Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Modernism was a cultural movement with roots in late nineteenth-century aestheticism and symbolism, prominent in Europe and the US, but with practitioners and theorists around the globe. While there is no general accord as to the precise dating of the “modernist era,” most critics and theorists work within a period that extends from the latter decades of the nineteenth century to World War II. As a cultural movement, modernism was characterized by technical innovations in narrative, dramatic, and poetic forms as well as in the materials and composition of the plastic arts. New and often provocative subject matter, including the critical representation of gender, race, and class, are found throughout the spectrum of modernist cultural practices. In addition to the prominence of nineteenth-century aesthetic movements, the revolutionary aspirations of Romanticism, especially the willingness to contest inherited literary norms and to claim the arts as a historically transformative practice, were one decisive precedent. Equally important were the massive social changes of the nineteenth century – political, technological, economic – which produced, among other effects, a growing and heterogeneous urban culture, where artistic novelty could win small but responsive audiences, indispensable to its experimental ambitions. The emergence of bohemian colonies within the metropolis offered ... log in or subscribe to read full text