Patterns of literary transformation

Between 1800 and 1900 the dominant literary mode of romanticism, with its various transformations, moved in the direction of modernism, accompanied and sometimes assailed along the way by different kinds of realism. More paradoxically, over the same period literature tended to become ever more international, indeed cosmopolitan, even as self-consciously national literatures developed and asserted themselves with growing confidence in Ireland and in the United States, in Russia and in Scandinavia.