214- ] English Literature

214- ] English Literature

D. H. Lawrence

Summary

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)  is best known for his infamous novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' which was banned in the United States until 1959.

Who Was D.H. Lawrence?

D.H. Lawrence is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He published many novels and poetry volumes during his lifetime, including Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, but is best known for his infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover. The graphic and highly sexual novel was published in Italy in 1928, but was banned in the United States until 1959, and in England until 1960. Garnering fame for his novels and short stories early on in his career, Lawrence later received acclaim for his personal letters, in which he detailed a range of emotions, from exhilaration to depression to prophetic brooding.

Early Life

Author D.H. Lawrence, regarded today as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born David Herbert Lawrence on September 11, 1885, in the small mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, was a coal miner, and his mother, Lydia Lawrence, worked in the lace-making industry to supplement the family income. Lawrence's mother was from a middle-class family that had fallen into financial ruin, but not before she had become well-educated and a great lover of literature. She instilled in young D.H. a love of books and a strong desire to rise above his blue-collar beginnings.

Lawrence's hardscrabble, working-class upbringing made a strong impression on him, and he later wrote extensively about the experience of growing up in a poor mining town. "Whatever I forget," he later said, "I shall not forget the Haggs, a tiny red brick farm on the edge of the wood, where I got my first incentive to write."

As a child, Lawrence often struggled to fit in with other boys. He was physically frail and frequently susceptible to illness, a condition exacerbated by the dirty air of a town surrounded by coal pits. He was poor at sports and, unlike nearly every other boy in town, had no desire to follow in his father's footsteps and become a miner. However, he was an excellent student, and in 1897, at the age of 12, he became the first boy in Eastwood's history to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. But at Nottingham, Lawrence once again struggled to make friends. He often fell ill and grew depressed and lethargic in his studies, graduating in 1901 having made little academic impression. Reflecting back on his childhood, Lawrence said, "If I think of my childhood it is always as if there was a sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal in which we moved and had our being."

In the summer of 1901, Lawrence took a job as a factory clerk for a Nottingham surgical appliances manufacturer called Haywoods. However, that autumn, his older brother William suddenly fell ill and died, and in his grief, Lawrence also came down with a bad case of pneumonia. After recovering, he began working as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood, where he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers, who became his close friend and intellectual companion. At her encouragement, he began writing poetry and also started drafting his first novel, which would eventually become The White Peacock.

Books: 'The White Peacock' & 'The Trespasser'

In the fall of 1906, Lawrence left Eastwood to attend the University College of Nottingham to obtain his teacher's certificate. While there, he won a short-story competition for "An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude," which was published in the Nottingham Guardian in 1907. In order to enter multiple stories in the competition, he entered "An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude" under Jessie Chambers's name, and although it was published as such, people soon discovered that Lawrence was its true author.

In 1908, having received his teaching certificate, Lawrence took a teaching post at an elementary school in the London suburb of Croydon. He also continued to write, and in 1909 he received his big break when Jessie Chambers managed to get some of his poems published in the English Review. The publishers at the English Review took a great interest in Lawrence's work, recommending his draft of The White Peacock to another publisher, William Heinemann, who printed it in 1911. Set in his childhood hometown of Eastwood, the novel foreshadowed many of the themes that would pervade his later work, such as mismatched marriages and class divides.

A year later, Lawrence published his second novel, The Trespasser, a story based on the experiences of a fellow teacher who had an affair with a married man who then committed suicide. Around the same time, Lawrence became engaged to an old friend from college named Louie Burrows.

'Sons and Lovers'

However, in the spring of 1912, Lawrence's life changed suddenly and irrevocably when he went to visit an old Nottingham professor, Ernest Weekley, to solicit advice about his future and his writing. During his visit, Lawrence fell desperately in love with Weekley's wife, Frieda von Richthofen. Lawrence immediately resolved to break off his engagement, quit teaching, and try to make a living as a writer, and, by May of that year, he had persuaded Frieda to leave her family. The couple ran off to Germany, later traveling to Italy. While traveling with his new love, Lawrence continued to write at a furious pace. He published his first play, The Daughter-in-Law, in 1912. A year later, he published his first volume of poetry: Love Poems and Others.

