An uneasy read

That modernism is experiencing a revival and renewed popularity (according to Bret Johnson, writing for the New Statesman) came as news to me - as did the fact that it had fallen so far out of favour. Modernist texts were a cornerstone of my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, so I guess you could say I was locked in the ivory tower with them, largely unaware of their currency in popular culture.

In truth, though, Johnson is referring to modernism not as a cultural/artistic phenomenon belonging to a specific historical period but as a generic term for art that is inventive, experimental and (as a result) challenging. It's a questionable conflation, not least because it's precisely the use of the term as a synonym for "difficult" that helps to make the works of arch modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce seem more arcane and foreboding than necessary.

Nevertheless (and despite the fact that Johnson's article features plenty of backslapping over the New Statesman's role in the revival of "modernist" fiction, through the establishment of the Goldsmiths Prize, a rival to the Man Booker), it's encouraging to know that the British public retain some appetite for novels that resist easy readability and refuse to dumb down - and that there are both presses prepared to publish authors who take risks and literary prizes set up to reward them for doing so.