Twentieth

century and
Modernism

DR. EMİNE ŞENTÜRK

Answering The Question: What Is Modernism?

Romance ‘In medieval literature, a verse narrative [recounts] the marvellous adventures of a chivalric
hero.… In modern literature, i.e., from the latter part of the 18th through the 19th centuries, a romance is
a work of prose fiction in which the scenes and incidents are more or less removed from common life and
are surrounded by a halo of mystery, an atmosphere of strangeness and adventure’ (The Reader’s
Encyclopaedia, William Rose Benét)
Realism ‘literature that attempts to depict life in an entirely objective manner, without idealization or
glamor, and without didactic or moral ends. Realism may be said to have begun with such early English
novelists as Defoe, Fielding, and Smollett, and to have become a definite literary trend in the 19th
century’ (The Reader’s Encyclopaedia, William Rose Benét)
Modernism

‘Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenburg calls “the tradition
of the new”. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as
creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre
and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. …We can dispute about when it starts (French
symbolism; decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes
“paleo-modernism” and “neo-modernism” and hence a degree of continuity through to post-war art). We
can regard it as a timebound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, Villon,
Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka,
Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; Mallarmé,
Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain
striking technical innovation, emphasize spatial or “fugal” as opposed to chronological form, tend towards
ironic modes, and involve a certain “dehumanization of art”’ (Malcolm Bradbury in A Dictionary of
Modern Critical Terms, ed. Roger Fowler)
Post-war period

Modern Western literature commenced from the 1890s. The high modernism
began after the First World War. The architect Sir Edwin Lutyen visited the
battlefields of north-eastern France in July 1917 in order to investigate the
need for permanent memories to the vast number of dead. The post-war
period was haunted by long memories, tender, angry, and sickening. Sir
Lutyen says that poppies, cornflowers, skylarks and rats of the poetry had
emerged from the war that effectively marked the end of an art which had
once reached far comfortably to sympathetic images from nature.
“This is an accumulated sense of exhilaration at a variety of new beginnings
and rejections of the past.”

New feelings started in politics, society and in art and literature after the First
World War and its immediate aftermath. Virginia Woolf expressed this in
1924, “This is an accumulated sense of exhilaration at a variety of new
beginnings and rejections of the past.” She refers to Samuel Butler’s The Way
of All Flesh as an early symptom of cultural questioning and the plays of
Shaw. Her paper “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” would probably have
acknowledged the potent influence of the wider European innovations.
Art and exhibitions
In 1910, there was an exhibition in London of the blazing colours and visual
fragmentations of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin organized by Roger Fry and the
post-impressionists.
The second exhibition in 1912 introduced the visual economics, the rethinking of form
and the abstractions of Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Derain to the London public. It
included English imitators Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Russian artists.
Diaghilev’s company organized an exhibition of Russian art works. This influenced
European arts. It directed challenges to the vaunted refinement and urbanity of inherited
aristocratic Western culture and to the emasculated nature of much of its old-tradition.
The spirit of London collapsed in the winter of 1915-16. D.H. Lawrence focused on the city,
praised from heart a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes and fears. The artist of Europe and
America met at Versailles in order to unravel the outstanding historical, geographical, religious
and racial knots in Europe. The Bolshevik State, was first assaulted by armed Western
intervention, and wracked by the civil war and destructive manoeuvres of internal capital,
emerged from many post war intellectuals on the model of progressive society.
The Soviet Russian literature in the 1930s had the idea of working future of mankind, most
conveniently avoided contemplating the fate of Russian intelligentsia and the manifest
suffering of uprooted, regimented and forcibly collectivized peasants.
The modern British young writers less focused on the Western bourgeois but
they focused on the problems of poverty, and the problem of the explosive anti-
democratic energies of Italy, Germany and Spain.
The pre war Western literature focused on the conditions of the industrial,
agricultural poor, and the unemployment. The late nineteenth and early
twentieth century served the politics and electoral success of the Labour Party
in the 1920s.
women’s interests, The General Strike of May 1926, which
national and culture, collapsed after nine days, but the Government’s
elements of national propaganda victory, was partly due to its
life successful control of the media, including, for
the first time radio broadcasting. It continued
economic depression and helped to ensure that
Labour Party was able to form a second
Government between 1929 and 1931.
women’s interests, The British literature in the 1920s and 1930s
national and culture, demonstrated the existential instability in Europe. Roger
elements of national Fry (1866-1934) had argued about art and life. His
life argument was,
the idea of art as photographic representation. It
ends by announcing that the artist of the new movement
is moving into a sphere more and more remote from that
of the ordinary man and that in proportion as art becomes
purer the number of people to whom it appeals gets less.
The Mail (1896), Daily Mirror (1903) and Daily Express
newspapers were devoted to women’s interests, national
and culture, elements of national life. The first music
broadcast by the new corporation on New Year’s Day
1926, was instantly democratic. In 1930s T.V and cinema
took great role on British society.
 The Bloomsbury group

