Concept

Literary modernism

Overview

Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new". This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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We know the contrary; that they had thought, written, and quarrelled about it with all their might--in "words, words, words." Giving life to such words did not prove the death of the word-makers; in a certain sense they are living still. For if, as Gibbon says, nothing but time--though a long time--is needed for a world to perish, so nothing but time--though still more time--is needed for a false idea to be…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
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The æsthetic state represents an overflow _of means of communication_ as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is the zenith of communion and transmission between living creatures; it is the source of languages. In it, languages, whether of signs, sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our abilities are subtilised forms of richer…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
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Further, let it be remarked that in brevity--the other requisite of forcible expression which theory points out, and emotion spontaneously fulfils--poetical phraseology similarly differs from ordinary phraseology. Imperfect periods are frequent; elisions are perpetual; and many of the minor words, which would be deemed essential in prose, are dispensed with.
Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Modernism.

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