The semantics of “neo-” in German literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in German literature were emerging its major trends which should determine the specifics of literary development in following decades. One of the factors that defined the historical configuration of the literary situation were the dichotomous relations of conventional (traditional) and new (modernist) literature trends. In fact the confrontation of two paradigms of artistic awareness established the main vector of literary development in Germany in the 20th century. New literature, which announced itself in the early 1880s, was directed against the popular literature, devoid of relevance and artistic novelty, of the so called Establishment time (Grunderzeit). New modernist trends were emerging not only as rejection of the old and obsolete currents, but also as a result of confrontation of competing trends in those years. The main feature of German literary process at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries could be described as a multi-vector combination of different components of the artistic system, which manifested itself in the extreme heterogeneity of its structure, in the bizarre conjunction of aesthetic innovations with the reconceived past experience. The article attempts to identify the semantic features of the “updated” character of German literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, while forming the aesthetic frame of modernism.