Blackwell Reference Online

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The remarkably diverse essays in this collection help us understand how literary culture changed in the United States in the first 50 years of the twentieth century. The editors and other contributors refer often to the notoriously difficult task of defining modernism, given its many different versions. Although I agree that there are many different understandings of modernism and modernity, I want to begin with a basic definition: between 1900 and 1950 (more or less), various modernisms vigorously criticized the modernization process we identify with economic, technological, and political changes in this period. These changes are usually identified with “second-stage industrialization,” in order to distinguish them from those associated either with the earlier “industrial revolution” or the later “post-industrial” transformation of first-world economies. Second-stage industrialization includes production we identify with Henry Ford's assembly-line processes (Fordism), Frederick Winslow Taylor's development of managerial practices for improving the efficiency of production (Taylorization), the integration of marketing and advertising into the manufacturing processes, and responses to these economic changes, such as the international organization of labor in union movements, as well as communism and socialism. These economic, technological, and political changes had far-reaching ... log in or subscribe to read full text