Contexts of change

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, to take a random example, indicates the challenges facing anyone undertaking a definitive and detailed account of modernism. According to the Dictionary’s author, J.A. Cuddon, modernism is: ‘A comprehensive but vague term for a movement (or tendency) [that] pertains to all the creative arts, especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.’ As he notes, it is a matter for debate as to whether modernism, ‘as an innovative and revivifying movement’, was essentially over by the late 1940s or persisted well beyond that period. The ‘vagueness’ of the term ‘modernism’ and of its definitions reflects the diversity of artists, works and ideas that it encompasses; and the implicit contradiction of Cuddon’s pairing of the adjectives ‘innovative’ and ‘revivifying’ is suggestive of modernism’s emphasis on both radical originality and engagement with (rather than uncomplicated rejection of) the past.