Introduction

This chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book employs methods in modern periodical studies to recover Joyce's place in the networks of modernism and science. It also expand on the current state of scholarship by examining the discourse of science and the novel in the periodicals that serialized Ulysses, which emerged before and during the popularization of Albert Einstein, and Work In Progress, which developed entirely in the context of interwar popular science. It also performs a historical analysis of the discourse of science and the novel in Joyce's publishing networks before the first mass media exposition of Einstein, in order to highlight the immediate context in which Ulysses emerged. The book examines the development of 'Wandering Rocks' alongside discourses of science and the novel in The Egoist and The Little Review, and then its subsequent contribution back to those discourses when it serialized in those magazines.