Preface

Summary

The term modernism, in its literary sense, became current in English shortly after the First World War to describe new experimental literature, notably works by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. Since then, it has continually expanded in scope. The expression now encompasses a wide variety of movements in modern art and literature, including, in some definitions, naturalism, symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism, futurism, imagism, vorticism, dada, and surrealism, as well as a number of writers and artists not associated with any one of these movements. In its broadest sense, modernism has become the label for an entire tendency in literature and the arts, sometimes indeed for a whole period in cultural history, stretching as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing at least until the middle of the twentieth. Modernism has thus become a term of very wide application. While it does not have quite the expansiveness of names for earlier periods in cultural history, such as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment (whose solidity is demonstrated by the use of the definite article), it approaches the breadth of romanticism, a term that also embraces various sometimes opposed cultural phenomena and that can likewise be used to name either an international movement or an entire historical period. Despite the danger that such a term will become so vague in its reference as to be rendered meaningless, I believe that the word modernism designates a central phenomenon in cultural history.