Notes:
• The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century.
• The war produced major shifts in attitudes towards Western myths of progress and civilization.
• The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of internationally acclaimed voices from the former imperial dominions.
• The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution.
• By the end of the century modernism had given way to the striking pluralism of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
• Samuel Beckett played a leading role in the anglophone absorption of modernist experiment in drama.
Summaries
The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century. Rejecting Victorian notions of the artist’s moral duty, the aesthetic movement widened the bread between writers and the general public. The “alienation” of the artist underlies key works of modernism. The last decades of Victoria’s reign also saw the emergence of a mass literate population. Modernity disrupted the old order, casting into doubt previously stable assumptions about the self, community, and the divine. Freud’s psychoanalysis changed understandings of rationality and personal development. As the influence of organized religion weakened, many writers looked to literature as an alternative.
As terms applied to cultural history, Edwardian (1901-1910) suggestsa period marked by intellectual change but social continuity with Victorian times, while Georgian refers to the lull before the storm of World War I. The war produced major shifts in attitudes towards Western myths of progress and civilization. The 1930s in Britain were called the red decade, for the only solution to economic dislocation seemed to lie in socialism or communism.
Victory in World War II was accompanied by diminution in British political power. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies widened the gap between rich and poor and between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. Under Tony Blair, elected in 1997, Scotland and Wales were empowered to elect their own legislative bodies.
In 1914, nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface and more than a quarter of its population were under British dominion. Following victory in the Second World War, Britain lost its empire.
The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of internationally acclaimed voices from the former imperial dominions. Migrants to Britain from the Commonwealth brought distinctive vernaculars and cultural identities with them, prompting a large-scale and ongoing rethinking of national identity. In the 1970s and 1980s a younger generation of black and Asian British writers emerged, including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and John Agard.
The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution. The imagist movement arose in reaction against Romantic fuzziness and emotionalism in poetry. A new
critical movement went hand in hand with the new poetry, and T. S. Eliot was high priest of both. Poets looked back to the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and produced work of much greater intellectual complexity than the Victorians. In the 1950s, poets such as Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn were members of “the Movement,” which emphasized purity of diction and a neutral tone. Leading poets at the close of the century were the Irishman Seamus Heaney and the West Indian Derek Walcott, both of whom combine elements of the English literary tradition with the rhythms of their native lands.
The twentieth-century novel experienced three major movements. High modernism, lasting through the 1920s, celebrated personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and difficulties.
High modernists like Woolf and Joyce wrote in the wake of the shattering of confidence in old certainties. The 1930s through the 1950s saw a return to social realism and moralism as a reaction against modernism. Writers like Murdoch and Golding were consciously retrospective in their investment in moral form. By the end of the century modernism had given way to the striking pluralism of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
Although there were major innovations in Continental drama in the first half of the twentieth century, in Britain the impact of these innovations was delayed by a conservative theater establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s. Samuel Beckett played a leading role in the anglophone absorption of modernist experiment in drama. In the shadow of the mass death of World War II, Beckett’s absurdist intimation of an existential darkness without redemption gave impetus to a seismic shift in British drama. The Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the power of censorship that had rested in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, two eminent poets from Britain’s former dominions, helped breathe new life and diversity into English drama.
TimeLine of The Twentieth Century
Part 11902 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 1902 End of the Anglo-Boer War
1903 Henry Ford founds Ford Motor Company. Wright
Brothers make the first successful airplane flight
1905 Albert Einstein, theory of special relativity.
Impressionist exhibition, London
1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition, London
1910-36 Reign of George V
1910 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
1914 James Joyce, Dubliners. Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance
1914-18 World War I
1916 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin 1917 T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
1918 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems 1918 Armistice. Franchise Act grants vote to women over thirty
1920 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love 1920 Treaty of Versailles. League of Nations formed 1921 William Butler Yeats, Michael Robartes and the
Dancer
1921 Formation of Irish Free State with Northern Ireland (Ulster) remaining part of Great Britain
1922 Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories. Joyce, Ulysses. Eliot, The Waste Land.
1924 Forster, A Passage to India
1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
1928 Yeats, The Tower
1929 Woolf, A Room of One's Own. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
1929 Stock market crash; the Great Depression begins
1930 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany
1935 Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
1936-39 Spanish Civil War
1936 Edward VIII succeeds George V but abdicates in
favor of his brother, crowned as George VI
1937 David Jones, In Parenthesis
1939 Joyce, Finnegans Wake. Yeats, Last Poems and Two Plays
1939-45 World War II
1940 Fall of France. Battle of Britain
1941-45 The Holocaust
1944 Eliot, Four Quartets
1945 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems. George Orwell, Animal Farm
1945 First atomic bombs dropped, on Japan
1946 Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances
1947 India and Pakistan become independent nations
1949 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
1950 Apartheid laws passed in South Africa
1955 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
1956 Suez Crisis
TimeLine of The Twentieth Century
Part 21961 Berlin Wall erected
1962 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook 1962 Cuban missile crisis 1964 Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings
1965 U.S. troops land in South Vietnam
1966 Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
1969 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 1969 Apollo moon landing
1971 V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, leading to creation of Bangladesh
1972 Seamus Heaney, North 1972 Britain enters European Common Market
1973 U.S. troops leave Vietnam
1979 Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Shah flees. Soviets invade Afghanistan
1980 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War 1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
1982 Falklands War
1988 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall. Tieneman Square, Beijing,
demonstration and massacre 1991 Derek Walcott, Omeros 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union 1992 Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats
1994 Democracy comes to South Africa
1997 Labour Party victory in the UK ends eighteen years
of Conservative government
1998 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters 1998 Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. British handover of Hong Kong to China. Northern Ireland Assembly established