What are characteristics of Modernist literature, fiction in particular?

Modernist literature was a predominantly English genre of fiction writing, popular from roughly
the 1910s into the 1960s. Modernist literature came into its own due to increasing
industrialization and globalization. New technology and the horrifying events of both World
Wars (but specifically World War I) made many people question the future of humanity: What
was becoming of the world?

Writers reacted to this question by turning toward Modernist sentiments. Gone was the
Romantic period that focused on nature and being. Modernist fiction spoke of the inner self
and consciousness. Instead of progress, the Modernist writer saw a decline of civilization.
Instead of new technology, the Modernist writer saw cold machinery and increased capitalism,
which alienated the individual and led to loneliness. (Sounds like the same arguments you hear
about the Internet age, doesn't it?)

To achieve the emotions described above, most Modernist fiction was cast in first person.
Whereas earlier, most literature had a clear beginning, middle, and end (or introduction,
conflict, and resolution), the Modernist story was often more of a stream of consciousness.
Irony, satire, and comparisons were often employed to point out society's ills. For the first-time
Modernist reader, this can all add up to feel like the story is going nowhere.

A short list of some of famous Modernist writers includes Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Joseph
Conrad, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, E.E. Cummings, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence,
and Gertrude Stein.

From the above list, two specific works that epitomize Modernist literature are Faulkner's As I
Lay Dying and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Modernism

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the
beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period
was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and
interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where
in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one
sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great
War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At
the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that
many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards.
The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the
nineteenth century. As literary periods go, Modernism displays a relatively strong sense
of cohesion and similarity across genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted
the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-consciously. Indeed, a
central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In
contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature,
Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the
Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The
machinery of modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to
the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great deal of influence on such ways of
approaching the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-
shocked all of Western civilization.

In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a
visceral reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for
most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the
fundamental constants of the Modernist stance. Intellectuals and artists at the turn of
the twentieth century believed the previous generation’s way of doing things was a
cultural dead end. They could foresee that world events were spiraling into unknown
territory. The stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were rapidly becoming a
thing of the past. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially
the triggering event of the First World War, a conflict which swept away all
preconceived notions about the nature of so-called modern warfare.
In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction
between “high” art and “low” art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led
to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature or all
sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated
literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow
to the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream of
society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist,
producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It’s worth mentioning that this
alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by and large turned their backs on
many “elitist” artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffected
artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the
most effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were
absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writer’s inner circles. In the later
years of the Modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream,
as regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and
direction of artistic endeavor.

The nineteenth century, like the several centuries before it, was a time of privilege for
wealthy Caucasian males. Women, minorities, and the poor were marginalized to the
point of utter silence and inconsequence. The twentieth century witnessed the
beginnings of a new paradigm between first the sexes, and later between different
cultural groups. Class distinction remains arguably the most difficult bridge to cross in
terms of forming a truly equitable society. Some would argue that class has become a
euphemism for race, but that’s another discussion. The point is that as the twentieth
century moved forward, a greater variety of literary voices won the struggle to be
heard. What had so recently been inconceivable was steadily becoming a reality.
African-Americans took part in the Harlem Renaissance, with the likes of Langston
Hughes at the forefront of a vibrant new idiom in American poetry. Women like Hilda
Doolittle and Amy Lowell became leaders of the Imagist movement. None of this is to
suggest that racism and sexism had been completely left behind in the art world.
Perhaps such blemishes can never be fully erased, but the strides that were taken in
the twentieth century were remarkable by any measure.
In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of
the times, and stretched the possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously
imagined. In general, there was a disdain for most of the literary production of the last
century. The exceptions to this disdain were the French Symbolist poets like Charles
Beaudelaire, and the work of Irishman Gerard Manley Hopkins. The French Symbolists
were admired for the sophistication of their imagery. In comparison to much of what
was produced in England and America, the French were ahead of their time. They were
similarly unafraid to delve into subject matter that had usually been taboo for such a
refined art form. Hopkins, for his part, brought a fresh way to look at rhythm and word
usage. He more or less invented his own poetic rhythms, just as he coined his own
words for things which had, for him, no suitable descriptor. Hopkins had no formal
training in poetry, and he never published in his lifetime. This model – the self-taught
artist-hermit who has no desire for public adulation – would become synonymous with
the poet in the modern age. This stereotype continues unrivaled to this day, despite
the fact that the most accomplished poets of the Modern period were far from
recluses. Even though alienation was a nearly universal experience for Modernist poets,
it was impossible to escape some level of engagement with the world at large. Even if
this engagement was mediated through the poetry, the relationship that poets had
with their world was very real, and very much revealing of the state of things in the
early twentieth century.

Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating the scene, and
sweeping previous aesthetic points of view under the rug. The Imagists, among them
Ezra Pound, sought to boil language down to its absolute essence. They wanted poetry
to concentrate entirely upon “the thing itself,” in the words of critic-poet T. E. Hulme.
To achieve that effect required minimalist language, a lessening of structural rules and
a kind of directness that Victorian and Romantic poetry seriously lacked. Dreaminess or
Pastoral poetry were utterly abandoned in favor of this new, cold, some might say
mechanized poetics. Imagist poetry was almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably
sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. At some points, the line between poetry and
natural language became blurred. This was a sharp departure from the ornamental,
verbose style of the Victorian era. Gone also were the preoccupations with beauty and
nature. Potential subjects for poetry were now limitless, and poets took full advantage
of this new freedom.
No Modernist poet has garnered more praise and attention than Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Born in Missouri, T. S. Eliot would eventually settle in England, where he would
produce some of the greatest poetry and criticism of the last century. Eliot picked up
where the Imagists left off, while adding some of his own peculiar aesthetics to the mix.
His principal contribution to twentieth century verse was a return to highly intellectual,
allusive poetry. He looked backwards for inspiration, but he was not nostalgic or
romantic about the past. Eliot’s productions were entirely in the modern style, even if
his blueprints were seventeenth century metaphysical poets. One of the distinguishing
characteristics of Eliot’s work is the manner in which he seamlessly moves from very
high, formal verse into a more conversational and easy style. Yet even when his poetic
voice sounds very colloquial, there is a current underneath, which hides secondary
meanings. It is this layering of meanings and contrasting of styles that mark Modernist
poetry in general and T. S. Eliot in particular. It is no overstatement to say that Eliot
was the pioneer of the ironic mode in poetry; that is, deceptive appearances hiding
difficult truths.

In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation
has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several
American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These
included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott
Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the
spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive
warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world
in the wake of chaos. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by
turning the mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness.
For Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels
are famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play
out right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his
characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which
serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up
on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional,
and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world,
and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.
The novel was by no means immune from the self-conscious, reflective impulses of the
new century. Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that
would fundamentally change the entire essence of novel writing. The “unreliable”
narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and
readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel
should operate. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the prime example of a novel whose events
are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as well as
possible the strange pathways of human consciousness. A whole new perspective came
into being known as “stream of consciousness.” Rather than looking out into the world,
the great novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner space of the
human mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had
come into mainstream acceptance. These two forces worked together to alter people’s
basic understanding of what constituted truth and reality.

Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining characteristic of
Modernist literature. Perhaps the most representative example of this experimental
mode is T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single out The
Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by
biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-conversational interludes, dense and frequent
references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and sections that resemble
prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully displays all the conventions which
one expects in Modernist literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness,
the loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego against shocking realities, and a
fluid nature to truth and knowledge.

The cynicism and alienation of the first flowering of Modernist literature could not
persist. By mid-century, indeed by the Second World War, there was already a strong
reaction against the pretentions of the Moderns. Artists of this newer generation
pursued a more democratic, pluralistic mode for poetry and the novel. There was
optimism for the first time in a long time. Commercialism, publicity, and the popular
audience were finally embraced, not shunned. Alienation became boring. True, the
influence of Modernist literature continues to be quite astonishing. The Modern poet-
critics changed the way people think about artists and creative pursuits. The Modern
novelists changed the way many people perceive truth and reality. These changes are
indeed profound, and cannot easily be replaced by new schemas.

This article is copyrighted © 2011 by Jalic Inc. Do not reprint it without permission.
Written by Josh Rahn. Josh holds a Masters degree in English Literature from Morehead
State University, and a Masters degree in Library Science from the University of
Kentucky.

Major Modernist Writers

• Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

• Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924)

• Doolittle, Hilda (1886-1961)

• Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)

• Faulkner, William (1897-1962)

• Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940)

• Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961)

• Hughes, Langston (1902-1967)

• James, Henry (1843-1916)

• Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930)

• Lowell, Amy (1874-1925)

• Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)

• Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)

• Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

• Williams, Tennessee (1882-1941)

• Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)

• Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

Periods & History Home

• Literary Periods

o Renaissance Literature

o The Enlightenment

o Romanticism

o Transcendentalism

o Victorian Literature

o Realism

o Naturalism

o Modernism
o Bloomsbury Group

o Existentialism

o Beat Generation

________________________________________

• English Literature History

o From the Conquest to Chaucer 1066-1400

o From Chaucer to Spenser 1400-1599

o The Age of Shakespeare 1564-1616

o The Age of Milton 1608-1674

o From the Restoration to the Death of Pope 1660-1744

o The Death of Pope to the French Revolution 1744-1789

o The French Revolution to the Death of Scott 1789-1832

o From the Death of Scott to the Present Time 1832-1893

o Appendix

• American Literature History

o Preface

o The Colonial Period 1607-1765

o The Revolutionary Period 1765-1815

o The Era of National Expansion 1815-1837

o The Concord Writers 1837-1861

o The Cambridge Scholars 1837-1861

o Literature in the Cities 1837-1861

o Literature Since 1861

o AppendixModernism
by:

Rebecca Beasley
This is not to say that modernist literature is inaccessible, as its reputation can suggest.
There is no ideal reader of The Waste Land or Ulysses, who understands all T.S. Eliot’s or
James Joyce’s allusions—and there never was such an ideal reader. If you think about it,
we read all literature, understand all language, only partially: we miss references, we fail
to understand ironies in every conversation. Modernist literature often foregrounds the
limitations of language as a form of communication: many of its protagonists puzzle over
how best to express themselves: think of Eliot’s Prufrock in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’, Joyce’s Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Dorothy
Richardson’s Miriam in Pilgrimage or Virginia Woolf’s Bernard in The Waves. In examining
this problem, modernist writers are not only reflecting on their own struggle to produce
a compelling work of art, but examining how effectively language mediates our social and
political experiences.
But what is ‘modernism’? It’s a term that can only, really, mean up-to-dateness, yet when
we use it to talk about literature in English, we usually mean a movement, or a period,
that is in the past. If you take a course on modernist literature at school or university,
you’ll probably be studying writers who began their careers between 1908 and 1930—
such as those I’ve mentioned so far. Not everyone would agree that modernism is an
early twentieth-century movement, though: there are certainly contemporary writers
who would define themselves as modernist or ‘neo-modernist’.

