High modernism  

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High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", like similar names designating intellectual and artistic eras such as "the high Middle Ages" or "the high Baroque", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed, consistent, or florid manifestation of modernism. The term is used in literature, criticism, music and the visual arts.

In one sense, "high modernism" is closely associated with anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott, who uses the phrase in a pejorative sense. Scott and his followers use the phrase with an implied criticism of modernism as austerely minimalist and excessively rationalist or bureaucratic, combined with a sense of hubris in its claims about the inevitability of progress, or its claim to embody progress.

The pejorative sense is usually absent when the term is used in reference to literature.