The 20th Century Literature

---The Age of Modernity

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Modernism• Modernism is a term for a number of

tendencies in the arts, which were prominent in the first half of the 20th century.

• Modernism rejected the traditional (Victorian and Edwardian) framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favour of a stream-of-consciousness presentation of personality, a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle.

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• Modernist works (for instance, the poetry of Eliot and Pound) may have to the unfamiliar reader a tendency to dissolve into chaos of sharp atomistic impressions, and some critics have deplored their drift towards what has been described as “dehumanization. In short, alienation and loneliness are the basic themes of modernism .

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modernist poetry

Modernism modernist fiction modernist drama

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Modernist PoetryThe Imagist Movement17th century metaphysical poetry French symbolist poetry

poets

T. S. Eliot

W. B. Yeats23/4/19 5

Modernist FictionHeroic age of the modern novel(1912-

1930) Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Main writers: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster

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Three new trends of fiction 1. Personal notions of value 2. A new view of time 3. stream-of-consciousness

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Theme of modern fiction The possibility of love, the establishment

of emotional communication in a community of private consciousness.

The search for communion and the inescapable isolation of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is symbolic of the human condition. The theme of all Lawrence's novels is human relationships.

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Modernist Drama• Since the end of World War Ⅱ,

drama has been the major area of literary innovation.

• Samuel Beckett changed the course of English drama with his first play Waiting for Godot, which strongly influenced a younger group of playwrights, and which started the history of Drama of Absurdity. 23/4/19 9