THE 20TH CENTURY

• The 20th century opened with great hope but also with
some apprehension, for the new century marked the final
approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was
entering upon an unprecedented era.
• A common conviction that science and technology would
transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such
transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be
replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation
of the human spirit.
• The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of
Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited
era had begun.
 George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena
for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of
political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the
function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family
and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation.

EDWARDIA Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the

N PERIOD
shortcomings of English social life.

The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or

modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension but by
bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse
of a whole civilization.
EDWARDIAN PERIOD

No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline

more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist
Henry James.

Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef

Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents),
shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of
a specific civilization than to human failings.
• Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it.

James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-century

realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be
peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties.
THE MODERNIST
REVOLUTION
From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of
innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in
anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not
just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era.

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an

end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the
Anglo-American Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their
ideals and the chaos of the present.

Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view
made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war.
THE MODERNIST
REVOLUTION
In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and
Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern
civilization—a civilization in his view only too eager to participate in the
mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of industrialization upon the
human psyche.

On the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another
American resident in London, in his most innovative poetry,
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922),
traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on the
evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the
spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence.
Modernism

A break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of
expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the
arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the
years following World War I.

In an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, and

advances in science and the social sciences (e.g., Freudian theory),
Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian
morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology,
philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of
expression.
 • The enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the
foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist
literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation.
• A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a
Modernism in seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a
sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images
literature and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring
the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.
• The publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a
landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. Dense,
lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the
life of three Dubliners through a technique known as
stream of consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence
structure and incorporates fragments of thought in an attempt to
capture the flow of characters’ mental processes.
 • Experimental or innovatory in form;
• Concerned with consciousness, and also with the
subconscious or unconscious workings of the human
mind;
MODERNIST • Room for introspection, analysis and reflection;

FICTION • It has no real beginning as it plunges the reader into a

flowing stream of experience;
• Ending, usually open or ambiguous;
• It does not have an intrusive narrator, but rather either
a single, limited point of view, or multiple viewpoints
 • In the visual arts the roots of Modernism are often traced back to
painter Édouard Manet, who, beginning in the 1860s, broke away
from inherited notions of perspective, modeling, and subject
Modernism in matter. The avant-garde movements that followed—including
other arts Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism,
Expressionism, Constructivism, de Stijl, and
Abstract Expressionism—are generally defined as Modernist.
Over the span of these movements, artists increasingly focused
on the intrinsic qualities of their media—e.g., line, form, and
colour—and moved away from inherited notions of art.
 Manet
painting
 • The English novel had traditionally little to do with inner
visions or realities; it concerned more with the external
world, with the description of manners and criticism of
society (eg. Austen and Dickens).

MODERNIS • It had been little affected by Romanticism , which in

England was concerned almost exclusively with poetry.
M AND THE • Romanticism appeared in the peculiar form of the
Gothic fiction (18th century)
ENGLISH • The ‘great tradition’ of the English novel – realism
• The realities of the external rather than the interior
NOVEL world
• When it concerned with the interior of the
characters, it was at the conscious level, rarely
going deep into the mind
 • Modernist movement – degree of introversion of the
novel
• Considerable transformation under the influence of
new scientific theories and new social sciences,
MODERNIS which helped to represente and understand the
human mind and behaviour.
M AND THE • New subject matters.
• New kind of fiction – new vision of man and the
ENGLISH world
• The exploration of inner world gained momentum
NOVEL with the trauma of the War
• WWI was a crucial landmark for culture and
society
• The colapse of an entire, known civilized order.
• A new generation of novelists