modernist essay

Modernism in Literature: Definition, Characteristics, Examples, and More

The Industrial Revolution – and the rapid industrialization that followed it – marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But new technologies didn't only change the ways of manufacturing. They also made writers reconsider their attitudes toward the established norms of the craft. Out of this cultural shift, one of the most compelling literary movements was born: modernism.

Modernism in literature is the act of rebellion against the norms on the writers' part. They refused to conform to the rules any longer. Instead, they sought new ways to convey ideas and new forms of expressing themselves. In their opinion, the old ways of writing simply couldn't reflect the rapid social change and a new generation born out of it.

Today, let's take a deep dive into modernist work. What is modernism in literature? What are the key characteristics that set it apart from other literary movements? What modernism in literature examples reflect the movement's qualities the best? And who can represent modernism in American literature?

You'll find the answers to all of these questions – and more – below!

What is Modernism in Literature

As any physic helper would advise you to approach a subject, let's start with one crucial question: ‘What is modernism?’

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term 'modernism' as a practice characteristic of modern times and seeking to find original means of expressing oneself. Modernism was a movement not just in literature but also in arts, philosophy, and cinema.

As for the modernism in literature definition, the same dictionary describes it as a conscious break from the past and a search for new ways of expressing oneself. But its spirit is best reflected in a motto coined by Ezra Pound: ‘Make it new.’

The movement's main characteristics are individualism, experimentation, and absurdity. Its other characteristics include symbolism and formalism.

What about the history behind the modernism literary movement? Started by the Industrial Revolution and fueled by urbanization, the movement originated in Europe, with Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil as early modernists. It was also heavily influenced by the horrors of World War I: it shattered the preconceived notions about society for many modernists.

The movement first developed in American literature in the early 20th century modernism. Apart from the Industrial Revolution, it was influenced by Prohibition and the Great Depression and fueled by a sense of disillusionment and loss. William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings are among the prominent American modernists.

Feeling Stressed About an Assignment Due Soon?

No need to let the deadline ruin your life. Let a professional writer take this weight off your shoulders!

5 Key Characteristics of Modernist Literature

Now that we've covered the modernist genre definition let's examine why certain works are considered modernist more closely. In other words, what sets modernist works apart from their counterparts?

The key to unraveling the answer lies in the key characteristics of modernism. We'll define five of them that matter the most:

• individualism;
• experimentation;

Below you'll find a short description of each characteristic, along with examples.

Individualism

Individualism is one of the key elements of modernism. It postulates that an individual's experiences, opinions, and emotions are more fascinating than the events in a society as a whole.

So, modernism is focused on describing the subjective reality of one person rather than societal changes or historical events on an impersonal scale.

A typical protagonist in modernist literature is just trying to survive and adapt to the changing world. Presented with obstacles, the protagonist sometimes perseveres – but not always. You can find compelling examples of individualism in the works of Ernest Hemingway.

The fascination with subjective reality also led to the development of unreliable narrators in fiction. You can find great examples of the Madman type of unreliable narrator in Franz Kafka's works.

Experimentation

Literary modernism rejected many of the established writing norms, paving the way for experimentation with the form. Modernist poets best exemplify it: they revolted against the accepted rules of rhyme and rhythm, thus inventing free verse (vers libre) poetry.

Modernism in literature also led to experiments with prose. Combined with individualism as another core characteristic, writers developed a narrative device called ‘stream of consciousness.’

This device is meant to reflect how the characters think, even though it may be inconsistent, chaotic, or illogical. This new technique allowed writers to craft novels that read like the protagonist's stream of consciousness.

Among authors, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are the best examples of this characteristic in action. As for poetry, T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's bodies of work are a must-read.

During the modernist period, authors watched the world as they knew it crumbled around them. Two World Wars, the rise of capitalism, and fast-paced globalization all undermined authors' beliefs and opinions about humankind.

This led many of them to consider the world absurd and reflect it in their writing. From the setup to the plot development, modernist works based on this characteristic take surrealist or fantastical turns. They can also be described as bizarre or nonsensical.

The rise of absurdism also led to the invention of the Theatre of the Absurd. Pioneered by European playwrights, it revolves around the idea that human existence has no grand purpose or meaning. Absurdist plays don't seek to communicate effectively; instead, they include irrational speech.

There's no better example of absurdity in literary modernism than Franz Kafka's works, especially The Metamorphosis .

While symbolism in literature existed before the late 19th century, it quickly became one of the central characteristics of modernism in literature. Modernist authors and poets also reimagined symbolism. Where their predecessors left little unsaid, modernists preferred to leave plenty of blanks for the reader's imagination to fill.

That, however, doesn't mean there was no attention to details. On the contrary, modernist authors infused every layer of their work of fiction with symbolic details. The difference is that their way of using symbolism in writing allowed for several interpretations, all simultaneously possible and valid.

As a characteristic, symbolism in the modernism literary movement is most prominent in the works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.

As mentioned above, 20th-century modernism was defined by the search for radically new forms of expression. Creativity fueled this search, paving the way for the emergence of original forms.

In modern period literature, the writing process was no longer perceived as a laborious craft. Modernists treated it as a creative process instead. In some cases, the originality of the form was deemed more important than the substance.

Take the works of E. E. Cummings as an example here. Instead of conventionally putting the poetry on the page, he spread out separate words and phrases on the page as if it were a canvas and his poem – the paint.

Other examples of formalism include the use of invented or foreign words and phrases and unconventional structure – or its absence.

4 Recurring Themes in Modernist Literature

As an act of rebellion against conventional norms of the craft, literature of the modernist period touched on various themes that could best convey the author's opinion on the world around them.

Due to their variety, listing all of them here would be impossible. However, some of the modernist themes are more prominent than others. Below you can find four of them, along with examples.

These themes also represent a great starting point for essay writing. Whether you want to do it yourself or turn to a write my essay service, you can choose one of them as your topic for exploration.

Transformation

Modernism is practically inseparable from the theme of transformation. Be it the transformation of form, expression, or norm; the movement is based on the idea of radical change. If you want to see this theme in action, start with Ezra Pound's manifesto, Make It New .

As a theme, transformation also means a change in beliefs, opinions, and identities, a symbolic rebirth. Fueled by loss, destruction, and the war experiences of the authors caused fragmentation, this aspect of the theme.

You can find examples of transformation as a theme in Franz Kafka's absurdist The Metamorphosis . As for modernism in American literature, you can identify this theme in the works of Ernest Hemingway ( The Sun Also Rises ) and William Faulkner ( Barn Burning ).

Mythological Tales

Unlike their predecessors, modernist artists and authors didn't just refer to the Greek-Latin and other myths. Instead, they reimagined those tales in a new, modern world setting. Used as symbols or characters central to the plot, mythological tales and figures define modernism in literature.

As for examples of myths in the works of the modernist period, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is one of the best. In this poem, T. S. Eliot reimagines the myths of the Fisher King and uses Tarot cards and the Holy Grail as symbols. T. S. Eliot also used Greek and Latin phrases to enhance the poem's meaning.

Other examples of myths in modernist works include James Joyce's Ulysses, which alludes to Homer's Odysseus, and Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, which reimagines the Greek myth of Electra.

Loss, Separation, and Destruction

The cruel experiences of war are the major reason this theme became prevalent in modern-period literature. These experiences were infused with loss, separation, and destruction, and many authors lived through them. So, these experiences were reflected in the works of the post-war times.

Loss, destruction, and separation were also universal experiences that many went through simultaneously and shared their consequences. That's why the modernist works were also well-accepted by the readers.

You can find more than one instance of this theme in the works of Virginia Woolf, a British author and a pioneer of modernism in English literature. In American literature, the best examples of these themes are present in the works of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot.

Love and Sensuality

As one of the characteristics of modernism, individualism drove the theme of love and sensualism in the literature of this period. However, these themes didn't escape the disillusionment and demystification: they were reimagined somewhat cynically (or, some might say, realistically).

In modernist works, love isn't described as a magical feeling that can move mountains. Instead, the tone of love stories becomes grimmer and more fatalistic, and it serves as more proof of the social fabric corroding away.

In addition to love and sensuality, modernist works were marked by discussions of and reflections on sexuality, gender roles, and feminism. Some prominent authors in this regard are Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence.

For love and sensuality modernism examples in literature, read and analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls . D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is also a great example here as it examines the theme from the perspective of emancipation and gender equality.

10 Notable Modernist Writers in the Literary Movement

Need to write a literature review about one instance of modern-period literature? Start your search for the subject by checking out the works of the following ten authors and poets!

These creators are among the most prominent modernists that defined the movement, developed its qualities, and experimented with its main characteristics. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and more age-defining creators are among the notable modernist writers and poets below.

Virginia Woolf

A pioneer in modernism in English literature, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and her body of work defined the movement. For one, she was one of the first authors to start using the stream-of-consciousness narrative device to display the complex inner world of her characters.

Woolf also infused her works with feminist themes. She was one of the three female authors of the period to explore ‘the given,’ according to Simone de Beauvoir. However, other themes of the time – the war, destruction, and the role of social class – are also central to her work.

Virginia Woolf's most prominent works are Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). You may also enjoy reading The Waves (1931) and The Years (1936).

Further reading on Virginia Woolf's life and body of work includes J. Goldman's The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press) and V. Curtis's Virginia Woolf's Women (University of Wisconsin Press).

James Joyce

An Irish poet and novelist, James Joyce (1882-1941) is best known for his Ulysses novel (1922). He belonged to the group of creators who explored new styles and forms of expression. His approach to writing was detail-oriented, infused with internal monologues, and overturning traditional plot and character devices.

James Joyce focused on modernist themes such as destruction, social class, enlightenment, and identity. However, his works mostly focused on slice-of-life tales told in new, creative ways.

Apart from Ulysses , James Joyce's major works include a collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Finnegans Wake (1939). The latter pushed the use of stream of consciousness to its extreme.

As for poetry, James Joyce is best known for his three collections of poems, with Chamber Music (1907) being the most acclaimed one.

Gertrude Stein

Often referred to as the mother of modernism, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is one of the most important American modernist writers. Like the two previous authors on this list, Stein experimented with stream of consciousness and other narrative devices. Her writing style, in turn, can be described as distinctive and playful.

Stein's first novel, Q.E.D. Q.E.D. (1903), was one of the first to explore a coming-out story. A lesbian herself, Stein focused on sexuality in some of her works (case in point: Fernhurst (1904)) – an unprecedented choice for the time.

As a poet, Stein is best known for Tender Buttons (1914), a collection of poems that capture the routine of mundane life. In the publication, Stein experiments with sounds and fragmented words to convey an image to the reader.

Stein's most prominent prose works of fiction include The Making of Americans (1902–1911) and Three Lives (1905–1906).

William Faulkner

Look no further if you're looking for modernism examples in literature that explore symbolism and multiple perspectives. William Faulkner (1897-1962), an American novel and short story writer, belongs to the group of celebrated modernist authors who focused on these themes.

A Nobel prize laureate and a Mississippi native, Faulkner is famous for his Southern Gothic stories taking place in the made-up Yoknapatawpha County. Besides symbolism and multiple-perspective storytelling, Faulkner also explored the unreliable narrator and nonlinear storytelling devices.

Faulkner's most prominent novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), The Wild Palms (1939), and Light in August (1932). He was also working as a Hollywood screenwriter between 1932 and 1954. During that time, he crafted screenplays for films like Flesh (1932), To Have and Have Not (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946).

An expatriate American poet, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century modernism. He was unrivaled in using free-verse poetry and allusions in his body of work.

Pound also excelled in using imagism in his works – and he was one of the first poets to do so. This makes his poems vivid and powerful for the reader's imagination.

You've already seen several references to Ezra Pound's Make It New (1934), a manifesto for the modernist movement. However, that's not the cornerstone of Pound's literary legacy. To delve into it, read The Cantos (c. 1917–1962), an epic 800-page poem, In a Station of the Metro (1913), or The Return (1917).

Franz Kafka

An Austrian-Hungarian author, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is one of the most prominent modernist writers in the German-speaking world. Kafka explored the themes of transformation, existentialism, and alienation in his works.

Kafka focused his craft on absurdist, surrealistic, and fantastical plots, as best exemplified by The Metamorphosis (1915). In this short story, a salesman has turned into a large insect (commonly interpreted as a cockroach).

Kafka's body of work led to the birth of a new term – Kafkaesque. This term is the easiest way to describe the author's style: it's marked by absurdist, disorienting complexity and a surreal distortion of reality.

The Metamorphosis isn't the only work of Kafka worth reading. His best novels include The Castle (1926) and The Trial (1925).

E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was one of the most productive American poets and authors of modern-period literature. Over his lifetime, he crafted around 2,900 poems, four plays, and two autobiographical novels over his lifetime.

Cummings' poetry style is best defined as idiosyncratic. The poet disregarded not just the established norms of rhyme and rhythm. He went further and refused to abide by the syntax, punctuation, and spelling rules. His poems often employ lowercase spelling as a form of expression.

If you want to get acquainted with the best works of E. E. Cummings, we suggest you start with may I feel said he (1935) and [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] (1952). His books of poetry – 1 × 1 (1944) and No Thanks (1935) – are also a worthy read and a great introduction to the poet's unique style.

H. Lawrence

Another prominent English novelist and poet, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), didn't earn himself a worthy place in the modernism literary movement during his lifetime. Only after his death did his works earn him the recognition he deserved.

His works dealt with themes of sexuality, industrialization, modernity, and spontaneity. Exploring sexuality – especially from the standpoint of female characters – earned D. H. Lawrence many enemies. As a result of public persecution and censorship trials, D. H. Lawrence spent years in voluntary exile.

D. H. Lawrence's most prominent novels are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), The Rainbow (1915), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). However, the latter was deemed too scandalous to be published in Great Britain until 1960, after D. H. Lawrence's death.

Ernest Hemingway

An American novelist and short-story writer, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) isn't just considered one of the most influential creators of the modernist period but American literature as a whole. He is famous for his unique style of prose. It's economical, straightforward, and matter-of-fact, with few descriptive adjectives in the text.

Having spent years as a journalist on the battlefield, Hemingway experienced the horrors of war first-hand. This influenced the themes he explored in his writing: his novels reflected war, love, destruction, loss, and disillusionment.

Hemingway's bibliography consists of seven novels and six collections of short stories. His most prominent works include For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), based on his experiences of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is one of the iconic feminist modernist writers who specialized in crafting short stories. A New Zealand native, Mansfield reflected on anxiety, identity, existentialism, and sexuality in her works.

Mansfield's style draws inspiration from visual arts and psychoanalysis. This made for vivid descriptions in her prose and complex characters. Her short stories often have a twist in the form of a revelation or an epiphany about the protagonist.

If you want to get acquainted with Mansfield's literary style, we recommend you start with short stories like The Garden Party (1922) and Daughters of the Late Colonel (1920). Other great but lesser-known examples of her short stories include Something Childish But Very Natural (1914), Bliss (1918), and Sun and Moon (1920).

A Modernism Essay Example

If you've come here looking for examples of modernism in literature to write an essay later on, we've got you covered! Our professional writer flexed their custom writing muscles and crafted this example of a modernism essay you can download below.

Feel free to use this short essay sample as a guide on how to write a quality paper about this literary movement. And if you'd like to have a top-notch modernism essay edited or written for you, our writers and editors are waiting to hear from you!

Don't Have Time to Do an A-level Job Yourself?

Our writers will craft an outstanding custom paper at an affordable price for you – all you have to do is place an order!

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of divergent tendencies within a longer period, from the 1890s to the present. Modernism is an international movement, erupting in different countries at different times; in fact, one characteristic of modernism is its transgression of national and generic boundaries. My main focus here, however, is on English-language modernism. As a historically descriptive term, then, “modernism” is misleading not only because of its varying applications (to the historical period or to a highly organized style characteristic of some but not all writers of the period) but also because it is typically more evaluative than descriptive. In its positive sense, “modernism” signals a revolutionary break from established orthodoxies, a celebration of the present, and an experimental investigation into the future. As a negative value, “modernism” has connoted an incoherent, even opportunistic heterodoxy, an avoidance of the discipline of tradition. This critical overtone has sounded periodically since the eighteenth century, from the time that Jonathan Swift, in A Tale of a Tub (1704), lampooned the “modernists” as those who would eschew the study of the ancients through the late-nineteenth-century reform movement in the Catholic church, which was labeled “modernist” and condemned as the “synthesis of all the heresies” in the papal encyclical Pascendi of Pope Pius X (1907). It is interesting to note that in the recent debates over modernism versus postmodernism, the characteristic unorthodoxy of modernism has been displaced onto the postmodern; in a motivated reversal, modernism is characterized as the corrupt, canonized orthodoxy (identified, misleadingly, with the new critcism attributed to T. S. Eliot, among others), with postmodernism as its experimental offshoot.

The project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is vexed not only by the imprecision and contradictory overtones of the word “modernist” but also by the category “theory.” Certainly many modernist writers wrote criticism: Virginia Woolf published hundreds of essays and reviews; W. B. Yeats’s most important literary criticism has been collected in Essays and Introductions ; Ezra Pound’s voluminous criticism is well known for its informality and directness; Eliot was as important a critic, especially in his later years, as he was a poet. But the most interesting theoretical dimension of modernist writing is not always explicitly presented as either criticism or theory but is instantiated in the writing itself; the theory can be deduced, however controversially, from the practice.

