Modernism was a reaction to Victorianism
and Realism and the bourgeois moral and literary norms they espoused. It
was also a horrified reflex to the mass slaughter of World War I.
It was both a philosophical and
psychological attitude as well as a literary agenda. As a literary agenda, it:
Emphasized form and style over
content,
Espoused objectivity,
Employed ambivalence, irony, and
paradox,
Appropriated and invented mythic
structures,
Used allusive, sometimes multi-lingual
verbal strategies,
Developed reflexive, confessional, and
overly self-conscious characters,
Dispensed with the narrator/guide.