Has Death Come for Modernism?

Abstract

David James’s The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction collects essays from thirteen literary critics that expand typical classifications of twentieth-century literature by analyzing contemporary texts in relation to modernism. This text participates in a movement within modernist studies of fostering dialogue, rather than locating divisions, between texts written at different historical moments. The authors collected in Legacies seek to convince readers of modernism’s continued importance to literature produced later in the century while presenting distinct arguments about its influence on texts as diverse as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo (1964), and Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004).