Historic Dimensions of Modernism especially in literature

 

Modernism begins in the late 1800s or early 1900s, climaxing in the 1910s-30s as writers and artists throughout Europe, the USA, and beyond create and publish an enormous number of revolutionary works that are still recognized as titanic and influential, even if, a century later, their application as models grows more limited.

The great decades of Modernism parallel profound world events, particularly the two World Wars (1914-18 & 1939-45) and the Great Depression (1929-1940?).

World War 1 is often seen as a starting event of Modernism. The devastation and disillusion of Western Civilization in the Great War certainly accelerated and deepened Modernist thinking. However, harbingers of Modernism may be seen in late fiction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, or Impressionist paintings by Manet or Monet. Political revolutions, upheavals, reforms, or sea-changes are contemporary with cultural Modernism: Russian Revolution (1917), Nazism & Fascism (1930s), USA New Deal (1930s), Chinese Revolution (1946-52).

Modernism may or may not end at mid-20th century, depending on definitions of postmodernism, but certainly the heroic age of Modernism has passed; the current cultural era may be, like Realism following Romanticism, both an extension of and exhaustion from a revolutionary period.