Modernism is a term of Anglo-American provenance with both literary-critical and art-historical variants. It arose in the 1920s (Sultan 1987, p. 97), but did not become popular until the two decades after 1945 when formalist criticism held sway. Such ‘new critics’ thought of modernism as an approach to literature and the arts, emerging just before the First World War and dominant in the interwar period, that emphasised aesthetic autonomy and formalism, detachment and irony, mythic themes, and self-reflective attention to acts of creation and composition. The novels of Joyce and Woolf, the plays of Pirandello and Yeats, the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and the abstract art of Kandinsky and Mondrian were paradigmatic. The term was then appropriated by Western Marxists debating the properly revolutionary approach to aesthetics and cultural critique. More recent usage has greatly expanded and somewhat altered the concept, but it remains historiographical in the sense that the artists, writers and movements considered modernist by the critics rarely used the term to refer to themselves. It also remains essentially contested; there is no single, widely accepted usage. I will therefore begin by indicating how it is being used here.