What are the fundemental values of modernism?

Answer 1

Modernism covers a large number of writers, and a large geographical area (most of the innovative writers from both Europe and the US who established themselves later than about 1890 will come under the heading 'Modernist' for at least some of their output); there isn't really any single 'fundamental' value of modernism, it is more a general way of approaching writing.

That said:

1) almost all 'modernist' writers prefer to use natural language over literary forms (traditionalist writers as late as 1900 were still using 'thee', 'goeth', 'where'er', 'alas' in poetry - modernists try to write the way people actually talk: 'you', 'goes', 'wherever')

2) similarly, a modernist usually writes about the world he knows, not some old-fashioned fantasy world (traditionalist Alfred Dumas wrote about musketeers who rode around on steeds and fought with swords; modernist Emile Zola wrote about women who were married to rich factory-owners, and committed adultery)

3) as modernism takes hold (mainly after World War I) you increasingly see modernist authors having strong political or social ideas. Traditional authors like Dumas or Balzac were mainly interested in producing books which would sell well, and that the audience would enjoy reading. Modernist writers were more likely to want to write books that 'made people think'. Many early modernist writers were sympathetic to Fascism (Yeats, Pound, Marinetti), later there were more Socialist modernists (Brecht, Dos Passos). There was no special political orientation that made you a modernist, but modernists were much more likely to have political messages in their work than more traditional writers.