Modernists always question the received ideas, and hunt the critical
writing. They debate about tradition and the rejections of tradition
and the use and interpretation of history. Thomas Hardy, D.H.
Lawrence, Woolf, Pound and Huxley are modernist writers.
The Bloomsbury group was a group of writers and artists. It was
never a formal grouping. Its origin lay in a male friendship in the
late 19th century Cambridge. It was only with formation of the
Memorial Club in 1920, it was originally centred on Leslie
Stephen’s daughters Virginia and Vanessa Clive Bell, and their
friends E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan
Grant and Desmond McCarthy.
 The term ‘modernism’ is not a precise label but,
instead, a way of referring to the efforts of many
individuals across the arts who tried to move away
from the established modes of representation in
formal or political terms. It is said,
New forms In literature, the push to new forms necessitated
a reconsideration of the fundamentals of
imaginative writing: theme, character, narration
and plot, the presentation of time and space,
imagery and, above all, language.
 Modernism is variously argued to be a
period, style, genre or combination of the
Modern above; but it is first of all a complex word.
Its stem ‘modern’ is a term that from the
Latin modo, means ‘current’ and so has a
far wider currency and range of meaning.
‘Modernism’ is referred to the Christian
present in opposition to the Roman past.
 More generally ‘modern’ has been frequently used
to refer to the avant-garde since the Second World
Modern War. This sense has been shifted from meaning
‘now’ to ‘just now.’ It is this sense of the avant-
garde, radical, progressive or even revolutionary
side to the modern that was the catalyst for
coinage of modernism and its meaning.
It is loosely used as a label for the dominant
tendency of the 20th century. It is a new trend in
art and literature, in the Christian church, a
movement or tendency that began shortly before
1900 in an attempt to reconcile Christianity with
science, especially Darwin’s theory of evolution.
The word ‘Modernism’ in religion

