ABSTRACT
The modernist period, or ‘era’ as it has been called, straddles in its ‘high’ phase at least two decades of radical change (1910-30) during which many of the social values and aesthetic practices of the ‘long’ nineteenth century are left behind. Historically it includes the years of the Great War (1914-18) and, in Britain, post-war changes in the laws relating to education, women and public life, employment and housing, as well as the effects of economic recession. A period of extensive social and political change, it is marked also by diverse attempts in art and literature to understand, analyse and re-present the modern; as poet and critic Ezra Pound said, the task of the artist was to ‘make it new’.
