NATIONALISM

Nationalism, defined as devotion to one's nation or the striving after the unity, independence or interests of a nation, is not a term that readily springs to mind in relation to the study of modernism. Nationalism is more readily associated with nineteenth-century Romanticism, while COSMOPOLITANISM seems more accurately to describe the interactive, aesthetic and intellectual creativity of European cities in the early decades of the twentieth century where painters, sculptors, architects, musicians and writers from a variety of national roots exchanged innovatory ideas and EXPERIMENTAL forms. Paris was the outstanding centre for the visual arts, especially in the pre-1914 period, drawing to the METROPOLIS artists from the French provinces as well as from other countries. German cities such as Dresden and Munich also provided a place of cosmopolitan exchange and the German language itself became a conductor of new ideas in Central Europe as the late-nineteenth-century railway system enabled easy travel between cities such as Berlin, Budapest, Munich, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw. In Anglophone literary modernism, this seeming replacement of national concerns by cosmopolitan exchange was advanced by the development of academic criticism in the post-World war II period, especially by the influential NEW CRITICISM led by Americans Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Based on critical principles derived from the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and from the criticism of Eliot, I. A. Richards and William Empson, New Criticism developed an approach to poetry with an emphasis on impersonality, formal innovation and dislocation of language: an approach which could not readily accommodate hors texte references such as nationalism.

In contrast, nationalism and modernism have in recent years been brought into communication with each other (although not without tensions) in the wake of the late twentieth-century tide of cultural THEORY where ideological and postcolonial studies in particular encouraged understanding that a text – literary, visual or musical – might be of interest for more than its formal qualities and that the ‘messages’ it communicated could include the national. This has resulted in a widening of perceptions in modernist studies, bringing to attention what might be categorised as alternative modernisms emanating from national peripheries as opposed to cosmopolitan centres, or arising in response to specific social or national developmental situations (see also GLOBAL MODERNISMS).