Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In Modernist Patterns, Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith.
By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, Modernist Patterns expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.