Modernism is the early-20th-century literary movement that broke with realism in favour of fragmentation, interiority, and formal experiment.
Literary modernism flowered roughly between 1910 and 1940, in the long aftershock of Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and the First World War. Its writers — T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner — believed that realism's tidy plots and omniscient narrators no longer fit a world of relativity, mass slaughter, and unconscious drives. They responded with stream of consciousness, fragmented timelines, mythic parallels, unreliable narrators, and difficult allusion. 'The Waste Land' (1922) and 'Ulysses' (1922) are the movement's twin monuments, both published in the same year — a year now treated as modernism's high noon. The movement's challenge to traditional form is the ground from which almost all subsequent literary fiction grew, including the postmodern reaction against it.