One axiom of modernist theory that was importantly articulated by T. E. Hulme in “Romanticism and Classicism” (1913-14, posthumously published in Speculations , 1924) is an acceptance of limits that are identified with classicism. Hulme argues: “The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas” (120). The classical style, Hulme states, is carefully crafted, characterized by accurate description and a cheerful “dry hardness” (126). He asserts that “it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things” (131); Hulme’s preference is for the visual and the concrete over the general and abstract, for freshness of idiom, for the vital complexities that are “intensive” rather than extensive (139).

Hulme’s sounding of the note of classical style as one that is local, limited, intensive, and fresh resonates widely through the work of other modernist writers. Pound’s dictum “Make it New,” Eliot’s objective correlative (“Hamlet,” 1919, Selected Prose 48), James Joyce’s epiphanies, Woolf’s moments of being, and the explosive power of the concrete image celebrated in Imagism are all instances of a “classical” technique, a preference for the local and well-defined over the infinite. In Dubliners, Joyce defined the sickness of modern life as paralysis, a loss of local control, and he set about designing his fiction in a way that requires the reader to understand its individual, local parts before the whole can assume a meaningful shape.

The classical style is characteristic of much, but not all, modernist writing (D. H. Lawrence’s work being one well-known exception). However, the classical theory begins to bifurcate, producing political implications that are diametrically opposed, when the insistence on finitude is applied to the individual. Both groups of classical writers accepted the view that the individual is limited, but one group, which included Woolf, Joyce, and Yeats, began to develop a theory of supplemental “selves” that points toward a celebration of diversity as antidote to individual limitation. In Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf has Clarissa propose a theory that she is many things and many people, “so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them” (1925, reprint, 1981, 52-53). Yeats worked out an analogous idea in his theory of the anti-self in “Per Arnica Silentia Lunae” (1917), a notion that each individual is implicit in his or her opposite, which eventuated in the complex theory of interlocking personality types outlined in A Vision (1925, rev. ed., 1937). In Ulysses (1922), Joyce also pursues the idea that the self is luxuriously heterogeneous, a heterogeneity brought to the surface by multiple encounters with difference. He makes his hero an apostate Jew who is defined on either extreme by a “spoiled priest” and an adulterous woman, and in these slippages between limited individuals he celebrates such limits, such insufficiencies, as conditions of communal possibility. As Stephen Dedalus explains in the library, the varied world represents the potential scope of a disunited selfdom: “Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” ( Ulysses , 1922, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, 1984, chap. 9,11.1044-46).

The same recognition of the limitation of the individual produced in other modernist writers an insistence on strict, authoritarian regulation of the individual, the germ of fascist tendencies for which the movement became notorious. Hulme again articulates the premises of this position: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him” (116). He speaks of liberty and revolution as essentially negative things, citing the French Revolution as evidence that when you remove the restraints on individuals, what emerges is their destructiveness and greed. Like Eliot, Hulme appreciated religion for its power to control human depravity through traditional order.

The problem with controlling “human depravity” through institutional restrictions is that the controlling “order” tends to legislate sameness, so that some orders of existence are seen as preferable to—less depraved than—others. And this is where the seams of “classical” modernist theory split: not over the limited nature of humanity, but over the question of the value of difference. The split was a jagged one; some writers, such as Pound, could cultivate difference in their writing and denounce it in society (as he did in his infamous radio broadcasts of the 1930s). The different premium accorded to ethnic, social, religious, and sexual differences by writers who agreed on the limited nature of the individual, however, explains how the offensive tirades of Wyndham Lewis and the brilliant feminism of Woolf, the anti-Semitic propaganda of Pound and the Jewish hero of Joyce’s Ulysses could stem from the same “classical” root.

Virginia Woolf

In a period that was to culminate in World War II, racism was an inevitably controversial issue. The related cause of feminism was also hotly debated during the period, since women had only been granted suffrage after World War I (1920 in the United States, 1928 in Great Britain). Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own , details clearly and unpolemically the historical and material restrictions on women that prevented them from full participation in artistic and professional life. Her best illustration of the greater circumstantial constraints on women is her invention of a wonderfully gifted sister for Shakespeare named Judith, his counterpart in everything but freedom and opportunity. Woolf outlines what would have happened to this young girl if she had wanted to act in London, as her brother did; she sketches in the ridicule to which she would have been subjected, the ease with which more experienced men could have taken advantage of her, and the passion with which, upon finding herself with child, she would have killed herself: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” (1929, reprint, 1981, 48). Woolf’s main argument is that women need space—a room of their own—and economic freedom (a fixed income) for their hitherto pinched genius to flourish.

Finally, no discussion of modernist criticism and theory is complete without an account of the collapse of plot and its replacement by intertextual allusion and the “stream of consciousness.” In a much-cited review of Joyce’s Ulysses called “ Ulysses , Order and Myth” (1923) Eliot argued that developments in ethnology and psychology, and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough , had made it possible to replace the narrative method with what he called the “mythical method,” which was first adumbrated by Yeats. The mythical method works not through narrative but through allusion to different mythical narratives that, when fleshed out and juxtaposed, illuminate both the text in which they appear and each other in surprising and often revisionary ways. For example, Yeats’s early poetry worked to contextualize his hopeless love for Maud Gonne within the competing and mutually reinforcing contexts of Greek myth (Helen of Troy) and Celtic myth (Deirdre of the Sorrows; the magic of the Sidhe). In Ulysses , the main mythic parallels are the Odyssey and Hamlet , although individual episodes are further complicated by allusions to other intersecting narratives, historical, fictional, or mythic. Eliot’s The Waste Land provides the densest illustration of the mythical method, where the range of allusion includes a variety of Christian, Greek, occult, Scandinavian, Judaic, and Buddhist references, as well as allusions to music, drama, literature, and history.

Eliot chose to highlight myth as the key to modernist stylistics, but actually myth was just one category of narrative accessed through allusion; one might say that all kinds of narratives were situated behind the page, identifiable only through “tags” in the text, and that the interplay between these narratives produces a submerged commentary on it that imitates the pressure of the cultural unconscious (in narrativized form) on any individual performance. The stream-of-consciousness technique is yet another way of drawing the reader’s attention from conscious, deliberate, intentionalized discourse to the pressure of the unsaid on the said, of the repressed on the expressed. The apparent randomness of associative thought prompts the reader to question the submerged “logic” of connection, to listen for the unconscious poetry of repressed desire. This attention to the unknown as the shadow of the known is reversed in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , in which it is the known that is obscured by the highly organized distortions of language and history as processed by the unconscious mind and the “mudmound” of the past. It is no surprise, in light of this sensitivity to the muted voice of the unconscious in the literature of the period, that another great modernist theorist was Sigmund Freud .

In fact, the opposing political tendencies of modernist writers bear a significant relationship to their different attitudes toward the unconscious. Bounded by the eruption of two world wars, the modernist period can be read as a historical enactment of the tension between Friedrich Nietzsche ‘s Apollonian and Dionysian forces. The Dionysian power of the unconscious was making itself felt, and the writers who sought to contain or deny it through the Apollonian power of civic or religious authority were, like Pentheus in the Bacchae , torn apart. Others sought to express the creative potential of the unconscious, its capacity to unify without homogenization, to proliferate via division, and it is the writing of this group that is most animated by the zest of manifold contradictions. As Yeats wrote near the end of his career in the voice of a crazed old woman,

‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff When on Love intent; But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’

(“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition , ed. Richard J. Finneran, 1983, rev. ed., 1989, 259-60)

Bibliography T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923, reprinted in Selected Prose of T S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 1975);T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (ed. Herbert Read, 1924, 2d ed., 1936); Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927); Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz, eds., Modern Literary Criticism, 1900-1970 (1972); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929, reprint, 1981); W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (1961), Mythologies (1959). Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957); Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (1984); Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (1985); Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Share this:

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Modern Literary Criticism and Theor , Modernism , modernist criticism , modernist literary theory , Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism , modernist theory

Related Articles

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more: https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/about-us/news-and-blogs/cambridge-university-press-publishing-update-following-technical-disruption

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

• > The Cambridge History of Modernism
• > Introduction: A History of “Modernism”

Book contents

• The Cambridge History of Modernism
• Copyright page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A History of “Modernism”
• Part I Modernism in Time
• Part II Modernism in Space
• Part III Modernism In and Out of Kind: Genres, Composite Genres, and New Genres
• Part IV Modernism in Person, Modernism in Community
• Bibliography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2017

In one received understanding, “modernism” emerges as a working term only in the teaching cultures of postwar universities in England and (especially) America. According to this understanding, “modernism” earned its currency as a word mainly in those academic settings, where it offered itself chiefly as a term of convenience, providing a departmental curriculum with course titles or doctoral dissertations with historical frames. In those college classrooms and library studies, “modernism” is supposed to have exerted a neutral, mostly descriptive, non-controversial and certainly non-polemical function – at least at its inception. This is not an accurate understanding, and the history it outlines is wrong. The word “modernism” is circulating noticeably and in fact clamorously at the turn of the twentieth century. It emerges already and first of all as a fighting word, being fraught from the start with strident and contestable claims about the meaning of the experience of history in general and contemporary history in particular. This is the historical moment for which “modern” has recently been accepted as a designation and “ism” its newly challenging, and increasingly challenged, intensive. Such is the power of the denominator, in fact, that this Cambridge History of Modernism frames its broad historical subject through the word itself. “Modernism” provides the point of reference in this Introduction because it centers a debate about the meaning of being “modern,” especially in the inflection which the additional “ism” attributes to it, and because this controversy frames many of the critical issues and interpretive questions that are most cogent to the body of work that is brought under its heading. The debate is lengthening now into its second (actually third) century. In a fashion at least mildly appropriate to the temporal imaginary of its subject, this Introduction will move through this period counterclockwise as well as clockwise – from the beginning of the twenty-first century to the end of the nineteenth – by entering in medias res.

“What is ‘Modernism’?” So opens the annual Presidential Address at the English Association meeting in London in 1937. The interrogative mood dissolves quickly as the speaker, the Very Rev. W.R. Inge, turns to the etymology of the word he has pronged between those inverted commas:

The barbarous Latin word modernus (from modo , ‘just now’) occurs first in the sixth century, in the grammarian Priscian, and Cassiodorus, an official of Theodoric. In the twelfth century it was applied to the Nominalists by the Realists, and Roger Bacon called Alexander of Hales and Albert duo moderni gloriosi ; even Thomas Aquinas was called a Modernist by the Platonists and Augustinians. During the Renaissance it was applied to the new humanistic ways of thought. In the seventeenth century a ‘middle age’ was intercalated between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. Our own age will perhaps some day be called the middle age, unless they prefer to call it ‘the meddle and muddle age’. 1

The after-dinner humor concluding this first paragraph does not obscure a skepticism edging into enmity, which is manifest in that opening blast at the babbling Latinity of the early Dark Ages. Obviously motivated for attack, the philological learning in this overture includes nonetheless a precise understanding of the specific inflection of the Latin radical, which is indeed the root of the issue for Inge. Modo , as the Oxford English Dictionary informs him, means something narrower than an adjectival understanding of “recent” or “current”; it finds its meaning as a temporal adverb, telling the time of an action occurring not simply “today” or even “now” but “ just now .” So, modo enters into late antiquity as a most timely register of a temporality pressured by an immense sense of eventful change: a special present, a brink of time, a precipitous instant, all in all, a crisis time. These several associations move to the acutest register in the twentieth century through the addition of the suffix “ism,” which adds a self-conscious awareness to this special experience of the “modern” moment, turning the uncertainty of instantaneous time into not just a feeling but an idea, maybe even a faith or belief in this condition of constantly disruptive change.

The special motive and pressure for Inge’s riposte comes then from the modern context of the twentieth, the assignably “modern,” century, which, in his fearful apprehension, is realizing the meaning of a word introduced into late Roman antiquity as the original indicator of crisis time. The notion of “just now” has been lived out indeed in a century already divided into decades with names and nicknames, ranging from the dynastic to the dynamic, from Edwardian to Roaring. Most important, an instant-by-instant difference in the actual experience of historical time lives out – and in – the rhythms of an unprecedented and accelerating pace of change in the history of material cultures. Accordingly, the imaginative experience of temporality moves beyond one of crisis time to one of time itself in crisis: a formerly natural, apparently gradual time of diurnal days and seasonal rounds has been sliced ever more finely and grandly by the developing mechanisms of chronometry, which have worked in ways little and large – from the division of the globe into twenty-four equal time zones to the parsing of micro-times within a supposedly seamless instantaneity – to unsettle temporal measurement itself. It is the feeling of free-fall within these conditions that most unsettles critics like Inge. And so his and their attacks, which are more like counterattacks in the sense that they are manifestly reactive and panicky, tend to deflect from the source of their profounder dread to images of the predictably ridiculous, say, in the characterization of “modernist” sculpture as “figures apparently suffering from elephantiasis or acromegaly” or “modernist” painting as “zigzags” crisscrossing “a woman with green hair.” 2 No, it is not about the mannerisms, odd or otherwise, that are attached to “modernism” as its characterizing styles, which, in any case, are much too various to conform to any one version. No, it is about time: it is about this new experience of vertiginous instants in which “modernism” is most self-consciously involved, and it was about time, in the minds of those identified with this sensibility over the long turn of the twentieth century, that works of art constitute themselves in awareness of time and the changing conditions of time in their work. So, if the feeling of crisis time and time in crisis was undergone first in Inge’s history in the final collapse of classical culture in the sixth century, it is, now in the fourth decade of the twentieth, implicitly but insistently – and recognizably, in the currency of this word “modernism” – the present condition of things.

The decade-by-decade chronology in the twentieth-century history of modernism begins of course with the “fin de siècle,” where the French nomenclature frames an interval with an equal degree of self-consciousness about its own special time. Accordingly, in the archaeologies of the twentieth-century uses of this word, cultural historians usually find the foundational source of “modernism” in the later nineteenth century, specifically, in the histories of European and especially French Roman Catholicism. 3 This “modernist movement” included an effort at updating the formulations of traditional church doctrines and, most important, at understanding the history of these doctrinal positions as historically determined and, so, as relative and changeable. And so it is clear that the “just now”-ism of the modernist sensibility was scored into the founding principles of this religious movement, too. What needs to be recognized, however, is that this ecclesiastical “modernism” was not the inaugural form of the word in European usage. Roman Catholic “modernism” was echoing developments in the broader cultural histories of Europe, where the term “modern” was already flourishing in contemporary continental milieus with that charged and often fraught sense of a special present, of crisis time and time in crisis.

Through the last two decades of the nineteenth century, cognates of the term “modern” were appearing with increasing frequency in Italy and Spain, in Germany and Austria, in Denmark and Scandinavia and Russia. Primary bibliographies display a range of periodicals and magazines, novels and anthologies of poetry as well as discursive works, which feature the word “modern” in the title. This flourish occurs with special intensity in Germany, where the pressures of modernization were occurring in the most accelerated form in Europe. German journals include Die Moderne , Moderne Blätter , and Freie Bühne für modernes Leben , while monographs particularize this “modern” condition in a number of specifically topical considerations: Das sexuelle Problem in der modernen Litteratur (1890), for example, or Der Übermensch in der modernen Litteratur (1897), and already in 1890 in Zur Kritik der Moderne . The increasing frequency of this word indicates a sense sufficiently self-conscious as to mean, in every relevant way, “modernism.”

What is equally remarkable in continental Europe and, as Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane have pointed out, especially in Germany, is the sudden lapse of interest in the “modern,” which occurs just as the supposedly “modern” century has turned. In 1909, for indicative instance, Samuel Lublinski titles his monograph Der Ausgang der Moderne ( The Exit of the Modern ). 4 Similarly, in Italy, where the federation of the “modern” (as opposed to classical or Roman) state in 1870 coincided with the energies of a much-promulgated modernization: these developments of political and cultural history crested toward the century’s end as their moment or realization, when, however, a change of terms occurs and, as Luca Somigli succinctly notes, “the label of ‘ decadentismo ’ has come to identify much of what in other traditions is described as ‘modernism.’” 5 The Spanish variant on this pattern appears in modernismo , which, as a synonym of “modernity,” centers an intensity of debate in the years approaching the turn of the century. In that process, however, and especially after 1900, modernismo was always disaggregating into a composite topic in cultural and literary history, where the still uncertain associations of the term look backward as well as forward for its markers and come to include Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadentism, even pre-Raphaelitism. 6 This backward-turning aspect in the term emerges in Latin America as a point of strong reaction “around the turn of the last century,” as Rubén Gallo notes in this History in his chapter on “modernism” in Spanish America. Here a “once” but no longer “controversial verse became the rallying cry of a new movement called post-modernismo ( not to be confused with postmodernism), which called for a poetic renewal and a new aesthetics.”

The sense of crisis time and time in crisis in “modernism” thus clusters around the century’s turn as its likeliest temporal environment. As Frank Kermode has written about the end-and-beginning feeling of the turn of centuries, it is at this (recurring) point in history that a sense of instability is at its most intense. 7 In this understanding, the feeling of unease is as urgently uncertain as it is necessarily brief. There are other ways of explaining the brief but intense life of the turn-of-the-century “modern,” however, which involve the more particular history of the century then ending on the European continent. Recalling this history may allow us to understand some of the reasons why “modernism” fades as a critical descriptor for subsequent cultural histories on the continent even while it gains strength as a counter of value and center of attention from the beginning through the end of the twentieth century in Britain and America.

