Modernism

This Guide presents a judicious selection of key critical works relating to literary modernism. For several decades modernism was understood in contrast to postmodernism, and constructed as the authoritarian and conservative other of its successor. More recently, critics have come to recognize the plurality of modernisms, and to reconceptualize modernism in relation to modernity and modernization. This guide is designed to help readers engage with the major critical debates surrounding modernism, its relation to modernity and modernization, and its relation to other literary and cultural movements.

Michael H. Whitworth is University Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow of Merton College. His previous publications include Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (2001) and Virginia Woolf (2005).