If modernism can’t be securely tied to a period, can it be defined as a style? Works by the
writers associated most strongly with modernism—T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf, for example—do seem to share some common features: a preoccupation with the
city, rather than the country, a focus on the interior life of characters and speakers, and,
as I’ve already suggested, an interest in experimenting with new ways of using language
and literary forms. But these features are hardly consistent across all the works typically
termed ‘modernist’—little of W.B. Yeats’s poetry is about the city, for example, few of
D.H. Lawrence’s novels foreground experiments with narrative form. Moreover,
‘modernism’ was not a term these writers used to describe their own writing: it only
began to come into currency in the late 1920s, when it was influentially used in  A Survey
of Modernist Poetry (1927) by the poets Laura Riding and Robert Graves.
In other words, ‘modernism’ is a term that says more about the twentieth and twenty-
first century’s desire to categorise and prioritise certain kinds of writing, than about the
literature itself. It’s a kind of advertising ploy, reinforcing values that influential poets
and critics have wanted to associate with their own work and work they admired—T.S.
Eliot, for example, made a powerful claim for ‘impersonality’ as a feature of good
contemporary poetry in his famous essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919),
which led to some very strained readings of modernist works, like Ezra Pound’s  Cantos,
which contain plenty of autobiography and ‘personality’.
Interestingly, and by no means accidentally, the term ‘modernism’ has more currency
now than ever before, with ever increasing numbers of books using ‘modernism’ in their
title, at the very same time that critics are more sceptical about its use. Some of the most
interesting research in the field of early twentieth-century literature is breaking down
the boundaries between writers traditionally thought of as modernist and those that
have been kept out of the modernist canon. One way this has been done is through study
of early twentieth-century literary journals, which shows which writers were being
published together and how they were read. Have a look at Faith Binckes’ essay on this
site (to follow), which has more to say on this subject, and you can read facsimiles of
early twentieth-century journals yourself on-line at the websites of the ‘Modernist
Magazines Project’, based at De Montfort University, and the ‘Modernist Journals
Project’, based at Brown University and the University of Tulsa. Looking through these
journals is fascinating way of thinking about how ‘modern’ the writers we now call
modernist looked, and a way of finding some ‘Great Writers’ history has unjustly
forgotten.

In Collection(s):Introducing modernism , James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , Ezra Pound , D.H.

Lawrence , Katherine Mansfield

Reuse this essay:Download PDF Version  | Printer-friendly Version

Cite:Modernism by Rebecca Beasley at http://writersinspire.org/content/modernism.

Accessed on Friday, March 13, 2020.

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Modernism at

http://writersinspire.org/content/modernism by Rebecca Beasley, licensed as Creative
Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

Modernism in Literature as a Genre

A Scripted Freelance Writer Writing Sample

1. Freelance Writers
2. Lauren C
3. Modernism in Literature as a Genre

Modernism is a literary genre which sprung up around 1914, from the beginning of World War
I. It was born from the notion of putting an end to realistic novels, which modernist authors
believed had become stale and had lost all artistic merit. There are several notable themes and
literary devices which define modernism as a genre.

Time

The use of time in modernist literature is often unusual and significant. Many modernist
authors represent time as a symbolic or psychological construct, allowing them to take a
nonlinear approach to their novels or breeze through a large period of time very quickly. For
instance, Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" has a section entitled "Time Passes," which
portrays the passing of 10 years in just a matter of pages. In this case it represents the futility of
a person's efforts to protect her loved ones and stop the passage of time.

Perspective

Prior to modernism in literature, the majority of authors wrote in the third person perspective,
often utilizing an omniscient narrator. Modernist authors, however, preferred to write from a
first person perspective to get a more personal view of the story and tap into the character's
thoughts. Many modernist novels switch between the perspectives of various characters in
order to get different view points. This also serves as a commentary of the subjective nature of
perspective and reality. For example, in "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner changes perspective
with each chapter, the shortest of which is just five words long.

Literary Devices

In order to further remove themselves from realist literature, modernist writers employed a
number of literary devices. These included use of language with multiple meanings,
experimentation with form, nonlinear narratives, ironic juxtapositions and deliberate obscurity
of meaning. These devices have been described by some as modernist formalism -- the author's
way of making his work inaccessible to an average reader. Many saw this as the only way to
stop literature from becoming insipid and eroding into light entertainment. A good example of
modernist formalism is James Joyce's "Ulysses." It experiments with form by Joyce weaving
verse into his prose and by switching into play form for over 100 pages part way through the
novel. Even the length of the book, at nearly 700 pages, serves to put off the average reader.

Themes

As well as choices in style and form, modernist literature is characterized by certain themes.
The genre looks at the idea of meaning in modern times and of a world without God, in addition
to exploring the reality of experience and critiquing culture's traditional values. These themes
are considered to be deeply inspired by the shock of the brutality and bloodshed of World War I
-- and later World War II -- which caused these authors to question the very nature of society
and reality. Franz Kafka's seminal work, "The Trial," critiques traditional values and discusses
the idea of reality, by presenting an absurd situation in which a man wakes up one day and
finds himself facing trial for crime which no-one will tell him about.

