For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading James Joyce—useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found.
    Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-François Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce’s proto-postmodernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work’s ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts—the first constrained by the precious, would-be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.
    In short, The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism explores what happens when the extra-literary pronouncements of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, as well as Joyce’s early critics, are set aside and a new, “unauthorized” Joyce is allowed to appear. This postmodern Joyce, more willful and less easily compartmentalized, stands as a counterpoint to the modernist Joyce who has perhaps become too familiar.

Rarely have genres of literary expression been looked upon or read as commodities within a market system; we tend to think of our literature as "pure," untainted by any interaction with the world of commerce. Critical accounts of modernism are frequently theorized across the divide between the project itself and the larger marketplace, the world of consumption. Marketing Modernisms calls into question this curious separation and examines the material, intellectual, and ideological practices that comprise the notion of "marketing." Marketing Modernisms is concerned with Anglo-American modernists and their potential readers in both the popular audience and the academy. Examining the forms of promotion employed by book publishing houses, in the editorial offices of literary magazines, and in the minds of modern writers, the essays bring to the fore little-known connections between writers such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Langston Hughes, and the commercial marketplace they engaged. The book's provocative themes include the strategies that modernists and their publishers employed to market their work, to fashion themselves as artists or celebrities, and to bridge the gap between an avant-garde elite and the popular reader. Other essays explore the difficulties confronted by women, African American, and gay and lesbian writers in gaining literary acceptance and achieving commercial representation while maintaining the gendered, racial, and sexual aspects of their lives.