ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The Contemporaneity of Modernism stems from the conviction that this is one of the most significant and productive questions for those interested in contemporary cultural and literary production, as well as for those interested in the history, ontology, and function of modernism. The contemporaneity of modernism is thus not merely a matter of the retro or of the nostalgia mode that has long been associated with postmodernism. Contemporaneity is a relation to the present that does not simply live the now but that interrogates the present as history, a relationship, therefore, of being simultaneously with and without, in and out of time. David Cunningham's contribution, Time, Modernism, and the Contemporaneity of Realism, shows that there is much to be gained from historicizing the recently reinvigorated literary and critical interest in the relationship between realism and modernism.
