Between 1914 and 1937, American pulp magazines tended to package a century’s worth of artistic eras on the same newsstand. Even in the Machine Age, pulps carried the DNA of 19th-century Romanticism in tales of idealized heroes, heightened emotion, and exotic backdrops, as in the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Realism and the Victorian Age persisted in detective stories, domestic dramas, and historical serials built on detailed observation and procedural plotting. The Belle Époque returned in stylish serials of gentleman thieves, masked avengers, and urban glamour. But Modernism also emerged, in H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and existential alienation, Metropolis’s dystopian sci-fi, and Dashiell Hammett’s moral ambiguity, terse stripped-down prose, and cynical urban realism, expressed through the hardboiled Sam Spade.
| Era Modernist Era (1914 – 1937) |
| Alternative Names Elite Modernism, Radium Age (1904-1933), Expressionism, Futurism, Vitalism |
| Total Entries 242 |
| Articles Modernism – Wikipedia Scorched Earth: Expressions of Modernity in Dashiell Hammett’s Pulp Fiction – Anna P. Kelly via Harvard.edu H. P. Lovecraft and the Modernist Grotesque – Sean Elliot Martin via Duquesne.edu |
| Description Between 1914 and 1937, American pulp magazines tended to package a century’s worth of artistic eras on the same newsstand. Even in the Machine Age, pulps carried the DNA of 19th-century Romanticism in tales of idealized heroes, heightened emotion, and exotic backdrops, as in the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Realism and the Victorian Age persisted in detective stories, domestic dramas, and historical serials built on detailed observation and procedural plotting. The Belle Époque returned in stylish serials of gentleman thieves, masked avengers, and urban glamour. But Modernism also emerged, in H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and existential alienation, Metropolis’s dystopian sci-fi, and Dashiell Hammett’s moral ambiguity, terse stripped-down prose, and cynical urban realism, expressed through the hardboiled Sam Spade.
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, performing arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in a “growing alienation” from prevailing “morality, optimism, and convention” and a desire to change how “human beings in a society interact and live together”. The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for newer means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, musical atonality and twelve-tonality, modern dance, modernist architecture, and urban planning. Modernism took a critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism. The movement also rejected the concept of absolute originality — the idea of “Creatio ex nihilo” creation out of nothing — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism, replacing it with techniques of collage, reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody. Another feature of modernism was reflexivity about artistic and social convention, which led to experimentation highlighting how works of art are made as well as the material from which they are created. Debate about the timeline of modernism continues, with some scholars arguing that it evolved into late modernism or high modernism… ~ Modernism – Wikipedia
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