ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author investigates four novels of the 1930s that together, which raises some questions about the category 'modernism' and its relation to the public world. The novels are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Harold Nicolson's Public Faces, Henry Green's Party Going, and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. In theology, too, 'modernism' became a key term with a broad audience. These four novels, so diverse in their narrative methods and each so idiosyncratic in temper, do not all fit classic definitions of modernism. Instead they indicate how novelists work their own seams and do not cohere as a 'movement', except in retrospect, and by leaving aside discussion of outstanding works. But what does join all four is dread: a sense that the oncoming world may not endure and that the future is not something to be embraced but something to be staved off, by all the means available to fiction.
