Modernist literature is the general name of many literary schools that appeared in the 1980s from 65438 to 2009 and prevailed in Europe and America from the 1920s to the 1970s. Including expressionism, stream-of-consciousness novels, absurd dramas, magical realism and other schools. Metamorphosis, Spots on the Wall, Waiting for Godot (excerpt) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (excerpt) are the representative works of the above schools respectively. Take the American poet E Pound as an example. People think that the literature of five or six hundred years after the Middle Ages can be called modernism. American critic edmund wilson took 1870 as the starting point of modernist literature in his masterpiece Castle of Alkell Searle. American critic Cyril Connolly and others think that 1880 should be the starting point of modernism. Richard Alba and Richard Faidel Johnson, editors of Modern Tradition and experts on Joyce and Ye Zhi, think that the theoretical limit of the origin of modernism is more reasonable at 1900. However, most experts who study western modernist literature at home and abroad support brandeis, a famous Danish critic, and think that 1890 is the real beginning of modernism. Mr. Ai Kejia, a famous expert on foreign literature research in China, said: "I think it is best to choose a time that is a compromise for them-1890 as the upper limit of modernist literature." However, we believe that the official start time of western modernist literature should be 1857, which is the year when Baudelaire's first typical symbolic poem "Flowers of Evil" came out. We say this because: First, Flower of Evil is the first typical symbolic work, and it is also the first work that completely breaks through the traditional poetic art and finds another way. Its appearance marks the rise of symbolism and the formal appearance of modernist literature. 2. The Flower of Evil is the general source of various modernist literary schools and works that appeared in 100 years later, and its influence and traces can be seen in most modernist works. 3. The Flower of Evil has the basic characteristics of modernist literature, and it is a typical modernist literary work in itself. On the subject matter, modernist literature tries to explore the author's own inner world. The Flower of Evil is the first time to implement a great change in brushwork, which goes deep into the poet's heart and describes the evil of society and human nature as the object of artistic beauty. In terms of artistic skills, modernists widely use hints, symbols, contrasts and images to explore the inner mysteries of characters, which is the main artistic feature of Flowers of Evil. The poet Baudelaire developed the Swedish mystic philosopher Robert Jeffrey Sternberg's "Correspondence Theory", and regarded garden plants as a "symbolic forest" to convey information to people, and thought that external things and people's office world could interact and fit each other. Poets can use vivid images to hint at the subtle world inside. It is this method that emphasizes the expression of material images through hints, contrast, rendering, association and other channels that later became the basic method of symbolic poetry and the whole modernist literature. Fourthly, after Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, Wei Erlun's The Art of Poetry (1884), Rambo's Drunk Boat (187 1) and Malamei's Afternoon of the Faun appeared in 1890. Before 1898, all these poets died. So 1890 is the end of early symbolism, not the beginning. From the above facts, we can clearly see that the period from 1857 to 1898 is a complete process of the rise and fall of symbolism in the early stage. This 40-year history is the general source of the whole western modernist literature. It is completely reasonable to delimit the upper limit of modernist literary history to 1857.
Modernist literary trend of thought itself has a very complicated background. Strictly speaking, modernism is not a genre, but a literary trend of thought (including art, music, drama and architecture, etc. ) which combines many schools of modernist creative techniques.