The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response

to a much-
changed world. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary
movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations
of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. A primary theme of T.S.
Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal. Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty
landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in
interpreting the text.
The publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy,
and controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of consciousness,
which commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments of thought in an attempt to capture the flow of characters’ mental
processes. Portions of the book were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking countries. Other European
and American Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude
Stein, and William Faulkner.
The term Modernism is also used to refer to literary movements other than the European and American movement of the early to mid-20th century.
In Latin American literature, Modernismo arose in the late 19th century in the works of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and José Martí. The movement,
which continued into the early 20th century, reached its peak in the poetry of Rubén Darío. (See also American literature; Latin American
literature.)

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

In the northern hemisphere, April is clasically associated with spring. This is classic Eliot topsy-turviness. April is cruel? How can April be
cruel? It's spring; with flowers and mild weather and sex and love in the air.
He's giving us an insight into a mind that doesn't revel in these things as might be expected. "breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land" is a
very heavy, depressed way to describe the blooming of flowers. He sees the same things as everyone else, but there is no joy there.
"mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain"; a sense of loss and longing, of being rooted in the past, and spring re-
awakening memories of things that have passed.
By comparison; "Winter kept us warm" "forgetful snow"; these things suggest a state of comfortable emotional hibernation. April is the
cruellest month because the life and colour of spring throws one's depression into stark relief and forces painful memories to surface

1890: William James publishes his book Principles of Psychology

This book seriously influences Modernist writers' style and subject matter—it's the text that introduced the world to the idea of the stream of
consciousness. Yeah. It's a biggie.

1897: Sigmund Freud publishes Studies in Hysteriawith Josef Breuer, launching the age of psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud's contribution to modern thought is massive, massive, massive. And no, we're not just talking about Freudian slips.
Freud introduced the notion that our conscious minds are only the tip of the mental iceberg, and that beneath the surface, hidden fears and traumas
guide our thinking and our behavior. Writers of the period found this idea fertile ground for exploration… and they still do today.

1900: Freud publishes Interpretation of Dreams.

In this famous work, Freud argued that dreams, which had long been viewed as meaningless, were in fact a portal in to the innermost regions of
ourselves. Cue a collective Modernist "Woot!" and the sound of countless pens scribbling in countless dream diaries.

1905: Albert Einstein develops his Special Theory of Relativity, which was followed in 1915 by the General Theory of Relativity.

No biggie: in these theories Einstein just questions the existence of an absolute of time and space. Yeah, you got that right. In the space of five
years, scientists cast doubt upon dreams, the mind, time and space. Is it any wonder that people were feeling a little unhinged?

1908: Gertrude Stein publishes her first book, Three Lives

This may be the most critically acclaimed of her works. And no, it ain't easy reading.

1913: Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky's Rite of Spring premieres in Paris, France.

A riot ensues.

1914: World War I, dubbed "the war to end all wars," begins.

That same year, James Joyce publishes his collection of short stories, Dubliners. Ezra Pound publishes his manifesto and anthology, Des Imagistes.

1915: Franz Kafka's short novel The Metamorphosis is published…

... and cockroaches get a whole lot creepier. That same year, Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons appears… and buttons get a whole lot more Avant-
garde.

1916: James Joyce publishes Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Two groundbreaking works of literature in two years? No pressure, aspiring writers. None at all.

1917: U.S. enters World War I

Also, the Bolshevik Revolution breaks out in Russia, putting an end to Russia's Silver Age of Literary and Artistic Modernism, T.S. Eliot publishes
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and W.B. Yeats publishes The Wild Swans at Coole.

1918: Bits and pieces of James Joyce's novel, Ulysses appear in a U.S. literary journal, The Little Review.

This gets the journal's publishers in big trouble: their entire printing of the issues containing these parts of the novel are seized and destroyed by the
U.S. Postal Service on the grounds that they contained obscenity. Controversial not only for its famed dirty bits but for its innovative form, the book
was first published as a whole in 1922, in Paris.
Oh, and the Spanish Influenza epidemic kills millions worldwide. It is estimated that ten times as many people died of the flu than were killed in
WWI. In fact, half of U.S. soldiers who perished in Europe died of the flu.

1919: Kafka's short story, "In the Penal Colony," is published.

Although the story had actually been written five years before, it appeared only belatedly, like most of F.K.'s work.

1920: WWI ends.

Also, Pound publishes "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley."

1921: the Irish Free State (now called the Republic of Ireland) is founded.

Key figures of Irish literature responded strongly to this event, which, on a national level, spawned the Irish Civil War (1922-23).

1922: A banner year for the production of high-modernist literature.

T.S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land and James Joyce's complete Ulysses appears in Paris.

1923: Yeats wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

Also: Wallace Stevens' Harmonium appears and William Carlos William's collection Spring and All is published.

