Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention"^[1] and a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together".^[2]

The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I.^[3] Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, musical atonality and twelve-tonality, modernist architecture, and urban planning.^[4]

Modernism took a critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism. The movement also rejected the concept of absolute originality — the idea of "creation from nothingness" — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism, replacing it with techniques of collage,^[5] reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody.^[a][b][6] Another feature of modernism was reflexivity about artistic and social convention, which led to experimentation highlighting how works of art are made as well as the material from which they are created.^[7] Debate about the timeline of modernism continues, with some scholars arguing that it evolved into late modernism or high modernism.^[8] Postmodernism, meanwhile, rejects many of the principles of modernism.^[9][10][11]