Later in 1913, Lawrence published his third novel, Sons and Lovers, a highly autobiographical story of a young man and aspiring artist named Paul Morel, who struggles to transcend his upbringing in a poor mining town. The novel is widely considered Lawrence's first masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century.

'The Rainbow' & 'Women in Love'

Lawrence and Frieda von Richtofen soon returned to England, where they married on July 13, 1914. That same year, Lawrence published a highly regarded short-story collection, The Prussian Officer, and in 1915 he published another novel, The Rainbow, which was quite sexually explicit for the time. Critics harshly condemned The Rainbow for its sexual content, and the book was soon banned for obscenity.

Feeling betrayed by his country but unable to travel abroad because of World War I, Lawrence retreated to Cornwall at the far southwestern edge of Great Britain. However, the local government considered the presence of a controversial writer and his German wife so near the coast to be a wartime security threat, and it banished him from Cornwall in 1917. Lawrence spent the next two years moving among friends' apartments. However, despite the tumult of the period, Lawrence managed to publish four volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1919: Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through! (1919), New Poems (1918) and Bay: A Book of Poems (1919).

In 1919, with the First World War finally ended, Lawrence once again departed England for Italy. There, he spent two highly enjoyable years traveling and writing. In 1920, he revised and published Women in Love, which he considered the second half of The Rainbow. He also edited a series of short stories that he had written during the war, which were published under the title My England and Other Stories in 1922.

Determined to fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling to America, in February 1922, Lawrence left Europe and traveled east. By the end of the year—after stays in both Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and Australia—he landed in the United States, settling in Taos, New Mexico. While in New Mexico, Lawrence completed Studies in Classic American Literature, a book of highly regarded and influential literary criticism of great American authors such as Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

Over the next several years, Lawrence split his time between a ranch in New Mexico and travels to New York, Mexico and England. His works during this period includes a novel, Boy in the Bush (1924); a story collection about the American continent, St. Mawr (1925); and another novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926).

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' & Final Works

Having fallen ill with tuberculosis, Lawrence returned to Italy in 1927. There, in his last great creative burst, he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, his best-known and most infamous novel. Published in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover explores in graphic detail the sexual relationship between an aristocratic lady and a working-class man. Due to its graphic content, the book was banned in the United States until 1959, and in England until 1960, when a jury found Penguin Books not guilty of violating Britain's Obscene Publications Act and allowed the company to publish the book.

At the highly publicized British obscenity trial, the prosecuting attorney infamously asked the jurors, "Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" The jury's decision to allow publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover is considered a turning point in the history of freedom of expression and the open discussion of sex in popular culture. As British poet Philip Larkin quipped in one of his poems, "Sexual intercourse began/In 1963/Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban/And the Beatles' first LP."

Increasingly hobbled by his tuberculosis, Lawrence wrote very little near the end of his life. His final works were a critique of Western religion titled Apocalypse and Last Poems, both of which were published in 1930.

Death and Legacy

Lawrence died in Vence, France, on March 2, 1930, at the age of 44.

Reviled as a crude and pornographic writer for much of the latter part of his life, Lawrence is now widely considered—alongside James Joyce and Virginia Woolf—as one of the great modernist English-language writers. His linguistic precision, mastery of a wide range of subject matters and genres, psychological complexity and exploration of female sexuality distinguish him as one of the most refined and revolutionary English writers of the early 20th century.

Lawrence himself considered his writings an attempt to challenge and expose what he saw as the constrictive and oppressive cultural norms of modern Western culture. He once said, "If there weren't so many lies in the world . . . I wouldn't write at all."

QUICK FACTS

Name: D.H. Lawrence

Birth Year: 1885

Birth date: September 11, 1885

Birth City: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England

Birth Country: United Kingdom

Gender: Male

Best Known For: D.H. Lawrence is best known for his infamous novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' which was banned in the United States until 1959.

Industries

Fiction and Poetry

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Schools

University College of Nottingham

Nottingham High School

Death Year: 1930

Death date: March 2, 1930

Death City: Vence

Death Country: France  

213- ] English Literature

213- ] English Literature

Modernism

art

Modernism, in the fine arts, 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, the nearly global adoption of capitalism, 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.

