In the introduction i argued for a complex, ambivalent sense of Nielsen's modernism and its relationship with problematic notions of Danishness – one which embraces both Jørgen I. Jensen's passive image of the ‘biperson’ and the more discursive modernist model of the ‘double man’. Fredric Jameson's analysis of modernity pointed to the essentially dualist nature of such categories, the ‘dialectic of the break and the period’, which characterises the idea of modernity and introduced the idea of modernism as a narrative strategy, the ‘trope of “for the first time” which also reorganises our perceptions around the premise of a new kind of time line’. Yet it is important to try and move beyond such binary models. The modernist quality of Nielsen's work, I proposed, often lies more in its tone of voice or mode of utterance as much as in the perceived progressiveness (or not) of its musical materials. Analysis of a late work, the Sixth Symphony, in the final chapter of this book will underscore the novelistic nature of his music – the sense, which often pervades his compositions, of individual musical characters or speaking roles that shape, fracture, and gather together the texture into a dramatic dialogue. And it is this novelistic quality, I will suggest, that defines Nielsen's modernism best. It also offers insights into the complex status of his ‘Danishness’, an imaginary play between inward and outward impulses, drawing on H. C. Andersen's myth of a fairy-tale Funen while simultaneously resisting, or exploding outwards from, purely insular localist notions of Danish identity.