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How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world in order to reach the unknowable readers of the future? Modernist writers were obsessed with questions like these, and eager for their books to reach out to people, times, and cultures beyond their own. In recent years, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. We do so because we fear that any ambition to reach the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, and apolitical. We worry that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history itself. This book argues instead that literature can travel through time: not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. Each chapter pairs a modernist author with a reader who heard these old novels calling his or her name. In each case, these future readers are also novelists—who read with an eye to form and craft, and who put what they see to new use in their own novels. Their rewritings of the past treat the literary canon not as an object of antagonistic critique, but as a set of resources and tools to move new generations of readers.
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