Modernism in literature

The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. 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 seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.

Eliot’s was not the dominant voice among Modernist poets. In the United States Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived. The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world. During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American Modernist fiction. That sense may be centerd on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change. F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925), Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940), Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. Meanwhile, Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

Across the Atlantic, 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. Portions of the book were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking countries. Other European Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity included Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and the American expatriate Gertrude Stein.

The term Modernism is also used to refer to literary movements other than the European and American movement of the early to mid-20th century. In Latin American literature, Modernismo arose in the late 19th century in the works of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and José Martí. The movement, which continued into the early 20th century, reached its peak in the poetry of Rubén Darío.  

212- ] English Literature

212- ] English Literature

 Modern Period in English Literature

The 20th century began with both great optimism and some fear because it was the century closest to the start of a new millennium. A new era for humankind had begun, as believed by many. The literary movement known as the modern period, which existed from the late nineteenth century to around the middle of the twentieth, comprised a number of developing writing styles that had an impact on the development of literature.

Literary modernism gave authors more freedom to experiment with their modes of expression than in the past. The experiences and feelings of the person are frequently highlighted in the free-flowing inner dialogues and non-linear storylines seen in modernist works. Writers of modern literature include W.B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams.

This blog by AllAssignmenthelp will discuss a few fascinating things regarding the modern period. Keep reading the blog till the end to clear all your doubts related to this topic and make yourself aware of literary modernism.

Introduction to the Modern Period

The modern period in English literature begins with the 20th century and continues till 1965. The period saw an abrupt break away from the old ways of interacting with the world. In all the previous periods experimentation and individualism were highly discouraged but With the onset of the modern period, both these things became virtues. There were many cultural shocks with the beginning of modernism. The blow of the modern age was World War 1 and 2. These wars began in the year 1914 and lasted till 1919 and 1939 to 1945 respectively. The aftermath of the world wars was traumatic for everyone. The horror of the World War 1 was evident in the face of every citizen. The feeling of uncertainty was spread and no one knew where the world was heading into.

Additionally, if you are an English literature student in the United States and are looking for guidance with your assignment in the Modern Period, then you can ask a US assignment helper to guide you with the same. It will not only help you understand the concept better but curate your assignment in a professional manner.

There are five traits of modernist literature.

Here are a few elements that modernist literature has in common.

The process of experimentation: Modernist literature used a variety of innovative writing strategies that defied accepted principles of narrative structure. 

1-The use of mixed images and themes, absurdity, nonlinear tales, and stream of consciousness—a free-flowing internal monologue—are a few of these strategies.

2. Individualism: Instead of emphasizing society as a whole, modernist literature frequently concentrates on the individual. Stories follow characters as they adjust to a changing environment, usually coping with challenging situations and issues.

3. Different points of view: To highlight the subjectivity of each character and give the reader a range of points of view that might be taken into consideration, many modernist writers wrote in the first person with several characters.

4. Open verse: In place of the conventional poetic form, many modernist poets chose free verse, which lacks a recurring rhyme scheme, metrical framework, or musical rhythm.

5. Creative techniques: Many modernist authors use literary techniques like symbolism and imagery to make their writing easier to understand and to build a better bond with the reader.

Key Points to Remember About the Modern Period

Advancement of social science and natural science in the latter half of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century. Gains in material wealth with the rapid development and industrialization. The difference between aristocrats and clergy increased more.

English literature of the modern age started with the initiation of the 20th century. The prominent feature of the literature during the modern age was that it opposed the general attitude towards life as shown in Victorian literature. Understanding about modern period can be complex at times. However, as a solution, you can hire someone to take your online class regarding the same. Additional guidance will make your learning experience smooth.

People started to regard the Victorian age as a hypocritical age, having superficial and mean ideals. The hypocrisy of the Victorian period generated a rebellious attitude in the writers of modern literature. Things that were considered beautiful and honourable during the Victorian age were considered ugly by the writers of the modern period. Sense of questioning was absent in the minds of the people from the Victorian age.