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 WHAT IS MODERNISM?
Modernism is a period in literary history which started around
the early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s. Modernist
writers in general rebelled against clear-cut storytelling and
formulaic verse from the 19th century. Instead, many of them
told fragmented stories which reflected the fragmented state
of society during and after World War I.

Many Modernists wrote in free verse and they included many

countries and cultures in their poems. Some wrote
using numerous points-of-view or even used a “stream-of-
consciousness” style. These writing styles further demonstrate
the way the scattered state of society affected the work of
writes at that time.

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are thought to be the

mother and father of the movement because they had the
most direct influence on early Modernists. Some time after their deaths, the Imagist poets
began to gain importance. The University of Toledo’s Canaday Center has a rich collection of
poetry and critical work from that era.

Imagist poets generally wrote shorter poems and they chose their words carefully so that their
work would be rich and direct. The movement started in London, where a group of poets met
and discussed changes that were happening in poetry. Ezra Pound soon met these individuals,
and he eventually introduced them to H.D. and Richard Aldington in 1911. In 1912, Pound
submitted their work to Poetry magazine. After H.D.’s name, he signed the word "Imagiste" and
that was when Imagism was publicly launched. Two months later, Poetry published an essay
which discusses three points that the London group agreed upon. They felt that the following
rules should apply when writing poetry: 

1.         Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.

2.         To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3.         As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence
of a metronome.

In the following month’s issue, Pound’s two-line poem “In a Station at the Metro” was
published. In addition to the previously published works of Aldington and H.D., it exemplifies
the tenets of Imagism in that it is direct, written with precise words, and has a musical tone
which does not depend on a specific rhythm:

In a Station at the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Over the next four years, four anthologies of Imagist poetry were published. They included
work by people in that London group (Pound, F.S. Flint, H.D., and Aldington), but they also
contained the works of Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams,
James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Marianne Moore.

World War I broke out soon after the height of Imagism. Some
poets, like Aldington, were called to serve the country, and this
made the spread of Imagism difficult—as did paper shortages
as a result of the war. Eventually, war poets like Wilfred Owen
grew in popularity as people shifted their attention to the state
of the world. 

After the war ended, a sense of disillusionment grew, and

poems like T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” showed the way
poetry had shifted. This infamous poem contains various
narratives and voices that change quickly from one topic to
another. This style of poetry differed greatly from the slow and
focused poetry of the Imagists. Visit this link to read the poem
in its entirety.

Within a few years, many Modernist writers moved overseas.

There was an exciting expatriate scene in Paris which included Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude
Stein, and Mina Loy. These writers held and attended literary salons. Poets such as E.E.
Cummings, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams also attended these salons at times.

Not all Modernist poets followed the writers who were making revolutionary changes to the
world of poetics. Marianne Moore, for example, wrote some form poetry, and Robert Frost
once said that writing free verse was "like playing tennis without a net." Additionally, writers
who had gained popularity toward the end of the Modernist era were inspired by less
experimental poets such as Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats.  

By the 1950s, a new generation of Postmodern poets came to the forefront. Adding “post” in
front of the word "Modern" showed that this new period was different than the one before it,
yet was influenced by it. The Modernist ideas of Imagism and the work of William Carlos
Williams, for example, continue to have a great influence on writers today.
Modernism in Literature –
What are Characteristics of
Modernism in Writing?
High School English Lesson Plans - Grades 9-12 / By Trent Lorcher / High
School Lesson Plans & Tips

What is Modernism?

The following are characteristics of Modernism:

 Marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This

break includes a strong reaction against established religious,
political, and social views.
 Belief that the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that
is, 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.
 Life is unordered.
 Concerned with the sub-conscious.
British & Irish Modernism
The horrors of World War I (1914-19), with its accompanying
atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the
Modernist movement in literature and art. Modernist authors felt
betrayed by the war, believing the institutions in which they were
taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict.
They no longer considered these institutions as reliable means to
access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves
to discover the answers.

Modernism is just one recent literary movement

Their antipathy towards traditional institutions found its way into

their writing, not just in content, but in form. Popular British
Modernists include the following:

 James Joyce (from Dublin, Ireland) – His most experimental

and famous work, Ulysses, completely abandons generally
accepted notions of plot, setting, and characters.
 Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier examines the negative
effects of war.
 Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse, as well, strays from
conventional forms, focusing on Stream of Consciousness.
 Stevie Smith – Novel on Yellow Paper parodies
conventionality.
 Aldous Huxley – Brave New World  protests against the
dangers and nature of modern society.
  D.H. Lawrence – His novels reflected on the dehumanizing
effect of modern society.
 T.S. Eliot – Although American, Eliot’s The Wasteland is
associated with London and emphasizes the emptiness of
Industrialism.

American Modernism
Known as “The Lost Generation,” American writers of the 1920s
brought Modernism to the United States. For writers like
Hemingway and Fitzgerald, World War I destroyed the illusion
that acting virtuously brought about good. Like their British
contemporaries, American Modernists rejected traditional
institutions and forms. American Modernists include:

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 Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises chronicles the

meaningless lives of the Lost Generation. Farewell to
Arms narrates the tale of an ambulance driver searching for
meaning in WWI.
 F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby shows through its
protagonist, Jay Gatsby, the corruption of the American
Dream.
 John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson are
other prominent writers of the period.
Mini Lesson: Make a chart to identify aspects of modernism. In the
left column list the characteristics of modernism in literature – in
the middle column find specific passages; in the right
column write an analysis of the passage.
Image by Eli Digital Creative from Pixabay

This post is part of the series: Literary

Movements
These brief descriptions of literary movements make an easy day
of notes for you. Cut and paste. I don’t care.

