Literary Modernism: A Mood and a Movement

Literary Modernism

A Mood and a Movement

"And as happens sometimes when the weather is very fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the ships, and the ships looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signaled to each other some secret message of their own."

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

Alfred North Whitehead wrote a groundbreaking book titled Science and the Modern World, published in 1925. He wrote it during the same cultural moment in which many literary modernists—figures like Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein—were also grappling with the upheavals of modernity. Like Whitehead, they were responding to the rapidly changing conditions of the early 20th century: war, industrialization, technological transformation, the collapse of inherited certainties, and the fragmentation of traditional values and forms.

Whitehead addressed these challenges through the lens of science and philosophy, exploring how scientific revolutions had reshaped humanity’s understanding of nature, order, and experience. The literary modernists, in their own way, were engaged in a parallel endeavor—reimagining language, selfhood, and narrative form in light of similar disruptions.

We do well to explore what might have emerged had Whitehead turned his philosophical attention to literature, producing a companion volume titled Literary Modernism and the Modern World. While Whitehead never wrote such a book, the themes that animate his process philosophy—fluidity, becoming, multiplicity, creativity, novelty, the problem of evil, tragic beauty, the momentariness of experience, the reality of unconscious experience, the givenness of the past. the openness of the future, and the search for new forms of order—resonate deeply with the literary experiments of the modernist writers. The reflections that follow are written in the spirit of such a speculative volume, tracing the shared mood and metaphysical intuitions of both traditions and considering how the literary modernists, like Whitehead himself, sought to reimagine the human condition in a fractured yet still-becoming world.

What is Literary Modernism?

A Scholarly Discussion
offered by BBC's In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss literary modernism. In James Joyce’s Ulysses he writes, “Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man may lay down his wife for a friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius Professor of French letters to the University of Oxtail”. It is profane, it gets the Bible wrong on purpose, it nods in the direction of Nietzsche and it doesn’t quite seem to make sense - it must be modernism! The literary movement that embraced Joyce, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and many others in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Modernism claimed to be revolutionary, and has been accused of being wilfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rites of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movements defining features, and do the questions that exercised the genre at the start of the twentieth century have relevance to us at the beginning of the twenty-first?

With John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Laura Marcus, Reader in English at the University of Sussex; Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

Literary Modernism & the Modern World

Based on the Podcast

Literary Modernism is a movement of the 20th century represented by figures such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka. As discussed by scholars in the BBC podcast featured on this page, Modernism can be understood in multiple ways: as a historical period, as a constellation of key authors, and as a set of thematic concerns and formal innovations.

It is best imagined not as a single stream but as a river delta or sprawling nighttime city with multiple neighborhoods—branching, fluid, and diverse. The movement contains overlapping and sometimes contradictory themes: a suspicion of the crowd alongside a reclaiming of the ordinary; a return to myth and antiquity alongside avant-garde experimentation. Different modernist writers draw from different channels of the delta, or find themselves in different city districts, each illuminated by a distinct kind of light. What is important about this metaphor, especially in the 21st century, is that many of its themes remain visible in our own cultural waters.

Below I offer a summary and amplification of literary modernism as presented by three BBC scholars in the podcast: John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University; Laura Marcus, Reader in English at the University of Sussex; Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Then I suggest that the currents of such modernism continue in our times in what I call the Populist Reaction, the Spirit of Techno-Adventurism, and what seems to me a third and better alternative: The Spirit of Process Theology.

As a Historical Period

Modernism in literature is typically situated between the 1890s and the late 1920s, though its roots reach further back and its influence extends well into the mid-20th century. This was a time of profound and disorienting change—marked by industrialization, urbanization, global conflict, and the rise of new technologies and media. The trauma of World War I shattered illusions of progress, and the pace of life accelerated. Modernist literature emerged from this turbulence, reflecting a deep rupture with the past and a search for new modes of expression.

Through Its Key Figures

Modernism is not defined by a single voice, but by a chorus of distinct and often dissonant ones. Major authors include:

James Joyce (Ulysses, Dubliners)
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway)
T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Ezra Pound (The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley)
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time)
Franz Kafka (The Trial, The Metamorphosis)
Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons, Three Lives)
William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying)

Other significant voices include Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W.B. Yeats. Each contributed a unique aesthetic and philosophical approach, yet all responded to a shared sense of rupture and reinvention.

