Arguably, no word maps the kind of cultural shifts in language that Raymond Williams (1976, 1983b) was documenting better than _modernism_. At its simplest, this is because of its roots in the word _modern_. Inevitably, what is modern at one time eventually becomes dated and of its time. So from the first recorded use of that root word in 1500, to the appearance of the word _modernism_ itself in 1737, to the fin de siècle, it was a shifting signifier, referring to the current present of any given period rather than a specific historical moment or movement (_Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_). There have been, then, many modernisms, at some level all suggesting “a sense of forward-looking contemporaneity” (Wilk 2006). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, a new set of understandings started to come into play, and eventually the meaning of _modernism_ became more fixed. It is now widely used to refer to a movement that was particularly active across Europe (including pre- and postrevolutionary Russia) and North America from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. This movement embraced all the arts and resulted in practitioners, critics, and philosophers turning away from classical and...