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modernism  

Definition

  • Modernism can generally be defined as a broad movement or set of movements, primarily though not exclusively in the arts, that, responding to cultural, material, and political changes in the Western world, engendered new forms of cultural and artistic expression in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On the whole, modernist attitudes were those of revolt from traditional, Enlightenment (and, more recently, in Anglo-American contexts, “Victorian”) ways of viewing the world and expressing it through the arts, perhaps most pithily expressed in the poet Ezra Pound's dictum “Make it new!” World War I is generally viewed as the historical event that most profoundly gave rise to (or confirmed) disillusionment in the modern world order and in the orthodox and received ways of knowing that characterize modernist expression. [Source: Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia; Modernism]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/modernism

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