Continental Europe had known crisis times in the century then ending with an intensity worth remembering. If we understand revolution in its profoundest dimension as an effort of returning to some radical version of human sociality and, in effect, beginning history anew, we can see that the pan-European revolutions of the period extending from 1789 through 1848 or 1851 witness a continuing and increasingly desperate attempt at this renovation of historical time. This impetus finds a signature, original formulation in the new calendar of revolutionary France, which renames the months of the calendar year as the most explicit sign of the imaginative aspiration for a new time. It is not just those measures of temporality that are being renamed. Time itself is being reinvented as a dimension of novel possibility in the future perfect tense of visionary history. The manifest failure of this ambition is scored into the title of Karl Marx’s 1852 documentary memoir of revolutions lapsing now across Europe as well as in France: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. There is a specially condensed, bitter eloquence here. Where the word from the revolutionary calendar of republican France echoes ahead to the next Bonaparte, we hear the token of a new future closing down around a name that is not just recurring and so dynastic but institutionalized: by the end of this phrase, as by the end of the period the title frames, the quality of improvisational time in revolutionary temporality has all too obviously run down. This history of disappointed as well as expectant time converges as a complex sensibility, then, toward the turn of the century, when the force of this precedent history charges that otherwise arbitrary marker. This memory bears all too evident witness to the fact that a moment of round-numbered chronology may not be the circumstance of some apocalyptic transformation. And so the verbal token of crisis time – conveying not just the expectation of change or renovation but the feeling of an acute present, a preoccupation with and in a brink instant, of living in a Now explicitly different from a Then or even a Next – is let go with the feeling of crisis fatigue for which this history is prequel and explanation. In France, indeed, where the history of failed revolutions is perhaps most acute, the French cognate for “modernism” has never enjoyed any strong purchase as a term of interest or denominator of value in literary and cultural history, as Jean-Michel Rabaté points out in his chapter on Proust and Gide and Larbaud in this History . Such is the power of the word, it seems, that it has been displaced from the cultural histories in which its meaning has been made most starkly real.

But not unrealized: the radical meaning of “modernism” is readily and necessarily applicable to the cultural productions of the countries covered in this History . In the work of many different and in fact changing and emerging nations ( Russia and Ireland and Austria among them), the strong sense of the root meaning of the word is not at all attenuated: it is extended, diversified, even intensified. This work occurs under the rubric of the term more enduringly in Britain and North America, where the sense of crisis time and time in crisis does not include the events and memory, all in all, the form of historical consciousness, which put pressure on the sense of the word on continental tongues. So, in English, “modernism” operates as a denominator for a more chronic pattern of consciousness and a more diachronic experience of history. This is not to say, however, that the word abides in English in the quiet of consensus understandings in the long and lengthening era of the transatlantic midcentury. In the entity of faith or belief that this suffix makes of the modern condition, “modernism” suggests not just the awareness but the acceptance of crisis time as the abiding time of the modern century. And the fight over this idea flares up first as the end of the previous century begins.

In 1891, in Tess of the D’Urbervilles , Thomas Hardy produces a phrase that will echo across the turn of the century as a resonant expression of crisis time and its contemporary discontents: “the ache of modernism.” Hardy’s narrator uses this phrase to describe the feeling Tess experiences in seeing a vision of days winding away into a future that is at once infinite and diminishing, an eternity that is both meaningless and menacing. 8 This is a vision of time future as time indeterminate, as time unblessed and unbound from the covenants of eschatology, all in all, as time detached from the patterns of traditional biblical significance. Indeed, the insignificance of traditional time provides a new significance, a new critical condition. And “modernism” is the word for this condition. In Tess’s vision, the experience of time is suspended ever in a moment that recurs without meaningful sequence or consequence, where the root of the “just now” meaning of “modernism” includes the even more challenging sense of “only now” or “no more than now.” Tess stands thus in the exceptionality of her own instant as a radical “modernist.” And while her experience is historically grounded and broadly shared (her feelings are “those of the age”), 9 her vision stands for the sense of a present that is an isolated and radicalized piece of time, being at once full of itself and emptied of precedents or destinies. This is the modernism that hurts, and, in view of the whole “age” that shares this feeling, there is a lot of pain to go around. The hurt may be located most indicatively where older, accustomed understandings of time are confronted by an assignably “modern” one, which includes not just the diminishment of the post-Enlightenment idea of progressive history but the intensification of the feeling of existence in the sheerest of instants, in a phrase, the emergent menace of existentialism. So, “modernism” already enfolds the complexity of a fully and doubly measured sense, which includes the promise and the disappointment of the futurity Tess views in advancing but diminishing days. The deep time of “modernism” is this counter-rhythmic condition, which runs through the commentary on either side of that turning century.

“The Ache of Modernism”: in 1897, the phrase is already resonant and still provocative enough to provide the title for an essay in The Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine . In this venue, one might expect George Northcroft to complain about Hardy’s already well-known apostasy, but he concentrates instead on the meaning of his title phrase for this particular historical moment. “We are too much the children of the hour to be untouched by it,” Northcroft admits, and reiterates: “It is widely felt, and in many cases keenly. It is more than a literary fashion. It is a striking phase of the temper of to-day.” The “to-day” that Northcroft is marking is implicitly but irresistibly the short and shortening day of the end of the century, when a particularly “modern pessimism” and “modern sadness” attends the art of that “modern writer” and all those “modern novelists” that provisions “the public library of any modern city.” Repeating “modern” with an insistence equal to its frequency in that reiterative bibliography of German periodicals on or about the same year, Northcroft consolidates his self-consciousness about the condition to which the word refers, expressing the sense of the “ism” suffix in this conspicuous refrain. And this is a “modernism” that hurts just where Hardy feels it most keenly, that is, where the art of this self-consciously “modern” moment produces “no lasting satisfaction.” 10 The cultural value being threatened shows clearly in the title of the next article in this issue of the journal: “ Lasting Happiness.” 11 The impermanence that is scored into the root meaning of radical “modernism” is a condition equally of threat and opportunity, where an improvisatory “modern” is always allied with a sense of disintegration, so that the message of this mercurial instant includes also and inevitably a hermeneutic of decay.

Those are the threats against which R.A. Scott-James attempts to defend his “modernism” in the first book-length work of literary criticism to carry the English word in its title: Modernism and Romance (1908). He moves the meaning of the first of his title words toward the side of improvisatory opportunity. He puts “modernism” on the plotline of a “romance” novel of history that is driven to ever-better ends by a Progress-minded ideology. In this way, Scott-James’s book offers an inaugural form of a one-sided but defensive construction of “modernism” that will continue to be heard for at least a century longer. This early instance is indeed a radical form. So hard is Scott-James pushing this single-minded idea of Progress-minded modernism, he reads even the novels of a late imperial age, Conrad’s most conspicuously and in fact preposterously, as testaments to the assertion “that our civilisation so far from being very old is really in its infancy.” 12 All of this effortful work represents an attempt to counter the negative inflection of its Latin radical, the “passing moment” sense of its “just now” meaning, which is more than an inference insofar as it has already found a timely habitation and alternative name: “Decadence.”

This sensibility flourished (if “decadence” can be said to flourish) in the English as well as the continental fin de siècle. This last decade before the last century of the millennium provides an initial, defining instance of the idea of crisis time or time in crisis that “modernism” denominates. This so-called “decade of Decadence” provides a primary, paradigmatic location of the imaginative time of “modernism” as a verbal concept. And it is a measure of the threat presented by this negative side of dissolving time – told and tolled in the countdown letdown of Northcroft’s self-consciously “modern” time – that Scott-James has to counter it so strenuously. This work extends past his chapter “The Decadents,” which includes a single- and bloody-minded denunciation of that group, and into the strenuous efforts of passages like this:

It is a wearisome tale to tell … He is happy indeed who does not understand what I have sought to suggest rather than to explain … if he has not felt these and all the other parts of our over-developed community shaking and shivering in self-conscious postures, groaning in the agonies either of actual physical pain or the self-imposed torture of affectation, then he belongs to the happy few who have not been compelled to witness the “ache of modernism.” 13

Readers still familiar with the art and literature of the fin de siècle recognized the type characters of décadence in this mise-en-scène . Their febrile exhaustion, more specifically their over ripe (“ over -developed”) condition – these figures repeat the trope of civilization at its decaying-before-dying end that recurs among Decadent writers from Théophile Gautier on. Scott-James’s tableau mordant revives it all, and all for his own strenuous purpose – to make these figures alien to the optimist’s “modernism,” which he is trying to cure of the “ache” Hardy’s phrase preserves still in the nerve it touches. The pain of decaying time remains a constitutive element of this modernism even – or especially – as Scott-James works so hard to alleviate it.

This archive of turn-of-the-century writings restores some of the fullness of the discursive work being performed with and through “modernism.” In this original force field, the verbal radical generates the primary terms of the relevant debate, which swings between the opposite possibilities of its twofold sense. These root meanings may be attenuated in due course, even in short course, but, even when renamed and rehabbed in the longer durée of its ongoing use, the core ideas will continue to apply.

In shorter course, those potent signifiers of instability and diminishment are shifted into an increasingly indeterminate range of dangers which, in their variety, preserve some of the original negativity but diffuse its particular threat. So dispersed, the meanings of “modernism” do not so much constellate as conjure up many (or any) convention-dismaying qualities, which, lacking specificity, come quickly enough to be tolerated, even fondly tolerated, and so accommodated. Already in 1913 in The Athenaeum , for early instance, the author of “Modernism at the Albert Hall” asks “liberal-minded men” to look past the evidently “dangerous tendency” in some of the work on view, which includes cubism and futurism as well as post-impressionism, and recognize that “this revolution, if it is a real revolution, cannot be checked.” The use of “revolution” in this article, which includes the intensifying repetition of the word, includes a history of political revolutions in Europe that has been rewritten and reoriented in English, it seems, into a promissory cultural rebirth. Recognized as inevitable, needing thus to be allowed, this specifically cultural revolution is accommodated now, in the closing note of the piece, as “the immediate herald of a new Renaissance.” 14 So, in 1917, in the American journal New Opinion , the worst that can be said about the impresario of the original Parisian production of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps , which earned far worse for its recognizably or assignably “modernist” quality in 1913, is: “Jean Cocteau, the daring modernist poet.” 15 So in 1925, in a review of Marianne Moore’s poems in the American Dial , a magazine already sided with a poetics identifiably and also nominally “modernist,” William Carlos Williams can write to this evolving consciousness of popular acceptance: “modernism is distressing to many who would at least tolerate it if they knew how. These individuals, who cannot bear the necessary appearance of disorder in all immediacy, could be led to appreciation through critical study.” 16

The “critical study” that Williams asks for is the activity necessary to accommodate the quality of “difficulty” that comes increasingly to be attributed to “modernism.” This “difficulty” needs to be understood as an attributed, not a synonymic or intrinsic, condition, and so denaturalized. It may be understood best in terms of the uses and motives it serves in a cultural economy broader than one reader’s, one viewer’s, one listener’s experience.

While landmark works of modernism – from Schoenberg’s to Joyce’s to Kandinsky’s – create perplexity even for their most assiduous critics, the assigning of “difficulty” to this work also serves as a simpler equivalent – a euphemism – for the more challenging “difference” the works of modernism may register from conventional styles of representation. In fact, “difficulty” represents a quality of experience or a category of value that a number of modernists pointedly contest, seeing it as a misplaced understanding about what a work of art is or can do. “Never explain,” T.S. Eliot is said to have said, providing that cryptic motto for this authorial advice for remaining cryptic. The elusiveness – the irreducibility – of an art identified as “modernist” may locate the essential difference it presents to mass-educated notions. In a cultural history that has witnessed a burgeoning growth in the extent of “general” education, which emphasizes basic comprehension as the aim or merit of its activity, a standard-issue art will be regarded as a conveyer of content, as a statement of reducible truths. An art that presents, however, rather than re presents: such is the motive and means of work identified as “avant-garde,” which, often staged as an art of its own event, its own making or happening, defines the moment of its occurrence as the limiting but signifying condition of its existence. In its own ideation, at least, it cannot be converted into something else: there is no re visiting of some putative referent or anterior (let alone ulterior) meaning; the presentation of sheer experience locates the ground and warrant of the “special present” this radical form of modernism defines and occupies – however briefly. And brevity is the condition of the dozens and even hundreds of avant-garde phenomena in early and midcentury modernism, where their go-and-come-and-go pattern manifests the quality of the transitory in the core meaning of “ modernism.”

The displacement of this essential difference into “difficulty,” however, is one of the chief means by which mainstream cultures first acknowledge and tolerate products identified as “modernist.” What happens for a mass-educated readership applies as well to public consumption, to modernism as an increasingly mass-consumed product. This process is given a motivated pressure in the understanding of critics such as Theodor Adorno, who sees the threatening expressions of this avant- or radical modernism being converted by a master capitalist class into the commodities of a “culture industry,” which stylize the difference and, converting it into the acceptable, ultimately the desirable, neutralize its danger. 17 Whether one accepts the explicitly Marxist terms of Adorno’s analysis, one of the subplots in the cultural history of the 1920s witnesses this growing acceptance of “modernism” as a term and reference, and this development spurs the countermotioning efforts of artists and critics to hold onto the difference “modernism” constitutes in the more radical manifestations of avant-garde attitudes and practices.

Sheldon Cheney writes of the increasing pressure of this normalization of difference in the wryly titled “ America Shakes Hands with the Modernists,” in 1926, in a piece of cultural commentary in The Independent . “The proprietor of a small gallery that became one of the pioneer footholds of the modernists in America recently said to me: ‘The landslide has come; the town has gone modern. There isn’t even the fun of a fight any more.’” The fun of the fight of the difference this advocate of “modernism” is already nostalgic for has been quieted by the cultural production of modernism in one of the major New York museum shows, which provides the occasion for this piece. “For those who have been accustomed to consider modernist art merely a symptom of abnormality or eccentricity on the part of a few detached artists,” Cheney rues humorously but pointedly, the once “unusual, the eccentric thing, modern art has become the normal accepted thing in New York.” 18 Here the cultural institution converts the challenge of the “unusual” or the “eccentric” into the classificatory logic of an exhibition, where docents or academics will explain and so normalize it. Already in 1924, on the other side of the continent, at the University of Washington, Elias Thornleif Arnesen has submitted a doctoral dissertation, “Modernism and Literature,” which offers an earnest attempt to pull the immensities of the two title words into a reductive understanding; one senses the subtleties of understanding a good deal less than the pressures of reduction. 19 Against such pressures Robert Graves and Laura Riding will push back with the emphases they make in 1927, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry , which confronts the “plain reader” as the primary opponent, indeed the establishing antagonist, of their ideal “modernist” poet. 20 Graves and Riding are clearly seeking to reclaim the oppositional elusiveness of this poetry, of which they find plenty in the poems they choose to illustrate this understanding of the “modernist” impulse, Riding’s own most noticeably and so most of all.

Three decades later, as a young American poet, Donald Hall had a conversation with the critic who had done the most in the interim to put the literature of transatlantic, Anglo-Irish and Anglo-French modernism into the classrooms of American and English universities: Edmund Wilson, author of Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931). The tête-à-tête occurred at a party being given at Harvard by Harry Levin, who was using Wilson’s book as a critical frame for a course that covered most of the writers it featured: Eliot and Joyce and Yeats, Stein and Valéry and Proust. Attempting to ingratiate himself with “the master,” Hall conspicuously delivered the word “modernist” as a sign of his knowingness about things current. Wilson exploded, angrily but incoherently, about that “filthy and disgusting word.” Being sure “modernist” could not be “the offending word,” and attempting to regain the advantage, Hall repeated it: Wilson blew up again, even more angrily. 21 While no other report of the incident seems to have survived, it stands nonetheless as a parable and indeed a parabolic account of the rising and falling fortunes of “modernism” in the previous – and, in fact, subsequent – three decades.

As the currency of the term “modernism” was increasing, it was also working in the service of its own institutionalization, which the more radical understandings of modernism would perforce oppose. Obviously enough, Wilson hadn’t used it in his book, perhaps because he sensed those incipient pressures of institutionalization, which he would resist as a point of his own cultural politics. He had become more committed as a Marxist in the decade of the Great Depression, making explicit a set of political attitudes and values that were at least implicit in this formative critical book. There is indeed a residual if not polemical commitment to the principles of transformative revolutionary change in political history, not just literary history, in Axel’s Castle . 22 The influence of Wilson’s book was so great that his own personal politics exerted a profound effect on subsequent generations’ understandings of a politics of modernism. Indeed, surprising as it might now seem, and as Robert Spiller notes in a retrospective essay in The Nation in 1958 (the year of Hall’s encounter with its author), its prominence in university curricula helped to create an environment in which “a love of Eliot, Joyce, Proust, and Yeats seemed compatible with radical politics.” 23 In a midcentury American university culture, this “radical” energy was strongly and particularly leftward leaning, but, in any absolute sense, a radically “modernist” cultural revolution did not have a prescribed politics. The absolute Now could point Left or Right on the metaphorical spectrum of political opinion if not backward or forward on its figurative clock. In any case, the memory of radical modernism in the avant-moment of its own revolutionary making is working through Wilson’s book in ways little and large, subtle and striking.

