20th-Century British and Irish

Modernist Literature
A Quick Overview of General
Characteristics, Themes, and
Agendas

Historical Background

1901- The End of the Reign of Queen Victoria

1903- Ford Motor Company Founded
1905- Einstein Unveils the Theory of Special Relativity
1914-18- WWI
1916- Easter Rising in Dublin
1920- League of Nations Formed
1929- Stock Market Crash
1933- Hitler Rises to Power
1939-45- WWII
1945- Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan
1969- Apollo Lands on the Moon

Who is a British Writer in the

20th Century

20th-century writers who we call

British

Conrad (Polish)
T.S.Eliot & Pound (Americans)
Yeats & Joyce (Irish)

The British Empire has Stretched Across the Globe

Who is a British Writer in the

20th Century?

Writers that were once marginalized

by sexuality, gender, and class were
now celebrated.

W. H. Auden

Virginia
Woolf

D. H.
Lawrence

Much has Been Brewing in the

World of Science, Philosophy,
and Ideology

Marx

(1818-1883)

Marx felt that reality was determined by materialist cultures and economics.
He called for a social revolution.

Darwin

(1809-1882)

Darwin's theory of evolution and survival of the fittest suggests that survival
is determined by the ability to adapt. The Origin of the Species

Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

Feels that traditional religions have been debunked by physical and natural
sciences and thus, that moral and ethical systems that arise from traditional
religions are illogical.

Freud

(1856-1939)

Freud s theories of the dynamic unconscious suggested that humans are not
fully aware of what they think or why they think it. His ideas proposed that
awareness existed in layers and that many thoughts occur "below the surface.

Einstein

(1879-1955)

Overturns Newtonian conceptions of Physics. The universe is uncertain

and we are ill-equipped observers.

Reeds Reflections on Modernist

Literature
Modernist

literature is a movement
away from Romanticism, Victorian
trends in literature, and Realism, and
really, is marked by its determined
desire to break away from all previous
forms and conventions. It reflects the
lack of order seen in a growing urban
society, celebrates passion over reason,
and questions traditional moralities.

Some Formal Characteristics of

Modernist Literature
Open

and Experimental Form

Discontinuity
Juxtaposition
Intertextuality
Classical Allusions
Borrowings From Other Cultures
and Texts

T.S. Eliot
I grow old I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
( The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock lines 120125)

Some Thematic Characteristics

of Modernist Literature
Alienation

of the individual and the artist

Society as fractured and culture as fragmented
Sense of dislocation and meaninglessness
Questioning the value of cultural norms
Rejecting recorded history and valuing the
mythic
Focusing on the urban, the mundane, and the
marginalized

James Joyce
I will not serve that in which I no longer
believe whether it call itself home, my
fatherland or my church: and I will try to
express myself in some mode of life or art as
freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using
for my defence the only arms I allow myself
to use, silence, exile, and cunning.
(A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)