Modernism was a literary and artistic movement that, roughly between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, broke with traditional forms and conventions in search of new ways to represent a changed world.

Writers such as Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Kafka experimented with stream of consciousness, fragmented narrative, mythic allusion, and unreliable or multiple perspectives. The movement responded to industrialization, urbanization, world war, and the erosion of shared certainties. Formal innovation was not mere technical display; it was an attempt to find shapes adequate to modern experience. Difficulty and ambiguity were often accepted as necessary costs.

Modernism was never a single program. It included high-modernist complexity and more accessible strains, European and American variants, and ongoing debates about tradition and novelty. Its legacy remains visible in contemporary literature’s comfort with fragmentation, interiority, and self-conscious form. To read modernist works is still to encounter the shock of techniques that once redefined what literature could do.

The early-twentieth-century drive to make literature new, in form and vision, is what the term modernism names.