The Modernist Movement

The modernist movement began in the late 1880s and continued into the early 1900s. As discussed in The Norton Anthology of World Literature, this era is famous for producing work that deliberately broke preconceived notions of what literature and poetry could and could not be. New ideas in psychology and a need for writers to move away from old ideas drove the work to push beyond what had already been written. Whereas Victorian writers were concerned with science and nature, industrialization and the First World War led modernist writers to feel disconnected from the world around them, and so alienation is often a theme in modernist works. The modernist writer was intensely self-centered, in that much of the writing from that period is introspective and emotional. Modernist writing is noted for posing questions that cannot be answered and for conceiving of stories with no clear plot or storyline. The irony, stream-of-consciousness, and satire were all often employed, sometimes all within the same work. Much of the writing of this time is highly experimental as authors worked to see how much they could really push the boundaries of what others considered worthwhile literature. Several of what are now considered our most noted writers came from this period. Works such as Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” as well as Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” are all accurate examples of works from the modernist era. Modernism carried on into the second half of the twentieth century until other literary forms such as postmodernism and post-colonialism began to take over (Lawall 537-45). It still influences and inspires contemporary writers over the world.

Work Cited

Lawall, Sarah N., and Maynard Mack. The Norton anthology of world literature. (2nd ed).New York: Norton, 2002. Print.