Stephen Dedalus's statement that he means to fly by the nets of nationality, language, and religion is often regarded as Joyce's modernist manifesto, his declaration of independence from the past (P 199). Yet the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist, who longs to fly by nets, is superseded in Ulysses by a Stephen torn between the dream of flight and the recognition of entanglement. The Nets of Modernism investigates how four modernist writers – Joyce, Woolf, James, and Freud – confront the entangled nature of the self, caught in the nets of intersubjectivity and intertextuality. “Really … relations stop nowhere,” Henry James famously declared: his writings, like those of Woolf, Joyce, and Freud, portray the human subject as enmeshed in relations of exchange – sexual, linguistic, financial, pathogenic – that violate the limits of identity.

The chapters of this book have been written over several years, and each may still be read as a stand-alone essay. I have rewritten them in response to the kind request from friends and colleagues that my forays into modernism and psychoanalysis be collected in a single volume. In the process of revision I have tried to highlight interconnecting themes.