Modernism

Encyclopaedia Britannica describes Modernism in literature as „the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world.“  („Modernism“).

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 („Modernism“).

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 („Modernism in Literature“). Ulysses demonstrates most of the notable characteristics of the modern novel. As an exploration of consciousness or the inner life, it inspired Woolf’s injunction that the novelist should “consider the ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” („An Anthology of Sources and Documents“)

Other examples from Modernist literature might be Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godott, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.

Sources:

“Modernism.” Edited by Alicja Zelazko, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 21 Oct. 2024, www.britannica.com/art/Modernism-art#ref282535. 

Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidoe, eds. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998), p. 397. [Modernism Anthology]

Jana Boudnikova