The Golden Bough (1890-1915) (Drabble 658). Drabble maintains that a sense of cultural relativism pervaded modernist writing, as did an awareness of the irrational and the workings of the unconscious mind. Technically, she states, modernism was marked by an experimentalism that rejected the traditional framework of narration, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose. Instead, modernist writers favored stream of consciousness presentations of personality and depended upon the poetic image as the essential vehicle of 'sthetic communication and myth as a characteristic structural principle (Drabble 658).
Thus she argues, as does Merriam Webster, that modernist literature is a literature of discontinuity, both historically and 'sthetically. Historically, she argues, because the literature reflects discontinuity in its rejection of and adversarial stance toward the procedures and values of the immediate past. As did Abrams, Drabble argues that despite the diversity of its manifestations, modernist literature was recognized as repr
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