Movements
Modernism
Also Known As Literary Modernism
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
A broad international movement marked by a deliberate break with nineteenth-century narrative convention: fragmented chronology, interior monologue and stream of consciousness, unreliable narration and a self-consciousness about language and form itself. Its major figures, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Kafka and Faulkner among them, worked across genres and national traditions but shared a conviction that the upheavals of the early twentieth century, rapid urbanization, new psychology, and above all the First World War, had made older realist and Romantic modes of representation inadequate to contemporary experience.
Facts
Disputed
Period, From (Year)No single event marks Modernism's beginning; literary historians variously point to the 1890s aestheticist and symbolist ferment, or to specific landmark works published between 1910 and the early 1920s (Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, both 1922, are often treated as high-water marks rather than starting points). The movement is better described as an emergence than an event. Period, To (Year)Commonly closed around the Second World War, after which Postmodernism is generally reckoned to begin, but the transition is gradual and contested rather than a fixed date, and some scholars extend Modernism's active period well past 1945 for individual writers. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated Authors
Dada, which Tzara co-founded in 1916 and whose 1918 manifesto he wrote, sits inside literary Modernism's own 1890 to 1945 period as one of its constituent avant-gardes.
Associated With
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Period, To (Year)
Not every critic accepts 1945 as Modernism's effective close. Ihab Hassan, one of the first theorists to systematically distinguish Modernism from Postmodernism, argued the two are not cleanly sequential but exist on a continuum of shared avant-garde impulses, with genuinely late-modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett producing major work well past 1945 that resists clean assignment to either period. Fredric Jameson's own, later and more influential account treats the postwar consolidation of consumer capitalism as marking a genuine historical break rather than merely a stylistic one, which is the reading behind this entry's own 1945 dating; Hassan's account is a different reading of where the boundary runs, not a rejection that the two periods are distinguishable at all.
A dissenting reading, from Ihab HassanEncyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.