Chapter 14 - Realism and Mass Politics

Summary

All of the historicising of literary modernism in recent decades has brought scholars of literature to a point where the application of a simple test is warranted. We should ask, that is, whether the historical phenomena that made literary modernism what it was also extensively shaped the majority of literary practice delivered in a realist mode. The ‘modernismists’ amongst us must face an uncomfortable possibility: if modernism’s major causes can be found shaping the rest of the literary production of the period which we associate with modernism – that is, those works not commonly deemed modernist – then any intrinsic justification for categorising certain works as ‘modernist’ has disappeared. This chapter looks in detail at the impact of one of the established causes of literary modernism – the shift from individualism to collectivism in European politics during the late nineteenth century – on realist writing, to test the easy assumption that literary modernism was unique in being influenced by collectivist politics. It shows that the distinctiveness, self-consciousness, and sensitivity to the surrounding world that is conventionally ascribed to modernism is, at least, overstated.