Assignment : 110

 Assignment 110 : Exploring the  Key Literary Movements of the 20th Century

Tables of Contents

Personal Information

Assignment Details

Abstract

keywords

Introduction

Major Movements of Twentieth Century

Modernist Poetry

Modern Fiction

Modernist Drama

Major Theories of the Twentieth Century

Personal Information

Name : Reshma Yunusbhai Bilakhiya

Batch : M.A. Sem - 2 (2024)

Enrollment no : 5108230008

E - mail address : reshmabilakhiya21@gmail.com

Roll no: 23

Assignment Details : 

Topic:   Exploring the  Key Literary Movements of the 20th Century

Paper & Subject Code : 110 A:  History of English Literature - From 1900 to 2000

Submitted to : Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, 

MKBU, Bhavnagar

Date of Submission : 25th April, 2024.

Abstract :

The 20th century witnessed a myriad of literary movements that transformed the landscape of literature and shaped the way we understand and interpret texts. From modernism to postmodernism, these movements reflected the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the time. This paper provides an overview of five major literary movements of the 20th century, examining their defining characteristics, key figures, and significant works.

Keywords:

20th century, literary movements, modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, existentialism, feminist literature.

Introduction:

The 20th century was a period of immense change and innovation in the world of literature. Throughout this century, various literary movements emerged, each leaving a significant impact on the literary landscape. From the experimentation and disillusionment of modernism to the skepticism and self-reflexivity of postmodernism, these movements reflected the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the time. In this paper, we will explore five major literary movements of the 20th century, examining their defining characteristics, key figures, and significant works.

MAJOR MOVEMENTS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY

The modern movement emerged in the late 19th century , and was rooted in the idea that ‘traditional ‘forms of art ,literature ,social organization and daily life had become outdated , and that it was therefore essential to sweep them aside and reinvent culture. Beginning in the 1890s and with increasing force afterwards, a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, and instead of merely reviving past knowledge in light of current techniques, it would be necessary to make more thorough changes. The movement in art paralleled such developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of internal combustion and industrialisation; and the rise of social sciences in public policy. In literature, the symbolist movement had a tremendous influence on the development of the Modernism, because of its focus on sensation. Philosophically, the break with the tradition by Nietzsche and Freud provides a key underpinning of the movement going forward: to begin again from first principles, abandoning previous definitions and system.

 It was the fear of an impending war that dominated the first decades of the 20th century. The publication of Origin of Species in 1859 marked the erosion of religious belief simultaneous with the rise of new technologies. Foundations of Christianity were shaken and Nietzsche made his controversial statement, “God is dead, we have killed him”. A change over from an agrarian society to the Industrial resulted in the destabilization of moral values resulting in a state of acute identity crisis depicted in ‘the heap of broken images ‘in The Wasteland. Modernism marks a break in the Renaissance tradition of Humanism and centrality of the human subject/author, belief in permanent reality, perennial significance and values of the literary text crystallised with the invention of printing. The disorientation of European culture was reflected in the movements of Surrealism (Andre Breton) , Impressionism (Monet ), Symbolism (Baudelaire ,Rimbaud, Mallarme) ,Cubism (Picasso), Expressionism (Van Gogh ,Munch ,Gaugin), Dadaism (Tristan Tzara ) ,etc .These artists questioned the tyranny of conventional forms, colours, rhythm and harmony and represented reality as plural and subjective, affirming that art which exists for its own sake will provide the unity that is lost in contemporary society .