As a Cluster of Themes

Thematically, understood as a cluster of themes, literary modernism can be imagined on the analogy of a vast and electric city at night. The city if evolving through time, and people evolve with it. But it does not unfold along a single avenue, nor shine from a single source. Instead, it sprawls like a living map of tangled streets, neighborhoods, and shifting skylines. From every corner, a different kind of light shines—sometimes harsh, sometimes dim, sometimes brilliant with possibility.

Each of the ten themes of modernism is akin to a distinctive district of light, glowing with its own emotional and aesthetic atmosphere. Writers wander this city in their own ways. Some stay rooted in a single district, returning again and again. Others drift across boundaries, their works shaped by multiple illuminations. No writer sees the whole city, but each creates from the lights they follow.

Ten key themes help define the spirit and practice of literary modernism. These are not rigid doctrines but recurring motifs—sometimes in tension with one another, sometimes overlapping.

Fragmentation and the Breakdown of Order (Be Honest)
Modernist works often depict a world that feels fractured and incoherent. Traditional plots, fixed moralities, and stable identities dissolve. Novels and poems mirror the shattered institutions and cultural disarray of the early 20th century—reflecting the collapse of old frameworks and the dissonance of new realities.

Skepticism and the Collapse of Certainty (Be Hesitant)
Modernism harbors a deep suspicion of inherited truths—whether religious, moral, or scientific. Grand narratives give way to ambiguity. The modernist writer often dramatizes uncertainty, presenting knowledge as flickering and selfhood as unstable. Clarity is replaced by contradiction; resolution, by open-endedness.

Loss of a Singular Self (Accept the Fleeting)
Rather than a unified and continuous identity, the self appears in modernist literature as fragmented, impressionistic, and shaped by fleeting perceptions. Time becomes nonlinear. Inner life unfolds in flashes and fragments, often disconnected from coherent external narratives.

Acceleration, Flux, and the Shifting Ground of Experience (Accept Change)
Modernist writers responded to the speed of modern life—the rapid emergence of cars, phones, films, and cities—with forms that reflected flux: stream of consciousness, montage, juxtaposition. Characters no longer inhabit fixed worlds but are swept along in the current of change.

Cosmopolitan Urban Culture (Embrace Diversity)
Modernism was a cosmopolitan affair. Writers read widely across cultures and disciplines, integrating influences from Eastern religions, African oral traditions, European philosophy, and modern science. Cities like Paris and New York became crucibles of hybrid creation and intellectual ferment.

Hybridity, Juxtaposition, and the Logic of Collage (Mix up Styles)
Modernist literature often refuses the purity of genre, tone, or voice. High and low, poetic and prosaic, archaic and slangy, sacred and profane—all are layered side by side. A single text may shift from epic grandeur to domestic minutiae, from lyric beauty to journalistic bluntness. This stylistic collage reflects a world where coherence has been shattered—and where art must mirror the disorder to remain honest. The result is often dazzling, dizzying, or disorienting.

Trauma and Violence (Reveal the Cracks)
Beneath its stylistic brilliance and psychological introspection, modernism is haunted by violence, empire, and catastrophe. The breakdown of form and meaning is not only internal—it reflects wars, genocides, colonial atrocities, and systemic exploitation. Sometimes these forces are named directly, as in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; other times they flicker beneath the surface, as in Virginia Woolf’s reflections on war or Jean Rhys’s evocations of colonial dislocation.

Innovation, Indeterminacy, and the Avant-Garde (Make it New)
Modernism thrives on aesthetic experimentation. Influenced by avant-garde movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Cubism, modernist writers disrupted syntax, invented new forms, and embraced indeterminacy. They sought not to mirror reality, but to remake it.

Elitism and Deliberate Obscurity (Make it Difficult)
Many modernist texts embrace difficulty as a virtue—deliberately challenging conventional taste and mass appeal. Obscure references, fragmented narration, and formal opacity created a barrier between high art and popular culture. For some, this fostered innovation; for others, exclusion.

