avant-garde

Definition 
A French term originally used to describe the vanguard of an army, adapted to art and literature to describe various movements in the 19th and 20th centuries that called for experimentation and repudiated the established conventions of their times. The term implies that true artists are ahead of their times, establishing new frontiers of thought and expression. In the 19th century, the Romantics and later the symbolist poets were avant-garde; in the 20th century, the avant-garde has included the proponents of imagism, projectivism and, more recently, language poetry. Often an avant-garde's criticism of prevailing forms of literature extends to a criticism of society as a whole—as, for example, the beat movement's objections to American culture in the 1950s.