In this chapter, I explore the topic of new visualities and new visual spaces at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through questions of advertisement, spectatorship, display and the pictorial ‘language’ of modernity. In recent decades, there has been significant critical discussion of, on the one hand, literature and advertising and, on the other, literature and cinema. There has been little exploration, however, of the ways in which these three terms – literature, advertising, cinema – might function together. Yet it is certainly the case that many of the early twentieth-century literary texts which are most fully in dialogue with the medium of film are also those which are most directly engaged with the visual and verbal dimensions of advertising culture. Central examples from British, Irish and American fiction include Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight.

The connection between film and advertising in these texts is suggested, or secured, in a number of ways: through the representation of the shop or display window as a kind of screen; through the depiction of the mobile spectator in the urban sphere, caught by what he or she sees in passing and, in texts such as Dos Passos’s, having a new subjectivity or identity modelled upon it; through a focus on gesture and physiognomy; through various forms of projection, as in the aeroplane episode in Mrs Dalloway, in which advertising letters are written on the sky; through the construction of ‘a new alphabet’, comprised of both words and images; and through a focus on fashion, as in Ulysses, in which, as Jennifer Wicke has argued in her important study Advertising Fictions, fashion becomes ‘a kind of compact with modernity’. Ulysses is indeed the text in which modernist literature intersects with the culture of advertising most completely and most radically. The discourses of advertising both compose and flow through the inner and outer worlds of Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, shaping sound, vision and, above all, language.