The Crisis at the Heart of Modernity

Terry Eagleton’s recent book employs his trademark witty style in an attempt to say something new about the era that birthed modernism.

By Arleen IonescuFebruary 9, 2026

• Cultural Studies

• Literary Criticism

RECENTLY, THERE HAS been renewed scholarly interest in reassessing modernism. Several edited anthologies have been published this decade—Stephen J. Ross and Alys Moody’s Global Modernists on Modernism (2020), Douglas Mao’s The New Modernist Studies (2021), Sean Latham and ‎Gayle Rogers’s The New Modernist Studies Reader (2021), the renowned Bloomsbury series Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism, and Penn State University Press’s series Refiguring Modernism, to name a few. Terry Eagleton’s newest book, Modernism: A Literature in Crisis (2025), rides the wave of this renewed interest. The book is written in the author’s typically witty style, offering a reader-friendly introduction to—and vivid account of—modernism, not only in literature but also in all of its cultural dimensions. The word “literature” in the subtitle is thus misleading as the book goes well beyond that, engaging a range of debates about “crisis” at the beginning of the 20th century.

T. S. Eliot’s question from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—“Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”—comes to mind as an emblematic statement of crisis in modernist literature. Prufrock finds himself trapped in everyday social rituals, anxious, unable to express his true feelings. Eagleton does not cite this famous passage from Eliot’s poem but captures its key concerns, which were, indeed, crucial for modernist literature generally: social anxiety, irresolution, and the fragmentation of modern life. Eagleton reads modernism as stemming from a “historical” and a “cultural” crisis, hinging “on a crisis of identity” and “a crisis of language.”

A substantial thematic repertoire, on which countless studies have been written, is covered in only four chapters, two dealing mainly with literature and two, which the author calls “political,” with broader issues. Eagleton takes us straight into chapter one without any introduction or preface to clarify the book’s aims or structure. In this chapter, “The Time of Modernism,” he first endeavors to unpack the differences between modernism and modernity, outlining various debates over how to date the latter—ranging from the Renaissance and Reformation to the early 17th century and the Enlightenment. Eagleton blames scholars for this imprecision. For instance, he takes Antoine Compagnon to task for not employing the Anglo-American term “modernism” in his 1990 book The Five Paradoxes of Modernity. Yet the disagreement comes from Eagleton’s more insular understanding of modernity, as opposed to Compagnon’s continental approach. Compagnon discussed modernity versus the avant-garde, and the divergent meanings of modern and postmodern on both sides of the Atlantic. “Modernity” was thus the correct label to use, given the time span and the geographical range Compagnon considered—from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Baudelaire to those of Matei Călinescu, whose 1977 book Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism makes “modernism” part of the broader movement of “modernity.”

To find an appropriate answer to the frustrating question of the time span of modernism (was it 1910 to 1930? 1890 to 1930? 1890 to 1940?), Eagleton proposes a “standard Marxist”—one could almost say dogmatically Marxist—solution favored by Georg Lukács. In this reading, the first stirrings of modernism followed the European insurrections of 1848. This does not mean that modernist aesthetics were not present before that. Indeed, Eagleton traces features of modernism back to the 1830s, when Théophile Gautier’s work first appeared, and ventures even further back in time to show that the “modernist zest for innovation” originates among the Romantic poets.

In the next chapter, Eagleton shows that modernism and mass culture “were twinned at birth.” He introduces us first to the world of the British provincial press, which increased in circulation during the last three decades of the 19th century, reaching the impressive number of 13 million copies for Sunday newspapers by 1914. Since these papers also covered literary subjects, readers’ interest in literature and cultural issues also increased. Yet modernists were hard to follow, their aesthetics far above the level of the average person, and as a result, modernist artists puzzled common readers and art viewers. Eagleton characterizes modernist artists as “secular priest[s], transubstantiating the profane into the sacred” through their interest in creating new forms, transforming art into “a new religious cult, remote from daily existence.”

The main innovations of modernist writers were in matters of form. For instance, with Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869) in mind, James Joyce used words in a new fashion in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), as did T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922). Obscurity of form was a highly intentional tactic of modernist writers, and “not simply a sign of the limited understanding of its audience.” Echoing Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1948), Eagleton claims that modernist writers didn’t “want” to be understood. Poetic experiments consisted of weaving a “web of suggestions and allusions without clearly etched frontiers.” Aware that today’s readers may not be familiar with a text like Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Chandos Letter” (1902), Eagleton draws comparisons with more familiar works of contemporary literature. He finds parallels between Hofmannsthal’s fictional Lord Chandos—who, in the poem, explains to Francis Bacon why he can no longer write—and the narrator of W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. Eagleton’s goal here is laudable, yet one can hardly compare Chandos’s loss of faith in words with the Austerlitz narrator’s loss of faith in humanity. Sebald’s immersion of Jacques Austerlitz in a nonlinear journey to the past has totally different aims: conceived as an allegory of the post–World War II world, the memory of whose horrors are suppressed in the novel, Austerlitz is about a different type of crisis altogether.

Perhaps the only modernist writer to engage with a crisis of humanity like Sebald’s was Samuel Beckett, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 for writing that “acquires its elevation” in exploring “the destitution of modern man.” Theodor Adorno made a significant point about how Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame can be regarded as an “oblique” way of introducing us to a post-Holocaust world—a point Eagleton perhaps misses. Beckett’s characters seem not to fear anything anymore since, after the concentration camps, even fear has been abolished. Eagleton is aware of Beckett’s experiences during the Nazi occupation of France and believes that the “flatness and stringent economy” of his texts originate from this experience. Beckett fought against fascism in the ranks of the French Resistance and “his favourite word was ‘perhaps,’” as Eagleton points out. The titular protagonist of Beckett’s 1951 novel Malone Dies believed that “there is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.”

At this point in his book, Eagleton proceeds to answer a political question—namely, whether modern art can “change the world rather than simply negating it.” In the third chapter, he takes readers back to the Bolshevik Revolution, when art had to be harnessed to social needs. He singles out the Russian futurists as the only group of artists who cooperated enthusiastically with the new Soviet regime. Vladimir Mayakovsky, the leading figure of the futurist movement in Russia, supported the Bolshevik cause so strongly that he proclaimed his work through the regime’s default media—the megaphone. Cubists and Suprematists decorated Moscow streets and raised revolutionary monuments. Eagleton compares the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to show that the two totalitarianisms shared features: the Russian avant-garde could not survive the onset of Stalinism any more than its German counterpart could survive the rise of Hitler, since the Nazis equated modernist art with Bolshevism.

For those seeking to gain a surer foothold in thinking about modernist culture, Eagleton’s book should be helpful. For those who already have some knowledge of modernism, the book, albeit witty and colorful, remains a glib demonstration that nothing new can really be said about the subject.