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.
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