Questioning Periodization in Literary Studies: Romantic forms from John Henry Newman to Irish Modernism

This article contends that the revolutionary forms we encounter in Modernist writing owe to «The New» as much as to some of their predecessors, among them John Henry Newman. Its purpose is therefore that of mitigating the current historicistic perspectives on Modernism, by retracing a pattern of continuity that goes from Romanticism to Mo- dernism, both in terms of idealism as its philoso- phical premise, and in terms of formal experimen- tation, expressed through the esthetic of the frag- ment and through a renegotiation of realism. To do so, it will be looking at John Henry Newman as the ideological center of these philosophical and esthetic developments, while also touching on the influence of Newman’s vision on Decadence and Irish Modernism.