During Victorian times, people adhered to the voice of the people who were in power, they accepted the rules made by the church. People started to accept the law without questioning them. But the generation came after critical thinking, they raised questions against the decisions produced by supreme authorities. Writers of the modern age refuted the ideas and beliefs of the previous era.

The modern age helped in replacing the simple belief of the Victorians with modern man’s desire to probe. George Bernard Shaw attacked the old superstitious religious beliefs as well as the superstitions of science. He was the one who pioneered the interrogative habits in the middle of modern people. Shaw openly challenged the voice of those who were ruling the country, and religious authority. He provoked the people to come up with questions about morality and religion.

 List of modernist writers

Literary modernism has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and prose. Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new".[1] The modernist literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time.[2] It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen 1910 as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf, who declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910."[3] But modernism was already stirring by 1899, with works such as Joseph Conrad's (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarry's (1873–1907) absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared even earlier, in 1896. Knut Hamsun's (1859–1952) Hunger (1890) is a groundbreaking modernist novel and Mysteries (1892) pioneers modernist stream of consciousness method.

When modernism ends is debatable. Though The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees Modernism ending by c.1939,[4] with regard to British and American literature, "When (if) Modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to Modernism occurred".[5] Clement Greenberg sees Modernism ending in the 1930s, with the exception of the visual and performing arts.[6] In fact many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960s, though generally speaking they were no longer producing major works. The term late modernism is also sometimes applied to modernist works published after 1930.[7] Among modernists (or late modernists) still publishing after 1945 were Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965. In addition Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in 1947. Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, has been described as a "later modernist". Beckett is a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of modernism, who produced works from the 1930s until the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), En attendant Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961), Rockaby (1981). The poets Charles Olson (1910-1970) and J. H. Prynne (1936- ) are, amongst other writing in the second half of the 20th century, who have been described as late modernists.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

The following is a list of significant worldwide modernist writers:

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) , Jorge Amado (1912–2001) , Mário de ndrade (1893–1945) , Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) , Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863–1938) , Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) , W. H. Auden (1907–1973) , Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)*, Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Andrei Bely (1880–1934)

Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Menno ter Braak (1902–40)

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), André Breton (1896–1966), Hermann Broch (1886–1951), Basil Bunting (1900–1985), Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), Karel Čapek (1890–1938), Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933), Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), Inger Christensen (1935-2009), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

Hart Crane (1899–1932), E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), Rubén Darío (1867–1916) , Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) , Leonid Dobychin (1894–1936 [?]) , John Dos Passos (1896-1970) , Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) , Gunnar Ekelöf (1907–1968) , T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) , Ralph W. Ellison (1914–1994) , Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967) , William Faulkner (1897–1962)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) , E. M. Forster (1879–1971) , Robert Frost (1874–1963) , Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973) , André Gide (1869–1951)

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) , Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) (later works)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) , Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) , Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) , Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951) , Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) , Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) , Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929)

Max Jacob (1876–1944) , David Jones (1895–1974) , James Joyce (1882–1941)[10] , Franz Kafka (1883–1924) , Georg Kaiser (1878–1945) , Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) , Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981) , D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) , Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) , Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) , Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) , Robert Lowell (1917–1977) m Mina Loy (1882–1966) , Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) , Artur Lundkvist (1906–1991)

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) , Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), Antonio Machado Ruiz (1875–1939), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) , Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Harry Martinson (1904–1978) , Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), Marianne Moore (1887–1972) , Robert Musil (1880–1942) , Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) , Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) , George Orwell (1903–1950) , Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974)

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) , Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1880–1962) , Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) , Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) , Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) , Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Anthony Powell (1905-2000) , John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) , Marcel Proust (1871–1922) , Aleksey Remizov (1877–1957), Jean Rhys (1890-1979)

Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957), Klaus Rifbjerg (1931–2015),Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926),Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916),Peter Seeberg (1925–1999),Victor Serge (1890–1947),Gertrude Stein (1874–1946),John Steinbeck (1902–1968),Wallace Stevens (1875–1955),Italo Svevo (1861–1928),Edith Södergran (1892–1923),Villy Sørensen (1929-2001),Dylan Thomas (1914–1953),Ernst Toller (1893–1939) ,Federigo Tozzi (1883–1920),Georg Trakl (1887–1914) ,Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) ,Paul Valéry (1871–1945)

Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) ,Robert Walser (1878–1956),Frank Wedekind (1864–1918),Nathanael West (1903–1940),William Carlos Williams (1883–1963),Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) ,Lu Xun (1881–1936),W. B. Yeats (1865–1939),Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) 

211- ] English Literature

211-] English Literature

 Modern Period

Overview of Modern Age Literature

James Joyce set his novels and short stories in a small city of Dublin. Dubliners published in 1914 is a part of the modernist literature along with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Stephen Daedalus is a central character both in the Portrait and Ulysses. The latter however was banned.

The next important writer was Virginia Woolf who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group which was a group of intellectuals and writers that met at her house which included E.M Forster and Leopold Woolf. Woolf attempted to present the changed world through a changed style of writing. In 1915 came her first novel called The Voyage Out and then came Night and Day in 1919. There was a realistic serious tone to both these books. Modernist strain in her writing began with her next novel call Jacob’s Room which was published in 1922 along with Ulysses. The rest of the novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando had the same modernist tone.

After Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 came the period which saw writers like Joseph Conrad, H.G Wells, D.H Lawrence, E.M Forster and others. The most important event in the early part of the 20th century was the First World War that took place from 1914 to 1918. It was a crucial event that changed the way of the world, impacted the psyche of the people and also the way literature was written. The pessimism and doubts that were a part of the writings of the earlier period may perhaps have anticipated the War. Hence Joseph Conrad, instead of talking of the society and its change now focused on dislocated individuals, a question of where one belongs in a seemingly cruel world. Colonialism are important part of his works wherein he presents a stark reality of exploitation and greed. Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, are some of his major works. H.G Wells was a prolific writer and wrote around a hundred novels. The Time Machine, Ann Veronica, The History of Mr. Polly, The War of the Worlds, are some his important novels and Tono- Bungay is seen as his most brilliant work . Lawrence , was a controversial writer because of the open sexual references in his work. His work was different because of the sensual language and emotional feelings that made them. Therefore the novel then moved from the realism of the world outside more towards a description of the reality of the individual within. Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love are important works by him. E.M Forster, lastly wrote his famous Howard’s End that deals with the Schegel and the Wilcox family and the society in 1910, brilliantly and delicately described which would then be transformed permanently by the First World War.

The Georgian Poets and World War I

During the reign of George V, was published five anthologies of poetry by Edward Marsh in the year 1912 to 1922. Many important writers like of the time like Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, D.H Lawrence, Walter de la Mare contributed to these anthologies. The main concern was to depict the real issues surrounding the world around the World War.

Modernism

Modernism as a movement was a response to the horrors of World War-I and to the rising industrial societies and growth of cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It challenged the harmony and the rationality of the Enlightenment and sought to reinvent art and literature of the age. To do so, it broke away from the works of the past and conventions that were earlier held at a pedestal. The view that traditional conceptions of beauty and on the whole the meaning of art itself did not fit the age lead to another movement called “Dadaism” that consciously set to redefine art itself. The movement was seen as “anti-art” that aimed to upturn its order. Chaos then as the basic antithesis to order was abundantly used by artists. Started by Tristan Tzara (1896- 1963) as a reaction against the senseless violence of the First World War and to reflect the anarchy that it spread in the social system as well as in the lives of ordinary people. What was also opposed was the conception of what was worthy of being the object of art. The classical subjects were replaced by the mundane as the urinal that Marcel Duchamp placed as an object of art in his gallery. Also in his ‘LHOOQ’ Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a moustache was a direct means to shake the viewer and the age out from his complacency that lead to the war itself. It was the direct expression of disillusionment with the war and that art too had lost its meaning like the literature of the classical time. The breaking down of any previously set rules and a violent portrayal of freedom of expression to shock and awe was the channel of the time that saw the violence of the World War firsthand. The artists and writers of the Dada movement were mostly war veterans and expressed through their work the psychological devastation of the war. The call for re-invention was echoed in the movement and stood for what modernism broadly aimed at.