The word ‘Modernism’ in religion is an outlook, holding that modern scholarship

and scientific advances require fundamental restatement of traditional doctrine. The
term is specifically applied to Roman Catholic movement of the last 19th and early
20th centuries. The modernists in the Roman Catholic Church sought to retain the
letter of church doctrine by reinterpreting it in the light of modern knowledge. In
doing so they showed the influence of current evolutionary philosophies. Dogmas,
for example, were not thought to be exact and authoritative formulations of truths
revealed by God and fixed for all time, but rather statements of religious feelings and
experiences in a given historical epoch. Thus religious truths were held to be subject
to a constant evolutionary progress as part of mankind’s progressive experience.
Now frequently used in the discussion of the twentieth century literature, Modernism means that
some of today’s literary aspects of literature are distinguished from classical times. Modernists
have new and distinctive features in their subjects, forms, concepts and style in their art; they
had deliberately and radically broken away from some of the traditional aspects and they
questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of conceiving literature.
Humanism, symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, ultraismo, dadaism,
stream of consciousness, surrealism, the theatre of absurd, cubism, realism, existentialism and
cultural crisis are newly emerged in our time.
They reject the 19th century traditions and their consensus between author and reader, the
concept of realism, free-verse and avant-garde. They adopted complexes and different forms and
styles.
Stephen Spender defines modernism as, “ruffling the realist surface of literature by underlying forces; the disturbance
may arise, though, from logic solely aesthetic or highly social.”
Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan and often it expresses a sense of urban culture, dislocation along with
awareness of new anthropologies and psychological theories.
Literary historians locate the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890’s but most are agreed that what is called high
modernism had rapid changes after First World War. European and American writers who are central to modernism
include Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide,
Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, William Faulkner, Stephen Mallarme, William Butler Yeats, Maria Rilke, Marianne
Moore, William Carlos William, Wallace Stevens, Carl Strindberg, Wedekind, Apollinaire, August Strindberg, Luigi
Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, Bertolt Brecht, May Sinclair, Rosy Macaulay, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West, Gertrude Stein,
Bonnie Kim, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, Jean Rhys, Mina Loy, Catherine Mansfield,
Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. It is said, «Victorian novels all appeal directly to their readers in emotional
terms, assuming their experience of life will be sufficiently like these of their authors to claim assent.»
The period from 1910 to 1930 had an economic depression. Yet the period produced works
such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, James Joyce’s
Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Virginia Woolf’s To The Light House and W.B.
Yeats The Tower. The two decades constitute an intelligible unity from the point of view of the
present discussion. There can be valid disagreement about the extent of the interaction between
culture and society but it is evident that modernist writers are very much aware of the state of
the world around them.
A modern writer has been rendered more self-directed by the influence of psychological
investigation, revealing his complexity of the human personality, emphasizing the role of agent
in creating the reality which he experiences.
Modern novelists do not investigate characters in the term of the morality of their action and
motivation but examine human sensibility and perception. Man’s exploration of the
preoccupation, inevitable language and the nature of human discourse will become a major
theme for the modernist along with the sense of rootlessness, lack of valid purpose, flexibility,
power of art, contradiction and paradox.
1930 onwards, there is a continuous change: there is an economic breakdown and the means of
unemployment of the West formed a grim continuity, while the development of Fascism in
Italy and Nazism in Germany initiated a process of violence which led to the invasion of
Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.
In such a world the new generation of writers were much more political, generally left-wing.
Especially in poets there is direct criticism of English society. Michel Roberts, W. H. Auden, C.
Day Lewis, William Plomer, and Stephen Spender wrote of poetry being turned to propaganda
and Louis MacNiece and George Orwell did it in prose. The strong political writers included
Sartre, Camus, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Baldwin, Mailer and Beckett.
In the 1960s the term ‘modernism’ became widely used as a description of a generation of written and a
literary phase that was deniable. The word ‘modernity’ is first used by Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth
century in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” He describes modernity as the fashionable fleeting
and contingent in art. Peter Childs observes,
In relation to modernism, modernity is considered to be described as a way of living and of experiencing life
which arises with the changes wrought by industrialization, urbanization and secularization; its characteristics are
disintegration and reformation, fragmentation and rapid change, ephemerality, reality and insecurity. It involves
certain new understanding of time and space; speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos, and
cultural revolution.

Modernism has come to be regarded as a distinct cultural movement in the recent past; it has come in for
more direct criticism from American critics Edmund Wilson, Robert Conquest and Donald Davie.
Modernism is characteristic too of Marxist criticism, depicting the burst of artistic
experimentation in the Soviet Union in the years immediately after the revaluation, including
the works of Mayakovsky, Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, Hungarian George Lucks, Tolstoy,
Rolland, Shaw, Dreiser, Sterne, Pirandello and Mann.
Modernist writers fail to see man socially and historically, and so describe him in alienation,
which is a social process. Other modernist writers are Frank Kermode, C.K. Stead, A. Alvarez,
Rilkee, Heine, C.M. Bowra, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Soren Kierkegaard, George
Crosz, John Hartsfield, Wieland Hezfelde, Raoul Heinemann, Johannes Baader, Otto
Schmalhausen, and Henry Levin.
Modernism is regularly viewed as time-bound or as genre-bound art form.
When time-bound, it is often primarily located in the years from 1890 to 1930, with a wider
acknowledgement that it develops from the mid-nineteenth century and begins to lose its influence in the
mid-twentieth century. Modernism favored anti-historicism, it always focused on the micro rather than the
macrocosm, and, hence, the individual more than the social.
Modernist art stressed complexity and changed in response to the mechanic age. It introduced feminism,
homosexuality, androgyny and bi-sexuality besides questioning the constrains of the nuclear family which
seemed to hamper the individual’s search for personal values. The cultural commentator and poet Matthew
Arnold delivered a lecture entitled, “The Modern Element in Literature. He described this modern style in
terms of response, confidence, and tolerance, free activity of the mind, reason and universals.” Modernist
writers and artists take several things, including industrialization, urban society, war, technical change, new
philosophical ideas, feminism, identity crisis and the sense of rootlessnesses.
Work-Cited
«Literary Modernism and English Fiction»