Modern Literature - ENGL 370 Resource Guide

Secular and literary applications of the term “canon” refer to a constellation of highly valued, high-cultural texts that have traditionally acted as arbiters of literary value, determining the discipline of literary studies as well as influencing the critical and cultural reception of literature.

Includes links to literary symbolism, impressionist art and music, postimpressionism, cubism, futurism, and a bibliography.

The term for an international tendency in the arts brought about by a creative renaissance during the last decade of the 19th century and lasting into the post-war years. Strictly speaking, modernism cannot be described as a ‘movement’ or reliably characterized by a uniform style.

Some scholars tend to use “Modernism” as a general label for the historical period, implying that artistic/cultural production between 1885 and anywhere from 1925 to 1940 can be subsumed under the general rubric of “Modernism.” This tendency is apparent, for example, in a justly famous critical anthology edited in 1976 by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane titled Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930.

The word modernism can apply to many different artistic and literary groups, movements, and individuals, but the one thing they all had in common in the twentieth century was a belief in the value of the new. As poet Ezra Pound advised, “Make it new.”

Includes books and e-books

Missouri residents can request books from MOBIUS

It is well known that the New Age played a vital role in the dissemination of literary modernism and post-Impressionist art in Britain before the First World War. Of the three main polemicists of early modernism—T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis—Hulme wrote almost exclusively for the magazine, Pound wrote a large proportion of his criticism for its pages and Lewis, who described the New Age in 1914 as "one of the only good papers in the country" ("Letter" 319), published some of his early stories in the paper and used its correspondence columns to lash out at his opponents, real or imagined.

The modern era was a time of great technical innovation and political upheaval. Extending roughly from the 1880s to the 1930s, the machine age of the modern era was noted for mass production and the assembly line; improved transport (car, tram, train, and airplane); modern warfare devices (tanks, submarines, manufactured gasses); radio and phonograph technology; and the high-speed printing press, all of which contributed to social upheaval, such as increased consumerism, cultural leveling, and an enlarged working class.