Modernism is a term encompassing numerous movements characterizing international developments in literature, music, and the graphic and plastic arts from the late nineteenth century onward. Most commentators consider literary Modernism’s typifying manifestations in English to have appeared between 1890 and 1930. Among the authors most frequently cited are Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, D. H. “Lawrence, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats; European writers associated with Modernism include Bertolt Brecht, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marcel Proust, and Rainer Maria Rilke, while Charles Baudelaire, Gustav Flaubert, and Arthur Rimbaud are regarded as three of its principal progenitors. The experimental qualities thought of as essentially Modernist are found in the writings of many of the above; others are more traditional in their stylistic and narrative practices. All, however, respond acutely to the radical shifts in the structures of thought and belief that were brought about in the fields of religion, philosophy, and psychology by the works of Sir James Frazer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and others. The moral cataclysm of the First World War accentuated the senses of general cultural catastrophe and individual spiritual crisis apparent in the writings of novelists and poets already sensitive to such disruptions in the humanist tradition. Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Eliot’s The *Waste Land (1922), Woolf s Jacob’s Room (1922), and Joyce’s “Ulysses (1922) are among the works which indicate the breach with the conventions of rational exposition and stylistic decorum in the immediate post-war period.

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