Modernist Fiction

While the parameters of the terms “modernist” and “modernism” are constantly under debate, there is a broad critical consensus that “modernist fiction,” in the Western Anglophone world, usually denotes experimental narrative works produced between 1890 and 1940, and the major figures in British and Irish modernist fiction would include Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Prose fiction falling within this category is identified by its breaking with literary norms; being “modern,” in the sense of new, different, unprecedented. And while experimentation in terms of form is most widely seen as identifying modernist literature – breaking up linear narrative, using non‐normative syntax, inventing new forms of narrator, and so on – modernist texts are also characterized by their willingness to address new and sometimes controversial subject matter. Modernist fiction has often been caricatured as holding “real life” at a distance, interested only in its own formal and stylistic innovations. But much modernist fiction is characterized by a direct, often antagonistic, engagement with the lived realities of its rapidly changed, and changing, social and political world, influencing and influenced by the contemporaneous developments in other art forms, as well as presenting complex responses to intellectual developments in every field, from politics and philosophy to physics and biology.