WHEN

DID 20TH CENTURY BEGIN?

In Britain, the beginning of the 20th century coincided with a period of great
hope but also with some apprehension. The death of Queen Victoria who had reigned
for 83 years (1819-1901) gave way to Edwardianism (the reign of Edward VII, 1901-
1910). The new century began with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the
Boer War, 18991902), and it seemed that the British Empire was as doomed to
destruction. For many, humankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells
works claimed that science and technology would transform the world in the century
ahead. But to achieve such transformation, institutions and ideals had to be replaced by
ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit.
MAIN LITERARY MOVEMENT
The spirit of Modernisma radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in
anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysisbecame
also apparent in literature and art. Modernist literature began around the turn of the
twentieth century and went through 1965. It arose as a tendency opposed to the
attitude to life and its problems adopted by the Victorian writers and the public. Writers
experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound 's maxim to
"Make it new".
Due to the impact of scientific thought, this new trend was affected by a new
understanding of psychology (the human personality) and mythology (aspects of
human history), and there was an attitude of interrogations and disintegration of old
values.
Modernist novels are divided into three periods: 1900-1920s (a time of
experimentation, allusiveness, and complexity); 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (a time when
novelists returned to social realism); and post-1960s (a period when important writers
emerged from post-colonial contexts).
WHAT ARE THE MAIN MODERNIST FEATURES?
Modernist writers tried to treat the themes in a different manner even if
they share topics with Victorians. They evoked different thoughts and emotions with the
idea of cultivating a fresh point of view, and also a fresh technique. But despite its
diversity, Modernist novels typically focus on themes like the individual in society and
the temporality of human existence.
 Modernism was marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition,
including a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.
One characteristic of English Modernism is "the dehumanization of art". The
major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted relationships between man
and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. From these strands
evolved what came to be known as the stream of consciousness.
WHO ARE THE FIRST MODERNIST WRITERS?
Many Edwardian novelists were outsiders: Irish, immigrants, expatriates,
exiles, but all of them shared the willingness to explore the shortcomings of English
social life. As for the central modernist writers from the first decade, we can highlight:
H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, and Joseph Conrad.
H.G. Wells, captured the frustrations of lower- and middle-class existence in Love
and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-suffragist novel;
and The History of Mr. Polly (1910),
John Galsworthy, in The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte
Saga, he described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie.
E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and
philistinism of the English middle classes in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The
Longest Journey (1907). Moreover, in Howards End (1910), Forster showed how little
the rootless and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more
rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil.
James Joyces was another writer whose fiction presented characters within a
social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and
enigmatic, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901).
Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad, considered man was a solitary,
romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world as he
portraits in Lord Jim (1900). But in Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), and The
Secret Agent (1907) he detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he
increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist
whose concern with the limits of human knowledge affected not only the content of his
fiction but also its very structure.