One of the major motifs of Modernist literature was myth which was expected to give shape and significance to a contemporary fragmented reality. Like Yeats in his Byzantium poems, Eliot in The Wasteland also tries to revive the lost spirituality in the ancient and oriental culture. The fragmentary technique of The Wasteland is also employed by Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. The question of time also emerges in these works .The modernist individual is caught in an existential angst, devoid of dignity, purpose, value and meaning reminiscent of a Beckettian void and Kafkaesque claustrophobia manifest in Lucky , Pozzo ( Waiting for Godot) and Gregor Samsa (Metamorphosis). Modernist fiction vindicated colonial ideology to a larger extent. It involved a lament for the loss of European centre. The novels of Joseph Conrad and E.M .Forster offered ambiguous moral positions related to colonial issues .Virginia Woolf took a resisting feminist stance against the mainstream male canon.

MODERNIST POETRY

The first world war and its horror greatly influenced modern poetry .The War poetry developed into two phases : first, poets like Rupert Brooke who did not personally experience the horror of war and song of patriotism and nobility of sacrifice ; secondly ,those poets who like Wilfred Owen and Sassoon who had actually been to the war front and had known immense human suffering and depravity .Then came Georgian poetry which reacted against the decadent transitional poetry .The Georgians aimed at putting English poetry “on a new strength and beauty .” They aimed to treat natural things in a clear, natural and beautiful way, neither too modern nor too like the Victorians. They endeavoured to restore simplicity and naturalness to English poetry and avoided the use of archaic diction, grandiloquent expressions and all pomposities of thought and expression. Important Georgian poets are Walter de la Mare, W.H. Davies, John Masefield, John Drinkwater, Harold Munro and Alfred Noyes.

The poetical movement, known as Imagism, was a reaction against Romanticism, especially Georgian poetry .The Georgians lived in a world of fantasy and discarded the sordid realities of contemporary life. The Imagists reacted against the hackneyed and  fantastic approach of the Georgians. It was in vogue between the years 1910 and 1918. Its first anthology , Des Imagists was published in 1914 with Ezra Pound as the editor .The movement was spearheaded by Ezra Pound , James Joyce ,Hilda Doolittle , Amy Lowell ,T.E. Hulme ,William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington while it evidently influenced T.S Eliot, W.B .Yeats, Wallance Stevens , Vorticists like Wyndham Lewis and poets of the 1930s.The Imagists liberated poetry from the shackles of classical discipline and waywardness of Romanticism. Pound defined an image as an “ intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time ”. They experimented in ‘verse libre’ and believed in unlimited freedom of expression. They endeavoured to reveal the new consciousness in beautifully moulded images. Though the movement was criticised for its obscurity, licence and restrictiveness, it definitely inaugurated a distinctive feature of modernist poetry.

 The poets W.H .Auden, Stephen Spender ,Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice came to be known as the Oxford Poets .These poets were Oxford graduates and had been great friends when they were undergraduates. The Oxford poets “affirmed the value of being contemporary, of expressing the common experience, and the sensibility of the age ..”.The new poets took interest in current political and economic affairs and thought that Marxism was the only panacea to end all the evils infecting mankind. They had more intellectual appeal, contained marks of innovation and experimental ideas. These poets show the influence of Freud. Their poetical technique was greatly influenced by Imagism, French symbolism and Hopkins-Eliot innovations. Two new poets Dylan Thomas and George Barker weaned poetry away from the political consciousness which characterised the poetry of the Oxford Poets, and gave prominence to religion and romanticism and hence termed as neo romanticism. The poets of this period were also influenced by the Second World War .The notable poets who composed war poetry are Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, Alan Rock and Roy Fuller.

 Among the themes which recur in the work of war poets are the boredom and frustration of service life, the waste caused by war, appreciation of the friendship found in the services, a deep enjoyment of nature and of the landscape of home, and, above all the courage facing up to the hardships of struggle and the possibilities of ultimate death. The predominant note is that of sadness.

 The poets of the Apocalyptic movement centre on the individual and not the community. J .E. Hendry and Henry Treece, who edited The New Apocalypse (1940) and The White Horseman (1941), were the pioneers of this poetic movement. Nicholas Moore, G.S. Fraser, Tom Scott and Vernon Watkins were other prominent members of this group.

