Utopia
...or these; but it is first of all a word; one which exists along side cognate words. Modernism was first used in the early eighteen century simply to denote trends, characteristics of modern times, while in the nineteenth century it¡¦s meaning encompassed sympathy with modern options, styles or expressions. In the later part of the nineteenth century Modernism referred to progressive trends in the Catholic Church. In literature it surfaced in Thomas Hardy¡¦s Tess of the d¡¦urbervilles (1891), to denote what he called a general and unwelcomed creeping industrial ¡§ ache of modernism¡¨.
Modernism, as an international art term covers the many avant-garde styles and movements that proliferated under the names of Expressionism, Imagism, Surrealism, Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Formalism and in writing, if not painting, Impressionism. It forbears were Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche; its intellectual guru was Freud.
Typical aspects of modernist writing are radical aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic rather than chronological form, self-conscious reflexiveness, sceptism towards the idea of a central subject and a sustained inquiry into the uncertainty of reality. Modernism can be taken as a response by artists and writers to several things, including industrialisation, urban society, war, technological change and new philosophical ideas.
Technological changes meant that modernism was an art of a rapidly transforming world of industrial development, mechanisation, urbanisation, secularisation and mass forms of social interaction. In fiction new writers spearheaded a rejection of several of the fundamentals of classical realism.
This rejection of classical realism and the technological changes in modernism is effectively reflected in one of its powerful aspect called Science Fiction o a special literary genre, different from other imaginative...
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