Introduction: Beyond the Novelty Effect

Literary history is no longer dominated by the model of the “tradition of innovation” and by the belief that literary changes can be explained with the help of the sole tension between old and new. The articles assembled here offer a detailed look at what happened during the Modernist period (the first half of the twentieth century), demonstrating that more complex mechanisms are at work, which in turns helps to make literary history understandable in more heterogeneous terms.