Thematic and Technical Features of Modern Literature

The conception that reality could be easily be comprehended was replaced by modernism with a more subjective argument. Reality became not what was directly seen but what was behind the apparent surfaces and it took a crude look at the ugly, the stark behind the glossy surfaces. It was to raise these questions that distortion became a crucial trope in the visual arts of the era. Comte’s Positivism could no longer be used to describe reality. The distorted images force the onlooker to step out of his comfort zone and to question his conception of reality. It highlights the dialectical relationship between the object of expression and the language that expresses it. This was echoed in the Literature of the time where sentences are fragmented and deliberately left incomplete as in Waiting for Godot. Dialogues are seldom completed and there is an inability to find the correct words to describe the state of the self. This breakdown of language after the World War calls out for a need to reinvent language to fit the post war world.

Hitler’s use of almost an enigmatic, opera type use of words (he admired Wagner) that achieved his mass appeal, did also lead to the war. It was perhaps then necessary to breakdown language to reinvent it. The distortion and the fragments not only hint at the former but to a unity that needs to be rediscovered. The half-sentence make the reader seek to complete them and participate in the call for a search of a new unity and identity which is Pound’s injunction to “Make it New”. The onlooker/reader is removed from his role as a mere passive observer to an active one who contributes to the meaning of the art he views/reads. Hence the incompleteness was not aimed at a completely pessimistic answer that leads to a loss of hope, but to different source of comfort similar to what T.S Eliot finds in the world of ‘shanti shanti shanti’ at the end of ‘Wasteland’.

Stream of Consciousness

Picasso’s cubism became an important part of modernism’s subjective view of reality and a need to move away from traditional forms of art. It was this subjectivity that lead to the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique of narration, as used by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. The focus on the interiority of the self and its perception of the objects it conceives was way to grasp the changed notion of reality. The ‘Pre-Speech’ level of consciousness (as Henry James called it) of the character where the narrative deals with what is freely sensed or felt by the characters rather than what is directly uttered changed the way that narratives functioned. The expression of the self was also to highlight the crisis of the self within itself. The existential view of life and its cyclical futile form was what entrapped it rendering it unable to transcend futility of existence. This pessimistic view was a residue of the war which saw man as Sisyphus with his worthless search for meaning, identity and unity in an age that cannot satiate his search. In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ Albert Camus dwells on this futility of the modern experience.

Poetic Drama

The term ‘poetic drama’ was made popular during the middle of the 20th century. The term was made famous due to the works of T.S Eliot who used his work as a reaction to the drama of G. B Shaw and Galsworthy who were immensely influenced by Henrik Ibsen who wrote A Doll’s House and Ghosts. In the ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ written by G.B Shaw, he accepted the former’s influence on him. T.S Eliot apart from being a poet was also a critic and wrote many important works like ‘Possibility of Poetic Drama’ and ‘Poetry and Drama’ in which he expressed his belief that poetry and drama are linked inseparably. W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden and other poets also tried writing poetic drama. 

210- ] English Literature

210-] English Literature

  

The Transition From the Victorian Period to the Modern Period

It is nearly a fact to state that no other transitional period in English literature has been as rich in its diversity and complexity, in the confluence of advancement and regression at the same time. Writing is always a reflection of life and also a product of the times, and modernist writing has been more influenced by its social environment than literature from other eras. In the first decades of the century, new technologies and ideas were quickly changing the globe, and social life in all of its diverse physical, intellectual, political, economic, and moral facets had essentially begun afresh.

Changes in the literature

There were various changes took place in the field of literature also during the modern period. The imaginative writing, verses, and structure of the verses of the Victorian period became obsolete. Writers’ work started losing the magic they used to have in the previous age. Victorian writers were becoming rancid and their works were failing to evoke the spirit of the readers. Art has to be renewed in order to revitalize the readers. However Victorian artworks lacked the surprising elements and freshness in the content.

Declination of sentiments and values

Modern world people are more into independence, they don’t want to be bound by parental authority, whereas Victorians believed in maintaining the home life, they consider themselves a family person. Moreover, the feeling of love was getting limited to sex in modern times, love had become less of a romance and more like a greed. Such things portray the decline in the values, emotions and feelings of the people of the modern period. Literary work also portrays a similar lifestyle. If writers tried to write on the themes of the Victorian age then it would be no longer a striking piece of literature. Therefore, you will find the literature of the modern period having less zeal for love, natural beauty and sentiments. Modern writers come up with fresh points of view to suit the conventional audience.

