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Literature vocabulary · Literary Movements

Modernism

Meaning in literature, with examples

/ˈmɒdənɪzəm/nounCommon term

In literature, Modernism means: An early twentieth-century movement that broke with traditional forms and experimented with new ways of writing, such as fragmentation, multiple viewpoints and stream of consciousness.

In Turkish: modernizm

How it is used

Usually dated roughly 1900 to 1940. Key figures are James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust; 1922, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, is often called its peak. In Turkish, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Yusuf Atılgan are often read as modernists.

Example sentences

  1. Modernism rejected the neat, chronological plots of the Victorian novel.

  2. Huzur is often discussed as a modernist novel about time and memory.

Common collocations

  • literary Modernism
  • high Modernism
  • modernist novel
  • modernist poetry
  • PostmodernismA movement in literature after the Second World War that plays with form and questions truth, often through irony, parody, mixing genres and fiction that comments on itself.
  • stream of consciousnessA narrative technique that presents a character's thoughts, feelings and memories as a continuous, often unpunctuated flow, the way they pass through the mind.
  • literary movementA group of writers in a particular period who share similar ideas, styles and aims, such as Romanticism, Realism or Modernism.
  • free versePoetry that does not follow a regular meter or rhyme scheme, relying instead on natural speech rhythms, line breaks and imagery.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Literary Movements

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