This movement was immensely influenced by the Book of Revelation, Shakespeare, Kafka, Donne, Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. The Apocalyptic poetry is obscure .This movement was opposed to the political affinities of Auden and his group. It expressed hatred of the Machine Age and proclaimed its faith in the individual as the hope for humanity. D .J. Enright’s anthology Poets of the Fifties (1950) and Robert Conquest’s Anthology (1956) brought nine new poets to notice. They were John Wain , Kingsley Amis ,John Holloway ,Donald Davie , Philip Larkin , Thom Gunn ,Robert Conquest and Elizabeth Jennings. The majority of these young poets belonged to working class or lower middle class and all of them were educated in Oxford or Cambridge University. They were classified as University Wits or New Empsonians but later on the critics called the new poets as belonging to the Movement.

 

Symbolist movement which began in the late nineteenth century in France continued to influence English writers. Symbolism emphasised the primary importance of suggestion and evocation in the expression of a private mood or reverie, as employed by romantic poets like Shelley and Blake in England and Novalis and Holderin in Germany. The symbol was held to evoke subtle relations and affinities especially between sound, sense and colour , and between the material and the spiritual worlds .The techniques of the French symbolists , who exploited an order of private symbols in a poetry of rich suggestiveness rather than explicit signification had an immense influence throughout Europe and America on writers like T .S .Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Dowson, Dylan  Thomas and so on. 

The modernist writers, in the decades after the World War 1, were notable exponents of Symbolism in literature. Many of them exploited symbols which were in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in part invented. Some of their works are symbolist in their settings , agents , actions , as well as in objects they refer to , as can be seen in Yeats’ Byzantium, Dylan Thomas’ sonnet series Altarwise by Owl-Light, TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and so  on.  Symbolism’s influence on other arts can be seen in the music of Debussy and the paintings of Odilon Redon, Gustae Moreau,Van Gogh and Gauguin.

 

Movements like Dadaism and Surrealism also influenced writers. Dadaism which emerged in 1916 out of disgust with the brutality and destructiveness of the First World War, set out to engender a negative art and literature that would shock and bewilder observers and serve to destroy the false values of modern bourgeois society, including its rationality and the kind of art and literature that rationality had fostered. Exponents of Dadaism are Tristram Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Mary Ray, and Max Ernest. Surrealism was a revolutionary movement in painting, sculpture and other arts, as well as literature. Andre Breton, Louis Aragon ,Salvador Dali are its prominent members. The influence of surrealism can be found in many modern writers of prose and verse who have broken with conventional modes of artistic organisation to experiment with free association, a broken syntax, non logical and non– chronological order, dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, and the juxtaposition of bizarre, shocking, or seeming unrelated images.

 MODERN FICTION

 The modern novel from 1900 to the present can broadly be divided into three periods. The first period extending from 1900 to the 1918 , includes such prominent novelists as Henry James, George Gissing, George Moore, Rudyard Kipling, Arnold Bennet, John Galsworthy , Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. By and large these novelists follow the Victorian tradition of the novel, though newer trends are also visible .The second period extends from 1919 -1939 and covers the period between the two Wars. The main novelists of this period are Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, E .M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Masefield. It is during this period that ‘stream of consciousness novel ‘comes of its own. The third period  is the post –War period from 1939 -1960 .The chief novelists of this period are Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton Burnett, Joyce Cary and Henry Green.

MODERNIST DRAMA

Drama, which had suffered steep decline during the Victorian Age was revived with great gusto in the beginning of twentieth century, and the course of six decades had witnessed many trends and currents in the twentieth century drama. Elements of realism, romanticism, impressionism, expressionism can be seen in modern drama .Angry Young Men were a group of writers of the 1950s who vociferously protested against the prevalent social mores and institutions. George Osborne‘s Look Back in Anger pioneered the movement and was followed by writers like John Braine , John Wain and Alan Sillitoe .The poetic plays of W.B.Yeats and T.S .Eliot etc deserve a special mention. G B .Shaw, Henry Jones, Arthur Pinero, John Galsworthy followed the tradition of the Irish dramatist Ibsen and wrote problem plays. The Theatre of Absurd envisaged a radical departure from all kinds of conventional drama. The Theatre of Absurd came to England with the staging in London of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 .The content of the Theatre was largely derived from the philosophical thought of Camus and Sartre , which may be called Absurdism and Existentialism respectively . Harold Pinter’s plays also fall into the same category.

