Knowra Modernism Modernism Modernism is a broad movement that challenged inherited artistic forms and pursued new approaches to representation, materials, and experience. It reshaped visual art, literature, architecture, music, and design from the late nineteenth century onward.
Realism : An artistic approach that represents people and the world with attention to observable detail and social conditions. Modernist artists and writers rejected realism’s assumption that external appearances could adequately represent experience.
Stream of consciousness : A literary technique that represents the shifting flow of a character’s thoughts and perceptions. It replaces orderly narration with the unsettled rhythms of inner experience.
The Waste Land : A 1922 poem by T. S. Eliot that uses fragmented voices, allusions, and shifting scenes to depict cultural dislocation. Its discontinuous structure became a landmark example of modernist literary form.
Virginia Woolf : An English writer whose novels include Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Her fiction uses shifting perception and time to reshape the modern novel.
Postmodernism : A broad cultural movement that questions modernism’s faith in coherent systems, originality, and universal progress. Postmodernism challenges modernist ambitions while borrowing many of its formal experiments.
Impressionism : A late nineteenth-century art movement that emphasized changing light, color, and immediate visual impressions. Its loose brushwork and focus on perception helped open painting to modernist experiments.
Collage : An artwork made by assembling pieces of paper, images, or other materials onto a surface. Its fragments and found materials make construction itself part of the work’s meaning.
Ulysses : A 1922 novel by James Joyce that follows a day in Dublin through experimental narrative techniques. Its transformations of language and viewpoint test how fiction can represent ordinary consciousness.
James Joyce : An Irish novelist and short-story writer known for Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His linguistic and narrative experiments expanded modernist fiction’s formal range.
Arts and Crafts movement : A reform movement that championed skilled handcraft, useful design, and the dignity of labor in response to industrial production. Its craft-centered ideals offered a different response to the same industrial changes modernism confronted.
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