Modernist literature

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Modernist literature is the literary form of modernism, it should not be confused with modern literature, which is the history of the modern novel and modern poetry.

Modernist literature was at its height from 1900 to 1940, and featured such authors as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka, Menno ter Braak and Ernest Hemingway.

Modernist literature has attempted to move from the bonds of realist literature and introduce concepts as disjointed timelines.

Modernist literature is defined by its move away from Romanticism, venturing into subject matter that is traditionally mundane--a prime example being "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. Modernist Literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common motif in modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society". However, many modernist works like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land are marked by the absence of a central, heroic figure; in rejecting the solipsism of Romantics like Shelley and Byron, these works reject the subject of Cartesian dualism and collapse narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.

Modernist literature goes beyond the limitations of the realistic novel with its concern for larger factors such as social or historical change; this is largely demonstrated in "stream of consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, and others.

Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society.

Many modernist works are studied in schools today, from Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to T.S. Eliot's King Arthur, to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

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