Literature in Pieces In previous eras, writers felt obligated to the literary rules and authors who had preceded them. With the onset of Modernism, however, established rules were breakable. Writers and many readers accepted poems and stories in shorter bursts, segments that did not obviously flow from one to the next, Rather than a unified oil painting, a Modernist work was more like a mosaic com posed of individual pieces. It required the viewer to organize the pieces into a meaningful picture.