Lukács and Muktibodh on Modernismin the Twentieth Century

Ideas of modernism had a considerable influence on literary writers in both western and eastern parts of the world in the twentieth century. Springing from Europe modernism explained the crisis faced by people during the two world wars. It expressed their helplessness in the wake of bloodshed, violence and deaths exhibiting eventually their loss of faith in human endeavour. Writers expressed life as absurd and dilemma-ridden. There was recourse to the self as it were; an inwardness to the complete exclusion of the outer world. Finding essence in life was an unnecessary if not meaningless exercise for modernists who believed that the modern world had come to a halt and turned into a wasteland.