1924: Ernest Hemingway's book of short stories, In Our Time is published.

1925: Huge year for the Modernists: a bunch of super-important works were published, including Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Franz
Kafka's The Trial, and W.B. Yeats' A Vision. In another category altogether, Adolf Hitler's notorious tract Mein Kampf is also published.

1926: Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Risesappears. and millions of artistic Americans immediately start planning their trips to run with
the bulls in Pamplona.

1927: Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is published. Also, Franz Kafka's novel Amerika is released.

1928: D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover appears in Italy. Like Joyce's Ulysses, this novel would be called obscene. A complete and
uncensored version of the book was not legally published in either England or the United States until after a court in the 1950s declared the book
had literary merit, and was therefore not pornography. Also, W. B. Yeats' The Tower is published and Virginia Woolf's gender bending short work
of speculative fiction Orlando appears.
1929: The New York Stock Market crashes, leading swiftly to the Great Depression This is a big year for literature, too: William Faulkner's
novel The Sound and the Fury is published, and so is Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own is published. The
book is actually made up of material Woolf presented on the subject of Women in Literature.

1930: T.S. Eliot publishes Ash Wednesday.

Hart Crane's book length poem, The Bridge, also appears. And Robert Musil, an Austrian novelist, publishes volume one of three of his novel The
Man Without Qualities, reportedly the greatest novel no one has read.
And if you were a Modernist, well, all rules were meant to be broken. The Modernists definitely lived by Bender's "being bad feels pretty
good" ethos. 1900-1930. And what was this "old" that needed to be eradicated? Well, all the old forms of art, from novelistic and poetic structures
to characterization and imagery. They were fusty old relics of a world that was definitely bygone.. World War I brought Americans to
Europe, exposing them to ideas and influences that probably seemed pearl-clutchingly shocking to their sheltered sensibilities and, yeah, shattering
their faith in humanity with the horrors of war. So how do you thumb your nose at history when you're a young and brilliant Modernist? Well, for
starters, you take a cue from that slick new science, psychology, and start writing books that zoom in (sometimes waytoo close for comfort) on
characters' points of view. Modernists thought freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose…and that the world had lost its innocence
(and everything else) post-WWI. These guys were hardly rebels without a cause, though. Oh, they had causes. They had manifestos. They had
ideals. They had vision, and they weren't going to let any stodgy old Victorian-holdover beardos stop them. And they were crazy prolific.
Modernists were so rebellious because they lived in an age of crazy technological upheaval—things were changing at a breakneck pace, bringing
about (gasp!) motorcars and (double gasp!) airplanes. The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in
anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the
Anglo-American Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms
and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war. poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident in
London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern
civilization—a civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of
modern existence. Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American Modernism in England in the whole of the postwar
period.

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In
broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world.
Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one
sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918,
known now as World War One. At the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could
not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards.

In contrast to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history. Instead of
progress and growth, the Modernist intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of modern society is
perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic impulse. War most certainly had a great deal of influence on such ways of
approaching the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-shocked all of Western civilization.

In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of the times, and stretched the possibilities of their craft to
lengths not previously imagined.

Modern art (aka "modernist art") simply denotes new, non-traditional art. Modern artists, who deliberately sought to break with traditional styles,
innovated a wide range of new aesthetics. Modern literature can be broadly divided into two approaches, realism and radicalism, both of which
can be traced back to ca. 1850. Realist literature features realistic characters, settings, and plot, which are described in a straightforward, detailed
manner (just as a work of visual art, in order to be realistic, must be straightforward and detailed). Events are not idealized, fantastic, or excessively
improbable; life and society are simply presented as they are, positive and negative qualities alike. Radical literature features a wide range of
untraditional techniques, often inspired by movements in visual art. radical literature is united by the rejection of traditional restrictions (to
varying degrees). Rules of spelling and grammar might be ignored, or conventional linear narrative subverted. In poetry, restrictions
of metre and rhyme are often loosened, and even removed altogether (resulting in free verse). In drama, conventions are routinely shattered with
regard to acting itself and theatre's auxiliary elements (e.g. staging, lighting, costumes). One especially popular innovation of radical literature
is stream of consciousness, which attempts to set down the constant flow of thought experienced by the mind. This technique is most famously
employed in the novel Ulysses, masterpiece of Irish author James Joyce

The Catholic Church was the most important colonial institution to survive the Wars of Independence. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the church was the principal symbol of tradition and stability in the midst of political and social change. It touched the lives of everyone,
but its influence was felt most deeply among the lower classes and the rural peasantry. Religion not only offered consolation, but Sunday morning
Mass or the patron saint's feast day were natural occasions to socialize or sell wares in the village plaza. But this most traditional of all institutions,
after undergoing a series of prolonged crises in the post-Independence period, experienced a profound transformation in the 1960s. Since that time
the church has emerged as an advocate of human rights, democracy, and social change.