The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

no longer enhanced by being embedded
in a rhetorical syntax allegedly equal to it,
but rather is given ‘epic’ finality by being
set against voracious and self-perpetuating
dictions. This may account for a cyclical
mock-epic like Ted Hughes’s Crow
(1970), a mock-epic of short and complete
utterances.
See R. P. Bond, English Burlesque
Poetry, 1700–50 (1932); J. Dixon Hunt
(ed.), Pope – The Rape of the Lock (1968);
Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (1952);
Gregory G. Colomb, Designs on Truth:
Poetics of Augustan Mock-epic (1992).
MHP and CS
Modernism Modernist art is, in most
critical usage, reckoned to be the art of
what Harold Rosenburg calls ‘the tradition
of the new’. It is experimental, formally
complex, elliptical, contains elements of
decreation as well as creation, and tends to
associate notions of the artist’s freedom
from realism, materialism, traditional
genre and form, with notions of cultural
apocalypse and disaster. Its social content
is characteristically avant-garde or
bohemian; hence, specialized. Its notion
of the artist is of a futurist, not the conserver
of culture but its onward creator; its
notion of the audience is that it is foolish
if potentially redeemable: ‘Artists are the
antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed
many will never learn to trust their great
artists’ is Ezra Pound’s definition. Beyond
art’s specialized enclave, conditions of crisis
are evident: language awry, cultural
cohesion lost, perception pluralized.
Further than this, there are several
modernisms: an intensifying sequence
of movements from Symbolism on
(Post-impressionism, Expressionism,
Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism,
Surrealism) often radically at odds, and
sharp differences of cultural interpretation
coming from writers apparently
Modernism 145
stylistically analogous (e.g. T. S. Eliot and
William Carlos Williams). A like technique
can be very differently used (e.g.
the use of STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS in
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William
Faulkner) according to different notions
of underlying order in life or art. The
post-symbolist stress on the ‘hard’ or
impersonal image (see IMAGISM) can
dissolve into the fluidity of Dada or
Surrealism or into romantic personalization:
while the famous ‘classical’ element
in modernism, emanating particularly
from Eliot, its stress on the luminous
symbol outside time, can be qualified by
a wide variety of political attitudes and
forms of historicism.
Modernism means the ruffling of the
realistic surface of literature by underlying
forces; the disturbance may arise,
though, from logics solely aesthetic or
highly social. Hence, modernism still
remains a loose label. We can dispute
about when it starts (French symbolism;
decadence; the break-up of naturalism)
and when it ends (Kermode distinguishes
‘paleo-modernism’ and ‘neo-modernism’
and hence a degree of continuity through
to postwar art). We can regard it as a
timebound concept (say 1890–1930) or
a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne,
Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains
a body of major writers (James, Conrad,
Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce,
Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg,
Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama;
Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke,
Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose
works are aesthetically radical, contain
striking technical innovation, emphasize
spatial or ‘fugal’ as opposed to chronological
form, tend towards ironic modes, and
involve a certain ‘dehumanization of art’
(Ortega y Gasset). See also CLASSICISM,
DADA, EXPRESSIONISM, IMAGISM, SYMBOL,
SURREALISM.