DEFINITION

Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture,
music, literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914.
It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic
and historicist traditions, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the
emerging modern world.
Modernism is a recent period of Western or World Civilization
Modernism is a period or movement: an international movement in European, American, and
World art, literature, and culture.
ORIGINS OF MOERNISTLITERATURE
This movement was originated when the writers felt that they required a new form of writing to
express their ideologies and outlook towards life.
HISTORIC DIMENSIONS OF MODERNISM
Modernism begins in the late 1800s or early 1900s, climaxing in the 1910s-30s as writers and artists
throughout Europe, America, and the world create and publish an enormous number of revolutionary
works that are still recognized as titanic and influential, even if their application as models grows more
limited a century later.
The great decades of Modernism parallel profound world events, particularly the two World Wars
(1914-18 & 1939-45) and the Great Depression (1929-1940?).
World War 1 is often seen as a starting event of Modernism. The devastation and disillusion of
Western Civilization in the great war certainly accelerated and deepened Modernist thinking.
Political revolutions, upheavals, reforms, or sea-changes are contemporary with cultural Modernism:
Russian Revolution (1917), Nazism & Fascism (1930s), USA New Deal (1930s), Chinese Revolution
(1946-52).
CARACTETISTICS OF MODERNISM
Modernism is marked by a strong and intentional break from the traditional way of rendering a
theme or a thought.
The concept of modernism denies the existence of truth.
Modernists believe that the world is what we perceive or, in other words, the world is what we
say it is.
There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative.
No connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of alienation, loss, and
despair.
Championship of the individual and celebration of inner strength.
Concerned with the sub-conscious.

AUTHORS
Virginia Woolf: She was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth
century.
Main Works: During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary
society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most
famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando
(1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Ezra Pound: Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 1 November 1972) was an
expatriate US poet and critic who was a major figure in the early modernist movement. His
contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from
classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.
Main Works: His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (191769).
Richard Aldington: He was an English writer and poet.
Main works: Aldington was known best for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a
Hero, and the controversy resulting from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry.
Katherine Anne Porter: She (May 15, 1890 September 18, 1980) was a Pulitzer Prizewinning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist.
Main Works : Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but
her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight;
her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil. In 1990,
Recorded Texas Historic Landmark number 2905 was placed in Brown County, Texas, to honor
the life and career of Porter.
Wallace Stevens: Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 August 2, 1955) was an American
Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New
York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance
company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected
Poems in 1955.
Main Works: Some of his best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar," "Disillusionment of
Ten O'Clock," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday
Morning," "The Snow Man," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."