1. [n]  practices typical of contemporary life or thought
2. [n]  genre of art and literature that makes a self-conscious break with previous genres
3. [n]  the quality of being current or of the present; "a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village"

Modernism
`The Modern movement in the arts transformed consciousness and artistic form just as the energies of modernity--scientific, technological, philosophical, political--transformed for ever the nature, the speed, the sensation of human life, ` write the editors in their new Preface. This now classic survey explores the ideas, the groupings and the social tensions that shaped this transformation.

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1. \Mod"ern*ism\, n.
   Modern practice; a thing of recent date; esp., a modern usage
   or mode of expression.
   

2. \Mod"ern*ism\, n.
   Certain methods and tendencies which, in Biblical questions,
   apologetics, and the theory of dogma, in the endeavor to
   reconcile the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church with the
   conclusions of modern science, replace the authority of the
   church by purely subjective criteria; -- so called officially
   by Pope Pius X.