This week we’re rounding out—at long last!—our serialized release of a paper by Indirect Books Publisher—and L’Esprit Literary Review Editor—Dan White. Originally written for the American Literature Association Conference in Chicago last month, the essay considers the form of the novel over the long 20th Century, specifically looking at the legacy of Modernism and its current status today. Does Modernism continue to exist, or have terms such as New Modernism properly replaced it in the ongoing understanding of what the novel can be? If you missed the earlier installments, you can read Part I; Part II; and Part III at your leisure!
“The Novel, Perpetual: Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form” will be published in the Summer 2026 Quarterly of L’Esprit, after being realised in four parts here on the Substack. The essay examines Lucy Ives’ novel Life is Everywhere, along with her essay “The Weak Novel,” which is particularly apt as we enter the finalist stage of our Clarissa Dalloway Prize, judged by Lucy herself.
Part IV zooms out a bit to consider why any of this matters, and what we might expect from, and for, the novel in the present day. We hope you’ve enjoyed our first attempt at a serialized release, and be sure to check out the Spring 26 Quarterly for the fulll version, complete with footnotes!
Merci !
The Novel, Perpetual:
Modernism and Contemporary Literary Form
D. W. White
IV. The End (of The Novel)
Another, and final, reason for reframing Modernism as, first, our avant-garde commitment to form and, second, as something ongoing and perpetual, is that it very well may be the last word, at least for now, in The Novel. One possible near-conviction I’ve been orbiting, if not landing upon, in designing and thinking about my upcoming course is that the High Modernist movement of the 1920s and 30s represents a profound—and the most recent—techno-spiritual transformation in the history of the novel as an art form. I suspect the em-dash is the bit people might query. But what has the novel done, or discovered, in the last century that’s seismically different from what’s going on in Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, relative to the changes they represent when compared to Dickens, or Tolstoy, or Zola? I don’t mean, obviously, that all books today look like Woolf or Joyce; rather I mean that a system of intra-textual metaphysics, an ontology and an epistemology, emerged as a compositional first principle around the time following the First World War, and that this system—one that is both the way a novel might orient itself to the world and understand its own internal workings—became for a time the prevailing, or culturally dominant, novelistic mode before progressing through the last hundred years in various iterations, such that it never materially changed.
Besides everything on the sentence level—narration and the rest (most notably free-indirect style)—one thing the Modernist novel does, or fails to do, is enact a morality. This is intentional, and is a result of the skepticism the Modernist novel retains towards narrative linearity and neat arcing plots. We can see this amorality in the titanic single days of Clarissa Dalloway and Leopold Bloom, and in the linguistic purgatory of Speedboat, and the fractured superstructure of The Broom of the System, and in Erin Adamo’s bag—but we can’t find it in David Copperfield or (even) Pride and Prejudice. This absence of morality, as emergent from a lack of narrative linearity, is perhaps one of the three great inventions offered by the High Modernist novel, along with a prioritization of character interiority within a scenic-immediate structure and an elevating of narrational agency to a level with narrative agency. This last, and in a way all three, account for the Modernist novel’s fixation on form.
Of course not every novel written since 1922 is a Modernist novel; most take the other path, or an other path, which is more or less the one the novel was on in the nineteenth century. Most of the convention fiction I find myself frustrated and bored with in equal measure, published by the “big four” corporate houses in the United States, is essentially Victorian, not only in form but also, increasingly, in content: although naturally the mores have changed, the basic idea that a novel is a “socially improving,” and/or entertaining, method of communication has not. This is not what the Modernist novel is. The Modernist novel is, to repeat, urgently and inexhaustibly aware of itself as a novel, and seeks above all to innovate in form. As with Ives’ definition of the weak novel (which has much, but not complete, overlap with my notion here), this awareness is not necessarily or even frequently “postmodern metafiction,” although it can be. Postmodernism is much closer to Modernism than it is to being something new, especially as its fixation with self-referentiality is being done as early as 1891, with George Gissing’s New Grub Street, the novel with which I plan to begin my class.
As we slide well into our risk-adverse literary age, the Modernist novel, while far from dead, has certainly been sidelined for widespread acclaim of the Victorian. (Maybe we can call it “The New Victorian.”) Once again, the old friends are back at it. But there’s room for everyone, certainly in the literary community if not on the lists of the major publishers. We hear the reasons: shrinking attention spans in the social media age, the ever-septic economy, the lure of adaption from a plethora of streaming services, it’s hard to concentrate on good fiction during spin class, who has time to read anymore? Etcetera. It may be the case that truly innovative writing is virtually impossible, that nothing of the last 100 years quite reaches the avant-garde but instead recycles High Modernist agitations. Some of this comes down to semantics, and perhaps then recedes into pointlessness. But there are some novelists doing fascinating things in the form, and if it’s not strictly true that the methods and techniques found in Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel, Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Sonya Walger’s Lion, or indeed Life is Everywhere have never been done before—if these writers are continuing to build on High Modernist foundations in using free-indirect style as their narrational engine, or constructing their books primarily out of fictive-present scenes featuring an interwoven tapestry of rendered consciousness and exterior detail, or depicting their characters in ways that see them evolve narrationally alongside/rather than narratively—it does little to dull their achievements. After all, Virginia Woolf didn’t invent free-indirect.
When compared to the larger, especially mainstream, ecosystem of literature around them, Modernist novelists in the twenty-first century are just as innovative and experimental as those who came before them. Ives’ theory brings this sense of continuity back to Eliot, as well: “Disorienting yet at ease with its own enormity, the weak novel suggests that what was written in the past may serve as an interpretation of what is written in the present.” Attempting to understand the Modernist novel as one that orients itself towards form can account for both Woolf and Ives, and the lineage connecting them. It also accounts for the mass of books that do not do that, those that stick to prevailing convention, presenting life as something prepackage and preordained, rather than mysterious, terrifying, challenging—with ample room for brilliance.
Modernism, like all systems of belief, is an attempt to engage with the world, to understand it and then return back to it something of the self. This means that there is inevitably something lost, and gained, in the exchange. The movement began by wanting to locate the human in the oppressive trappings of the novel, its harsh corners of convention. Such a search still seems to be a worthy one, an exploration that can push the novel, and those who write them, and who read them, into new and exhilarating spaces. No one said it would be easy. But really, if you think about it, why would we want it to be?
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Thanks for reading. Come back next week for something new—and in the meantime, stay critical!