In this impassioned and scholarly study, Gabriel Josipovici takes a long view of modernism’s origins, refusing the conventional 1850-1950 period in favour of beginnings with Dürer, Rabelais, Cervantes and the Reformation, a time of ‘coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities’, leaving ‘something that will, from now on, always be with us.’ Whatever Happened to Modernism? is a call to arms, charging contemporary literary culture with the neglect of modernism’s astringent demands. The British novel is, in Josipovici’s argument, particularly culpable, lacking the ‘European sensibility’ and ‘real historical awareness’ that connected Woolf and Joyce, Kafka and Baudelaire.

From the publisher:
The quality of today’s literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing – a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Durer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected – including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cezanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.

Yale University Press | Paperback 224 pp. |ISBN: 9780300178005