modern literature
...dern state; revolted against modernity, but believed in modernism [helped Eliot publish The Waste Land and Joyce publish Ulysses; Yeats, a major figure of the "Celtic Twilight" of the 1890s, was his poetic hero; Yeats had helped establish the modern tradition of the symbolist poets in Britain] -as the best known literary prophet of the new, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was reported as saying: "The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions-to destroy" -the tradition of the new: the belief that the time had come for the arts to break more or less entirely with the past, and assert their connections with the present and above all with the future -everything needed to change: subject matter; the relationship between form and content, artist and audience, individual and society -we could characterize modernists as those artists and authors who undertake, in Ezra Pound's phrase, to "make it new" Why did everything need to change? -aesthetic change not just an isolated phenomenon; linked to socio-political change, causes Great War of 1914-1918 -was to bring home the underlying instability in the social and political order -destroyed much of what was left of traditional culture -the old continental empires had been convulsed, and, in the case of the Austrian-Hungarian and Turkish empires, posthumously dismembered -after WW1, there was a feeling that a new start ought to be made in politics and society (though this feeling was accentuated rather than initiated by the war) -the war was a profound shock to artists and writers, as it was to the citizens of Europe -Henry James expressed the horror he felt at the "plunge of civilization into the a...