Modernism
A broad cultural movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that rejected established forms in art, literature, music, and architecture in favour of radical experimentation. In literature, modernist writers — including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and T. S. Eliot — broke from the conventions of realist fiction, abandoning omniscient narrators and linear plots in favour of stream of consciousness, multiple perspectives, and fragmented time. The movement was shaped by industrialisation, the catastrophe of World War One, and the new sciences of psychology and relativity, which together destabilised confidence in objective, rational accounts of the world.