ABSTRACT
I have suggested two motives for Modernism: the desire to exploit a more diversified market for fiction by establishing stylistic thresholds which test the reader’s powers of inference, and thus offer an increased effect in return for an increased effort; and the fascination of the unusually wide range of new subjectmatters thrown up by the pace of economic, social and political change. If there is one novel which exemplifies the convergence-the interlocking-of these motives, it is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
