This concluding chapter shifts toward the content side of the form-content distinction. It focuses on and is organized according to the subversion and reworking of the master narratives in the modernist period. To this development can be added two specific theses about substantive history: that the modernist world witnessed the breakdown of a shared sense of meaning, and that the dominant value distinctions used to interpret the meaning of individual lives shifted gradually from moral in the realist period to more aesthetic and existential in the modernist period.

Subversion, breakdown, and crisis in meaning are leitmotifs of the age. Woolf identified its prevailing sound as “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction.” Grammar was violated, syntax disintegrated; and Joyce's Ulysses was the “calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows.” Woolf found the crashing “vigorous and stimulating,” while others found it disorienting, as subversion of master narratives left them without guidelines, especially for personal identity, courtship conventions, family relationships, national ethos, and religious faith. Some longed for the past, while others, including most artists, welcomed iconoclasm and even alienation, or at least productive solitude, as a precondition for meaningful life and art. While subversion attracted greater literary attention, a measure of reworking made up the positive content of modernist novels.