The battle over the status of this memory will be one of the primary issues centering the discursive work being performed through “modernism” in the postwar decades. Although the word is doing some work in the university worlds of the 1950s, it is spreading widely only by the later 1980s. Yet the three decades of the sixties, seventies, and eighties witness a consistent and consecutive engagement not just with the word but with the intellectual and political issues implicit in it. This colloquy may be represented best at the focal points of the turns of decades. Here, as a measure of the pressure the term is exerting, some of the major voices of literary criticism and cultural commentary are working its root meanings toward contemporary circumstances, where the new inflections often turn on the recognition that, whatever “modernism” means, it is no longer new, for its referent is dead.

In 1960, Harry Levin gave a talk at Queen’s University in Canada that would be reprinted a number of times in subsequent years: “What Was Modernism?” The past tense of the verb in the title indicates all too clearly that its predicate nominative has passed into history, an historical fact that ramifies through this midcentury commentary as a formative orientation and issue. As a kind of tuning fork for this commentary, Levin opens his lecture with a humorous but rueful anecdote of “The Picasso,” now the name of a posh “modern” apartment building in Manhattan. “ Picasso,” he reminds his auditors, has only recently appeared as a signature under images of “rootless transience,” of “collapsible stairways” and “rooms without floors.” 24 This imagery focuses Picasso’s own signature version of the most volatile qualities of modernism in its radical sense, all in all, of the incandescent impermanence that is at once the insignia and the stimulus of its most breathtaking inventions. Now, however, “The Picasso” is obviously as secure as the building behind it and as definite as the article in front of a name that has become a common noun. And so Levin moves between a record of that development and a compensatory effort to locate the moment of an original, singular or proper “modernism” in history – a center of definitional, legitimating attention, which would properly occupy the consciousness of scholars. For Levin, this is the era flowing into and through the years of the First World War, where crisis time and time in crisis were all too manifestly apparent. In this location he is able to claim – more accurately, reclaim – the original and now it seems aboriginal moment of the special present, of crisis time and time in crisis. This “interval,” he observes assertively, “thought of itself in the present tense … Ernest Hemingway’s first book of stories was aptly entitled In Our Time , and its grasp of immediacy was heightened by … His intensive concentration on the instant.” “Whatever the language,” Levin concludes, “the meaning is imminence; and that ‘nowness’ is a precondition of the search for newness.” 25 The point of significant interest is not so much the correctness of that placement of modernism in or around the war years, which would be contested and reasserted repeatedly over the next half-century. What seems most noteworthy is the ambitious precision of the effort to find that center of reference; so to locate an epicenter of activity in this original force field of “modernism”; so to repossess an energy that appears now to be an erstwhile force, its cultural production an increasingly archival record.

There is an essential tension between living the history of “modernism,” that is, and outliving it: this tension is inevitable in a verbal concept that has the idea of a radical present as its core sense. The tension is generative already in this still early moment of the long midcentury establishment of the canon of “modernist” art for university curricula, when that era of putatively revolutionary activity has become an area of academically organized study. Fairly or not, though fairness is not the issue here, the later institutionalization of the term will come to stand for the institutional quality of its referent, which, for a revolution, let alone a revolution for the sake of the impermanence of its own moment, seems contradictory at best. In this respect, it is at once indicative and prescient that Levin should be compelled to defend his “modernism,” especially in the radical meaning he has recovered for it, against “its Post-Modern attackers.” 26 As Steven Connor notes in the Epilogue to this History , the generation of “ postmodernism,” both as word and era, concurs with and is spurred by – it may also serve to spur – the development of “modernism” as a working term in the institutional language of university study and book publishing into and through the 1980s. In a longer view of cultural history, as Connor also shows, many of the now typical features of postmodernism can be read as an extended echo of attitudes and practices that are recognizably, even adamantly, “modernist.” What we can see here, in an even longer view, is a vying for the authority of an original, legitimating force of a Just Now moment – in 1968 as well as 1914 – where the once revolutionary energy of “modernism,” muted in its university work, would be revived now in unrest in those universities, as experienced and told in the cultural histories of the 1960s in England and the Americas as well as on the European continent, especially France.

This current circumstance is also encouraging the recognition that the innovative energy of “modernism” is a matter of finished history, although, as a function of the core meanings of the word, the admission continues to be interestingly and significantly difficult. It lives on as an issue in the odd combination of diminuendo and bravado in the title of Irving Howe’s landmark volume of 1970: Decline of the New . Howe’s opening essay, “The Culture of Modernism,” radicalizes the meaning of “modernism” as a “catastrophe” that is “unique” in history but, he claims adamantly, has not passed into history: this “catastrophe,” he warrants, is “the experience of our age .” Whether or not the art of the late 1960s looks like that of the 1910s, its establishing circumstance, Howe wants to say, is the same. Such is the power of this idea of a perpetual threshold moment in history, so prepossessed is Howe by the notion of chronic catastrophe, that he has obviously memorized but misremembered the formulation Virginia Woolf so famously gave it nearly a half-century earlier: “‘ On or about December 1910 human nature [Woolf wrote “character”] changed.’” 27 Yet it is a manifest fact to Howe that the convention-dismaying energy of an avant-garde modernism has been assimilated to mainstream culture in the same way that his sometime fellow-traveling Marxist Adorno has emphasized. This is the concern he worries recursively throughout the essay. It leads him nowhere near the extremity of Marxist critique that Georg Lukács formulated a decade earlier in his polemical essay “ The Ideology of Modernism,” which presents the word as a malicious contradiction: here “modernism,” no revolution of its own or anyone else’s, represents in fact a counter- revolutionary force, all in all, a reaction formation to the energies of emancipated “potentiality” (his word for Progress) in European socialism; it presents a bourgeois obstacle right – wrong – from the start. 28 Nonetheless, the disappointment Howe cannot help but announce in the failure of the historical avant-garde locates a growing point of the postmodernist critique that is emerging simultaneously with and not independently from it.

At the beginning of the next decade, in prefatory acknowledgements dated “January 1981,” Howe is included among the formative influences on Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity . This book resumes where Howe left off: Berman makes an impassioned attempt to live the history of modernism forward from the point at which Howe feared it had ended. To do so, Berman makes a move that is intellectually ambitious but tactically simplistic, a measure all in all of the difficulty of the project and the urgency of a solution. The effort gains particular significance in terms of the existing history of the criticism of “modernism,” which he recapitulates, and recapitulates at just that moment when “modernism” is about to emerge and flourish as a term in the discursive as well as analytical work of the decade.

Berman takes the paradox in the verbal concept of “modernism” – the improvisatory energy, the force of decay – and their elaborated consequences – the technical inventiveness, a refusal of futurity – and shifts these oppositions into the schemes and tropes of a dialectic that is explicitly Marxist (his main title is a phrase from Marx) and implicitly but insistently Hegelian. Progress, the resolving value in Scott-James’s early account of “modernism,” once again provides the compelling conceptual force. In developing this argument, Berman turns the word “modernism” into an historical protagonist, a virtual character who is propelled by motivating aims and directive values and so, in the process of realizing these, faces situational difficulties, experiences global setbacks as well as local successes. This dramatic narrative emerges with the eloquence of a believer in Berman’s book, drawing it a great deal of critical attention. If his simplifications come from the fact that he has forgotten that “modernism” is first and last a word, his narrative character “modernism” also represents his defiance of the historicity of “modernism” as a verbal concept: for him, the story of its referent is far from over. Indeed, in the subjunctive mood of Berman’s report, in the imaginative grammar of his political commitment, the ideology of Progress that is inseparable from “modernism” must and will be spoken, in the future perfect tense, as its promissory consequence. Extending the memory of his “modernism” back to romanticism, then, he sends it forward as well in the last passages of his “Introduction”: “I want to bring the dynamic and dialectical modernism of the nineteenth century to life again,” he begins his peroration, so “that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first.” 29

The decade opened by this book ends with the publication of a volume that features “modernism” in its title (the first of those we’ve considered in the postwar era to do so): The Politics of Modernism , a posthumously published collection of essays and lectures by Raymond Williams. The framing piece, his recent (1987) talk “When Was Modernism?”, offers a nearly thirty-year-old echo and variation to the “What Was Modernism?” question of 1960, but it also launches a stronger, more pointed riposte to the dramatic exaggerations in Berman’s particular history of “modernism.” So well-known is this account, in fact, Williams does not refer to it by name – although the editor of this retrospective collection makes a point of picking through a lot of its negative press in his “Introduction.” 30 In the talk itself, Williams counters Berman’s hyperboles, in particular the distended temporalities of the Progress plot for “modernism,” by returning attention to the word, which is spurred not just by the currency it has earned in the intervening years but also by the inflation of sense that Berman both initiates and typifies. Thus Williams carefully establishes the “just now” meaning in the root as he follows the modulating sense of this verbal concept from its beginnings in late Latinity through a now nearly millennium-and-a-half lifecycle. Williams brings this long story of the “just now” moment to its meaningful use for the period stretching from the 1890s to roughly midcentury; he emphasizes how the extraordinary range and pace of change over these years stimulated the intense consciousness about time that lies in the inherent idea of the word: here, then, is the “when” for which his “modernism” is the proper denominator. 31 But his tightening of the borders of its historical reference also coincides with a narrowing of its political possibilities. One of the strongest points in Williams’s critique of any idea of a revolutionary or progressive and evolving “modernism” goes to the same fact that Levin and Howe and a lot of the commentators have already confronted in the years when the word is earning its sense. “Modernism” is becoming a subject of academic study just as the era to which it refers is ending, and the idea of crisis time or time in crisis, lived out as the very claim on currency is outlived, seems to loop back from the circumstantial belatedness of the commentators into the motivating values of its subject. In this force field of acquired associations, “modernism” includes associations very close to the received order of things, so that any “anti-bourgeois” associations are indeed long gone. 32 Any putative involvement of “modernism” in dynamic change – cultural as well as political – is effectively questioned. Williams certainly interrogates those notions.

This narrative line through four decades of midcentury scholarship follows a commentary that shows a predominance of Marxists, but not because Marxists owned – or opposed – “modernism” in any instrumental way. Rather, the time-mindedness of its verbal concept is critical to the story unfolding in the history to which Marxists bring their own political interests. And so the essential, definite, specifically temporal sense of the word is furthered, contested, and confirmed, and confirmed as it is contested, in a criticism committed equally to longer- and shorter-range stories of historical change. These issues are simplified considerably in some of the slogans to which the consciousness of modernism is routinely reduced, say, “Make it New” (not written by Pound in fact until the mid-1930s, a date which might locate the moment when modernism is beginning to be made Old). Nonetheless, the idea of transformational change in cultural and political histories as well as in works of aesthetic invention remains in place as a frame of reference and a standard of value in a proliferating work on “modernism,” which occurs through the turn of the next century.

Here, Marxist or not, Berman’s view of the future proves to have been prescient. His pluralizing of “modernism s ,” in the remarkable tour-de-force finale to that book, was particularly prophetic. He already forecasts the reorienting work that Peter Nicholls will formalize in his 1995 volume, Modernisms: A Literary Guide . 33 In multiplying the number of “modernisms” across cultural histories as well as cultural geographies, Nicholls’s book provides a foundation for the soon-to-be-called New Modernist Studies, which will extend the frame of temporal reference for the Old Modernism as well as diversify its personnel. The forward slash of Modernism/Modernity , the journal of a Modernist Studies Association formed in 1999, points the referent of its first word into the future tense perennial of its second. In this wise, in gesturing to the emergence of contemporarily “modernist” work on the African continent and the Indian subcontinent, Berman was also already bringing into focus an interest in global modernism s that has now grown under various rubrics. These range from the problematic principle of “uneven development” to the directing premises of scholars like Susan Stanford Friedman, who see an experience of “modernism” as intrinsic to the historical progressions and lifecycle of any cultural history and, so, decisively and even polemically pluralize the noun. What is occurring in a larger sense is a conversion of a mostly exclusionary idea, where the “ism” or “ist” of the “modern” requires the decision of an individual sensibility, to an inclusive notion, where, beyond any cenacle of chosen or choosing ones, an entire historical period may be called “modernist.” 34 Given the temporal significance of the root of the word, there is a constant, often productive tension between “modernism” as the circumstance of the modern and the sensibility of the modern, and much of the best recent scholarship turns this difference into a frame of reference and framework of analysis that is highly productive.

These developments also reveal impetuses not so abstract, and a memory of the particulars of the instigating history may help to put some of the motivating interests of recent work into intellectual – and political – perspective. The consolidation of interest in “modernism” from the late 1970s through the late 1980s focused interest, predictably, on the then “usual suspects.” “The Men of 1914” – Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis – provides as a referential phrase a site of passage between modernisms new and old. The fact that three of those four men – Pound, Eliot, Lewis – maintained political commitments at odds with anything like Berman’s model of tolerantly progressive politics was certainly disconcerting to the institutionalization of “modernism” in university culture, which, at least in its transatlantic sphere, tended to go more rather than less “liberal.” A counterturn occurred, and the political trials of “modernism” were pursued and fueled in the 1990s with energy commensurate with earlier efforts to suppress those truths. By diversifying its personnel, however, by multiplying its subsidiary or contributory “isms,” all in all, by extending its temporal longevity, the “M” word earned its reprieve, and, newly spoken, offered a rubric renewed for a new era of “modernist studies,” which, to switch the plurals, is now the “study of modernisms.”

The title for this History remains in the singular, but not as a gesture of constriction or reaction to those developments in the history of criticism. Rather, the singular provides a means of maintaining a focus no less radical for remaining true to the root sense of the word, whose representative expressions are indeed multiple. Its brink-instant sensibility is associated necessarily with the ever-accelerating conditions of change in the circumstances of urban modernity, but it is essential to maintain the difference between “modern” (or “ modernization”) and “modernism,” which, in turn, refer to the chronological location of the twentieth century (with its dynamic of change) and a special, ramifying self-consciousness about living in these specific conditions. The Cambridge History of Modernism uses its title term thus to identify a distinctive temperament of “modernism” within the “modern” period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes “modernist” by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. This involvement dramatizes itself in the expression of a sensibility, the practice of an attitude, and, while the effects or metrics of its presence will vary necessarily from art to art and genre to genre, there will be a steady effort in these essays to discern this special identity of “modernism” as a particular (if diversely manifested) state of artistic and cultural mind. This “mind of modernism” may be invoked variously as sensibility, temperament, disposition, attitude, outlook – a range that indexes the extensive import of the special awareness we designate as “modernism” and that suggests as well something of the protean consciousness this History will document in its multiple centers of attention.

As already indicated, advance signals of this sensibility appear at specific points of mid-late nineteenth-century European culture, especially in France; the essays in this History follow it as it grows and changes in pan-European and transatlantic contexts, while developments in imperial and late imperial histories are reflected in representative postcolonial settings. The historical coverage moves between 1890 and (for reasons that have to do with space limitations and current uncertainty about end-dates) roughly 1970. There is of course a tapering effect at the ends of that historical spectrum. In the four major sections of this History , there is an increasing preponderance of attention to literary modernism in particular; unlike painting or sculpture or music, literature requires translation or at least multilingual knowledge to exert its influence, and it gains greatest emphasis here, among other reasons, because it serves to assert and test the internationalism that is understood commonly to be the establishing circumstance of artistic modernism (the importance of translation warrants a chapter in this History ). In the comprehensive logic this volume follows from its initial sections, however, the emphasis on literature occurs within an understanding of “modernism” that presents this sensibility in its most widely working expressions, which include major developments in music, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, theoretical as well as practical science, painting and sculpture, and also the allied arts of architecture and urban design.

In any comprehensive account of “modernism,” its dominance as a category moves in tension – sometimes amiable, sometimes not – with its various, constitutive, subsidiary “isms”: Symbolism, imagism, futurism, vorticism, Dadaism, surrealism, expressionism, etc. These groups will not be the subjects here of separate, dedicated chapters; they form a composite subject in a single chapter, which presents the evolving avant-garde of modernism in a kind of vertical profile across the early midcentury. These movements may differ considerably from each other in their visual and literary signatures, but they join in expressing the intensified faith of their adherents in particular programs of artistic attitude and practice and, as such, demonstrate the “just now” idea of modernism as an aesthetic sensibility and expression. As advance-guards in cultural history, moreover, these movements locate the action of modernism in a signal time, a signature tense – a present intensified with the sense of the break it is making from the past and the breakthrough it makes to a future. At this core of modernism as a sensibility, a temporal imaginary dominates its consciousness, and for this reason, among others, the first of the four sections that organize this History is “Modernism in time.”

“Modernism in time,” “Modernism in space,” “Modernism in and out of kind: genres, new genres, and composite genres,” and “Modernism in person, modernism in community”: the titles for the four sections of this History divide further in accordance with the frames of reference and the kinds of inquiry they organize.