Myth and the Pre-Modern Past (Think Mythically)
While breaking with tradition, modernists also reached backward—invoking ancient myths, religious symbolism, and premodern narratives. Myths became scaffolding amid chaos, offering continuity in a fractured world. Importantly, modernist writers drew from global traditions, not only Western ones.

Everyday Life as Serious Art (Find the Sacred in the Ordinary)
Despite its abstraction, modernism also turned to the small and mundane—moments of domestic life, street scenes, daily routines—as worthy of deep artistic exploration. In Woolf, Joyce, and Proust, the inner world of thought and memory unfolds against the quiet backdrop of ordinary things.

Dreams, Desires, and the Depths Beneath Thought (Recognize the Unconscious)
Modernist literature was shaped by the rise of psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud, who argued that much of human behavior is driven not by reason, but by unconscious desires, memories, and anxieties. Beneath the surface of rational thought lie dreams, fears, traumas, and forbidden impulses—forces that often contradict the public self. This influence is palpable in modernist form: stream of consciousness, dream sequences, free association, and sudden eruptions of irrationality. The modernist text often mimics the inner workings of the psyche, revealing layers of meaning that cannot be easily explained. Characters are not coherent agents but sites of psychic tension, where past and present, conscious and unconscious, collide.

Suspicion of Mass Culture and of Democracy (Don't Fall into a Herd Mentality)
While modernism often celebrates aesthetic innovation and cosmopolitan diversity, it also harbors deep anxieties about mass society. Many writers viewed the rise of democracy, consumer culture, and popular entertainment as a threat to artistic integrity, intellectual depth, and individual authenticity. The crowd was seen as a force of conformity, distraction, or even vulgarity—capable of overwhelming subtlety and meaning with spectacle and sensation.

In some cases, this suspicion of the masses extended beyond aesthetics into political thought. Ezra Pound, for example, openly supported Italian fascism, seeing it as a bulwark against the mediocrity and chaos of democratic capitalism. T.S. Eliot, though less politically overt, expressed a desire for cultural order rooted in hierarchy, tradition, and aristocratic restraint—revealing a discomfort with democratic pluralism. For such figures, the modernist withdrawal into difficult, elite literature was not only a stylistic decision but a political stance: a resistance to the leveling tendencies of modern democratic life.

A Legacy of Restless Experimentation

Together, these themes—thirteen in all—reflect a cultural mood at once disillusioned and visionary: haunted by fragmentation, loss, and historical trauma, yet determined to search for new forms of beauty, coherence, and depth. Literary modernism did not merely describe the modern condition—it sought to reform the very conditions of perception, to invent new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling. Its legacy is one of restless experimentation, aesthetic daring, and intellectual courage.

In our time, we encounter many of these same themes in new and evolving cultural contexts. The disintegration of shared narratives, the questioning of identity, the proliferation of hybrid forms, and the return to mythic or unconscious depths—these are not confined to the early 20th century. In literature, film, digital media, and visual art, the spirit of modernism remains contemporary, not as a fixed style but as an ongoing sensibility. It persists as a deep intuition: that the world is broken in ways we cannot ignore—and that art, at its most courageous, must meet that brokenness with honesty, complexity, and invention.

Three responses to these modernist sensibilities are readily apparent in our time—each offering a different reaction to the fragmentation, uncertainty, and innovation that modernism helped articulate.

The Populist Reaction

First, there is populism, which seeks a return to tradition, stability, and familiar identities. It often positions itself against the complexity and cosmopolitanism of modernist and postmodernist art, favoring clarity, rootedness, and shared cultural narratives. Populism reacts to the disorientation of modern life by invoking the authority of the past—whether religious, national, or moral—and promising restoration.

The Spirit of Techno-Futurism

Second, we see a kind of technocratic adventurism, which embraces novelty and innovation, but with a focus on efficiency, control, and mastery. This response thrives in the realms of artificial intelligence, data science, and algorithmic culture. It shares modernism’s fascination with the new and the future but tends to marginalize the emotional, existential, and aesthetic dimensions of experience in favor of optimization, scalability, and predictive modeling.

