What are some characteristics of the modernist movement and who are its major representatives?

The modernist movement developed in the first half of the
twentieth century, influenced by the impact of Freud's psychonanalysis and the shock of
the carnage of the First World War. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf
are usually cited as the major British modernists, while William Carlos Williams,
Hernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Dos Passos are considered American examples
of the movement.

As with all the labels that we apply to
literary movements, Modernism includes a wide variety of texts and tendencies. The
movement was far from homogeneous. However, a few common element also emerge such as the
importance of the human unconscious, a sense of fragmentation both in society and within
man's psyche, a constant effort to experiment with and innovate narrative techniques.
Modernism thus rejects linear, logical developments and the conventional chronological
expostion of events in favor of more complex structures that can better reproduce the
depths of the unconscious. One of the literary techniques that some modernists authors
adopted to this end was the stream of consciousness which strives to record the
apparently inconsequential flow of associations passing through a chacter's
mind.