Introducing Literary Criticism A Graphic - Owen Holland 2015

Modernism

Eliot was one of the most prominent modernist writers in England, whose poetry radically challenged inherited stylistic and literary norms.

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941), another prominent modernist and part of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals, made similarly experimental new departures in the novel. Her novels, including Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), broke with the conventions of Victorian realism, disrupting the linear, chronological sequencing of plot to explore new ways of representing the interior world of human consciousness and feeling.

Modernism is something of a suitcase concept: much can be made to fit into it. It describes a literary and artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, and contains many subgroups (e.g. Imagism, Surrealism). It is identified with literary and formal experimentation, challenges to established taste, traditions and conventions, and the discovery of novel ways of comprehending the human condition.