In recent years, a number of modernist scholars have begun to revise our understanding of modernism's relationship to markets and marketing. Lawrence Rainey, Kevin Dettmar, Stephen Watt, Joyce Wexler, Paige Reynolds, Catherine Turner, and others have highlighted modernists’ engagements with promotional culture, making it impossible to see modernists as turning their backs on audiences, self-promotion, and commercial considerations. Jennifer Wicke's groundbreaking work, in particular, has foregrounded the relationships among economics, culture, and modernism.

Now John Xiros Cooper, a noted T. S. Eliot scholar, has taken up this line of inquiry. He asks sweeping questions about modernism's role in crucial developments in Western capitalist culture. Though Cooper's “new path to the study of modernism” (4), as he puts it, may not be quite as new as he claims, he has certainly taken arguments about modernism's role in market society further than most scholars. Cooper argues that “the modernist bohemias were the social places where an unrestrained market society first began to reveal itself in its most concrete social forms, including offering a social space in which the gender and sexual emancipation that characterizes fully developed market societies could begin. By the end of the twentieth century, the culture intrinsic to market society had spread from the avant-garde enclave to society at large, transforming, in its course, the everyday lives of the very philistine masses the early modernists haughtily kept at arm's length” (4). That is, modernists did not simply engage market culture. They were ahead of their time in exemplifying it.

Cooper follows his introductory claims with a trenchantly written, sweeping account that moves with facility among work as diverse as that of Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Marx, Flaubert, Eliot, Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Stein, and the Bloomsbury circle. For example, Cooper reads The Waste Land as a text “far sighted and well-adjusted … to the structural revolution” of market society (212). Of the Bloomsbury group, he observes that their “sociocultural self-segregation … provides market society with its most typical form of social and cultural development” (246). He especially shines in his attention to questions of literary style, even tackling Wyndham Lewis's often neglected work.

Cooper's study is most innovative when it pans back from the narrow focus on the modernist era to locate modernist engagements with market society in the longer history of modernity. He insistently directs our attention to modernism's relationship to the present: “the culture of everyday life in the early twenty-first century has been profoundly influenced by the modernist avant-garde of the early twentieth century” (5). Indeed, he may relish the resistance some of his provocative claims will face.

Yet Cooper seems, at times, to overstate his case—especially in his introductory chapter on market society. Yes, surely he is right that the market is not just an economic fact but “has utterly transformed the fundamental forms of our existence” (11), that it is “the engine of history” (11). It is not the only engine of history, of course. But Cooper exhorts us to “forget the class struggle, forget the ballot box, forget representative government, the market is now the drive shaft of the historical process” (11). Yes and no.

To illustrate his point, Cooper cites a department store ad featuring men in revealing bikini-style underwear and the caption, “Don we now our gay apparel!” He concludes, “you can be pretty sure capitalism is not inherently homophobic. How Wilde, vilified as a depraved sodomist in 1895, would have enjoyed the irony of this victory” (21). Yet anyone who believes that we can now forget the ballot box as a driving engine of history—and that the market inevitably leads to social freedom—should remember that in the 2004 U.S. elections, eleven states passed antigay marriage initiatives. Moreover, in the week I began reading Cooper's book, a Pennsylvania representative introduced legislation stripping sexual orientation from hate crimes laws in the state. And the new U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, prevented the Public Broadcasting System from distributing a children's cartoon that sought to explore tolerance and diversity in American society. The Bush administration squelched the cartoon because it briefly displayed a lesbian couple as parents. There was indeed a market niche for such a cartoon, but it was decisively trumped by the supposedly historically negligible representative government. Certainly the last two presidential elections in the United States would belie Cooper's claim.

Cooper berates scholars such as Rita Felski and Judith Butler for asserting the gendering of capitalism and modernity, arguing instead that social and cultural phenomena such as patriarchy, sexism, kinship loyalties, homophobia, racism, and class prejudice are simply precapitalist holdovers. Such claims, of course, presuppose that one can have a “pure” market society—capitalism in the abstract. But there simply are more sociocultural engines driving history than this totalizing argument about the nature of capitalist culture will allow.

A question automatically raised by such sweeping arguments is that of evidence. Cooper often argues that avant-garde insights pioneered current marketing tactics, even if today's marketers do not realize it. The historicism of the claims can be fairly thin, though. For instance, as Rainey has shown in careful historical detail, Ulysses entered the marketplace through a number of strategies designed to commodify it. Cooper also turns his attention to Ulysses, and he seems to move beyond what Rainey has done with the history of the novel's relationship to market capitalism: “what has never been studied adequately,” he says, “is the relationship of this [modernist] system of cultural production and marketing to the evolution of the late twentieth-century turbo-capitalism to come” (181). But Cooper's analysis might have been strengthened by a historical account that, in this example, could show how we get from Ulysses's publication in 1922 to its status at the end of the century. Such an account might involve an exploration not only of the collector's market but also of how academic course adoptions and reading lists affected the longevity of modernist novels. Work on reception and on canonization might also be relevant here. But Cooper is left, instead, largely with a stylistic analysis of Joyce's decentered syntax to carry the kind of historical meaning he posits for market culture. Surely he is correct that modernism contributed to forms of niche marketing in the twentieth century, but given his sense of the importance of modernist bohemianism for market culture, one might wonder why modernism (leaving aside the commercials and television shows that Cooper brings out as evidence of avant-garde influence) is so far from being the dominant aesthetic in the most commercially successful early twenty-first-century literature.

These reservations aside, though, it is clear that Modernism and the Culture of Market Society will inspire debate and future scholarship. Cooper's ambitious work will help keep scholarly arguments about the relationship of modernism to commodity culture lively and productive for many years to come.