The Spirit of Process Philosophy

Third, and what I will call—however provisionally—process-relational thinking, offers a more integrative and humane response. Building upon the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, it affirms many modernist insights—fragmentation, multiplicity, the unconscious, and becoming—while emphasizing relationality, creativity, and the inherent value of experience. It sees the self not as a fixed substance but as a moment of unfolding process, shaped by the world and shaping it in return. Rather than fleeing from uncertainty or trying to master it, process-relational thinking invites us to dwell within it—with empathy, imagination, and care.

It also invites us to find the sacred in the ordinary—to attend to the subtle depth of everyday moments and the vibratory texture of lived experience. It recognizes the enduring power of mythical thinking, not as superstition or nostalgia, but as a complement to scientific and rational modes of thought—a way of holding meaning, pattern, and cosmic resonance. Where populism clings to the past and technocracy seeks control, process-relational thought opens space for trust, improvisation, and beauty in a world still becoming.

In this way, process-relational thinking can be seen as a living heir to the modernist experiment—one that honors the cracks without being defined by them. It encourages us to be honest about the fractures in our world, in our histories, and in ourselves, while also affirming the possibility of transformation. It calls us not to retreat into nostalgia or abstraction, but to participate in the ongoing creation of a new and better world—one rooted in relationship, open to beauty, and alive to the sacredness of becoming. If literary modernism shattered the old mirrors, process-relational thought gathers the shards—not to restore what was, but to refract what might be.

A key aspect of process philosophy's social aspiration is the vision of fostering ecological civilizations around the world. These civilizations are built upon local communities, both rural and urban, that prioritize creativity, compassion, participation, humane treatment of animals, and environmental sustainability, ensuring no one is left behind. Importantly, this vision will, for the most part, be brought to life not through the technical study of Whitehead's philosophy in universities—where it remains a niche discipline—but rather through the influence of artists, such as musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers, as well as locally engaged citizens who embrace its general ideas. In this way, the mood of process philosophy can permeate culture, much like the Enlightenment spirit once did, guiding societies toward inclusive and sustainable futures.

Interestingly, the process tradition, understood as a mood, does affirm certain aspects of both populism and techno-futurism. In terms of populism, it emphasizes the importance of cultural roots and the role of local communities, grounded in tradition, in creating a better world. This reflects a populist spirit that values community and belonging, while avoiding the authoritarian tendencies that can sometimes accompany populism. As for techno-futurism, the process movement is open to a sense of adventure that includes exploring outer space and developing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, for constructive purposes. In this way, the process movement builds upon and harmonizes elements of these two streams, while also drawing from the currents of literary modernism.

But it integrates these streams and adds something new that was not present in many literary modernists - perhaps with the powerful exception of Virginia Woolf. In her book Virginia Woolf as a Process-Oriented Thinker, Veronika Krajíčková makes a strong case that Woolf and Whitehead resemble one another in many ways. Her book bridges the gap between the cosmological and phenomenological sides of Whitehead, showing, with the help of Virginia Woolf, how the cosmological ideas are indeed relevant to human experience. It also recognizes and builds upon the side of Whitehead that is experimental and exploratory, not dogmatic or overly rigid.

Along the way her book develops a Whiteheadian approach to literary criticism or, at least, a Whiteheadian approach to literature. And it does so by showing how literature itself can deepen and enliven what otherwise might remain rarified abstractions even if important and perhaps even true: abstractions such as "all living beings have intrinsic value" and "everything is interconnected" and "there are no isolated subjects" and "we live in an intersubjective universe." Such abstractions are ineffective unless concretized in stories and metaphors which bring big ideas down to earth and into the heart. They not simply illustrations of more general truths, they are carriers of truths in their own right. In some respects they are more true than the abstractions they are meant to illuminate. They are, to again use Whitehead's phrase, "lures for feeling."

It is arguable that the kind of modernist literature with a Whiteheadian twist, needed in our time, already exists in writers such as Woolf and others. We can return to the modernist past in order to find our way into a constructively postmodern future.

Of course, much of what I have said has been aspirational. The world that we find today is not the world of ecological civilizations or process thinking. It is a world that, for many, is in dire need of new vision. The literary modernists sensed that they lived in such a world as well. They were courageous enough to experiment with new options, given the realities of fragmentation they faced. The calling today for us is to be equally experimental and grateful to their legacy.