Modernism developed in the late 19th and early 20th century as a response to the earlier Romanticism that had informed the Western artistic tradition. While Romanticism created romantic, dramatic, and heightened interpretations of the human experience, modernism sought to depict human life as realistically as possible. Major social and political upheaval such as organized labor, women’s rights, the technological revolution, and World War I prompted Western artists and authors to seek a new mode of expression and representation. Modernism was a revolutionary interpretation of the human experience, focusing on the detail of normal, everyday lives over social or moral themes, and making more space for female and other marginalized voices.

Modernism emphasizes human psychology as a primary lens of human consciousness. In the late 19th century, the psychological texts and theories of Sigmund Freud changed the way people understood their own minds. Modernists adapted psychology into a new form of literature that honored the psychological experience, making narratives that were concerned with the experiences and processes of consciousness, very often in the first-person. One major effect of this is that the first-person narrators of modernist works express self-reflective psychological and existential concerns, such as the meaning of life and the construction of their identity.