The twentieth century saw the dawn of a realisation that the world comprises not one reality but a variety of shifting subjectivities, that the old assurances of linear history and theology can no longer hold true in the face of mass production (the technologisation of popular culture) and mass destruction (two world wars). The realisation that this new world required a new way of telling it underlies Modernism as a literary and cultural movement. From the art of Picasso to the music of Stravinsky, to the work of literary modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, there emerges a common thread: a "high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representation towards style, technique, and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life".¹