Age of machinery

There is no doubt that machinery has dominated the modern people’s life. The modern period is also known as the age of machinery. People had become too materialistic brought by the machinery. There is no doubt that the advent of machinery made life comfortable for modern man. Living became quite easy and production of goods was also accelerated. But the downward side of mechanical life was that man has mechanical like a clock, using all his energy not according to his/her own will but rather according to the time scheme. Such an atmosphere of modern life brought great distress among the people.

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Literature of the Modern period

Everything in Victorian culture suffered greatly from a large deal of contempt during this all-encompassing and thorough transition process. New spheres of experience were included, outdated literary expression theories were abandoned, and new ones emerged. All branches of the period’s literature, including poetry, the novel, and drama, reflect this.

Literary trends

The trend of modernism emerged after the end of the First World War. They include:

-Stream of consciousness

-Surrealism

-Cubism

-Dadaism

-Futurism

-Expressionism

-Imagism

-Symbolism

a) Modern English poetry

Modern English poetry is a sort of revolution against the traditional thoughts and types of Victorian-era poetry. The Red Wheelbarrow, The Embankment, Darkness, and Image are a few of the masterpieces of modern English poetry. There is no doubt that these poems are the best in their way, but the major problem arises when it comes to understanding their meaning. Students studying English literature often experience issues comprehending the serious compression of information in these lyrics.

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b) Modern English novels

They rein the literature in the initial three decades of the twentieth century, these years are known as the golden period of modernist novels.

c) The development of 20th-century English drama

George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were the most known, praised and celebrated drama writers of the nineteenth century. They were highly popular in the last decade of the century. One can say that they marked the beginning of the modern drama. However, these two eminent writers never brought many variations or innovations in the writing techniques and types.

2. Modern period: Artistic features

Rapid advancements in technology and industry have inspired artists to portray the world in fresh and creative ways. The end result was art that experimented with minimalism and incorporated new colours and other forms.

a) Modernism

Modernism is a quite unique and complex movement in almost all the creative areas. It began at the end of the 19th century. During this period literature was the inception of the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. When the First World War ended, a number of literary trends of the modern period such as Dadaism, stream of consciousness, futurism, cubism, expressionism and imagism emerged.

b) Basic characteristics of modernism:

The foundation of modernism lies in the theory of psychoanalysis and irrational philosophy. One of the main characteristics of the modern period is “the dehumanization of art”. Some other crucial themes of modernism involve alienated, ill and distorted relations between man and man, man and his own self, man and society and most importantly between man and nature.

The pillars of modernism

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) – Sons and Lovers

James Joyce (1882- 1941) Ulysses

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888- 1965) Murder in the Cathedral

George Bernard Shaw (1856- 1950) Mrs. Warrant’s Profession

William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939) The Land of Heart’s Desire

John Galsworthy (1867- 1933) The Man of Property

These authors are regarded as major figures in modernist literature. Reading their literary works can help you become familiar with the main modernist concepts. If you need some guidance with any literary device, technique, or work, you can rely on an online assignment service for assistance. The talented English experts at these websites have extensive knowledge of everything and can assist you with everything you need.

Let’s know more about the lives, thoughts and works of some major representatives of this age:

D. H. Lawrence

David Herber Lawrence was born in 1885 in a mining village which lies in Nottinghamshire. He was reared by parents who belonged to different classes and saw a silent conflict of views. His father was a man who acquired little education and led his life as a coal miner. On the other hand, his mother was educated and had experience working as a teacher. She used to think that she her marriage was beneath her and had a strong desire to provide education to her sons so they could stay away from the tough life of the coal miners.

His personal life had a great impact on this literary work. It can be read in his masterpiece “Sons and Lovers” as well. In that, he has portrayed the consistent conflict between a strong strong-willed, up-climbing mother and a coarse, energetic, earthy but often drunken father. “Sons and Lovers” is considered an autobiographical novel.

His masterpieces include:

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

The Rainbow

Woman in Love

The theme in the novels of Lawrence

In his opinion, the bourgeois industrialization or civilization, which made its realization at the cost of ravishing the land, started the catastrophic uprooting of man from nature and caused the distortion of personality, the corruption of the will, and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passions of man.

In most of his writings, D.H. Lawrence showcased a stern reaction against the then-mechanical civilization.

According to him, materialistic civilization or industrialization became the cause of detachment between man and nature. His opinion suggested that these factors are at the cost of ravishing lives and land.

He considered materialism as the prime cause of the corruption of the will, the dominance of sterile intellect defeat of real inward passion of humans and distortion of personality.

Lawrence thought that the mechanism for making humans in animated matter, this agonized view regarding the dehumanizing impact of robotic civilization on the sensitivity of human nature always haunted the writing of Lawrence.

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Brief Analysis of Lawrence’s Masterpiece

Sons and Lovers – Introduction

Sons and Lovers is known as one of the best writings of Lawrence. It is more or less an autobiographical piece which is written in vivid episodes and straightforward narrative. The novel follows a chronological sequence, where the story begins with the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Morel, parents of Paul. Mrs. Morel belongs to a well-settled middle-class family who is highly ambitious, Lawrence presents her as “a woman of character and refinement”. She is an intelligent, strong-will woman and falls in love with an energetic and sensuous coal miner named Walter Morel. In the course of her love, she marries beneath her own class and enters into a chaotic life full of everyday struggles.

Sons and lovers – Theme

D. H. Lawrence is remembered as one of the first writers who brought the theme of psychology into literature. Through his works, he presented a number of psychological themes in a precise manner. Lawrence had an opinion that life impulse or sexual impulse is the safest way to the psychological development of human beings. For him human sexuality had some different notions, he considered him a symbol of the force of life. He showcases the slight and deep psychological experience of individuals and relationships. Through Sons and Lovers, he began a new territory of novels.

Analysis of two main characters of Sons and Lovers

Mrs. Gertrude Morel

She is the first major character and protagonist in the story. She marries beneath her class in her fascination with energetic Walter Morel, a coal miner. With the passage of time, she comes one after another struggling with both financial and emotional aspects of her marriage. Her unhappiness with her marriage creates detachment with her husband and she devotes her life to their 4 kids.

Paul Morel

After Gertrude Morel her son Paul Morel takes over the role of main protagonist from the second half of the novel. He emerges as a main character after his elder brother William dies. William Morel was the first child of Mrs Morel and her favourite among all children. When he dies, it is Paul who becomes her favourite. Throughout the novel, he struggles to bring a balance between his love for Mrs. Morel and other relationships with women.

James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He belonged to a Catholic family and got his education from Catholic schools. During his studies he went through a phase of religious zest, however, he rejected the Catholic Church. He was influenced was Ibsen and inspired by his views, Joyce took literary mission as a career. He was sternly against the bigotry of Philistines in Dublin.

His most remarkable works include:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Dubliners

The theme in the works of Joyce

Ulysses

Joyce brought a number of changes in the conventional forms of fiction by generating a unique medium of art. He portrayed the crisis and chaos of consciousness in his contemporary world.

He brought light to the stream of consciousness as a genre in modern period literature.

Brief analysis of Joyce’s writing

Ulysses

It gives insight into a man’s life in a day (16 June, 1904). The main characters of Ulysses are An Irish Jew, his wife, Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Marion Tweedy Bloom. The novel’s division is into eighteen chapters resembling 18 hours of the day.

Conclusion

All the institutions that once rebelled against now adhere to modernism as the new tradition. The grand story of modernism was broken down by postmodern artists with the goal of studying cultural norms, politics, and social ideology in their specific environment, pushing the boundaries of modernism to new heights. The use of new media and technology, such as video, techniques of bricolage and collage, the collision of art, and the appropriation of older styles within a contemporary context are characteristics of postmodern art.

To conclude everything, in short, I would say there are many more things you should know about the modern period and the literary development of this era. The more you study the works of this modernist literature, the more you will admire them. We all know that English literature can both be interesting and difficult at the same time.