LITERATURE IN MODERN ENGLISH Sara Uribe G贸mez Luisa Sastoque Arjona Mar铆a Alejandra G贸mez Oviedo
Something About History The modern age of literature started from the beginning of the twentieth century, and it followed the Victorian age. The most important characteristic of Modern Literature is that it is opposed to the general attitude to life and its problems adopted by the victorian writers and the public which may be called ‘Victorian’. After that was the Edwardian Period, which lasted until the beginning of the First World War. At that time many writers reflected in his writings the social problems such as the luxurious life of the rich and the poor who lived most of the population. The most common literary genre was the novel. The first World War had an impact on literature and art as the loss of humanist values, which resulted in movements such as expressionism and surrealism. This produced an experimentation in all literary genres.
Expressionism and Surrealism Expressionist literature used torn language, death, violence, cruelty and abstract characters to criticize the bourgeoisie through the fragmented narratives.
Surrealism despite being a French art movement had an impact on literature, because it sought the total liberation of human beings, in which Freud’s theory was emphasized.
This was part of the tiredness of the time by the trends of XIX century and the vanguard movements that occurred after the War.
The surrealist techniques were through writing, language release and use of metaphors.
Some Literature Characteristics in Modern English General Characteristics:
New insights from the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. Anthropological studies of comparative religion. New theories of electromagnetism and quantum physics. A growing critique of British imperialism and the ideology of empire. The growing force of doctrines of racial superiority in Germany.
● The escalation of warfare to a global level. ● Shifting power structures, particularly as women enter the work force. ● The emergence of a new "city consciousness". ● New information technologies such as radio and cinema. ● The advent of mass democracy and the rise of mass communication. ● Fin-de-siècle ["end-of-the-century"] consciousness.
Some Literature Characteristics in Modern English Specific ones:
In poetry, the concept of ‘image’ (Imagism): the writer’s response to a visual object or scene.
Fragmented plots, sometimes without a beginning or an end are also frequent. Disappearance of the traditional omniscient
Obscurity, opacity. The reader is required
narrator in the novel. In their search for
to make an effort to understand the
different ways to represent reality, they
works. In Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry, for
replaced this narrator by partial points of
example, there are all kinds of cultural
view
references the reader must work hard to
soliloquies that try to reproduce the
understand.
‘stream
Time is not presented in chronological order. Flashbacks and flash-forwards are used instead.
or
by
of
characters.
interior
monologues
consciousness’
of
or
the
DID YOU KNOW? As a literary movement, modernism gained prominence during and especially, just after the First World War; it flourished in Europe and America throughout 1920s and 30s. Modernist authors sought to break away from tradition and conventions through experimentation with new forms, devices and styles. They incorporated the new psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung into their works and paid attention to language.
Modern English Authors As it has been already said, the Modernist Period in literature were developed from shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century. This period was marked by an unexpected break with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Modern period set in motion a series of cultural shocks. One of them marked part of the ravaged Europe (1914): The Great War (World War I)
The authors who belong to this era were overlapped by this event so, some of them, took advantage from this one as an excuse The modern period has been described as the “coming of age� of American Literature and it is, certainly, an extraordinary and productive time with an outstanding number of writers in English, whether British, Irish or American.
T. S. Eliot: (Thomas Stearns Eliot/ 26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to the old Yankee Eliot family descended from Andrew Eliot, who migrated to Boston, Massachusetts from East Coker, England in the 1660s. He immigrated to England in 1914 (at age 25), settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship
The influence of Eliot extended beyond the English language. His work, in particular The Waste Land but also The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday strongly influenced the poetry of two of the most significant post-War Irish language poets, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Díreáin as well as The Weekend of Dermot and Grace(1964) by Eoghan O Tuairisc
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Additional works, including three novels, four short story collections, and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
The Old Man and the Sea (1951)*
(July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations.
*The Old Man and the Sea was One of his most famous works, it centers upon Santiago, an aging fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.
Virginia Woolf Was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse(1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf's best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women in education and society.
Dylan Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion", the "Play for Voices", Under Milk Wood, and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death in New York City. In his later life he acquired a reputation, which he encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet"
Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in his augmenting his income with reading tours and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention.
James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century.
Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized. Joyce's work has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types. He has also been an important influence on writers and scholars as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, Salman Rushdie, Robert Anton Wilson, John Updike, David Lodge and Joseph Campbell. Ulysses has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire [Modernist] movement".
References ● http://www.unishivaji.ac.in/uploads/distedu/M.%20A.%20PartII%20English%20Modern%20&%20Post%20Modern%20British%20Literature%20All.PDF ● http://literatureinenglishunican.blogspot.com.co/2009/12/modernism-1901-1945.html ● http://www.sprog.asb.dk/tt/giddens/lectures/some_characteristics_of_modernism.htm ● http://college.cengage.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/instructors/irm/modern.pdf