Modernism

Catalog description

What should literature be and do in an era of war, revolution and cataclysmic cultural change? Modernist literature emerged across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century in response to this question. Old ideas and forms suddenly seemed ill-equipped to respond to the twentieth century, which led modernist artists to rebel against convention. Writers such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., W.B. Yeats and Gertrude Stein worked across languages, national traditions and genres to reinvent the literary past and change contemporary history. In the process, they created some of the most astonishing, daring and rewarding poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century.