Modernism is a deceptively simple name for the diversity of cultural responses, mainly in Western Europe and the United States, to the complex process of historical change encapsulated in the term modernity. ‘Modernity’, in turn, indicates an array of scientific, technological and economic innovations as well as major shifts in the experience of life – felt either as advance and improvement or loss and disturbance – that we may conveniently date from the late Renaissance. The term modernity connotes leaps and bounds in knowledge, material progress and prospects for social harmony (a ‘higher civilization’) but also encompasses a growing sense, especially among western elites, that the enterprise of humanity threatens to exceed human control and lead instead into chaos, exploitation, mass brutality and destruction of an unprecedented scope (‘the horror’, to borrow Joseph Conrad’s word). It is this second vector of modernity – the image of humankind stripped of its meliorist hopes and caught in the throes of degeneration, atavism, crises of individual subjectivity and collective faith – that T. S. Eliot evokes in referring to the ‘immense panorama of futility and anarchy’ confronting persons from all walks of life in the wake of the Great War of 1914–18. Significantly, Eliot’s cry of alarm appears in his testimonial to James Joyce’s monumental Ulysses, the question of the hour being just what Art – and particularly new modes of literature – might do to repair the cultural damage and restore a sense of order, purpose and meaning.