Literary Modernism

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement breaking with realist narrative and traditional meter through formal experimentation.

Specifications & Metrics

era: c. 1890s–1940s (peak 1910s–1930s)
region: Europe and North America
key figures: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett
exemplar: Ulysses (1922); The Waste Land (1922); Mrs Dalloway (1925)
introduced: 1912

Driven by a self-conscious break with Victorian realism and traditional prosody—summed up in Ezra Pound's maxim 'Make it new'—and by the early Imagist movement founded in 1912.
Shaped by the cataclysm of the First World War and theories of time and the unconscious from Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, pioneering stream-of-consciousness and free verse.
Reached a landmark year in 1922 with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, alongside works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka.