The term “Modernist literature” is often erroneously used to describe the trashy airport novels that populate the Target book aisle and sit front and center in Barnes & Noble. This misuse stems from the misconception that Modernist and Contemporary literature are the same thing, when really “Contemporary literature” refers to books published after 1945, while Modernism emerged in the late 19th century and ended in 1945. The literary period that preceded the Modernist age was, in a global sense, Romanticism, and in an Anglocentric sense, Victorianism; in England, the Romantic era lasted from 1800 to the 1830s and was replaced by the Victorian era, but elsewhere, the Romantic period lasted until the turn of the century (albeit with some Realist developments), at which point it was supplanted by Modernism. Understanding how popular literature evolved from an emotion-driven, syntactically-complex form into a passive, simple-syntax form in a matter of years is key to understanding Modernist (and thereby Contemporary) literature. 

In terms of content, Romantic literature is characterized by emotion, passion, individuality, and spirituality. In terms of structure, it’s notable for its long, complex sentences and advanced vocabulary. Shelley’s Frankenstein is a work of early Romantic literature, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter a mid-century example and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov a late-century piece. The style of Romantic literature can be summarized by a quotation from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” While five successive exclamatory sentences and phrases may seem excessive and even insufferable to us now, that dramatism was the intellectual food of the Romantic era. And Brontë’s use of complex syntax (or sentence structure) is also telling of the novel’s Romantic nature. 

In contrast, a famous quotation from the father of literary Modernism, Walt Whitman, goes, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Here, the syntax is simple, and the narrator’s voice is comically detached, amusedly passive. So how did we get from Brontë to Whitman? When I asked McGill University English lecturer and writer Curtis Brown this question, he gave me a two-part theory: Freud and advertising.

According to Brown, pre-Freudian society understood the human mind as having a single state of consciousness that held all memories, knowledge, and aspects of personality. This led Romanticist authors to make all parts of a character’s mental processes and feelings visible to the reader by using third-person narration and monologues to delve into characters’ psyches, as in Brontë’s passage above. Freud revolutionized literature by showing that the human mind comprises different levels of consciousness, meaning that we are oblivious to certain aspects of our own personalities and mental experiences and that these hidden aspects can be uncovered through psychoanalysis. This inclined authors to begin crafting intricate characters not by having them openly analyze themselves or having a third-person narrator analyze them but rather by forcing the reader themself to perform a level of character analysis. This meant a deviation from the Romantic tradition of deluges of dramatism and a shift toward Modernism’s dispassionate first-person narrators whose mental experiences are more shielded and thus worthy of analysis. 

As for the question of syntax, Brown claims that the advent of advertising played a major role. The first two decades of the 20th century saw the development of modern advertising, in which businesses had to very deliberately and precisely decide on select, few words to grab the attention of their audience. One 1910s advertisement for a corset reads, “REDUCE YOUR FLESH,” and one for weight treatment is labeled “FAT IS FATAL.” Another — this one from the American Radiator Company — depicts a mother and child below large, bold, yellow letters that say “Bar out Winter.” Advertising forced people selling a service to condense their messages into a few words that packed a persuasive punch and got straight to the point in order to maximize shortening attention spans. This applied to authors of the time as they were selling a service of their own — their books — and thus, Brown says, it helped transform literature into the simple-sentence form that is literary Modernism and whose plainness and clarity of voice can be found in the works of such writers as Ernest Hemingway (author of The Old Man and the Sea) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby). 

Though the Modernist age of literature is now dead, its impact lives on in Contemporary literature, and though critics may disparage literary Modernism for its directness and accessibility, it must be admired at least for its multilayered depth and willingness for experimentation. As Walt Whitman once said, “The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”