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This dissertation looks at the changing relationship between modernist writers and commercial publishers during the high modernist period. It explores the ways in which commercial publishers became involved in modernism, the reasons they did so, and how some managed to make money from a movement that their readers knew to be difficult. It does this with a view to finding out more about modernism's relationship with the mainstream - commercial publishers and their readers. Why is there a need for this type of study? A significant amount of research has looked at the ways in which modernist writers reached elite readerships. More recently, a number of studies have focused on modernist writers' relationship with mass culture, showing that they interacted with it in a number of ways, including borrowing publicity strategies, entering into dialogue with popular writers through the pages of literary magazines and interacting with new media. However, there has not yet been a broad review on the way in which modernism was developed and disseminated for that mainstream audience. This dissertation considers how the strategies and business decisions of mainstream commercial publishers impeded or accelerated the development of modernism in the . context of the rapidly changing economic, social and cultural conditions during the period of high modernism. It shows how the Great War dramatically changed publishing conditions, leading a wide range of writers, publishers, translators and readers to collaborate and co-operate to help bring modernism to the mainstream. It also explores how commercial publishers found ways of making the movement pay - as well as how, and if, these commercial aims could be reconciled with modernist writers' literary ideals. The dissertation is divided into two parts.

The aim of this thesis is to explore and compare representations of femininity in modernist writings of inter-war France: Andre Breton's Nadja, Cendrars' Dan Yack, Paul Morand's Tendres Stocks and Ouvert la nuit, Colette Peignot's Ecrits de Laure, EIsa Triolet's Camouflage and Bonsoir Therese. This comparison seeks to undermine gender categorisation which, in the study of modernism and Modernity, either marginalises women's writings or accuses male modernism of misogyny. Questioning this gender categorisation is crucial to an analysis of female modernist writers which takes into account the influence of male modernism on their writings, and also highlights their specificity. It enables a new reading of two neglected female writers (Colette Peignot and EIsa Triolet) who are still very much remembered as the Muses of two influential male writers of the inter-war period (respectively: Georges Bataille and Louis Aragon). The need to question any absolute division between male and female modernism becomes apparent when we examine inter-war representations of femininity. The figure of the detraquee (literally the woman 'off-track') recurs throughout inter-war male modernist writings. The detraquee is a character through which male writers represent the pervasive inter-war malaise about subjectivity and gender. She crystallises at once a conservative view of gender roles and a radical desire to break away from tradition. This ambivalence symbolises the challenges faced by writers who want to create and enact the New. It permeates through the semi-autobiographical writings of Colette Peignot and EIsa Triolet who oscillate between a sharp criticism of patriarchal violence against women and the desire to correspond to stable definitions of identity and gender. Through their representation of femininity, modernist writers of both sexes reflect on the possibility of breaking away from the past.

This thesis examines representations of sensation within modernist novels alongside contemporary philosophical debates over the concept of qualia. Concentrating on the work of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Percy Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett, it confronts a longstanding critical tradition that has tended to obscure or misunderstand the implications of arguments made by philosophers of mind in relation to literary descriptions of sensation. That the mind is a thing, and that modernist narrative fiction is particularly successful at representing that thing, has become a critical commonplace. In this thesis I argue that interpretations of modernism’s supposed ‘inward turn’ are founded on a mistaken notion of ‘cognitive realism’, a critical position endorsing the idea that it is both possible and desirable to describe the mind (conceived of as a stable and unchanging object) without loss through the development and judicial deployment of new literary techniques. The myth of the inward turn in its various incarnations – the psychologised modernism described by many literary critics in the 50s and 60s, and the neuromodernism subscribed to by many contemporary critics – is, I argue, largely the result of a set of inter-linked misconceptions which attend the cognitive realist paradigm. The notion of qualia is central to my thesis. Defined as the ineffable, irreducible, and subjective properties of conscious experience, qualia emerge concomitantly with modernism, developing out of G. E. Moore’s definition of ‘sense-data’ and Bertrand Russell’s category of ‘sensibilia’. Though still disputed within contemporary philosophy, qualia create huge problems for materialist theories of consciousness, threatening to undermine critical approaches to literature which contend that formal literary strategies can ever hope to transcend the limitations of symbolic language in conveying sensation. The ‘problem’ of qualia referred to in this thesis, therefore, is the problem the concept poses for symbolic descriptions (either mathematic, psychological, or literary) of mental states, especially when those descriptions make special claims (or are interpreted as making special claims) of mimetic veracity. The problem emerged within philosophy at precisely the point at which the representative claims of literature came under direct attack. This thesis argues, therefore, that it is a profoundly literary problem, and that the absence of ‘sensation’ from the written is simply a manifestation of the inherent limitations of language. A critical tendency to re-insert sensory experience into the process of reading – through phenomenological interpretations of modernism, or in contemporary ‘neuroaesthetic’ approaches to literature – thus point to a general anxiety that manifests itself most forcefully in relation to modernist fiction’s ability to ‘write’ sensation. This thesis employs the concept of qualia as a way of contextualising narratives of the mind – philosophical, literary and scientific – from the period. In doing so it seeks to historicise modernism’s ‘crisis of the senses’; locating this argument in a broader theoretical space and questioning the relevance (and novelty) of contemporary approaches to reading the senses in modernism.