SOURCE: "Toward a Definition of 'Modernism,'" The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, Associated University Presses, 1987, pp. 32-44.

In the following essay, Gamache illuminates the origins and meaning of the term "Modernism " in both literary and nonliterary contexts.

Because the ambition to define modernism completely would be almost Miltonic, I will begin this study with an explanation of its limitations. By considering the history of the words modern and modernism and by adumbrating the cultural context that defines their literary usage, I intend to suggest several essential constituents of both literary and nonliterary modernism and to provide several examples of modernists whose lives and works manifest those constituents.

My initial intent was to clarify the uses of modernism and modernist to describe some twentieth-century writers and their works. I considered referring to four major figures—Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, and Lawrence—to represent what I think are the...