Modern Period Handout

English 202

Dr. Fike

Characteristics of the Modern Period:

Modernist period in English literature:  begins with WWI in 1914; 1965 marks the end of the modernist period.

Your handbook has good sections on “modernism” and the “modern period.”

A few important events prior to 1914:

• Queen Victoria died in 1901.

• The Boer War:  1899-1902.  The British tried to establish political and economic control over the Boer republic of South Africa.  The British won, but the protest at home was the sort that we experienced re. Vietnam.

• Edward VII:  King between 1901-10—this decade was a period of conspicuous enjoyment.

• 1905:  Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published.

• George V:  King starting in 1910—a time of stability prior to WWI.

• 1911-15:  Sir James G. Frazer published The Golden Bough, a compendium of mythology; abridged version in 1922.  Eliot made use of this.

Main events:

• 1914-18:  WWI:  a major theme in Eliot is the sickness of modern civilization, identified as death-in-life, a direct result of WWI.  A feminist writer like Virginia Woolf would view WWI as the height of masculine egotism.  Cf. uncertainty in "Prufrock."

• 1918:  Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry posthumously published (experimentation with language and rhythm).

• 1922:  Eliot’s The Waste Land (reflected post-war disillusion of the 1920s:  literal and spiritual waste land).  N.B. Eliot was American, but he lived in London and wrote about local places.  He is considered a British writer.

• 1922:  Joyce’s Ulysses (about a single day; stream of consciousness technique reflects modernism’s emphasis on the conscious and unconscious mind; this in turn is a reflection of Freud’s and Jung’s influence).

• 1928:  Women’s suffrage fully won.

• 1930:  Period of depression and unemployment begins; the rise of Hitler.

• 1939-45:  WWII.

Re. poetry, the main innovation was the emphasis on the image; on both sides of the Atlantic, an emphasis on “hard, clear, precise images.”  Key figure:  American poet Ezra Pound.  The image’s purpose was to describe and evoke a particular mood.  See Eliot's term "objective correlative" in Harmon and Holman, page 347.

In fiction, there were three major changes in attitude:

• A common sense of significance and shared values had disappeared because of the pervasive uncertainty.

• A new view of time:  no longer viewed as a series of chronological moments to be presented in a sequence; now considered a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual.

• Developments in the nature of consciousness:

• Stream of consciousness—a key new technique—explores the fabric of a character’s consciousness.  Important new technique for the English novel (Joyce’s Ulysses = best example).  The isolation of consciousness and the importance of emotional/human bonds were themes of the novel (e.g., Conrad). 
• The past is always present in consciousness at some level and affects our reactions.  Jung’s theory of archetypes—hence the importance of the primitive and the interaction of the primitive and the civilized.  See page 1515 in the introduction:  “that the primitive affects our conduct…became almost the most important single idea of the new century.”  Conrad’s Marlow gives us a negative version of the return to the primitive (he journeys backward in time).   

• In the short story particularly, there was a heightened use of ordinary objects and incidents to convey symbolic meaning—e.g., Joyce.

Drama:  Major figures were Yeats (Abbey Theater) ITO the Celtic revival; Yeats employs the image, but he also relied on the Irish national heritage, esp. the mystical and supernatural material of Celtic legend.  Most famous playwright:  Samuel Beckett.  His most famous play:  Waiting for Godot.