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History of English Literature Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 25: Twentieth Century

(Modern Novel-Lawrence, Stream of Consciousness)

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
25.1 Modernism and the Modern Novel
25.2 Modern Drama
25.3 Summary
25.4 Keywords
25.5 Review Questions
25.6 Further Readings

Objectives
After studying this unit, you will be able to:
Describe modernism and modern novel.
Explain modern drama.

Introduction

The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the
art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful
world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama
of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break
with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a
profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent
apathy and moral relativism.

25.1 Modernism and the Modern Novel
In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In
their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a
variety of literary tactics and devices:
the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations
concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof;
the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and
philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery
aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to
rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the
evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of
Replenishment" 68)
Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in
language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning
("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists
generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form.
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