Featuring time and space, the first two sections identify categories of perception and understanding that are fundamental to the sensibility of modernism. These headings also situate the expressions of this sensibility in the times and spaces of twentieth-century modernity. “Modernism in time” begins thus with a consideration of time as a subject of scientific and philosophical discussion as well as aesthetic representation, then moves this temporal imaginary in the complementary directions of the “avant-garde” and the “ primitive” in the second and third chapters, then follows this sensibility through the historical locations which the consecutive decades mark. Similarly, in “Modernism in space,” an opening essay on the science and sociology as well as the philosophy and aesthetics of space leads to chapters which feature the sensibility of modernism in visual and spatial media but also, necessarily, in the spatiality of urban modernity in various locations and modalities. In the larger frame of global space, newly imaginable with the closing of frontiers, the concluding chapter of this section follows modernism into Latin American locations, where, in no peripheral instance, interaction between New and Old Worlds reveals an autonomously powered extension and refinement of continental sensibilities in Latin American locations.

The third and fourth sections feature the forms in which a consciousness of modernism reorganizes existing systems of thinking about individuality and sociality as well as types and kinds in aesthetic representation. In sum, “Modernism in and out of kind: genres, new genres, and composite genres” connects the major inventions in the traditional genres of artistic expression to equally experimental thinking about categories of identity in the established taxonomies of cultural systems – gender and race as well as art and advertising, politics and technology. As a signal of existing divisions overcome, an essay on “Literature between media” in the middle of this section indicates the space between older forms of literature and newer media of transmission as a signal site of modernism’s improvisatory work with genre and media. This section opens thus with an essay on the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art, which, as it developed first in Wagnerian opera, expanded the thinking about the genres of aesthetic experience, seeking to combine visual and aural materials in a newly enriched synthesis: this is the impulse followed in its many turns and counterturns in subsequent chapters across that range of cultural production. Where this third section focuses on the forms of organization external to the persons of modernism, the fourth, “Modernism in person, modernism in community,” provides an account of some of the most significant individual figures in its history, who are seen both from the outside in and the inside out. An opening essay on Freud and Freudianism sets out the terms of then new and revolutionary notions of the person, which, among other things, unmade and remade a nineteenth-century idea of the liberal individual as an autonomous rational agent. This is the premise compelling developments in conceptions of the woman, or re-conceptions of the already New Woman, who has appeared in the third section of this History as a newly constituted agent of her gender and now, in the second essay of the fourth section, becomes the subject who registers best some of the developing pressures on an older idea of individuality. These new ideas also set the pattern for the interactions of the characters of modernism in the rest of the essays in this section. The featured artists and critics – even the forty-five followed here are intended not as a comprehensive but a representative selection – are offered as case studies of modernism in person, but also in groups, here in groups of three. One figure in these trios sometimes provides an unexpected point of resemblance with the other two and so, in the triangulated pattern, may offer a newly revealing view on each of those in the group. They may also be seen thus as individuals developing as artists in relation to the main lines of a modernism that is evolving with them and that is embodied in the works of the artists with whom they are associated in the individual chapters and, in large, in this section as a whole.

As the “Epilogue” indicates in its subtitle, “Modernism after postmodernism,” modernism’s long history is lengthening beyond the compass of this volume. Developments in cultural zones far from those associated with the generative grounds or staging areas of early mid-twentieth-century “modernism” do not need that term to be legitimated, however, and time will tell what those names should be. In any case, the critical activity on “modernism” promises longevity equal to the vitality of inquiry in the pages that follow. May this History take its place – whether provocation or cornerstone – in the work of Modernisms New and Old: the modernism of a twentieth century lengthening into a modernist study of many decades to come.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle .

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service .

• By Vincent Sherry
• Edited by Vincent Sherry , Washington University, St Louis
• Book: The Cambridge History of Modernism
• Online publication: 21 January 2017
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139540902.002

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox .

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive .

Modernism Lab

Search for texts by author

Search for authors & texts by year

The Modernism Lab

The Modernism Lab, a virtual space dedicated to collaborative research into the roots of literary modernism, was compiled from 2005 to 2012. Through this project, we hoped, by a process of shared investigation, to describe the emergence of modernism out of a background of social, political, and existential ferment. The project covered the period 1914-1926, from the outbreak of the first world war to the full-blown emergence of English modernism. The Lab has supported undergraduate classes on Modern Poetry, the Modern British Novel, Modernist London, and Joyce’s Ulysses , and a graduate course in English and Comparative Literature, “Moderns, 1914-1926,” as well as a class on modern German literature at the University of Notre Dame. Students in the classes have contributed materials to the website and used it as the platform for their research. The main components of the original website were an innovative research tool, YNote, containing information on the activities of 24 leading modernist writers during this crucial period and a wiki consisting of brief interpretive essays on literary works and movements of the period.

The project as a whole aimed to reconstitute the social and intellectual webs that linked these writers—correspondence, personal acquaintance, reading habits—and their influence on the major works of the period. We were interested, too, in broadening the canon of works studied in the period by paying attention to minor works by major authors, major works by minor authors, and works that may have been influential in their time but that are no longer much read.

Questions of particular importance for our research involved the modernists’ engagement with their literary, intellectual, and historical context. We were particularly interested in Anglo-European literary relations. A typical question of this sort would be, “How did the translations of Dostoevsky by Constance Garnett influence English writing in the period?” Another major concern was the tracing of intellectual trends: “How and when did psychoanalysis make its impact felt in modernist writing?” We paid particular attention to the literary manifestations of a broader historical context, including the modernists’ involvement with political movements such as socialism, feminism, liberalism, nationalism, and imperialism. Another major theme was the attitudes of these writers to formal religion and to alternatives such as atheism, neo-paganism, spiritualism, and the occult. The database traced the empirical information—such as references to Dostoevsky or Freud or Tagore in writers’ correspondence—while the wiki offered interpretive accounts of how these influences played out in the modernists’ formal and thematic concerns.

Lab vs. Archive vs. Reference Work

Our orientation towards ongoing research differentiated this project from other major websites devoted to humanistic research. One very successful model has been the electronic archive—a collection of primary documents made available on the web (e.g. the Modernist Journals Project or The Valley of the Shadow). In the case of our period, however, the potential archive of primary documents is massive. Questions of copyright also limit the applicability of this model. In our original website, we therefore included a set of links to existing web-based archives, including the collections of the Beinecke Library, Project Gutenberg, and Google Book Search.

Another model, typified by the Victorian Web, offers authoritative essays on the period. We recognize the value of such an approach, but ours was, by design, more experimental. As a Laboratory, we posed research questions and worked together to answer them. In a prototype of Modernism Lab, for example, Pericles Lewis and his graduate students created an archive of information from the letters, biographies, and published statements of 12 major modernist writers during the four months immediately following Britain’s declaration of war on August 4, 1914. This information served as the basis of Lewis’s article, “Inventing Literary Modernism During the Great War,” which argues that these authors’ contemporary reaction to the war continued to shape modernism for years to come.

While we have expanded the chronological field of inquiry, we used a comparative method to address some of the following major research questions:

• What was the influence of figures associated with the modernist movement and techniques, like Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair, who are less often read today than they once were?
• What role did Edwardian writers like Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Ford play in the development of literary modernism, before and after Woolf’s critical essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”?
• What Russian literature were the modernists reading and how did this affect their sense of their own literary endeavors?
• How much did the modernists know about the development of psychoanalysis and at what level did they engage with this emergent discipline in their own work?
• How did formal techniques like free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, and genres like the Bildungsroman and the travelogue, develop and change in this period?

A collaborative project, the Modernism Lab  drew on the efforts of over eighty graduate and undergraduate students at Yale and ten other universities.

History of the Modernism Lab

The Modernism Lab has its roots in Pericles Lewis’s courses on Modern British literature. In 2005, Professor Lewis received a grant from the ELI/Davis foundation to develop a website for the study of the Modern British Novel. That website became the nucleus for the Modernism Lab. Lewis’s book  The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism , based partly on his undergraduate teaching, became the basis for some of the first wiki entries posted on the Modernism Lab. His research has been supported by Hilles and Griswold fund grants at Yale.

The Yale Modernism lab was created as a space where students and established scholars could share insights on the work of modernist authors and collaborate in analysis, while reflecting the modernists’ spirit of collaboration, shared readership and reflection, and the exchange of ideas.

Other projects like  the Victorian Web  and  the Walt Whitman Archive , both of which pre-date the Yale Modernism Lab, work to accomplish similar goals, although more weight is placed in creating a database of primary resources or curated essays, in contrast with the Modernism Lab, which focuses on contributions generated by students and scholars.

Professor Lewis explained, “In the first few years of this century, the Web 1.0 model of publishing was being replaced by the Web 2.0 model that emphasized user-generated, dynamic content. We were aiming to bring that approach to scholarly work. If we were doing it today, we would probably be interested in what is now called Web 3.0, that is the semantic web and using machine learning to approach literary and biographical sources.”

As Anthony Domestico, a former managing editor of the Modernism Lab who is now an Assistant Professor of Literature at SUNY Purchase, explained, ““we’re always hearing about the crisis in the humanities, how we need to justify our existence — and I am resistant to trying to justify the existence of the humanities in a certain way because when you get into an instrumental argument by saying that humanities, that we should continue to fund the humanities because we make good workers, or we should fund the humanities because, you know, they train you for the kinds of critical thinking that can be useful in…consulting or something like that. I get very weary of that. I think that we should support the humanities because they are good in and of themselves, not because they serve this greater instrumental purpose. But — I think one way, if not to justify the humanities, in a way, make the inherent value of the humanities more obvious, is by writing for a broader audience, is by sharing your work with people outside the narrow coterie that is modernism.”

Since its original conception, the Modernism Lab has been widely used as a public resource for modernist research. Its editors continue to receive emails inquiring about the Modernism Lab wiki essays, from both professors who use the site as a pedagogical tool and students (like myself, as I referenced the wikis in writing my undergraduate thesis on James Joyce) who have used the wikis as a resource for analyzing modernist textsm(and, as you can see in Sam Alexander’s reflections, his student even plagiarized a Modernism Lab in his class!). Contributor Kirsty Dootson informed me her piece on Wyndham Lewis’s  Time and Western Man  had been cited in a scholarly book about James Joyce.

For technical reasons, we have migrated the site to a new address and to WordPress. This version of the site, designed, assembled, and developed during the summer of 2017, provides an archive of the original essays and collected media of the original site, which were primarily compiled between 2005 and 2012. We were unable to migrate the YNote database, which is discussed in Sam Alexander’s account of the site’s founding. As Professor Domestico noted, even the wikis did not achieve quite the level of interactivity we had hoped for: “Because, really, what they ended up being were short, more informal essays that were written and shared with the word, but weren’t — we didn’t leave them open to editing by other people — sometimes, you know, I’d look at Sam’s and offer suggestions, he’d look at mine and offer suggestions. Pericles would look at both of ours and offer suggestions. But it wasn’t a true Wiki, in kind of the broadest sense. And maybe a true Wiki isn’t quite what we were going for, I just wish that somehow, I think the Wikis were successful, but they weren’t as collaborative and provisional, as, at least in our initial conception we wanted them to be.”

One reason for this result was a concern with quality control—only about a hundred people had editing rights on the site—but another was probably the tendency of humanities scholarship towards sole authorship.

After 2012, Professor Lewis, the director of the project, largely stopped work on the Modernism Lab, in order to fulfill his new role as President of Yale-NUS College and aid in designing its curriculum. Here, he developed with his team a core curriculum which similarly strove for this spirit of collaboration and conversation in its approach to learning.

The course pages for Professor Lewis’s The Modern British Novel class and his seminar on  Ulysses  have also been preserved under the Modernism Lab’s Undergraduate Gateway. On these pages, you can find course materials, readings, and other resources used in the teaching of these courses, which serve as useful guides for approaching these subjects, in addition to their use as a pedagogical record.

Anthony Domestico, who was a PhD student at Yale and worked with Professor Lewis building and editing the Modernism Lab, explained that part of the intent originally was to profile non-canonical works, by canonical Modernist authors. This branched out into what the Modernism Lab is today, with essays on over 40 different modernist authors and artists, connected along the lines of time, correspondence, and collaboration.

In an interview with Domestico, he emphasized the liberating volume of content that was needed to create the Modernism Lab, explaining that it encouraged students and scholars alike to share more provisional content, and to open themselves up to feedback at an early, more vulnerable stage of composition. Generally, he explains, and particularly with graduate students, people can become isolated during the writing process, and unwilling to share their works-in-progress for fear of revealing flaws oropening themselves up to criticism prematurely. Domestico argues this stems the flow of ideas which conversation and collaboration can facilitate, which is crucial to creating not only the most thorough end-product, but also a more enjoyable, community-based way of working.

As Domestico said, ““a grad student has a very solitary existence — we don’t have to share our work if we don’t want to, and I think it’s good to share your work. Because it forces you to do work, it forces you to be in conversation with other people, other ideas.”

The “laboratory aspect” of the Modernism Lab, then, was sharing provisional work and getting feedback from peers, as opposed to what he described as the typical grad student way of “cordoning yourself off for 8 or 9 months, and then presenting something to the world.” This outlook of accessibility and outward-facing scholarship for graduate education extends to what Domestico sees as an opportunity for humanities academia. Of his hopes for the Modernism Lab’s effect on wider humanities scholarship, Domestico explained, “my hope would be that humanities scholars are less insular. More outward looking in their writing, meaning both that they write more for a popular audience, I mean I think that that’s one good thing about the writing — they were generally understandable by non-specialists.”

Interestingly, this mode of creativity and collaboration replicates the way this period of literature was produced:

“One of the trends within modernist studies is the networks of modernism — and the Modernism Lab ideally was a network of scholars looking at the networks of modernism. I mean, that was part of the purpose of the database itself, was to have an entry for, you know, a bit of Virginia Woolf’s diary, in which she talks about T.S. Eliot with Leonard, or something like that…talking to another modernist about another modernist. So network theory is important to modernist studies right now, and modernists themselves were a very networked movement.”

In fact, in a section of his forthcoming book, Domestico engages with periodical culture in modernist literature (poetry specifically), which was formative in the era’s literary culture. Publications like  The Little Review  and  The Egoist  cultivated networks in literary circles, their contents both growing out of and forging relationships. The structure and collaborative nature of the Modernism Lab, though perhaps imperfectly realized, draws on this value for connectivity and conversation in writing and engaging with literature. It can be described in much the same way that these modernist circles can be described: a group of enthusiastic people talking to each other, printing each other, and connecting each other to friends who could help them.

The web-presence of the Modernism Lab enables a new kind of connectivity in scholarship, and particularly in humanities scholarship. One of the founding goals of this project was to tap into this spirit of collaboration and community and create a more outward-looking kind of humanities scholarship, as Domestico described. In our conversation, he explains, “what we were hoping, for the Modernism Lab, was that it would, both at Yale and ideally rippling out from Yale, serve as a kind of testing space for the kinds of collaborative provisional projects that digital technology seems to enable.”

He continues, “I know for myself I’ve gotten lots of emails from people who read the Wikis. And so I think that, in that sense, it was a success, in that I think it was…a lot more people read our Wiki writing than will ever read any of the scholarly essays we’ve written (laughs).” Sam Alexander expressed a similar kind of amusement that a student in one of his classes had plagiarized a Modernism Lab article from his time as an editor. Both agree that the accessibility of the Modernism Lab online has generated a much wider and more informal audience, facilitating access to the material and breaking down the often insular nature of humanities academia.

In our conversation, Domestico stressed the importance of provisional work, and the accessibility of that provisional work to feedback, in addition to its being more accessible in terms of being useful and understandable to a broader audience of non-specialists.

One of the most successful projects, in Domestico’s view, was the  Mapping Ulysses project , perhaps because of its visual quality and how present and accessible it made the material. Students were enthusiastic, and it was readily understandable what this project was meant to accomplish. Domestico explains, “one tool that grew out of the Modernism Lab work we did was using arcGIS to map Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, and I think that had a clear pedagogical purpose — the students got really excited to be able to see how characters were moving through the narrative, moving through a city.”

Aside from fulfilling Joyce’s dream (the author painstakingly constructed  Ulysses  street by street and shop by shop, from the Dublin that he knew), these projects thoroughly engaged the students, who were excited to see the plots and characters of these novels mapped out in physical space. This project provided a visual and interactive use of literature, working toward the pedagogical goal of the digital humanities: increased engagement in art and literature by way of technology.

In the interest of cleaning up and facilitating the use of the modernism lab as this testing space, we have used the summer of 2017 to do some renovations. In this next edition of the Modernism Lab, we have decided to do away with the YNote feature, as well as the Digital Archive. However, we will be preserving the Undergraduate Gateway as a record of courses taught by Professor Pericles Lewis, and which utilize the Modernism Lab as a pedagogical tool. In our renovations, we hoped to make the Modernism Lab easier to navigate and more user-friendly, creating a more streamlined look and intuitive interface.

The Modernism Lab’s strength is its enthusiastic pedagogy, providing a space for people curious about this period of literature and wanting to explore it, whether for the first time or the thousandth. Our hope is that its content will continue to be used as a valuable tool in modernism research for many years to come.

—Ally Findley

Sam Alexander, a former Managing Editor of the project, provided his thoughts and reflections on the Modernism Lab — they can be read  here .

Contributors

Project director.

