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. Connections
Associated Authors
Source Alfred Döblin (Wikipedia)
Source Arthur Schnitzler (Wikipedia)
Source Ivan Cankar (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia (Portuguese): João Guimarães Rosa
Source Nella_Larsen (Wikipedia)
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.
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
Source Virginia Woolf (Wikipedia)
Source William Carlos Williams (Wikipedia)
Associated With
Woolf, Forster and other Bloomsbury writers are central figures of British literary Modernism.
Confessional poetry (Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Snodgrass, late 1950s-60s US) developed in dialogue with, and in reaction against, the formalist impersonality of prior modernist and New Critical poetics; M.L. Rosenthal on Lowells Life Studies: Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself. Wikipedia: Confessional poetry.
Literary history relation between named movements
Imagism, Movements Literary history relation between named movements
Source Stream of Consciousness (Wikipedia)
Influenced
Influenced By
Sources
1. Modernism (Wikipedia)
WikipediaLead paragraphQuote, Lead paragraph
emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience
2. The Norton Anthology of World Literature
W. W. Norton & Company- Period, From (Year): from 1890
- Period, To (Year): to 1945
Stream of Consciousness (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Associated With: Stream of ConsciousnessView the Source Virginia Woolf (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Associated Authors: Virginia WoolfView the Source William Carlos Williams (Wikipedia)
Associated Authors: William Carlos Williams, Lead, first sentence [in-movement]Quote, Associated Authors: William Carlos Williams, Lead, first sentence [in-movement]
closely associated with modernism and imagism
Ivan Cankar (Wikipedia)
Associated Authors: Ivan Cankar, Lead [in-movement]Quote, Associated Authors: Ivan Cankar, Lead [in-movement]
he is considered as the beginner of modernism in Slovene literature
Alfred Döblin (Wikipedia)
Associated Authors: Alfred Döblin, English Wikipedia article, lead section [in-movement]Quote, Associated Authors: Alfred Döblin, English Wikipedia article, lead section [in-movement]
one of the most important figures of German literary modernism
Wikipedia (Portuguese): João Guimarães Rosa
Wikipedia (Portuguese)Associated Authors: João Guimarães Rosa, Lead paragraphQuote, Associated Authors: João Guimarães Rosa, Lead paragraph
identificado com a terceira geração do modernismo no Brasil
Nella_Larsen (Wikipedia)
Associated Authors: Nella Larsen, Lead, critical reception [in-movement]Quote, Associated Authors: Nella Larsen, Lead, critical reception [in-movement]
an important figure in American modernism
Arthur Schnitzler (Wikipedia)
Associated Authors: Arthur Schnitzler, LeadQuote, Associated Authors: Arthur Schnitzler, Lead
He is considered one of the most significant representatives of Viennese Modernism
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.
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