Approaching Modernism

Although the difficulties of defining Modernism are properly aired elsewhere in this volume, its broad outlines are now only too familiar: its peak period in the Anglo-American context lay between 1910 and 1925, while its intellectual formation encompassed a coming to terms with the lines of thought associated with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Yet despite its apparent familiarity, interpretation of the literature of the period has become less rather than more clear by the end of the century. In particular, as Modernism becomes the assumed background against which to define postmodernism, it is in danger of being both banalized and misappreciated at the same time. Since the change from Modernism to postmodernism is not a difference in metaphysic so much as a different stage in the digestion of the same metaphysic, this chapter focuses on how new thought was assimilated at the time. And similarly, rather than giving an encyclopedic synopsis of intellectual developments within and preceding the period, it concentrates on the interpretative cruxes of Modernism, which are in many ways precisely a testing of this body of thought.