• Pericles Lewis

Managing Editor

• Anthony Domestico (2011-2012)

Associate Editors

• Sam Alexander, Managing Editor (2007-2011)
• Michaela Bronstein
• Colin Gillis
• Elyse Graham
• Tobias Boes, Editor for German Literature and Culture

Instructional Technology Group

• Ken Panko – Project Management, Instructional Design
• Yianni Yessios – Project Management, Technical Design
• Jacob Albert
• Annie Atura
• Anne Aufhauser
• Emily Cersonsky
• Michael Chan
• Patrick Clardy
• Olivia Coates
• Codi Coslet
• Samuel Cross
• Jay Dockendorf
• Merrick Doll
• Kirsty Dootson
• Nathan Ernst
• Colleen Fleshman
• Elizabeth Freund
• Julia Galeota
• Joshua Gang
• Edgar Eduardo Garcia
• Andrew Gates
• Alex Gatlin
• Matthew Gerken
• Stephen Gilb
• Ruth Gilligan
• Charles Ginner
• Kevin Godshall
• Paul Goerhke
• Monika Grzesiak
• Michael Hathaway
• James Heffernan
• Robert Higney
• Kira Hillman
• Steven Hobbs
• Lauren Holmes
• Qingyuan Jiang
• Daniel Jordan
• Andrew Karas
• Eike Kronshage
• Erik Larsen
• Elizabeth Legris
• Marcus Liddell
• Kenneth Ligda
• James Ross Macdonald
• Laura B. Marcus
• Katherine McComic
• Anne-Marie McManus
• Alexandria Miller
• Hayley Mohr
• Mariel Osetinksy
• Emily Petermann
• Annie Pfeifer
• Natalie Prizel
• Elizabeth Pugh
• Heather Rhoda
• Meaghan Rubsam
• Glyn Salton-Cox
• Jesse Schotter
• Michael Shapiro
• Carolyn Sinsky
• Jack Skeffington
• Aaron Steiner
• Aleksandar Stevic
• William Stewart
• William Stone
• Jessica Svendsen
• Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
• Jessica Technow
• Samantha Terkeltaub
• Olena Tsykynovska
• Noah Warren
• Christina Walter
• Robert Wiene
• Andrew Williamson
• Matthew Wilsey
• Ben Zweifach

Editorial Board

• Tobias Boes , University of Notre Dame
• Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
• Susan Chambers, Yale University
• Sarah Cole, Columbia University
• Kevin Dettmar, Pomona College
• Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania
• Laura Frost, The New School
• Joseph Gordon, Yale University
• Langdon Hammer, Yale University
• Eric Hayot, Pennsylvania State University
• Pericles Lewis, Yale University
• Doug Mao, Johns Hopkins University
• Jesse Matz , Kenyon College
• Barry McCrea, Yale University
• Liesl Olson, University of Chicago Society of Fellows
• Siobhan Phillips, Harvard Society of Fellows
• Jessica Pressman, Yale University
• Martin Puchner, Columbia University
• Megan Quigley, Villanova University
• Ravit Reichman, Brown University
• Victoria Rosner, Texas A&M University
• Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
• Sam See, Yale University
• Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University
• Mark Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University
• Alex Woloch, Stanford University

Initial funding was provided by a John and Yvonne McCredie Fellowship in Instructional Technology. Funding was also contributed by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Paul Moore Memorial Fund for Instructional Innovation in Yale College, and the Provost’s Office of Yale University. Technical support was provided by the Instructional Technology Group.

“The Lotus Eaters”

by Ally Findley Plot The “Lotus Eaters” episode is the fifth episode in Ulysses, and one of the shortest chapters in the novel. In this episode, Bloom begins wandering through Dublin, on his way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. It is a hot summer day, and the humidity perpetuates a mood of sluggishness. Bloom, in his… Continue Reading “The Lotus Eaters”

Reflections on the Modernism Lab

8/12/17 By Sam Alexander, in response to Ally Findley A recent book on modernist DH projects includes a description of Modernism Lab in an appendix titled “Field Guide to Digital Projects”: Focusing on the networks of people, places, ideas, and works of the early modernist period (1914-1926), the Modernism Lab grew out of Pericles Lewis’s… Continue Reading Reflections on the Modernism Lab

Sam Alexander

Sam Alexander, Associate Professor of English at Endicott College, was managing editor of the Modernism Lab from 2007-2013. He has written on the problem of population in Joyce’s Ulysses for Novel and on democratic form in modernist fiction for Gregory Castle’s recent History of the Modernist Novel. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Demographic Modernism” and helping to… Continue Reading Sam Alexander

Anthony Domestico

Anthony Domestico is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY and the books columnist for Commonweal. His book, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period​​, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can view his Purchase College faculty page here, and his website containing his book reviews and essays here.    

A Room of One’s Own

by Pericles Lewis A Room of One’s Own (1929) is Virginia Woolf‘s most famous work of feminist literary criticism. If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, in this work Woolf prefigures two concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a… Continue Reading A Room of One’s Own

Adolphe Appia

by Pericles Lewis The Swiss theorist Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), like the English actor and set designer Gordon Craig, created methods for implementing Richard Wagner’s vision of the “total work of art” in the theater. Appia, in The Staging of Wagnerian Music Drama (1895) and Music and the Art of Theatre (1899), proposed to banish painted… Continue Reading Adolphe Appia

by Elyse Graham Clive Bell’s theories of art shaped themselves under two major influences. One was the ethical philosopher G.E. Moore‘s defense of his field: for a set of things to shelter under one class, they must have a common property—in the case of ethics, goodness—which must really exist. 1 Bell, who like all art… Continue Reading Art

Reflections Upon War and Death

by Jessica Technow The declaration of World War I in 1914 marked the beginning of an era which to this day has had lasting effects on humanity. New technologies changed the face of warfare and, for the first time, trenches were the main method utilized in military strategy. On the home front, civilians became engrossed… Continue Reading Reflections Upon War and Death

The Professor’s House

by Jack Skeffington In the introduction to Not Under Forty, Willa Cather’s 1936 collection of essays, she (in)famously writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” an opinion that, if nothing else, has fairly successfully separated her from the ranks of artists and authors we have come to call modernists.[1] The judgment,… Continue Reading The Professor’s House

Roger Fry: A Biography

by Michael Shapiro In Roger Fry—the last book she saw to publication—Virginia Woolf experiments with the structure and style of biography. She exercises editorial control to burnish the occasionally imperfect life of her subject and, by implication, to smooth over public critiques of the Bloomsbury group. Fry (1866–1934) was an English artist and art scholar,… Continue Reading Roger Fry: A Biography

Learning Materials

• Business Studies
• Combined Science
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• English Literature
• Environmental Science
• Human Geography
• Macroeconomics
• Microeconomics

Why is it that a book like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis  (1915) feels like it is more modern and recent to our time period now than Emily Bronte's   Wuthering Heights   (1847)? Even though Kafka and Bronte historically lived closer together than we and Kafka? This is because the Modernist  movement separates the two. 

Millions of flashcards designed to help you ace your studies

• Cell Biology

What are key themes of Modernism?

Who are key Modernist writers?

What are the characteristics of Modernism in literature?

Review generated flashcards

to start learning or create your own AI flashcards

Start learning or create your own AI flashcards

StudySmarter Editorial Team

Team Modernism Teachers

• 12 minutes reading time
• Checked by StudySmarter Editorial Team
• American Drama
• American Literary Movements
• American Literature
• American Poetry
• American Regionalism Literature
• American Short Fiction
• Literary Criticism and Theory
• Literary Devices
• Literary Elements
• Literary Movements
• Aestheticism
• Aestheticism in Literature
• Age of Enlightenment
• American Naturalism
• American Realism
• Anglo Norman
• Anti-Aestheticism
• Beat Generation
• Bloomsbury Group
• Cavalier Poets
• Confessional Poets
• Elizabethan Age
• Expressionism
• Harlem Renaissance
• Hypermodernism
• Industrial Revolution in Literature
• Jacobean Age
• Jacobean Drama
• Kitchen Sink Realism
• Literary Minimalism
• Lost Generation
• Mersey Beat
• Metaphysical Poets
• Middle English Period
• Neo-Classical
• New Criticism
• New York School Poets
• Nouveau Roman
• Objectivism
• Old English
• Performance Poetry
• Pre-Raphaelite
• Renaissance
• Romanticism
• Social Novel
• Social realism (1930s-1980s)
• Sturm und Drang
• The Augustan Age
• The Restoration
• Victorian Period
• Literary Studies
• Non-Fiction Authors

Jump to a key chapter

And when you read the word 'Modernism,' what is the first thing you think of? Is it perhaps to do with the beginning part 'Modern'?

This text will give a brief introduction to M odernism . So let's start at the beginning: what is Modernism?

Modernism Definition

Modernism is a literary and artistic movement that began in the late 19th century and departed from previous traditional and classical forms of art and literature. It is a global movement where creatives radically produced new imagery , mediums, and means to best portray modern life. The movement not only was embraced by literature but art, music, architecture and other fields of thinking.

Modernism rejected all the movements that became before it, arguing that these forms of representation no longer adequately reflected the new forms of society.

The key points of Modernism are:

Many creatives broke from traditional forms of writing as they did not best reflect the struggles and issues of society.

Modernism grew out of a critical turning point in nearly every area of civilisation; it is marked by profound shifts in human perception.

This was a time of increasing internalisation of narration in literature, with aspects such as stream of consciousness , rejection of narrative continuity, and non-linear chronology.

Modernism Time Period

Modernism was born out of a time of great societal upheaval caused by industrialisation, modernisation and the first World War.

WW1 (1914–1918) shattered the concept of progress to many, resulting in fragmentation in both content and structure. The ideals of the Enlightenment claimed that new technology would bring progress to humans: technological advances would improve society and quality of life. Yet this was destroyed by WW1, as technological advances simply increased the mass destruction of life. The war resulted in the disillusionment of society and a deep pessimism of human nature; themes picked up by Modernism such as in the poem ' The Waste Land ' (1922) by T. S. Eliot.

The Enlightenment is an intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries that focused on scientific progress, rationalism and the pursuit of knowledge.

Industrialisation & Urbanisation

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the western world was using various inventions of the Industrial Revolution, such as the automobile, aeroplane and radio. These technological innovations challenged traditional notions of what was possible in society. Modernists could see the whole of society being transformed by machines.

Yet the Industrial Revolution and resulting urbanisation and industrialisation also led to significant social and economic inequalities. Many modernist authors such as Franz Kafka and T. S. Eliot explored the effects of these events on the population and the disillusionment and sense of loss people experienced.

The mass urban movement meant that the city became the key context and reference point for both human nature and humans. As a result, the city often starred as the main character in modernist texts.

Industrialisation is the development of economies from agricultural to industrial.

Urbanisation is the mass movement of people from the countryside to cities.

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

The tremendous social upheavals brought everything into doubt that was once fixed. The world was no longer reliable and set. Instead, it became slippery and dependent on one's perspective and subjectivity. Requiring new models to express this uncertainty, Modernism is characterised by experimentation in form, multi-perspectives, interiority and non-linear timelines.

Experimentation

Modernist writers experimented with their writing styles and broke with previous storytelling conventions. They went against narrative conventions and formulaic verse by writing fragmented stories to represent the state of society after great upheavals.

Ezra Pound's 'Make it new!' statement in 1934 about the Modernist movement emphasises the role of experimentation. This slogan was an attempt to encourage writers and poets to be innovative in their writing and experiment with new writing styles. 1

Modernist poets also rejected traditional conventions and rhyme schemes and started to write in free verse .

Free verse is a poetic form that does not have a consistent rhyme scheme , musical form or metrical pattern.

Subjectivity & Multi-Perspectives

Modernist texts are characterised by a growing mistrust of language to be able to reflect reality . Modernist writers rejected the neutrality and objectivity of third-person omniscient narrators often used in Victorian literature.

An o mniscient narrator is a narrator that has an all-knowing insight into the narrative that is being told (namely, is privy to all the thoughts and emotions of the characters).

A third-person narrator is a narrator that is outside the story (namely, is not present as a character).

Instead, Modernist writers embraced subjective language dependent on perspective .

From a neutral, object perspective, a red apple is simply a red apple. Yet, in subjective texts, this red apple is perceived through the narrator, who will see and describe this apple from their own subjective perspective. Maybe for one narrator, the red apple is actually deep oxblood red, whereas the red apple appears to be light pink for another narrator. So the apple will change depending on who is perceiving it.

Yet if reality changes depending on who perceives it, how can we really trust what we see? And what even is the reality in this new slippery world?

Modernist texts tried to deal with these questions by using new narrative perspectives, which became increasingly fragmented and turned inward into the characters.

Many Modernist writers wrote in the first-person but with different characters to present each character's individual thoughts and add complexity to the story. This m ulti-perspectival narration used several different viewpoints to present and evaluate a novel .

A first-person narrator is a narrator that is inside the text (a character in the story). The story is filtered through their perspective. An example is Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925).

Multi-perspectival narration includes various perspectives in one text. Namely, a text is created through multiple narrators, who each bring in their own perspective. James Joyce 's Ulysses (1920) is an example.

Modernist texts had an increased awareness of the unreliability of perspective, so they did not include fixed viewpoints but used techniques like paradox and ambiguity to add depth to the story.

Interiority and Individualism

Believing that traditional forms of storytelling were no longer fit to describe the world they were in, many experimental forms of writing increasingly turned inward into the characters. The following literary techniques allowed the writers to enter the interiority of the characters and emphasis the individual:

Stream of consciousness : a narrative device that attempts to express the character's thoughts as they come. A type of interior monologue, the text is more associative that often has sudden leaps in thought, long sentences and limited punctuation.

Interior monologue: is a narrative technique where the narrator enters the characters' minds to present their thoughts and feelings.

Free indirect speech: a narrative technique where a third-person narration uses some elements of first-person narration by presenting characters' inner workings.

By turning inward into the individual characters, modernist texts attempted to explore the diverse and ambiguous sense of self. Yet by doing this, the external reality and the perceiving mind become blurred.

Critics of Modernism thought that Modernist texts focused too much on characters' interior world without inviting social change.

Do you agree with this criticism?

Non-Linear Timelines

In 1905 and 1915, Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity , which proposed that time and space were relative to one's perspective. This means that time is not neutral or objective but changes depending on who perceives it.

So the next time you come late to a class, why not whip out Einstein's theory that time is only relative?

This theory exploded the linear perspective that ordered the world: that time can be easily categorised into past, present and future.

Drawing on this, modernist writers often rejected linear timelines. Modernist texts often dissolve the different time periods of past, present and future. Time becomes discontinuous, creating a text in "flux". Just as human thought processes are non-linear, so too became the plots and timelines.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) has a non-linear structure that frequently uses flashbacks.

Modernism Movement: Themes

Individualism & alienation.

Modernist writers focused on individuals instead of society. They followed the lives of these characters, coming to terms with a changing world and overcoming their trials and tribulations. Often these individuals felt alienated from their world. Caught up in the rapid pace of modernity, the characters are unable to find their bearings in the constantly changing environment through no fault of their own.

Modernism was inspired by the philosophy of nihilism in the sense that it rejected moral and religious principles that were perceived as the only way to achieve social progress. Modernists often believed that for people to be their authentic selves, individuals needed to be free from the overwhelming and restrictive control of conventions.

Nihilism is the philosophy that holds that all beliefs and values are intrinsically senseless. As such, life has no intrinsic meaning.

War made a significant impact on the public and also on writers. As poets and writers died or were greatly wounded during World War I, globalisation and capitalism re-created society. This contradiction in people's lives created a sense of absurdity. Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis (1915) presents the absurdity of modern life when the protagonist , a travelling salesman, wakes up one day as a giant cockroach.

Absurdism is a branch of Modernism that finds the modern world meaningless, and thus all attempts to find meaning are inherently absurd. Unlike Nihilism, Absurdism found positivity in this meaninglessness, arguing that if all is meaningless anyway, you might as well have fun.

Modernism's Writers

James joyce.

James Joyce is regarded as one of the great masters of modernist writing, with his incredibly complex texts often requiring intense studying to grasp them fully. Joyce pioneered the radical use of narration, turning such texts as Ulysses (1922) into the modernist canon. The experimental novel Ulysses (1922) mirrors Homer's Odyssey (725–675 BCE), yet in the former, all the events take place in one day. Joyce uses symbolism , stream of consciousness and various types of narration to explore the complexity of the inner consciousness.

James Joyce's work: Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka's work is so unique that it has even received its own adjective, 'kafkaesque'. Yet it clearly draws on many hallmarks of Modernism. Kafka's experimental use of narrative perspective blurs the subject and object. Moreover, his non-linear use of time is framed through the characters' subjectivity. For example, the passing of time in the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) is inextricably linked to the protagonist Gregor Samsa. The length that Gregor passes out at the end of each part is directly linked to the length of time passing in the novella.

Franz Kafka's works: The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926)

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is often hailed as one of the great modernist writers. Her texts pioneered the literary device of stream of consciousness. Through interior monologue, she created developed and inward-looking characters that exhibited complex emotions.

Virginia Woolf's work: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927)

As well as being well known in Modernism in which he used allusion and free verse extensively, Ezra Pound was also one of the first to use imagism in Modernist poetry.

Ezra Pound's works: 'In a Station of the Metro' (1913), 'The Return' (1917).

Modernism vs Postmodernism

While some critics argue that we still are in the movement of modernism, others suggest that a new literary movement of postmodernism has evolved since the 1950s. Postmodernism is characterised by fragmentation and intertextuality in a hyperconnected world.

