Modernism -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia [Link]
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Modernism
Modernism, in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms
of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th
to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.
In an era characterized by industrialization, the nearly
global adoption of capitalism, rapid social change, and
advances in science and the social sciences (e.g.,
Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation
incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and
Giacomo Balla: Dynamism of a convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and
Dog on a Leash
political theory kindled a search for new modes of
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, oil on
canvas by Giacomo Balla, 1912; in the expression.
Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, New York.
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Modernism in literature
Buffalo, New York; bequest of A. Conger
Goodyear and Gift of George F.
The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures
Goodyear, 1964
by industrialization and urbanization and by the
search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although prewar works by
Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a
literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The enormity
of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of Western society and
culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and
fragmentation. A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a
seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and
spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is
typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.
Eliot’s was not the dominant voice among Modernist poets. In the United States Robert
Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the
Midwest, respectively—in which they lived. The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich
coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice
Dunbar Nelson. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it
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Modernism -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia [Link]
the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-
speaking world. During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E.
Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American Modernist fiction. That sense
may be centred on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or
toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may
express hope at the prospect of change. F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream
in The Great Gatsby (1925), Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in
Native Son (1940), Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages
in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun
Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost
Generation. Meanwhile, Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set
mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), John Steinbeck
depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes
of Wrath (1939), and William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and
other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury
(1929).
Across the Atlantic, the publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a
landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy, and
controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a
technique known as stream of consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence
structure and incorporates fragments of thought in an attempt to capture the flow of
characters’ mental processes. Portions of the book were considered obscene, and Ulysses
was banned for many years in English-speaking countries. Other European Modernist
authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity included Virginia
Woolf, Marcel Proust, and the American expatriate Gertrude Stein.
The term Modernism is also used to refer to literary
movements other than the European and American
movement of the early to mid-20th century. In Latin
American literature, Modernismo arose in the late
19th century in the works of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera
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Virginia Woolf and José Martí. The movement, which continued into
Virginia Woolf.
New York World-Telegram & Sun the early 20th century, reached its peak in the poetry
Collection/Library of Congress, of Rubén Darío. (See also American literature; Latin
Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-
USZ62-111438)
American literature.)
Rubén Darío
Rubén Darío.
Courtesy of the Archivo General de la
Nación, Buenos Aires
Citation Information
Article Title: Modernism
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 14 December 2021
URL: [Link]
Access Date: March 16, 2022
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