The publication of Mark Wollaeger's Modernism, Media, and Propaganda is an important event in the ongoing development of what has been called the New Modernist Studies, a recent turn in the study of modernism toward more finely historicized accounts of aesthetics and politics within the cultural field of the first four decades (give or take) of the twentieth century. If one of the key points of emphasis in this reinvigorated field has been to clarify the necessary relation of modernism to the marketplace, then Wollaeger's new book examines—in many ways, for the first time—the necessary relation of modernism to propaganda, which, like the marketplace, is one of the “others” against which modernism has traditionally been defined. Tracing this relation through subtle close readings of works of six canonical modernists (Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles), Wollaeger contends that “both modernism and propaganda provided mechanisms for coping with information flows that had begun to outstrip the processing capacity of the mind; both fabricated new forms of coherence in response to new experiences of chaos” (xiii). By locating mainstays of modernist critical discourse (such as formal recalcitrance, fragmentation, discontinuous temporality, and subjective impressionism) within a British media environment rapidly changing under military and imperial contingencies, he understands both modernism and propaganda as “incipient languages of the new information age” (10), as homologous modes of organizing modern experience. In sketching out this homology, however, Wollaeger patiently details how modernism and propaganda deviate at questions of autonomy and integration, an effect of address and reception that remains as difficult for today's audience as it was for that at the scene of the modern.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Ellul on integration propaganda, Mary Poovey on the modern fact, and Michael North on publicity and public opinion, Wollaeger offers a compellingly synthesized account of how the “complex entangling of modernism, new media, and propaganda” (26) during the period inheres in the very problem of separating text and context, in the interplay of details (whether “fragments” or “facts”) and “larger systems of meaning that invest them with significance” (24). While this circumstance could have resulted in a mass of undigested and poorly enfolded data, each of Wollaeger's chapters effortlessly balances historical and archival research with skillful, and at times stunning, close readings of a primary text, a methodological strategy that neatly explicates, without ever simply replicating, the genuinely vexed hermeneutic question at the heart of the book. For example, in the first chapter (“From Conrad to Hitchcock: Modernism, Film, and the Art of Propaganda”), Wollaeger examines Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907) and Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) through a technical comparison of each text's embodiment of a notion of mastery, rather than through the sterile terms of adaptation, and in this way convincingly suggests that both Conrad and Hitchcock aimed to dominate their audiences, but with medium-specific techniques of manipulation ultimately derived from alterations in the British media environment. Similarly, the second chapter (“The Woolfs, Picture Postcards, and the Propaganda of Everyday Life”) places Woolf's The Voyage Out (1915) against the new medium of picture postcards, modern English epistolary culture, and the increasingly mediated experience of imperial authenticity in order to “attend more closely to the shaping power of integration propaganda and to the tangle of interpersonal and intertextual relations that informs literary production” (124). In what is the book's conceptual centerpiece, the third chapter (“Impressionism and Propaganda: Ford's Wellington House Books and The Good Soldier”) reexamines what has often been taken to be Ford's contradictory (or incoherent) response to propaganda as a means of illuminating the notable intersections, but crucial divergences, of the impression and propaganda. If both serve to articulate a sense of immediacy to replace what is absent in modern communities, it is only the impression—as “a utopian information technology” (144)—that disallows instrumental identification by enjoining readerly desire to the formal disjointedness of the text. Unlike Ford's contemporaneous propaganda writing, “The Good Soldier, animating multiple circuits and webbing out into provisional networks of meaning, prevents its pages from becoming too familiar” (163). As a kind of epilogue, the fifth and final chapter looks at the intriguing “afterlife” (219) of these processes of identification and disruption in the parallel careers of Hitchcock and Welles in the 1930s and 1940s, as film became a privileged medium of propaganda and high modernism was in eclipse.

In its ambitious fourth chapter (“Joyce and the Limits of Political Propaganda”), Modernism, Media, and Propaganda does hit something of a snag in its investigation of informational webs and networks of motivated significance. Using British military recruiting posters as the optic through which to examine Joyce's techniques of disruption and dislocation in Ulysses, Wollaeger argues that “the novel's increasingly complicated relations between narrative event and narrative discourse intervene in the process of identification in order to lay bare the mechanisms on which propaganda depends” (200), a dynamic that culminates in the riotous ending to the “Circe” episode. In the preface, Wollaeger notes that his readings of Joyce draw “as much on colonial propaganda as they do on war propaganda” (xvii), yet it is precisely this distinction that becomes extremely tenuous in the colonial Irish context in which Joyce grew up and to which he remained scrupulously attuned in his writings. Without fully endorsing the view of Ireland as a staging ground for British experiments in techniques of military and social control, it is the case that Irish writing manifests a marked skepticism toward the “despotism of fact” as a condition of its modernity. This is not to argue that Joyce was in advance of Woolf or Ford, but only that the material conditions of uneven development cut both ways: what may have seemed new and disorienting in Britain in 1920 may have been less so in Ireland. This criticism merely speaks to the truly innovative nature of Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, in which one is left considering again that oldest of modernist mainstays: the new.