers a new way to think about a swath of key issues. Reading these two texts as bookends to the modernist period opens up not only this singular connection, but a broader web of intertwined forces and topics, and reveals some of the ways that technology, social status, race, science, violence and power were often thought together. Whether as a fantasy or a delusion, a desire or an ironic reality, invisibility mattered to writers in the first half of the century; restoring it to critical view helps to realign and in many cases deepen a range of works and their most pressing preoccupations.