At the beginning of the 20th century, in some big European countries, some novel schools appeared in various fields of literature and art, such as abstraction in painting, anti-metaphysics in music, anti-realism in sculpture, futurism in poetry, stream of consciousness in novels, expressionism in drama and so on. In the1920s, it gradually merged with the social landscape into modernism, or modernism. Its main characteristics are: opposing the classical art tradition, striving for novelty and originality in theme and technique, and being hysterical and crazy in spirit. What the writer tries to explore is not the external objective world, but the author's own poor and empty inner world. They rejected Balzac's critical realism and thought it was dull, monotonous and mechanical. They worship the psychoanalysis of Austrian pathologist Freud, advocate describing dreams and people's subconscious, and pursue the "mysterious and abstract kingdom" that people feel in an instant. Western scholars generally call this literary thought of anti-realism, arbitrary behavior and crazy self-expression of writers modernism.
Postmodernism is an artistic, social, cultural and philosophical trend of thought that occurred in Europe and America in the 1960s and was popular in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. Its essence is to abandon the basic premise of modernity and its normative content. In post-modern art, this abandonment is manifested in rejecting modernist art as an independent value to divide cultural fields, and rejecting modernist formal restriction principle and partisan principle. Its essence is anti-rationalism, moral cynicism and emotional hedonism of intellectuals.