Modernism— Context

Modernism begins, paradoxically, in a quarrel about beginnings. Writers and critics struggle to define “the
modern,” to separate modernity as a historical condition from Modernism as an aesthetic response, and both
from the everyday adjective “modern.” Virginia Woolf’s wryly “arbitrary” marker—“on or about December
1910 human character changed”—already acknowledges that this rupture is uneven, shaped by class and
history, and often seen only in retrospect. Modernity refers to a complex and contested set of historical
transformations often associated with developments in rational thought, science, industrial capitalism, and
global imperial expansion. Emerging primarily in Europe from the Renaissance onwards, these processes took
diverse forms across different regions. Modernism, by contrast, refers to a range of artistic and literary
movements from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that engaged in self-conscious experimentation with
form and representation. These movements responded to—and sometimes sought to shape—the profound
cultural, social, and political upheavals of modernity: industrialization, urbanization, war, and changing ideas of
subjectivity. Recognizing these distinctions helps us see why Modernist texts repeatedly return to themes of
epistemological crisis, formal innovation, and the urban cityscape. As Raymond Williams observes,
“Modernity… is a new way of seeing the city, a consciousness that is at once fragmented and yet overwhelmed
by the totality of urban experience.”

Eric Hobsbawm’s series of books—The Age of Revolution (1789–1848), The Age of Capital (1848–1875), The
Age of Empire (1875–1914), and The Age of Extremes (1914–1991)—provides an essential historical backdrop,
helping us understand how revolution, capital, Empire, and war contributed to the formation of European
modern urban middle-class consciousness. London’s transformation from Chaucer’s medieval town into a
modern metropolis during the 19th and early 20th centuries was driven by capitalism, imperial wealth, and
technological progress. Raymond Williams calls this transformation the “new metropolis,” an urban space both
dazzling and destructive. The city symbolized ambition, labor, and cultural dynamism, yet also moral decline,
alienation, and spiritual emptiness. As Bradbury and McFarlane note, “Modernism is a particularly urban art…
an extraordinary compound of the futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative.”

In literature, the modern city is often shown as a paradox: a place of movement, technology, and cosmopolitan
contact, but also one of loneliness, poverty, and moral decay. The shock of the urban crowd—what Georg
Simmel calls the overstimulation that leads to a “blasé attitude”—changes how people perceive the world,
creating a style of quick impressions and emotional numbness. T.S. Eliot’s “Unreal City” in The Waste Land
perfectly captures the metropolis as a paradoxical site of both vitality and decay. The lines “A crowd flowed
over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many” (ll. 62–63) align the modern
urban crowd with Dante’s vision of hell, indicating how the city can devour individuality and humanity.
Similarly, Gerontion’s tired, fragmented voice conveys the spiritual exhaustion of modern urban life: “After
such knowledge, what forgiveness?” (l. 33). The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock reflects the same paralysis and
alienation in its hesitant, indecisive speaker wandering through “half-deserted streets,” while The Hollow Men
amplifies this sense of spiritual desolation with its vision of a world ending “not with a bang but a whimper” (l.
98). These poems present the metropolis as a symbolic landscape where cultural progress coexists with moral
and psychological disintegration. The metropolis in became a workplace rather than a home, a space of
ambition but lacking belonging.

Modernist literature frequently emerges from a metropolitan, middle-class consciousness, a sensibility shaped
by the constant intellectual upheavals that challenged older beliefs. Darwin’s theory of evolution displaced the
idea of a God-planned world; Marx exposed capitalism’s hidden structures; Nietzsche questioned morality and
religion; and Freud revealed the unconscious mind, destabilizing the Enlightenment ideal of a rational self.
Feminism challenged patriarchal systems, while Einstein’s relativity and new technologies altered perceptions
of time and space. Raymond Williams observed that “the modern city… produces a consciousness that is at
once intense and fragmentary,” a sensibility reflected in Eliot’s Prufrock and Gerontion, whose speakers
balance cultural sophistication with existential despair. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway also captures this urban
sensibility through its portrayal of Clarissa’s interior consciousness as she navigates the bustling, impersonal
streets of London. The metropolitan middle-class identity was also profoundly shaken by global upheavals like
communism, fascism, and the fall of empires. World War I destroyed faith in progress, leaving mass death and
displacement in its wake. The resulting disillusionment is powerfully captured by Yeats’s “The Second
Coming”:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

In this time of deep angst, disorientation, and fragmentation, Modernist writers often looked back nostalgically
at an earlier sense of unity. As Eysteinsson and Liska note, Modernism “came in many flavors” but shared “a
preoccupation with the fragment,” which was both nostalgic and revolutionary. Similarly, Peter Barry observes,
“The modernist features [fragmentation] in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an earlier age when
faith was full and authority intact.” Eliot’s The Waste Land embodies this paradox by juxtaposing ancient myth
with modern urban decay, presenting fragments of cultural memory in a shattered world. Eliot in the poem tries
to bring order to the fragments by using patterns like myths, allusions, and symbolic structures, which is
popularly known as his “mythic method.” Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “Genus phase” also captures this
tension. Modernist works often swing between a desire for the future (futurism) and a longing for the past
(nostalgia), treating history as something alive and present, where broken pieces of the past suddenly shine with
meaning.

In conclusion, Modernism emerged from the social and cultural upheavals that shaped modern urban middle-
class consciousness. Industrialization, rapid urban growth, global wars, and the collapse of older religious and
moral certainties created a world marked by fragmentation and instability. T.S. Eliot, in ‘The Metaphysical
Poets’, argued that poetry “must be difficult,” because modern civilization has “great variety and complexity”
and therefore requires a style that is “more allusive, more indirect.” This helps explain why much early 20th-
century writing focuses on how meaning is created rather than simply making statements. Writers like
Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, and Yeats sought not merely to record the alienation and dislocation experienced by the
metropolitan middle class but to find patterns—through myth, symbolism, and formal innovation—that could
bring meaning to a fractured world. In doing so, Modernist literature offered both a powerful response to
cultural crisis and an ambitious attempt to create order from chaos, making it one of the defining artistic
movements of the 20th century.