The main task of this article is to describe the new situation of modernist studies at the turn of the 20th century and an attempt to position this description in a broader history of criticism of modernism in art. The transformations in the studies into modernist literature have been characterized here in three aspects: expanding the time frame (going beyond the basic period of modernism from the end of the 19th c. until 1930s), spatial dimension (abandonment of a privileged position of research into West European and American modernism in favour of a transnational perspective) and vertical dimension (connected with the necessity to rethink the relationship high art-low art, and also the influence of mass media upon modernist literature)
