One of the few heresies left today is to say you don't believe in democracy. But many famous modernist writers were either suspicious of it or attracted to totalitarianism, at just the time when the vote was being extended to women and the working classes, and universal education was producing a newly-literate and well-informed mass public. By looking at writers from across the pro- and anti-democratic spectrum and the changing relations of artists, markets and audiences, we will try to unpick what their anxieties about democracy were, and how they emerge in the form as well as the content of their work. As we do so, we will also explore what a `democratic culture' actually is, and to what degree our own age has one either.