On Modernism

Modernism in British arts, literature and philosophy is manifest as a unique thingaround and after 1900. This paradigm shift in all arts and modern science madetraditional beliefs, norms, and social patterns obsolete. Forerunners were 19th-centuryintellectuals, who favoured a new and lively spiritual culture. A new concept ofreality not only changed the view of nature (atomic physics) but also the structureand gist of literature. As the belief in the visible world declined, consciousness andsymbolism (surface and depth structures) occupied the focus of attention. Literaturebecame an autonomous field. From artistic subjectivity modernism led the way tocrystallizing creations of complex imaginative structures. Simultaneously, neorealismin philosophy and relativity in physics substituted a worn-out mechanistic worldpicture by a scientific reality reaching far beyond the visible world.