Characteristics of Modernist Art (genre and style)
- Modernist art is often coupled with the increasing doubt in religion and God. This disillusionment and disjointedness from society is in part due to WWI and its horrors. Many people began to doubt that a loving God would let horrors like WWI occur. Artists of the modernist period have a detached and remote point of view, and feelings of not belonging in society as the towns and city grew increasingly bigger and easier to get lost in. Alienation is a predominant mood in modernist works of art, and irony is often also a large part of Modernist works. Experimentation and Individualism became the main themes.
http://www.online-literature.com/periods/modernism.php
Characteristics
- Modernism was Anti-Romantic. It focused on the meaning in art and not nature.The meanings were often claimed to be subjective, a poem needn't necessarily have a meaning. It was just art.
- Modernism also involved the search for new forms of writing. Traditions that had been in place were broken as the definition of art shifted to include anything, because art was subjective.
- Modernism deliberately broke with tradition from the past.
- Alienation and isolation from society were often found in Modernist works.
- procrastination/inability to act
- Agonized flashbacks into the past-- fear of the past.
- Fear of Death and/or the appearance of death.
- Inability or fear to love and express love
- World expressed as a wasteland.
Major Themes
- Violence
- Alienation
- Historical Discontinuity
- Loss and Despair
- Rejection of History
- Unavoidable Change
- Race Relations
Genre and Style
- The main genres of Modernist Literature included Novels, Poems, Diaries, among other forms. This period in literature involved a lot of broken traditions, so the writing style came in many forms.