1. Let’s Be Realistic: What Puts Literature in the “Realism”

Category?
2. American Literature: American Romanticism Overview
3. Modernism in Literature: Quick Overview
4. Naturalism in Literature
5. Overview of British Romanticism & Poets from That Era

8 Classic Works of Modernist

Literature Everyone Should Read
The best modernist novels, poems, and short stories by English-
language authors
‘A literary movement’, the Irish novelist George Moore once observed,
‘consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each
other cordially.’ Few literary movements better exemplify Moore’s point
than modernism. Modernism was a hugely significant movement in art,
literature, architecture, and music in the early twentieth century. In this
post, we’ve attempted to condense English-language modernist literature
into eight key works of poetry and prose. We reckon a reader looking to
take a crash-course in modernist writing could do worse than seek out
these finest, defining works of literature.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. First published in three instalments

in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, and then in book form in
1902, Heart of Darkness thus straddles the Victorian and ‘modern’ eras:
it first appeared when Victoria was still on the throne, but by the time
the book version was published, Britain had a new monarch and was
firmly in a new century. This novella examines the evils of Belgian
imperialism in Africa, but also interrogates the very nature of
storytelling itself – and all that comes with it, whether truth, trust, the
reliability of language to convey one’s experiences, and a whole host of
other quasi-metaphysical issues. The book also inspired the 1979
film Apocalypse Now about a modern ‘imperialistic’ mission, namely
the American presence in Vietnam. Mr Kurtz became Colonel Kurtz.

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. This 1922 long poem features (as it must)

in our pick of Eliot’s best poems, and it’s one of the landmark works of
modernist literature – perhaps the most important poem in all of
modernism. In the poem, T. S. Eliot draws on personal experience (his
first marriage, his knowledge of London, his convalescence following
some sort of nervous breakdown) but transmutes it into something
universal and, in his word, ‘impersonal’ – a poem that spoke for an
entire generation. A medley of Arthurian legend, Greek myth, quotations
from Shakespeare, jazz rhythms, and Wagner – among much else
besides – the poem as we have it was beaten into shape by Ezra Pound,
to whom Eliot dedicated the final poem.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please’. Written during WWI and focusing
on the men and women who work on the trams in Nottingham, ‘Tickets,
Please’ examines the shifting gender roles in the early twentieth century
and the latent desires and impulses which Freudian psychoanalysis had
lain bare. If you need another reason to read this short story, the
principal male character is named John Thomas, after a slang term for
‘penis’. Typical Lawrence. You can read our analysis of another
classic Lawrence story here.

Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound

was born in the United States but moved to Europe – and London – as
a young man. His two most famous works are among the longest and
shortest in canonical ‘English’ literature: The Cantos runs to nearly a
thousand pages, while ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) is just two lines
in length (you can read it online here; we offer an in-depth
commentary on Pound’s poem here). It’s one of the defining poems
of the imagist movement in modern poetry, which would pave the way
for later, more ambitious works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land (as well
as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘, which, although not
imagist, reflects some of the central principles of imagism).

Henry James, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’. This story has variously

been described as a satire on literary criticism and simply ‘a joke’. It is
narrated by a rather odd and self-absorbed critic for a fictional
newspaper; this narrator is told by a leading novelist, Hugh Vereker, that
he – Vereker – has concealed a ‘secret’ within all of his fiction. Every
one of his novels contains this secret which, like a thread in a Turkish
carpet, has been so carefully woven into the fabric of the novel that only
the most careful reader will find it. The story that ensues is part mystery,
part detective story, part exposé of the worst aspects of the literary
world.

James Joyce, Ulysses. Published in the annus mirabilis of modernism,

1922, Ulysses is Joyce’s masterpiece. It’s also one of the best modernist
novels ever written. The novel is a retelling of Homer’s epic poem The
Odyssey, about Greek hero Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan Wars
(a journey which took him ten years, but which Joyce condenses to a
single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904). Joyce had been interested in the
figure of Odysseus (or Ulysses, as the Romans called him) since his
schooldays, and organised Ulysses around eighteen episodes, each of
which is devised to echo one of the episodes from Homer’s epic. Joyce’s
attention to detail was impressive.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, this novel is set

over the course of one day, in June 1923. And, like Joyce’s work, it’s
one of the finest modernist novels in the English language. Originally
titled ‘The Hours’, Mrs Dalloway is perhaps Woolf’s best-known
work. Indeed, the structure of Woolf’s novel was inspired by her
reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. Woolf liked the idea of writing a novel set
over the course of just one day. But Woolf had her reservations about
Joyce’s obsession with what she saw as the more squalid side of life –
sex and bodily functions – and went as far as to describe Ulysses as ‘a
queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’. Her approach to the ‘one-
day novel’, then, would be different.The character of Mrs Dalloway
didn’t make her debut in Mrs Dalloway (1925). She’d first appeared in
print a decade before, in Woolf’s first ever published novel, The Voyage
Out, in 1915. (This was a very conventional novel in comparison with
Woolf’s later novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The
Waves.)

Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’. Katherine Mansfield was

the one writer Virginia Woolf was jealous of, according to Woolf
herself. Mansfield never wrote a full-length novel, but wrote a number
of classic modernist short stories. This story, from 1920, is probably her
most famous: it focuses on a young woman, Laura Sheridan, whose
family is holding a garden party at their home in New Zealand. Shortly
before the guests arrive, tragedy strikes: one of their neighbours from the
poor part of the village dies in an accident. The story is told in a spare,
simple style, but with moments of trademark modernist features: in
particular, stream of consciousness and the idea of the ‘epiphany’ or
moment of consciousness. We’ve offered a short summary and
analysis of ‘The Garden Party’ here.

If you enjoyed this pick of the best works of modernist literature, you
might also enjoy our short modernist poems everyone should read.

Image (top): T. S. Eliot (picture credit: Ellie Koczela,

2015), Wikimedia Commons. Image (bottom): Mrs Dalloway,
London, Hogarth Press, 1925; Wikimedia Commons; public
domain.

The Main Characteristics of Modernist Literature

Josh Patrick Updated June 13, 2017

Home » The Rewrite

Literature scholars differ over the years that encompass the Modernist period, however
most generally agree that modernist authors published as early as the 1880s and into
the mid-1940s. During this period, society at every level underwent profound changes.
War and industrialization seemed to devalue the individual. Global communication
made the world a smaller place. The pace of change was dizzying. Writers responded
to this new world in a variety of ways.

Individualism
In Modernist literature, the individual is more interesting than society. Specifically,
modernist writers were fascinated with how the individual adapted to the changing
world. In some cases, the individual triumphed over obstacles. For the most part,
Modernist literature featured characters who just kept their heads above water. Writers
presented the world or society as a challenge to the integrity of their characters. Ernest
Hemingway is especially remembered for vivid characters who accepted their
circumstances at face value and persevered.

Experimentation
Modernist writers broke free of old forms and techniques. Poets abandoned traditional
rhyme schemes and wrote in free verse. Novelists defied all expectations. Writers mixed
images from the past with modern languages and themes, creating a collage of styles.
The inner workings of consciousness were a common subject for modernists. This
preoccupation led to a form of narration called stream of consciousness, where the
point of view of the novel meanders in a pattern resembling human thought. Authors
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, along with poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, are well
known for their experimental Modernist works.

Absurdity
The carnage of two World Wars profoundly affected writers of the period. Several great
English poets died or were wounded in WWI. At the same time, global capitalism was
reorganizing society at every level. For many writers, the world was becoming a more
absurd place every day. The mysteriousness of life was being lost in the rush of daily
life. The senseless violence of WWII was yet more evidence that humanity had lost its
way. Modernist authors depicted this absurdity in their works. Franz Kafka's "The
Metamorphosis," in which a traveling salesman is transformed into an insect-like
creature, is an example of modern absurdism.

Symbolism
The Modernist writers infused objects, people, places and events with significant
meanings. They imagined a reality with multiple layers, many of them hidden or in a sort
of code. The idea of a poem as a riddle to be cracked had its beginnings in the
Modernist period. Symbolism was not a new concept in literature, but the Modernists'
particular use of symbols was an innovation. They left much more to the reader's
imagination than earlier writers, leading to open-ended narratives with multiple
interpretations. For example, James Joyce's "Ulysses" incorporates distinctive, open-
ended symbols in each chapter.

Formalism
Writers of the Modernist period saw literature more as a craft than a flowering of
creativity. They believed that poems and novels were constructed from smaller parts
instead of the organic, internal process that earlier generations had described. The idea
of literature as craft fed the Modernists' desire for creativity and originality. Modernist
poetry often includes foreign languages, dense vocabulary and invented words. The
poet e.e. cummings abandoned all structure and spread his words all across the page.
What is Modernist Literature
and How Is it Different From
Realism?
Modernism
The aggressively modernist author Ezra Pound made “Make it new!” his battle cry in reaction to the
obsolete tradition of the past. He was a small part of a much larger process of renewal that was
proliferating through the industrialised culture of western society. This renewal was punctuated by an
urge to experiment, innovate and challenge the norm.

In the arts, Modernism is a lofty term. It departs from realism, but not simply as black departs from
white. Much like adolescence, modernism represents the accumulation of rebellious attitude against
traditional authority. This authority then was the elitist and bourgeois state of realist art or "realism,"
which normalised the form and content of art as purely faithful imitation of shared "true" reality.

To this, the modernist believes the contrary. He claims that reality exists solely in the mind, and he
appreciates and seeks to capture the subjective nature of human being in its beautiful and vulgar
entirety.

Nietzsche offered the notion in 1883 that “God is dead,” and questioned where this left human
morality. He concluded that we live in a meaningless universe and are therefore truly free to explore
the capabilities of human endeavour.

Narrative Form
The modern man was now capable of acting as the creator of the universe around him. This focus
on creation drew the artist’s attention to the method of art. Writers began to play and experiment with
narrative method and form to express a newly-envisioned form of subjective reality. The narrator
could no longer be an outside voice looming over a text; his subjective mind must become engrained
in the text.

Therefore many narrative tendencies and techniques arose to best represent this. Examples I will be
focusing on include:

 Impressionism
 The unreliable narrator
 Interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness

Impressionism
The emerging desire to capture reality as it exists in the mind began to revolutionize a vast degree of
disciplines. Visual art was revolutionized by a new Parisian painting style, Impressionism, which
sought to transcribe the immediate sensations of reality, in terms of light and colour, in order to give
the visual impression of a scene as it appears to the painter's mind and eye.
In 1913 The British novelist Ford Madox Ford released :On Impressionism," a manifesto of what he
understood as impressionism, its application to narrative, and its attitude as underpinning the
precursor to modernism: the Imagist movement . Ford believed that “the general effect of a novel
must be the general effect that life makes on mankind”. This principle is the basis for a range of
specific and characteristic impressionist techniques that appear in imagist, symbolist, modern verse
poetry and, as Ford writes, in many 19th century novels. These novels sought to make the narrator
narrate like a real human telling his story in the way that he would recall it.

Ford and Unreliable Narrators

This kind of narration is especially prominent in Ford's own novel "The Good Soldier," in which the
flawed or arguably devious narrator Dowel would make use of inversions, postponements, reversals,
skipping back and forward in time, withholding information, forgetting details, repeating himself, and
summarizing other characters' speech rather than quote them. “I have, I am aware, told this story in
a very rambling way." He tells us the story of his tragic life filled with lies and deceit as filtered
through his troubled, chaotic and unreliable mind. However, Dowell’s narration is unreliable, not just
in that it is rambling, but because it contains fundamental logical incongruities, within which Ford
conceals evidence for a kind of murder mystery reading, with Dowell, the killer, delivering his alibi
with a deliberate lack of clarity under the persona of a lovable halfwit so that we overlook his
inconsistencies.

Ford is, nevertheless, encouraging our scepticism and playing an ingenious game with genre
expectations. If we were to interpret Dowell’s narration in the faithful Victorian realist style, which we
expect of Ford, we would be non-sceptical and so we trust our narrator’s word as objective truth.
However this alternative reading is possible; it is one of the fundamentals of the Modernist
philosophy that the author doesn't give a text meaning, the reader’s interpretation does. In this
sense, this reading, like any possible reading, has validity, and we as readers are swimming in a sea
of possible interpretations.

But, like many, Ford doesn’t seek to belong to any genre, his purpose is to best project “an illusion of
reality” onto his text and especially his characters. His revolutionary experiment with unreliable
narrative is done in order to birth real life into his narrator. Here is where we find "Fordian"
Impressionism with roots in Realism and movements of the Modernist. Ford’s approach is like
climbing into the mind of a character to accurately render what impressions life has left.

Example of Stream of Consciousness from Ulysses

"Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia,
worlds. Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea,
unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from
me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches
me here?" -Ulysses ('Poteus' 3.78)

Ulysses and Stream of Consciousness

If it were possible to reduce the entirety of modernism to a single philosophical paradigm, Virginia
Woolf does it justly when she describes the effect of James Joyce’s masterpiece of modernist prose
fiction Ulysses.

“Reveal the flickering’s of that innermost flame which flashes messages through the brain”.

Ulysses is the major modernist work, and Woolf describes it as being faithfully realistic, “at all costs,”
to human psychology rather than to the material world. It sacrifices, if necessary, comprehensibility
in the pursuit of transcribing the raw flowing thoughts of his characters. The effect Woolf discusses is
the product of Joyce’s mastery of stream-of-consciousness writing as a form of interior monologue
so close to the subjective movement of thoughts that we feel we are inside the brain of another. We
watch, with exquisite detail, how the external reality shapes the mind of the characters in what they
perceive, think and feel. Stream of consciousness allows us to see through the protagonist, Stephen,
completely. All that he thinks and feels about his life and death is encoded in his every thought.

Joyce’s "Ulysses replaces coherent narrative with a multi-layered stream of events, sights sounds,
thoughts, impressions, emotions, sensations, reflections and observations. These fall together and
represent an account of what moves through the active mind consciously immersed in a single day.
From this we get a unique transparent vision of the subjective character and we see into the mind of
Stephen as he navigates his existence.

Joyce’s use of stream-of consciousness explores the levels of consciousness from what is merely
perceived to the way this shapes an underlying thought monologue and presents itself as our
opinions, feelings and experience of mind. The juxtaposing of grand narratives and everyday
activities gives Ulysses its ability to crystallise and unite all of human culture and existence and
insert it into the humble subjective state of one man’s mind through one day, which is arguably the
overarching goal of much modernist fiction.

Conclusion
Modernism can be expressed as the accumulation of concepts representing the ideological
revolution of the time. Among these concepts, as we have seen, are subjectivity, disillusionment,
anti-tradition and the quest for true realism.

Modernism and realism, ultimately, share the same goal: to produce an “illusion of reality” (Ford,
1913). What separates the two is a shift in the understanding of reality.

Scientific, psychological and philosophical discoveries revolutionised our understanding of reality as

no longer external but existing solely in the mind, and this understanding meant writers had to
reproduce reality in different ways. It was now the task, not to read and transcribe external reality,
but to read and translate the mind’s navigation through reality.

More Major Modernist Literary Works

Author Work

Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time (1914-27)

Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis (1915)

T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (1922)

D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)

W. B. Yeats Wild Swans at Coole (1917)

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)

 Author Work

Earnest Hemmingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Jorge Luis Borges A Universal History of Infamy (1935

Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway (1925)

William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)

James Joyce Dubliners (1914)

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Literature in the Modern Era

February 25 2016

  Literature in the present generation still exists as an expression of art, a source of knowledge, and
an instrument of entertainment. Books are being read seriously by readers who crave for information
and recreationally by those who are passionate in exploring their imagination. Literature kindles new
ideas. It gives voice to the people who want to express their opinions about certain things in life –
whether it be in politics, health, religion, and the like. Literature is the heart of songs, rhythmic and
harmonious pieces that give message and inspiration to people. Films are visual representations of
literature, they give life and action to the words written on a page. Magazines, newspapers, the
television, the radio, and even the internet contain literature. It is found everywhere and anywhere.
The power of literature affects all of us. It is complex, intergenerational, and long-lasting.

  Literature is found in the beginning of all things, this is what I am truly certain about. It continues
to live throughout the ages. It connects human beings and mirrors reality in an artistic way, in a
profound value. As long as our world lives, so does literature flourish.

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Some philosophers, like Georg Lukacs, theorized
that literary modernism had its origins in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Modernism is
characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse. Modernists
experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new".
[1]
 The modernist literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of
representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. [2] The horrors of the First World
War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed. [3] Thinkers such as Sigmund
Freud and Karl Marxquestioned the rationality of mankind. [3]
In the 1880s increased attention was given to the idea that it was necessary to push aside previous
norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of contemporary techniques. The
theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Ernst Mach (1838–1916) influenced early Modernist
literature. Mach argued that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience
was based on the interplay of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics (1883). Freud's first
major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895). According to Freud, all subjective
reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was
perceived. As a philosopher of science, Ernst Mach was a major influence on logical positivism, and
through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's theory of relativity.

Many prior theories about epistemology argued that external and absolute reality could impress
itself, as it were, on an individual, as, for example, John Locke's (1632–1704)empiricism, which saw
the mind beginning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
1690). Freud's description of subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses
and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung (1875–1961) with the
idea of the collective unconscious, which the conscious mind either fought or embraced.
While Charles Darwin's work remade the Aristotelian concept of "man, the animal" in the public
mind, Jung suggested that human impulses toward breaking social norms were not the product of
childishness, or ignorance, but rather derived from the essential nature of the human animal. [citation needed]

Another major precursor of modernism[4] was Friedrich Nietzsche, especially his idea that

psychological drives, specifically the "will to power", were more important than facts, or things. Henri
Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific clock time
and the direct, subjective, human experience of time [5] His work on time and consciousness "had a
great influence on twentieth-century novelists," especially those modernists who used the stream of
consciousness technique, such as Dorothy Richardson for the book Pointed Roofs (1915), James
Joyce for Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) for Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the
Lighthouse (1927).[6] Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force,
which "brings about the creative evolution of everything" [7] His philosophy also placed a high value on
intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. [7] These various thinkers were united
by a distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty. [citation needed] Modernism as a literary movement can be
seen also, as a reaction to industrialization, urbanization and new technologies.

Important literary precursors of Modernism were: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81) (Crime and

Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)); Walt Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass)
(1855–91); Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) (Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–91) (Illuminations,
1874); August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including, the trilogy To
Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata (1907).
 

Modernist literature scholar David Thorburn saw connections between literary style and impressionist painters
such as Claude Monet. Modernist writers, like Monet's paintings of water lilies, suggested an awareness of art
as art, rejected realistic interpretations of the world and dramatized "a drive towards the abstract". [8]

Initially, some modernists fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations

in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, physics and psychoanalysis. The poets of
the Imagist movement, founded by Ezra Pound in 1912 as a new poetic style, gave Modernism its
early start in the 20th century,[9] and were characterized by a poetry that favoured a precision
ofimagery, brevity and Free verse.[9] This idealism, however, ended, with the outbreak of World War
I, and writers created more cynical works that reflected a prevailing sense of disillusionment. Many
modernist writers also shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion,
and rejected the notion of absolute truths. Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot'sThe Waste
Land (1922), were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and explored the darker aspects of human
nature.

Early modernist writers, especially those writing after World War I and the disillusionment that
followed, broke the implicit contract with the general public that artists were the reliable interpreters
and representatives of mainstream ("bourgeois") culture and ideas, and, instead,
developed unreliable narrators, exposing the irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world.
[11]

They also attempted to take into account changing ideas about reality developed
by Darwin, Mach, Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson and others. From this developed innovative
literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, as well as the use of
multiple points-of-view. This can reflect doubts about the philosophical basis of realism, or
alternatively an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. So that, for example
the use of stream-of-consciousness, or interior monologue reflects the need for greater
psychological realism.

It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen 1910 as
roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf, who declared that human nature
underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." [12] But modernism was already
stirring by 1902, with works such as Joseph Conrad's (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness, while Alfred
Jarry's (1873–1907) absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared even earlier, in 1896.

Among early modernist non-literary landmarks is the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second

String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinskystarting in 1903 and
culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Expressionist Blue Rider group
in Munich in 1911, the rise of fauvism, and the introduction of cubism from the studios of Henri
Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and others between 1900 and 1910.

1.  Pound, Ezra, Make it New, Essays, London, 1935

2. Jump up^ Childs, Peter (2008). Modernism. Routledge. p. 4. ISBN 0415415462.
3. ^     Morley, Catherine (1 March 2012). . EDINBURGH University Press.
Jump up to:a b

p. 4. ISBN 978-0-7486-2506-2. Retrieved 20 April 2013.

4. Jump up^ Robert Gooding-Williams, "Nietzsche's Pursuit of Modernism" New German
Critique, No. 41, Special Issue on the Critiques of the Enlightenment. (Spring - Summer,
1987), pp. 95-108.