Modernist literature rejected previous forms of poetry and prose as it felt that they were no longer sufficient to represent modern life. In contrast, postmodernism consciously used previous forms and styles to comment on intertextuality .

Intertextuality is the relationship between texts. This can be achieved by writers directly referencing texts within their own work, creating a dialogue between writers and works.

Modernism - Key takeaways

Modernism is a global literary and artistic movement born out of major societal upheaval.

Modernism desires to break from all previous movements, holding that they are inadequate to reflect the turmoil of modern life.

Modernist texts experiment with form to emphasise subjectivity, multi-perspective narration, interiority and non-linear timelines.

Key themes of Modernism are individualism and alienation and the philosophies of nihilism and absurdism .

Famous modernist writers include James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound.

1 Lumen Learning, 'The Rise of Modernism,' 2016

Flashcards in Modernism 3

Individualism 

Learn with 3 Modernism flashcards in the free StudySmarter app

We have 14,000 flashcards about Dynamic Landscapes.

Already have an account? Log in

Frequently Asked Questions about Modernism

What is the main idea of Modernism?

The main idea of Modernism is to break from previous literary movements and create new experimental forms that emphasise subjectivity, individualism and the inner world of the characters. 

What is an example of Modernism?

The experimental novel Ulysses  (1922) by James Joyce is an example of a Modernist text as Joyce uses symbolism, stream of consciousness and various types of narration to explore the complexity of the inner consciousness.

What are characteristics of Modernism?

Characteristics of Modernism are experimentation, subjectivity, multi-perspectives, interiority, and non-linear timelines. 

What are the three elements of Modernism?

Three elements of Modernism are breaking from traditional forms of writing, profound shifts in human perception and increasing internationalisation of narration. 

What are the 5 aspects of modernism?

5 aspects of Modernism are experimentation, subjectivity, multi-perspectives, interiority, and non-linear timelines. 

Discover learning materials with the free StudySmarter app

About StudySmarter

StudySmarter is a globally recognized educational technology company, offering a holistic learning platform designed for students of all ages and educational levels. Our platform provides learning support for a wide range of subjects, including STEM, Social Sciences, and Languages and also helps students to successfully master various tests and exams worldwide, such as GCSE, A Level, SAT, ACT, Abitur, and more. We offer an extensive library of learning materials, including interactive flashcards, comprehensive textbook solutions, and detailed explanations. The cutting-edge technology and tools we provide help students create their own learning materials. StudySmarter’s content is not only expert-verified but also regularly updated to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Team English Literature Teachers

Study anywhere. Anytime.Across all devices.

Create a free account to save this explanation..

Save explanations to your personalised space and access them anytime, anywhere!

By signing up, you agree to the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy of StudySmarter.

Sign up to highlight and take notes. It’s 100% free.

Join over 22 million students in learning with our StudySmarter App

The first learning app that truly has everything you need to ace your exams in one place

• Flashcards & Quizzes
• AI Study Assistant
• Study Planner
• Smart Note-Taking

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction
• Alliterative verse
• The major manuscripts
• Problems of dating
• Religious verse
• Elegiac and heroic verse
• Early translations into English
• Late 10th- and 11th-century prose
• Influence of French poetry
• Didactic poetry
• Verse romance
• The revival of alliterative poetry
• Courtly poetry
• Chaucer and Gower
• Popular and secular verse
• Political verse
• Religious prose
• Secular prose
• Middle English drama
• The transition from medieval to Renaissance
• Social conditions
• Intellectual and religious revolution
• The race for cultural development
• Development of the English language
• Sidney and Spenser
• Elizabethan lyric
• The sonnet sequence
• Other poetic styles
• Prose styles, 1550–1600
• Theatres in London and the provinces
• Professional playwrights
• The early histories
• The early comedies
• The tragedies
• Shakespeare’s later works
• Other Jacobean dramatists
• The last Renaissance dramatists
• Donne’s influence
• Jonson and the Cavalier poets
• Continued influence of Spenser
• Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose
• Prose styles
• The defeated republicans
• Writings of the Nonconformists
• Writings of the royalists
• Chroniclers
• The court wits
• Drama by Dryden and others
• Thomson, Prior, and Gay
• Shaftesbury and others
• Other novelists
• Johnson’s poetry and prose
• The nature of Romanticism
• Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
• Other poets of the early Romantic period
• The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
• Other poets of the later period
• The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
• Discursive prose
• Thackeray, Gaskell, and others
• The Brontës
• Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Arnold and Clough
• Early Victorian nonfiction prose
• The Victorian theater
• Victorian literary comedy
• The Edwardians
• Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot

Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid

• The literature of World War I and the interwar period
• The literature of World War II (1939–45)
• The 21st century

The Modernist revolution

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• HistoryNet - Anne Frank
• Jewish Virtual Library - English Literature
• Academia - English Literature
• HistoryWorld - History of English literature
• Complutense University of Madrid - The Development of English Literature (Summary)
• English literature - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• English literature - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Anglo-American Modernism : Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot

From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London , which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound , and many of its most notable figures were American.

The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian movement (1912–22; see Georgian poetry ) and more authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry , and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets T.E. Hulme , F.S. Flint , and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell .

Reacting against what they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood. To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made the image their principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and economical forms.

Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the banner of Vorticism , combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature the new sensations of movement and scale associated with modern developments such as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in Lewis, its editor, its most active propagandist and accomplished literary exponent. His experimental play Enemy of the Stars, published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental novel Tarr (1918) can still surprise with their violent exuberance.

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the bearers of authentic meanings.

In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human intensity and passion.

On the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot , another American resident in London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth, but he differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come through self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no less than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the First World War, ensured that Lawrence and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American Modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period.

During the 1920s Lawrence (who had left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds with the reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence revealed the attraction to him of charismatic , masculine leadership, while, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928), Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion” and committed himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and paternalistic, they did not, however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who left England in 1920 and settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing upon the ideas of the left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy as a sham and argued that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant factor. For some, the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American Modernists simply made explicit the reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its beginning; for others, they came from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by World War I. This issue is a complex one, and judgments upon the literary merit and political status of Pound’s ambitious but immensely difficult Imagist epic The Cantos (1917–70) and Lewis’s powerful sequence of politico-theological novels The Human Age ( The Childermass , 1928; Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta , both 1955) are sharply divided.

Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot were the principal male figures of Anglo-American Modernism, but important contributions also were made by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and the Irish novelist James Joyce . By virtue of nationality, residence, and, in Yeats’s case, an unjust reputation as a poet still steeped in Celtic mythology, they had less immediate impact upon the British literary intelligentsia in the late 1910s and early 1920s than Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot, although by the mid-1920s their influence had become direct and substantial. Many critics today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet and Joyce’s work as a novelist are the most important Modernist achievements of the period.

In his early verse and drama , Yeats, who had been influenced as a young man by the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements, evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland in language that was often vague and grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish nationalism , he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however, was marked not only by a more concrete and colloquial style but also by a growing isolation from the nationalist movement, for Yeats celebrated an aristocratic Ireland epitomized for him by the family and country house of his friend and patron, Lady Gregory .

The grandeur of his mature reflective poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929) derived in large measure from the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of contemporary Irish history) he accepted the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory. At its best his mature style combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon public themes, he never ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the individual’s relationship to nature, time, and history.

Joyce, who spent his adult life on the continent of Europe , expressed in his fiction his sense of the limits and possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in fiction at once realist and symbolist the individual cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by provocative contrast, his panoramic novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank and imaginatively profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned by the New York postal authorities, and British customs officials seized the second edition in 1923.) Employing extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including the stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the experiences and the fantasies of various men and women in Dublin on a summer’s day in June 1904. Yet his purpose was not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic range of European literature to stress the rich universality of life buried beneath the provincialism of pre-independence Dublin, in 1904 a city still within the British Empire . In his even more experimental Finnegans Wake (1939), extracts of which had already appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, Joyce’s commitment to cultural universality became absolute. By means of a strange, polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words , he not only explored the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also suggested that the languages and myths of Ireland were interwoven with the languages and myths of many other cultures .

The example of Joyce’s experimentalism was followed by the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones and by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve). Whereas Jones concerned himself, in his complex and allusive poetry and prose, with the Celtic, Saxon, Roman, and Christian roots of Great Britain, MacDiarmid sought not only to recover what he considered to be an authentically Scottish culture but also to establish, as in his In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), the truly cosmopolitan nature of Celtic consciousness and achievement. MacDiarmid’s masterpiece in the vernacular , A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), helped to inspire the Scottish renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s.

Essay on Modernism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Modernism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Modernism

What is modernism.

Modernism is a movement in art and culture that started around the late 19th century. It was a big change in how people made art, wrote books, and built buildings. Before modernism, many stories and paintings looked real, like a photograph. Modernism tried new styles that didn’t always look real but shared feelings and ideas in different ways.

Features of Modernism

Modernism has a few key features. It likes to break rules and is often about finding new ways to create things. For example, modernist painters might use bright, unexpected colors, or writers might write stories that don’t follow the usual beginning-middle-end structure.

Impact of Modernism

Modernism has had a big impact on the world. It changed how we think about art and what it can be. It also influenced how buildings are designed, making them simpler and more focused on their function. Modernism taught us that there are many ways to see and understand the world.

250 Words Essay on Modernism

Modernism is a movement that started around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a time when artists, writers, and thinkers wanted to break away from old traditions. They aimed to create new ways of expressing ideas through art, literature, and other cultural works.

Changes in Art and Literature

Modernism in architecture.

Modernism also changed buildings. Architects designed structures with simple lines and no extra decoration. These buildings were meant to be practical and useful, not just pretty. The famous architect Le Corbusier made houses and buildings that showed this new style.

The Impact of Modernism

Modernism has had a big impact on how we think about art and culture. It taught people that it’s okay to try new things and that being different can be good. Even today, modernism influences artists and thinkers who want to make something unique and not just follow what was done before.

In short, modernism was about creating a new way to see and show the world, one that was different from the past and looked forward to the future.

500 Words Essay on Modernism

Modernism is like a big change in art, culture, and how people think, which started around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before modernism, many people liked traditional ways of making art, writing stories, and building things. But as the world began to change quickly with new inventions and different ideas, some people wanted to make new kinds of art and think in new ways. This is what we call modernism.

In the world of painting and sculpture, artists started to make works that didn’t look like real life. Instead of painting a perfect apple, they might just use a splash of color to show the idea of an apple. This is called abstract art. In writing, authors began to create stories that didn’t always have a clear beginning, middle, and end. They tried to show how people think and feel in a more realistic way, which can be a bit messy and confusing, just like our real thoughts and feelings.

Technology and Modernism

Modern buildings.

In architecture, which is the art of designing buildings, modernism brought new materials like steel and glass. Architects began to design simpler buildings without a lot of decoration. They focused on making buildings that were useful and made sense for the modern world, with big windows and open spaces.

Modernism in Society

Modernism wasn’t just about art and buildings; it also changed how people thought about society. People started to question old rules and ideas about how to live, who should be in charge, and what was important in life. They wanted to make a society that was fairer and gave more people the chance to have a good life.

Modernism Today

In conclusion, modernism was like a big wave that washed away a lot of old ideas and brought in new ones. It made people think differently about art, technology, buildings, and society. Because of modernism, we have a world that’s always ready to try something new and isn’t afraid to change. It’s like a garden where new kinds of flowers are always popping up, surprising us with their colors and shapes. And just like gardeners, we keep learning how to take care of this ever-changing world.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Presentations made painless

• Get Premium

124 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Modernism is a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, characterized by a break from traditional forms and conventions. It sought to capture the complexities and uncertainties of the modern world, often through fragmented narratives, stream-of-consciousness writing, and experimentation with form and language.

If you're studying modernism, you may be looking for essay topics that will help you explore the movement's key themes, techniques, and influences. To help you get started, here are 124 modernism essay topic ideas and examples:

• Analyze the role of technology in modernist literature.
• Discuss the influence of Freudian psychology on modernist writers.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of gender in modernist literature.
• Explore the ways in which modernist writers responded to the trauma of World War I.
• Examine the use of stream-of-consciousness narration in modernist novels.
• Discuss the concept of the "modernist manifesto" and its impact on literature.
• Analyze the role of the city in modernist writing.
• Compare and contrast the approaches to time and memory in modernist novels.
• Explore the theme of alienation in modernist literature.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and postcolonialism.
• Analyze the influence of modernist art movements on literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of race in modernist novels.
• Discuss the use of irony and satire in modernist writing.
• Analyze the representation of madness in modernist literature.
• Explore the theme of disillusionment in modernist novels.
• Discuss the role of the avant-garde in shaping modernist literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of religion in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of intertextuality in modernist writing.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and existentialism.
• Explore the ways in which modernist writers challenged traditional narrative structures.
• Analyze the representation of sexuality in modernist literature.
• Discuss the influence of modernist philosophy on literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of class in modernist novels.
• Explore the theme of violence in modernist literature.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and feminism.
• Analyze the use of symbolism in modernist writing.
• Discuss the role of the artist in modernist literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of nature in modernist novels.
• Explore the theme of identity in modernist literature.
• Analyze the representation of war in modernist writing.
• Discuss the influence of modernist architecture on literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of love in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of allegory in modernist writing.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and surrealism.
• Explore the theme of memory in modernist literature.
• Analyze the representation of technology in modernist novels.
• Discuss the influence of modernist music on literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of politics in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of allusion in modernist writing.
• Discuss the role of the reader in modernist literature.
• Explore the theme of exile in modernist novels.
• Analyze the representation of the body in modernist writing.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and modernity.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of language in modernist literature.
• Analyze the use of metaphor in modernist writing.
• Discuss the influence of modernist film on literature.
• Explore the theme of memory in modernist novels.
• Analyze the representation of nature in modernist writing.
• Discuss the role of the urban landscape in modernist literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of time in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of repetition in modernist writing.
• Discuss the influence of modernist photography on literature.
• Explore the theme of nostalgia in modernist novels.
• Analyze the representation of the subconscious in modernist writing.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of reality in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of ambiguity in modernist writing.
• Discuss the influence of modernist theater on literature.
• Explore the theme of death in modernist novels.
• Analyze the representation of the city in modernist writing.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and postmodernism.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of memory in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of fragmentation in modernist writing.
• Discuss the influence of modernist painting on literature.
• Explore the theme of trauma in modernist novels.
• Analyze the representation of the self in modernist writing.
• Discuss the role of the body in modernist literature.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of the individual in modernist novels.
• Analyze the use of sound in modernist writing.
• Discuss the influence of modernist dance on literature.
• Explore the theme of the uncanny in modernist novels.
• Analyze the representation of technology in modernist writing.
• Discuss the relationship between modernism and realism.
• Compare and contrast the treatment of the natural world in modernist novels.
• Explore the theme of the body in modernist novels.

These essay topics should provide you with a wide range of ideas to explore the complexities and nuances of modernism in literature. Whether you're interested in the influence of technology, the role of the city, or the representation of the self, there's a topic here for you to delve into. Good luck with your writing!

Want to research companies faster?

Instantly access industry insights

Let PitchGrade do this for me

Leverage powerful AI research capabilities

We will create your text and designs for you. Sit back and relax while we do the work.

Explore More Content

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service

© 2024 Pitchgrade

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• The Lit Hub Podcast
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• I’m a Writer But
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• Behind the Mic
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• Emergence Magazine
• The History of Literature
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

Previous article, next article.

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best modernism topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on modernism, 💡 interesting topics to write about modernism, 📌 simple & easy modernism essay titles, 🔎 most interesting modernism topics to write about, ❓ questions about modernism.

