Avant-garde literature is that corpus of texts that emerged under the premises that the avant-garde movement held in the first decades of the 20th century.. Basically, the criteria by which the avant-gardes were guided implied a rejection of established aesthetic norms while advocating experimentation and the search for art to reflect the changes that were glimpsed both socially and specifically culturally. From this perspective, it is correct to affirm that the fundamental features of these literatures were to have a character of great innovation and to orient themselves to topics that were not only traditionally considered as aesthetic, but bordering on the decadent.
This obsession with underdeveloped topics in the past can be explained by looking at the context in which these literary expressions arose. During the first decades of the 20th century, the world underwent one of the most vertiginous processes of change in history. In the first place, there was already a climate of some upheaval as a consequence of the inheritance of the industrial revolution. Second, there are events that affected the whole world both politically and socially. The First World War, the Russian Revolution, the economic crisis of the 1930s, were extremely difficult events to face and with enormous implications.
The most relevant experiences of avant-garde literature are: the surrealism, who, imbued with Freud's contributions, sought to capture the echoes of the unconscious through words using automatic writing; the expressionism, which sought to express the inner emotionality over an impartial description of the outside; and finally, the ultraism, which was a reaction to modernism and which tried to revitalize the role of metaphor and eliminate rhymes.
Beyond having written a chapter in the history of literature, the truth is that none of these movements could overcome the conjunctural and project itself in time, although its influence is undeniable.
