Timeline - Overview - Modernism
Rejection of realism
In the twentieth century writers began to reject the conventions of realist novels, drama and poetry, feeling that they were too restrictive and didn't reflect the human condition. This feeling intensified in the wake of World War I. Individuals who had witnessed the horror and destruction of the trenches and the battlefields could no longer subscribe to the Victorian world view which had led people to believe that if they worked hard and upheld Christian morals, they would prosper. Cause and effect, the backbone of plot and narrative, no longer made any sense. Scientists such as Albert Einstein were overturning concepts as fundamental as time: once the Theory of Relativity had been published and disseminated, the stability of the universe which Newton had proposed was called into question.
As a result, novelists and playwrights began to eschew linear narratives and often to do away with plot altogether. Virginia Woolf, in her essay 'Modern Fiction' (1919), urged fellow writers: 'Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.' The writing which Woolf and her contemporaries aspired to aimed to record not the world itself, as the realist writers had attempted to, but an individual's subjective perception of the world. The stream-of-consciousness technique evolved to meet their objectives; characterised by fast-flowing, often discordant, thoughts and images, this narrative style aims to reflect the character's mental landscape, to record moment by moment the character's experience of the world and their perception of that experience.
Charges of elitism
Unable to believe in the morals of their forbears, in the word of God, modernist writers no longer wished to instruct their readers. Instead, they began to produce art for art's sake. Ezra Pound, a poet, editor and influential figure within the modernist movement, exhorted writers to 'make it new'. Making it new meant doing away with established conventions such as chapters, characterisation, plot and metre. As a result the literature of this period tends to be fragmented, non-linear, abstract and often very difficult to read.
The movement was also highly self-referential; intertextuality was a key trope and one of the most reknowned modernist texts, T.S.Eliot's poem 'The Waste Land' includes, among others, allusions to the following texts: The Canterbury Tales by C14th English poet Chaucer, the German operas Tristan und Isolde and Götterdammerung, Fleurs du mal by C19th French poet Baudelaire, the 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante, the epic Roman poem Aeneid by Virgil and the repository of Greek myths Metamorphosis by Ovid, epic English poem Paradise Lost by Milton, Metaphysical poet Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', a wealth of English Renaissance dramas including Webster's White Devil, Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, as well as the religious texts the Holy Bible, books of Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes and the Gospels, St. Augustine's Confessions, the Hindu doctrines Upanishads, and the Buddha's 'Fire Sermon'. The number and range of such allusions, combined with the modernists' use of experimental forms that deliberately challenge readers' desire for meaning led many critics to denounce the movement as elitist.
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