• Modernism in Symbolism and Imagery as Presented in the Works of W.B. Yeats Modernism is a term that refers to a movement in art and literature that began in the late 19th century and extended through the early days of the 20th century.
• Modern, Modernism, and Modernization Modern, modernism, and modernization are the notions which may be easily defined in human mind, it means that one can understand what modern, modernism, and modernization mean, however, when it comes to formulation of the […]
• From Modernism to Postmodernism The desire to move out of the era of modernism to postmodernism was desirable. The change of modernism to postmodernism is an evolution of traditional believes and practices to a modern way of thinking.
• Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism Period However, Richard Wright is the most important figure of this period; actually, the other writers were said to have attended “Wright School”.
• Between Romanticism and Modernism The first of the modernists in music sought to begin new dimensions and depths in music through the use of non-conventional instruments and novel sounds.
• Fashion in the Period of Modernism The main content of the Modern was the desire of artists to contrast their creativity with the historicism and eclecticism of art of the second half of the XIX century.
• Alienation in Modernist Short Stories and Poems As the paper unfolds, the treatment of the theme of alienation as per different writers will be looked into to establish whether there exists a common denominator in the treatment of the works or not.
• Modernism in Art and Painting Paintings done in the past about the state of people and past society presently help to give direction to in the world of art.
• Differences of Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism Periods in Art The realism movement in art is a product of the ideological and philosophical spirit of its time. Modernism is the movement in search of new forms of art, and it emphasizes the interior world.
• Paradigm Shift From Modernism to Postmodernism Ways of Thinking Specifically, Freud invented the subconscious part of the mind, the superego, which helps in analyzing how one thinks, in other words, evaluating the correctness of the thinking. On the part of the ego, Sartre acknowledges […]
• Analysis of Modernist Painting by Clement Greenberg Analyzing Greenberg’s work requires three components: reviewing his arguments, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the text, and showing examples of art that demonstrate the author’s principal points.
• The Influence of the Cultural Current “Modernism” on the Conception of Music in the 20th Century Modernism movement provoked composers changed their music from any possible perspective, and one of the most frequent was the change of music language and the necessity “to turn a composition into a ‘text’ constructed of […]
• Feminism Builds up in Romanticism, Realism, Modernism Exploring the significance of the theme as well as the motifs of this piece, it becomes essential to understand that the era of modernism injected individualism in the literary works.
• 20th Century Art History and the Idea of Late Modernism This movement turned out to be a significant development in contemporary art towards the end of the 1960s. This is a kind of contemporary art that came to be renown in the course of the […]
• Islamic Modernism and Its Culture Modernists reforms aimed to deal with aspects relating to the law of evidence, modern education, the status of women in the society, right of Muslim to have independent thinking and rationality, constitutional reforms, the nature […]
• Virginia Woolf and Modernism The lack of actual historical information is a testament to the treatment accorded to women in the 16th century and this is an element of modernity that Woolf uses; the oppression of women in the […]
• Wallace Stevens: An American Modernist Poet The road was not easy for Wallace Stevens. Wallace Stevens nearly never changes the themes of his poems.
• Modernism in “Girl” Short Story by Jamaica Kincaid A general image of Girl and the seriousness of its separate elements make the work closer to modernistic style. The first sign of modernism in the work is the seriousness of the story and its […]
• Architectural Sustainability and Modernism Architecture In a general sense, sustainability is about confirming that the quality of human life and the surrounding eco-systems will not be reduced in the short and the long terms, making sure that the capacity of […]
• Postmodern Architecture vs. International Modernism A clear example of the new concept of postmodernism is that it is seen as the return of the pillars and other essential elements of the pre-modern designs.
• Is Fashion a Product of Modernism? The purpose of this study is to trace the development of fashion in the context of modernism. The disappearance of opulent Victorian dresses and close attention to the functionality of clothes attests the major change […]
• Modern Age: Deconstructivism vs. Modernism In the course of their evolution people obtained new values that impacted their vision of the world and resulted in the appearance of new ideals of beauty.
• Modernism and Avant-Garde in Edward Estlin Cummings’ Poems A critical analysis of Cummings’ works reveals that the techniques of modernism found in his poems are illustrations of the constant change in poetry.
• Product Design and Modernism It is necessary to focus on the following important distinctions of this style, namely: the absence of ornamental elements and minimalism; pure geometrical forms; the use of new materials; the suitability of the modernist designs […]
• Modernism – Yeats, Eliot, and Wolf Yeats successfully draws the minds of the readers of the reality of the aging population. In the poem, Eliot’s is able to draw the conscious of the readers to imagine of the outlook of the […]
• Modernism and Arts and Crafts: Comparison Today, critics view modernism as a breakdown of the traditional styles inherent to the Western culture that used to connect the appearance of works of art to the appearance of the natural world. In particular, […]
• Arts and Crafts Movement and Modernism Winter states in the beginning that he is not unbiased toward the Arts and Crafts movement, and yet his article gives a lot of thought to the weaknesses and failures of the movement.
• The Shift From Modernism to Postmodernism Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism theory is considered to be “the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so consistent thing […]
• History of Literary Modernism in 19th Century The radical shift in the aesthetic value as well as the cultural sensibilities of the works of literature of the early 20th century is what people regard to as literary modernism.
• Modernist Movement in Music: Investigating Style Evolution of Western Classical Music The modernist movement in music seems appropriate for this paper because of the unique and exciting styles of composing modern-era music, such as jazz, pop, and rock.
• Modernist Literature: Representatives and Techniques Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” experiment with language and narrative structure, creating a new form of storytelling that reflects the complexities of the modern world.
• Eliot and Joyce: How Modernism Uses Myth The poem is based on the myth of the search for the Holy Grail and the legend of the poor fisherman.
• Modernism: Yeats’ Poems and The Stranger by Camus Yeats’ poems also reflect the times, exploring the idea of a chaotic and uncertain future and the individual’s attempts to make sense of it.
• Avant-Garde Fashion: The History of Modernism and How It Changed the World One of the main reasons why this particular movement resists the main fashion trends is that the garments are abundant with black color, the combination of leather and cotton, and multiple layers.
• Modernism: Kincaid’s Girl vs. Pound’s in a Station of the Metro Howe calls one of the distinguishing features of modernist literature its complexity and the depth of the author’s thought, presenting the challenge to the reader.
• Mark Bradford on Reimagine Modernist Art Instead of painting in a realistic style, abstract painters seek to capture the ethereal, unveil the unseen, and express the mysterious.
• Modernism and Representation of Its Principles In addition, the grid is considered an announcement of the modernity of art and symbolizes the transition from the past to the present.
• Modernism: “The Painter of Modern Life” and “Paris Spleen” by Baudelaire According to Baudelaire, “to contemplate the movements of those who leave and those who arrive, those who still have strength of will, the desire to travel or to grow rich” can be viewed as a […]
• Modernism in Art: Themes and Techniques Scientific advancements that made them doubt the stability of the “actual” world and the accuracy of experience strengthened their views. However, Modernism appeared primarily as a protest against the old values and ideals, thereby challenging […]
• Modernism in Short Stories and Poems In “Hills like white elephant,” the author applies four features of modernism; the first trait that places the poem in modernism is not the use of romanticism.
• Modernist and Classical Architecture of Federal Buildings Buildings of classical architecture are designed to return respect for the power and the constitution, to remind us of the antiquity of such things as law and human rights.
• The Beauty of Simplicity: Modernist Architecture as a Worldwide Phenomenon With the advent of Modernist architecture, the emphasis has clearly been shifted onto the functionality of the architectural elements. Even with due regard for the novelty and reasonability of Modernist postulates, the popularity of the […]
• The Architecture of California and the Modernism of the USA The architecture of California was highly advanced because of the social and political revolutions coupled with the rise of technological and engineering developments.
• Popular and Serious: Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and Punk At the beginning of the century, modernism and the avant-garde were the most revolutionary musical movements, while later, with the development of punk and other popular music styles, the boundaries of art expanded to include […]
• A Journey From Neoclassicism to Modernism Particularly, with the focus on the lack of excessively and the promotion of utility as the foundational quality of art objects, urban design of the time promoted laconism in the choice of form and restraint […]
• Gio Ponti: A Journey From Neoclassicism to Modernism By founding his Modernist approach on the pillars of Neoclassicism, Gio Ponti managed to embrace the specifics of the urban environment to create the solutions that made the form serve the function, as his “Bottle […]
• Definition of Modernism and Avant-Garde Movements The main unifying characteristic is the artists’ belief in the value of art and their “self-consciousness,” as they were sure that it matters.
• Modernism in Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” and Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl” In both the pictures, there is the use of the supremacy of nature to express the emotions in the piece of work.
• Modernist Art: A Feminist Perspective Clarke limited the definition of modernism even further by his restriction of it to the facets of the Paris of Manet and the Impressionists, a place of leisure, pleasure, and excesses, and it seems that […]
• Modernist Avant-Garde Attitude to the Early Traditions of the Mainstream in Cinema Such a concern is one of the various reasons that do revolve around the reasons behind the suspicions of the early conventions of the mainstream cinema by the modernist avant-garde of the 1910 and 20s.
• “The Dance” by William Carol Williams: The Modernist Poem Still it seems that the power of the sound as the one that gives birth to the word is the one of the utmost importance.
• Modernism in the Eyes of Picasso The term refers to all the social changes that are constantly occurring in this time period, the way that people experience these changes and the way that the changes are reflected in different circles, such […]
• History of Art: Modernism’s New Industry and Innovation The earliest roots of what today’s researchers identify as the modern period are generally recognized to be twined about the natural forms and artistic investigations of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1860s and […]
• Modernism and Islam, the Connection Between Them The issue is that of the connection between Islam and Modernity or rather the compatibility between Islamic ideals and beliefs and the phenomenon which is defined as modernity.
• Humanistic Tradition. Modernism of Friedrich Nietzsche It can be assumed that Nietzsche is praising the moral values provided by religion, whereas knowing the fact that he rejected the religion as an institution, it can be stated that Nietzsche points out to […]
• Modernist Poetry: Wallace Stevens and T.S. Elliot The main character of the poem contemplates the idea of death and religion. She says that “death is the mother of beauty” and that a change of the seasons, a change of the living to […]
• The History of Modernism Era: The Modern Philosophy of Art Modernism is used for the description of the style and ideas of a work of art that was produced during this period or era of modernism.
• Modernist Typography in Graphic Design In the example above, it can be seen that these serifs take on a strong triangular shape, joined to the main stroke with a series of brackets that serves both to fill in the negative […]
• Disintegration for Modernist Writers Different and sometimes opposite currents within modernism itself make it difficult to create a comprehensive picture of this literary phenomenon in this essay that is why we are going to draw our attention to the […]
• Architecture and Modernism Connections Review There is no denying the importance of the fact that architecture is not only the aggregation of a given level of techniques, engineer capacities, approach to design, materials and form but what is more important […]
• In What Ways Do Walt Whitman Anticipate the Modernist Movement? In this paper, special attention will be paid to Walt Whitman as one of major and the most effective anticipators of the modernism movement because of the chosen fearlessness, intents to promote equalities in everything, […]
• Edward Weston’s Modernist Photographs More attention should be paid to the analysis of Weston’s photographs and the comparison of their style to my photographs. The object in my black-and-white photograph looks like a kind of tubes, which texture is […]
• Interior Architecture in Context: Subjective Well-Being in Modernist Design According to Petermans and Pohlmeyer, subjective well-being is an emerging topic of research in the field of design, although, no consensus has been reached in the scientific area as to what represents the essence of […]
• The World Wars, Modernism, and Post-Modernism Additionally, the realization of the worthlessness of human life due to the rise of science and technology led to the development of existentialism as a protest to the pressures of the changes provoked by the […]
• Modernist Revolution in Art History Simultaneously, the works of Karl Marx challenged the assumption of the relative nature of the shortcomings of capitalist society and suggested its fundamental flaws and inherent contradictions as reasons for the current social issues.
• Australia’s Aboriginal and Modernist Visual Arts Indigenous Australian art is characterized by a lot of imagery that depicted the origin of the artist and the themes in the paintings.
• Traditional Islamic Response to Modernism According to the readings, the British rule in India was a major contributor to the rise of modernism. This part of the readings is a bit confusing.
• Adolf Loos’s Architecture in Modernist Theory The inside of the building was created by Loos, who at the time was disenchanted with the style of other contemporary architects and wanted to present a modern look different from the popular trends of […]
• Modernism and the Feminine Voice The major issues discussed in the book are the place of women in modernism, Stieglitz’s impact on O’Keeffe, and the role of O’Keeffe in Stieglitz’s life.
• Modernist Painting: Critical Anthology In his publication “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg proves that the deficiency of figurativeness inherent in the contemporary modernist painting is the result of the art self-development instead of impacts made by social and historic factors.
• Pablo Picasso’s Art Modernism It generally rejected the belief and the certainty in enlightenment thinking with a consequent rejection in the belief of the existence of a powerful and most compassionate creator-God. This led to the birth of a […]
• Explaining Modernism: Evolving Beliefs and Ideas Historically, the very beginning of the modern period in art and design is assigned to the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s.
• Post Modernism and Nursing Science It is important to note that just like post modernism, nursing science has come to the view that there is some inner force that helps to heal patients.
• The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism, and the First World War The first theme is the connection of writings of women on the subject of the First World War and the modernism theoretical constructs.
• The Literary Renaissance: The Many Faces of Modernism London nails down the major problems of the post-war U.S.society: “This tower [.] represented [.] the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of […]
• Modernism, Modernization and Modernity in Australia, 1919-1939 The figure of the ‘flapper’ and her mode of dressing initiated Australians quest for pleasure and changes in moral and social values and attitudes.
• Architecture in Australia Modernism The spirit of the modern times denotes the intellectual and the culture that is in practice within the 20th century, which is linked to the Australian views, sense, collective consciousness and taste.
• Melancholy Caused by Fasting: An Artist in the Modernist Period In the personality of the hunger artist, we may notice the generalized character of a modernist artist, and in the actions of fasting, we may recognize the characteristics of modernism as an epoch in history […]
• Le Corbusier: The Life of Modernist Architect It is through his remarkable designs that he received his nickname, Le Corbusier that was a rather annoying resemblance to his ancestor.
• Factors and Reason Why Modernism Arose in Europe The painters and the sculptors started to portray the dying and the dead with images of the grim and death reapers.
• American Modernism: Key Representatives and Evolution
• Fundamental Differences Between Modernism and Postmodernism
• Characteristics and Theoretical Framework of Modernism
• China’s Reform and the Transition From Nationalism to Modernism During the Dynastic Period
• Comparing the Industrial Age With the Era of Modernism
• Criticism and Self-Criticism in German Modernism
• Cubism and Its Influence on Cultural Productions Associated With Modernism
• Design and Comparison Between Modernism and Postmodernism
• Early 20th Century Eugenics as Part of Modernism
• The Creative Typographic Relationships Between Modernism and Current Design
• Factors That Helped to Shape Modernism
• Modernism and Fundamentalism in Islam Faith
• Henrik Ibsen: The Father of Modernism in Theatre
• Modernism and Its Effect on the Inner Self and Consciousness
• How Postmodernism Has Rejected the Modernism Movement
• How New York City’s Bridges and Rivers Became a Muse of Modernism
• Literary Devices and Modernism in Araby
• Meaning Modernism and Postmodernism in the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• Modernism and Imperialism Themes in Orwell’s Work
• How Modernism Changed the Visual Art World Starkly
• Modernism and Its Impact on Art and Architecture
• Modern World Changes Brought by Modernism and Postmodernism
• Modernism and Its Impact on Society
• New York and American Modernism: Space, Time, and the Vision
• Symbolism and the Introduction of Psychology During the Literary Modernism Movement
• The Design Failure That Ended Modernism
• The Advantages and Disadvantages of Modernism
• The Modernism Movement During World War I
• The Relationship Between Gender and Modernism
• The Roaring 20’s: Modernism vs. Traditionalism
• Comparing Female Characters Victorian Era Modernism
• War and Modernism Poems During the Early 1900s
• What Are the Most Interesting Aspects of Modernism
• The Importance of the Year 1913 to the Development of Modernism
• The Historical Development of Literature From the Enlightenment Through Romanticism to Modernism
• The Philosophy of Modernism According to Robert Kaufman
• Modernism Concept of Poetry Dominated the 20th Century
• The Defiance of Postmodernism to Modernism Movement
• A Discussion About Definition of Modernism in Fiction Literature
• New Lives, New Landscapes: Rural Modernism in 20th Century Britain
• What Changes in the Modern World Are Caused by Modernism and Postmodernism?
• Is Henrik Ibsen the Father of Modernism in the Theater?
• What Was the Impact of Modernism on Society?
• How Did Modernism Affect the Culture in Europe?
• What Influence Did Modernism Have on Art and Architecture?
• How Are Zarathustra’s Three Metamorphoses Applied to Modernism?
• What Role Do Modernism and Fundamentalism Play in the Islamic Faith?
• Does Modernism Symbolize the Rejection of Tradition?
• What Are the Similarities Between Romanticism and Modernism?
• How Can Ulysses, Modernism, and Myth Be Explained Using a Modernist Approach?
• What Influence Did Cubism Have on Cultural Works Related to Modernism?
• Is Virginia Woolf the Founder of Modernism?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between Postmodernism and Modernism?
• Did Modernism Bring Much Change into the World?
• What Are the Key Representatives and Evolution of American Modernism?
• How Is Modernism Expressed Through African American Art?
• What Is the Importance of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Stories of Ernest Hemingway?
• How Is Modernism Related to Symbolic Interpretation Theory & Organizational Effectiveness?
• What Examples from Literature, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture Demonstrate Modernism?
• How Did Modernism and Postmodernism Affect Architecture After World War II?
• What Design Failure Marked the End of Modernism?
• Did Social Classes and Modernism Shape the Weimar Republic?
• What Are the Differences Between Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism?
• How Did Modernism, Modernity, and Modernization Affect Urban Growth in Melbourne Between the Wars?
• What Is the Phenomenon of Modernism?
• How Are Modernism and Postmodernism Reflected in Literature?
• What Historical Events Took Place During the Period of Modernism?
• Are There Similarities Between Romanticism, Modernism, and Victorian Literature?
• What Factors Contributed to the Formation of Modernism?
• Does Modernism Affect the Inner Self and Consciousness?
• Pablo Picasso Paper Topics
• Organizational Theory Topics
• Pluralism Paper Topics
• Scientific Revolution Titles
• Post-Structuralism Paper Topics
• Romanticism Titles
• Tolerance Essay Ideas
• Criticism Research Topics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 2). 160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/modernism-essay-topics/

"160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 2 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/modernism-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 2 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/modernism-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/modernism-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "160 Modernism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." March 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/modernism-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

• Basic site functions
• Ensuring secure, safe transactions
• Secure account login
• Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
• Remembering privacy and security settings
• Analyzing site traffic and usage
• Personalized search, content, and recommendations
• Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

• Remembering general and regional preferences
• Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .