Taner Can explores the prevailing problems of literary periodisation and canon formation in the
history of English literary modernism. In his comprehensive survey of the development of
modernist literary studies he demonstrates that the current conception of English literary
modernism and its established historical accounts are largely dominated by the exclusionary
aesthetic perspective and restrictive critical assumptions that the early modernist writers
deployed to define their art. Can seeks to redress this negative and marginalising
historiography of modernism through a reassessment of Joseph Conrad's literary career and
achievements.
