Prospect - article_details: "Modernism as a movement may not be at fault. The problem is that its initial doctrine - the psychological and linguistic purity pursued by Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens - rapidly matured into a catastrophic literary self-consciousness. After the 1950s it was more creditable, as a writer of fiction, to be Beckett's or Borges's descendant than Orwell's or Waugh's. Possibly writers were tired of making the effort of linear narrative, possibly they simply wanted to be modern."