American Modernism
Modernism is a comprehensive term for a movement (or tendency) which began to get under way in the closing years of the nineteenth century and which had a wide influence internationally during much of the twentieth century. In the United States, Modernism spanned roughly from shortly before the First World War into the inter-war period. (It should be pointed out, however, that, as with any literary “movement,” the beginning and ending of Modernism is open to critical question. Indeed, one could argue that Modernism reaches into the 1950s, and there are even critics who suggest that the modern period is still not entirely over.) It is perhaps best characterized not by any particular style or structure, but by the search for an individual style and structure. Modernism is most commonly summarized by Ezra Pound’s famous statement, “Make it new!” “Day by day,” Pound says in The Cantos, “make it new/cut the underbrush/pile the logs/keep it growing.” As such, Modernism acknowledges the failure of existing literary forms and a desperate search for new ones. It reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions, and conventions, emphasizing aesthetic independence; fresh ways of looking at the human position and function in the universe; a turning inward to explore consciousness; and encourages many experiments in form and style to “get to” this consciousness. Some American modernist writers include Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Roth, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer (in fiction); T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H. D., Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes (in poetry); and Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller (in drama).
It is most useful to look at Modernism not as a consensus of artistic ideas, but as an interplay of groups, aesthetic attitudes, and techniques,...