Modernism is a succinct but authoritative analysis of the most important literary innovations of the last hundred years. Peter Childs explains the pan-European origins of the radical literary changes that occurred in the novel, poetry and drama, as well as the many revolutions in art, film and aesthetic theory. This highly readable book explains the key terminology of the subject; orients the reader in terms of modernism's basic aspects; explores the literary shifts from realism to modernism to postmodernism; analyzes to modernist elements in the texts of writers such as Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Yeats, Ford, Eliot, Richardson, Conrad, Beckett; explains the impetus that Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure and Einstein gave to experimental writers at the turn of the century.