At a moment when theories of postmodernism seemed to offer the most comprehensive assessment of post-war literature and culture, Seamus Heaney argued for the continued relevance of the modernist project. In a 1986 essay, ‘The Impact of Translation’, Heaney evaluates the legacies of modernism:

Heaney's historical approach to the European literary tradition leads him to view modernism and postmodernism as productive moments in its survival and expansion. He draws attention to modernism as a movement poised between tradition and innovation, the past and the future. He returned to the modernists over the course of his career to determine his own role in continuing their work of cultural conservation. Reading the potential multiple meanings of his final word here – ‘indefinitely’ – signals an important tension in this ongoing evaluation of modernism. First, the modernists made possible an indefinite, potentially unending lifespan for the European literary tradition, a tradition in which he could participate in the years of the Troubles. However, the outcome of this modernist inheritance may be viewed as indefinite, uncertain or ambiguous.

In recent years, the field of modernist studies has shared Heaney's sense that the inheritance of the modernist project remains indefinite (in both senses). For example, a recent PMLA article by David James and Urmila Seshagiri tracks how contemporary novelists such as Tom McCarthy, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith ‘reassess and remobilize narratives of modernism’. Heaney offers a compelling case study that extends this conversation in terms of genre, geography and history.