>External reality is a mirage now and we can choose from any of the countless, mutually incompatible narratives as we see fit.

The problem, you see, is that everyone believes they themselves have a firm handle on "reality", and everyone else is spinning a "narrative".

Deciding what does/does not constitute external reality is the whole issue.

I would describe Wells not as modernist but as a hangover of a certain strain of Victorian thinking: a basically rationalist, socialist worldview, optimistic about the prospect of improving the world if we could just drop all our silly prejudices. John Stuart Mill, George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian Society.... This perspective didn't fare very well in the early twentieth Century. Orwell describes Wells somewhere as 'too sane to understand the modern world'.

I'd count Joyce as a canonical modernist. (If he isn't, who is?)

Thanks, so Finnegans Wake is considered a modernist novel? Interesting. Totally out of my depth here but it seems so much at odds with modernist ideas in other artistic disciplines, e.g., architecture.

Definitely.

Yes, there are lots of modernisms. Modernism in literature really has very little in common with modernism in architecture, for instance. Even more confusing, each of these modernisms has its own postmodernism, all 'post' their respective modernisms in different ways.

The sort of fragmentation of language and narrative that we see in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is a pretty central modernist trait, I'd say. An even more central example would be something like Eliot's The Wasteland.

Relevant Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature

Afaik Joyce is usually listed in the first dozen when talking about modernist writers. For myself, I explain this as: modernism being sorta the culmination of linear progress in laying out narratives, and literature's attempt at self-analysis in the context of this grand tradition with picking out techniques that are useful and ones that are decorative; the last phase before 20th century's all-out deconstruction and nonlinear mindgames. Joyce IMO utilized pretty much every technique he could think of and juggle, in ‘Ulysses’. Though frankly, by the same token ‘Ulysses’ could be just as well considered among post-WW2 postmodernism, so dunno.

I could be totally wrong, however, and led astray by architecture, graphic and industrial design where ‘modernism’ is rather straightforward.