To talk of 'early' modernism immediately raises questions of definition and periodization. Such questions have indeed been key to the long 'postmodernist' period of retrospective construction and reconstruction of 'modernism' itself. The recent tendency has been to stretch the term to neglected figures and literatures. 'It should surely be clear by now', Andrzej Gasiorek contends, 'that modernism is a portmanteau concept, which comprises a variety of often mutually incompatible trajectories.' Accordingly, the periodizing dates of modernism have shifted this way and that; from, for example, the years 1890-1930 adopted by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in 1976 to Jane Goldman’s 1910-45 in 2004. Critics have of course selected specific years and episodes within these bookends, but at its widest, the period of modernism could on this reckoning evidently run for fifty-odd years, from the 1890s to 1945.

The list of novelists with some claim to be included under the heading 'early modernism' is therefore a long one. Did Thomas Hardy in some ways anticipate modernism? Does the 'naturalism' of George Gissing belong to the modernist project? Were H. G. Wells or E. M. Forster modern or modernist? What is our estimate now of the undoubted newness of D. H. Lawrence’s fiction? Was this primarily a matter of new social content rather than artistic form? And what of contemporary examples of gothic fiction, or the advent of science fiction or the detective novel? Do we think of these as generic 'popular fiction' and are they opposed from the outset to modernism? Bradbury and MacFarlane’s volume indexes all the named writers here (which is not to say they are regarded as modernist).