ABSTRACT
Romance – ‘In medieval literature, a verse narrative [recounts] the marvellous adventures of a chivalric hero. ... In modern literature, i.e., from the latter part of the 18th through the 19th centuries, a romance is a work of prose fiction in which the scenes and incidents are more or less removed from common life and are surrounded by a halo of mystery, an atmosphere of strangeness and adventure.’ (The Reader’s Encyclopedia, William Rose Benét)
Realism – ‘A mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or “reflecting” faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description (i.e. verisimilitude) and to a more general attitude
that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of romance in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life.’ (Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Chris Baldick)
Modernism – ‘Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenburg calls “the tradition of the new”. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. … We can dispute about when it starts (French symbolism; decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes “paleo-modernism” and “neo-modernism” and hence a degree of continuity through to post-war art). We can regard it as a time-bound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking technical innovation, emphasize spatial or “fugal” as opposed to chronological form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a certain “dehumanization of art.”’ (Malcolm Bradbury in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, Second Edition, ed. Peter Childs and Roger Fowler)
Postmodernism – ‘The new avant-garde literature (neo-modernist or postmodernist) partly carried modernism further, partly reacted against it – for example against its ideology and its historical orientation. What it consistently pretended to be (and sometimes actually was) was new. Determinedly self-destructive, it attempted to cut off its branch of the past, by proposing entirely new methods, a fresh “syllabus” or canon of authors (Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Proust) and a new register of allusions.’ (A History of English Literature, Alastair Fowler)
If the idea that identity exists through difference is taken as a starting point, then Modernism can begin to be understood in terms of possible distinctions from other literary forms. Modernism is, for
example, frequently distinguished from realism, the dominant mode of the novel from its inception in Britain in the eighteenth century with the rise of bourgeois capitalism to the present day. According to many critics, realism is characterised by its attempt to offer up a mirror to the world, thus disavowing its own culturally conditioned processes and ideological stylistic assumptions. Modelled on prose forms such as historiography and journalism, realist writing thus often presents itself as transparently representative of the author’s society and so features characters, language, and a spatial-temporal setting familiar to its contemporary readers. Most importantly for a debate of literary history, it is apparent that the hegemony of realism as the dominant form of the novel was challenged by writers throughout the twentieth century as alternative ways of representing reality and the world were presented by Modernists and then postmodernists. Realism itself was once a new, innovative form of writing, with authors such as Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and Samuel Richardson (1690-1761) providing a different template for fiction from the previously dominant mode of prose writing, the Romance, which was parodied in one of the very first novels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-15), and survives in Gothic and fantasy fiction. To the present day, realism remains the primary favoured style for most novelists, but many avant-garde, innovative, and radical writers have sought to undermine its dominance. Very broadly speaking, the vast majority of attempts to offer alternative modes of representation from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century have at one time or another been termed Modernist, and this applies to literature, music, painting, film, and architecture (and to some works before and after this period). In poetry, Modernism is associated with moves to break from the iambic pentameter as the basic unit of verse, to introduce vers libre, symbolism, and other new forms of writing. In prose, it is associated with attempts to render human subjectivity in ways more real than realism: to represent consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunnelling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution and other terms that will be encountered later in the book. Modernist writers therefore struggled, in Ezra Pound’s brief phrase, to ‘make it new’, to modify if not overturn existing modes and subjects of representation, partly by pushing them towards the abstract or the
introspective, and to express the new sensibilities of their time: in a compressed, condensed, complex literature of the city, of industry and technology, war, machinery and speed, mass markets and communication, of internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist, and the flâneur.
