PERHAPS THE LEAST DISPUTABLE STATEMENT that can be made about the broad period of literary modernism is that the notion of art was in flux. Indeed, the etymology of the term modernism can be traced back to the Latin modo, which means “now” or “the present,” and modernism therefore evinces “the evanescence of the now.” And since the moment of the present is ever changing, there are radically different practices throughout the period from roughly 1890 to 1940. Despite the wide range of artistic visions, the literature of the early twentieth century can be separated into distinct chronological segments based on aesthetic techniques, formal features, and sociopolitical events in history. In recent years, literary scholarship has increasingly differentiated between early, high, and late phases of modernism. Early modernism is often described as starting near the end of the nineteenth century and lasting until the end of the First World War. High modernism is frequently figured as the ephemeral period of cultural productivity that emerged after the First World War and continued until 1930 or so. Late modernism, for its part, is typically depicted as beginning with the economic downturn of the Great Depression and continuing to or through the Second World War.

Separating a larger cultural epoch into early, high, and late phases is a relatively common scholarly practice in some disciplines. Art history frequently employs a triadic model to describe art from historical periods such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, baroque, and romanticism. With regard to the history of European cathedrals, for example, Christopher Wilson writes that the term “high gothic” is a “construct of at best doubtful merit” due to the unintended but inescapable connotation of superiority from the adjective “high.” Yet despite strong theoretical reservations, Wilson still sees pragmatic reasons for preserving the phrase high gothic. Scholars use it widely to describe the dominant formal features visible in particular works of gothic architecture from 1195 to 1230, and it is thus “a convenient shorthand term.” For art historians, high gothic thus entails an identifiable style, a narrow time frame within a larger historical period, and a specific collection of “works,” in this case cathedrals.

These three criteria—formal features, historical phase, and individual works—are frequently used to identify the high phases of other cultural epochs as well.