The conventional reading is that “realism,” certainly in the Victorian and late-Victorian mode, buckled to radical critiques and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, gave way to various experimental literary modes and to a widely shared sense, among the finest writers, that the strict representation of reality was both impossible and – in the mode of Gissing's Biffin – unutterably tedious. Mr. Bennett, with his realist representation of the surfaces of things, cannot read Mrs. Brown. Moreover, the possibility of in fact “representing” the real seemed more and more remote, in particular, insofar as the approach was literal. The human mind, human perceptions, human feelings, desires, and needs, get in the way of seeing things as in themselves they really are. As far back as Kant it had become clear that we could never know the thing in itself, but rather, at best, as Pater put it, only the thing as in itself it seems to me to be.

Modernism and post-modernism experimented with various forms of non-representational, or symbolist, or fantastic forms of art, from Dada to cubism, to the theater of the Absurd. Postmodern theory dramatized and speculated on the self-referentiality of all language and of all art. The apparent “innocence” of the Victorians would never be recovered and was not lamented because, as cultural theory increasingly has demonstrated, the innocence disguised – perhaps also from the artists themselves – the ideological work their literature was doing.