Modernism and the Marketplace: The Case of Conrad's Chance

This essay addresses the issue of modernism's troubled but dependent relationship to periodical marketing. It extends current critical perspectives by emphasising the role of textual studies in recovering the important transformation of modernist fiction from serial to book versions of the text. Focussing on Joseph Conrad's first economically successful novel, Chance, which initially appeared in serial form in the women's pages of the New York Herald Sunday Magazine in 1912, the essay shows how Conrad's fundamental revisions from serial to book (1913) contributed to its status as modernist romance. The discussion illustrates Conrad's complex response to feminist politics in this novel, his ironisation of the reductive homogeneity of popular visual representations of women, and his questioning of the relationship between gender and genre. The essay argues that in the revisions for the book Conrad poised the finished text between marketable romance and a critique of the serial romance itself.