 

MAJOR THEORIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

MARXISM is a materialist philosophy which tries to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in .It is opposed to the idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and controls the material world .According to Marxism, the society progresses through the struggle between opposing forces. It is the struggle between opposing classes that results in social transformation .History progresses through class struggle. Class struggle originates out of the exploitation of one class by another throughout history .Fundamental to classical Marxist thought are the concepts of base and superstructure which refer to the relationship between the material means of production and the cultural world of art and ideas. The foundation or base stands for the socio –economic relations and the mode of production, and the superstructure stands for art, law, politics, religion and above all, ideology. Marxist criticism flourished outside European countries and reached far and wide .There emerged many Marxist critics like Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams ,Fredric Jameson ,Georg Lukacs,

Terry Eagleton etc.

 

Psycho analytic criticism ,emerged in the 1960s is based on the works of the 19th century Austrian intellectual Sigmund Freud who proposed in his theoretical opus the notion of the unconscious mind through his works like The Ego and the Id , Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Interpretations of Dream, Totem and Taboo, etc. The uniqueness of Freud’s explorations lies in his attributing to the unconscious a decisive role in the lives of human being.

The unconscious is the repository of traumatic experiences,emotions, unadmitted desires, fears, unresolved conflicts etc. He later in his career

suggested a tripartite model of the psyche, dividing it into Id ,Ego ,superego.

His studies related to dreams are also much discussed.

 

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s and is first seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss. Its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation -they have to be seen in the context of the larger structures they are part of .Structuralism was imported into Britain mainly in the 1970s and attained widespread influence throughout the 1980s .It strongly believes that meaning or significance is not a kind of core or essence ‘inside’ things, in the literal sense that meanings are ‘attributed’ to the human mind, not contained within them. In the structuralist approach to literature there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures which contain them. These structures are usually abstract such as the notion of the literary or the poetic, or the nature of the narrative itself, rather than ‘mere’ concrete specifics like the history of a particular genre or tradition. Structuralism replaces the author and places the reader as the central agency in criticism .The arrival of structuralism in Britain and the USA in the 1970s caused a great deal of controversy, precisely because literary studies in these countries done mainly by following the tenets of New Criticism.

 

Post modernism is a socio cultural and literary theory and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences ,art ,literature, architecture, fashion, communications, and technology .It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanisation of the post second war era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism .The very term implies a relation to modernism .Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century . It has often been said that postmodernism is at once a continuation and a breakaway from the modernist stance .Postmodernism shares many of the features of modernism Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. They employ parody and pastiche ,and are also fragmented. The postmodernists distrust of coherence and unity points to a basic distinction between the two.

 

Post structuralism is an extension of post modernism. Post structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s .The two major figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes (1915-80) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). ‘The Death of the Author ‘(1968) is the hinge around which Barthes turns from structuralism to post structuralism .In that essay he announces the death of the author , which is a rhetorical way of asserting the independence of the literary text .The second key figure in the development of post structuralism in the late 1960s is the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Indeed , the starting point of post structuralism may be taken as his 1966 lecture ‘Structure ,Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. ‘In this paper Derrida sees in modern times a particular intellectual ‘event ‘ which constitutes a radical break from past ways of thought ,loosely associating this break with the philosophy of Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Heidegger (1889- 1976) and the psychoanalysis of Freud (1856-1939). Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings ,rather than being unified, logical whole. Derrida, who coined the term ‘deconstruction‘, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of ‘binary oppositions‘. Something is white but not black ,masculine and therefore not feminine, a cause rather than effect . Other common and mutually exclusive pairs  include  beginning/end,  conscious/unconscious,  presence/absence  and  speech/writing. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the boundary between binary oppositions and to do so in such a way that the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into question. Deconstruction is a post structuralist theory. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the reading of philosophical writings.

