ABSTRACT
Cary Snyder argues that H. G. Wells’s dismissal from the modernist canon, clearly related to aesthetic differences between Wells and writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, was also predicated on Wells’s immense popularity, a popularity which, for many contemporary Modernist writers, was incompatible with serious artistic endeavour. Wells’s fiction complicates the seemingly opposing terms of ‘popular’ and ‘modern’. Snyder’s analysis of the reception of Anne Veronica and its radical politics of ‘free love’ renders Wells both an outmoded Realist in terms of Modernist aesthetics and, at the same time, a distinctly modern author of cutting-edge fiction.
