WE LOVE LITERATURE

Modernism is a period in English literature which began in the early 20th century and continued successfully up to and including the 1960s. The modernists liked to do away with the traditional. They would experiment with the norms of literature and art.

Modernists were often obsessed with the inner self and consciousness. They would frequently depict urban areas in their literature and didn’t much care for nature.  The modernists were in a way rebelling to the oppressive Victorian period and were looking for a break in traditions.

According to Childs

     'Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art

     of what Harold Rosenburg calls “the tradition of the new”. It is  

     experimental, formally complex, and elliptical, contains elements

     of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions

     of the artists freedom from realism, materialism, traditional

     genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and

     disaster… We can dispute about when it starts (French

     symbolism   ; decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and 

     whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes “paleo-modernism”

     and “neo-modernism” and hence a degree of continuity through

     to post-war art). We can regard it as a time bound concept (say

     1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, Villon,

     Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers (James,

     Conrad, Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama;

     Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in

     poetry) whose works are esthetically radical, contain striking

     technical innovation, empathize spatial of “fugal” as opposed to

     chronological form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a

     certain “dehumanization of art”’ (Childs 2000)