 

Post colonialism is a critical analysis of the history, culture, literature and modes of discourse of the former colonies of European imperial powers, especially focussing on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Carribean Islands and South America, post colonialism concerns itself with the study of colonisation, decolonisation and the neo colonising process. Focussing on the omnipresent power struggles between cultures and the intersection of cultures which results in multiculturalism and polyvalence of culture, post colonialism analyses the metaphysical, ethical and political concerns about cultural identity, gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, subjectivity ,language and power .It focuses particularly on the way in which literature by the colonising culture distorts the experience and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonised people. And also on literature by colonised people which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past’s inevitable otherness. It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonising countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonised countries. The major theoretical works in postcolonial theory include The Wretched of the Earth (1961) by Franz Fanon, Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said, In Other Worlds (1987) by Gayatri Spivak, The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Ashcroft ,Nation and Narration (1990) by Homi Bhabha, and Culture and Imperialism(1993) by Edward Said. Postcolonial critics reinterpret and examine the values of literary texts, by focussing on the contexts in which they are produced and reveal the colonial ideologies that are concealed within .Such approaches are exemplified in Chinua Achebe’s rereading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Edward Said‘s rereading of Jane Austen ‘s Mansfield Park, Sara Suleri’s rereading of Kipling’s Kim , Homi Bhabha’s rereading of Foster’s A Passage to India .

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries struggle for cultural roles and socio political rights – a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) .Feminist theorists aim to understand the nature of inequality and focus on gender politics, power relations and sexuality . Feminist political activities advocate for social, political and economic equality between the sexes .They campaign on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity, leave, equal pay, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination and sexual violence .The basis of feminist ideology is that society is organised into a patriarchal system in which men have advantage over women. The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases /waves .The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women , by suffrage groups and activist organisations . An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929).The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ‘70s, was characterised by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman .Simon de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, ”One is not born ,but rather becomes a woman.” Mary Ellman ’s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969) and Betty Friedan‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) are the major works of the phase . In the third phase (post – 1980), feminism was actively involved in the academia, with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism, psychoanalysis, post structuralism, dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation, etc . It also has associations with alternate sexualities, post colonialism (Linda Hutchinson and Spivak ) and ecological studies (Vandana Shiva  )  . Elaine Showalter in Towards a Feminist Poetics, introduces the concept of gynocriticism, a criticism of gynotexts by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning .Patricia Spacks’ The Female Imagination, Showalter’s A Literature of their Own and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts .Present day feminism in its diverse and various forms ,such as liberal feminism, cultural /radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist /neo Marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women .Beyond literature and literary theory, feminism has also found radical expression in arts, painting, architecture and sculpture .

New Historicism, Reader response criticism, Cultural studies, Eco criticism, Subaltern studies are the new areas of interests.

Conclusion : 

In conclusion, the 20th century witnessed a rich tapestry of literary movements that transformed the landscape of literature. From the experimentation and fragmentation of modernism to the skepticism and self-reflexivity of postmodernism, these movements reflected the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the time. Through their exploration of new forms, styles, and themes, these movements challenged traditional notions of literature and expanded the possibilities of literary expression. As we continue to study and analyze these movements, we gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and innovations of 20th-century literature.

Reference : 

“Twentieth Century English Literature.” Major Movements of Twentieth Century – Twentieth Century English Literature, ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/engp04/chapter/major-movements-of-twentieth-century/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024. 

Word Count : 4117

Thank You!!