Why unwind with the latest mystery or light comic novel when you can grapple with some of the most demanding works ever written in English?
Early Modernism
Think of it as Pilates--or rock climbing--for your brain. Modernism, spanning the first half of the twentieth century, was the era of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and other heavyweights who made it their business to revolutionize literature. Modernists felt that they were living through a period of momentous change that called for equally radical changes in literature. Out went clear, coherent, linear plots, omniscient narrators, and straightforward language. In came fragmentation, multiple points of view, stream of consciousness, dense allusions, and ambiguity.
Modernism requires an active reader: A few tips on approaching these books.
Things become increasingly surreal as Marlow approaches the mysterious Kurtz. Its journal, Blast , only appeared twice before the Great War put an end to it. Full of bluster and bravado, Blast includes poetry by T. Eliot, Pound, and the lesser known Wyndham Lewis, along with manifestos and cubist-futurist art by the likes of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The macho tone is tempered a bit by a short story by the feminist journalist Rebecca West. Eliot , The Waste Land - The primer of poetic modernism and the quintessential statement of post-war despondency. When read carefully, repeating themes and evocative, lyrical passages cohere around a desire: But Ulysses is also hilarious, playful, bawdy, and at times downright moving.
The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary movements, including Imagism , Symbolism , Futurism , Vorticism , Cubism , Surrealism , Expressionism , and Dada. Early modernist writers, especially those writing after World War I and the disillusionment that followed, broke the implicit contract with the general public that artists were the reliable interpreters and representatives of mainstream "bourgeois" culture and ideas, and, instead, developed unreliable narrators , exposing the irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world.
They also attempted to take into account changing ideas about reality developed by Darwin , Mach , Freud , Einstein , Nietzsche , Bergson and others. From this developed innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue , as well as the use of multiple points-of-view. This can reflect doubts about the philosophical basis of realism , or alternatively an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. For example, the use of stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue reflects the need for greater psychological realism.
It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf , who declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December ". Among early modernist non-literary landmarks is the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg 's Second String Quartet in , the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Expressionist Blue Rider group in Munich in , the rise of fauvism , and the introduction of cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque and others between and Sherwood Anderson 's Winesburg, Ohio is known as an early work of modernism for its plain-spoken prose style and emphasis on psychological insight into characters.
James Joyce was a major modernist writer whose strategies employed in his novel Ulysses for depicting the events during a twenty-four-hour period in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom , have come to epitomize modernism's approach to fiction. Eliot described these qualities in , noting that Joyce's technique is "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.
It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art. This is in fact a rhetorical technique to convey the poem's theme: Modernist literature addressed similar aesthetic problems as contemporary modernist art. Gertrude Stein 's abstract writings, for example, have been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspective Cubist paintings of her friend Pablo Picasso. In this poem, MacDiarmid applies Eliot's techniques to respond to the question of nationalism, using comedic parody, in an optimistic though no less hopeless form of modernism in which the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.
Significant modernist works continued to be created in the s and s, including further novels by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil 'Man without qualities' , and Dorothy Richardson. The American modernist dramatist Eugene O'Neill 's career began in , but his major works appeared in the s and s and early s. Lawrence 's Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in , while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of William Faulkner 's The Sound and the Fury in Then in James Joyce 's Finnegans Wake appeared.
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It was in this year that another Irish modernist, W. Cummings , and Wallace Stevens continued writing from the s until the s. The term late modernism is sometimes applied to modernist works published after Basil Bunting , born in , published his most important modernist poem Briggflatts in It starts off with manifesto essays, like his essay on aesthetics and his essay on art and socialism, which politicises the making of art.
He writes essays on African sculpture and the art of the Bushmen. He looks at the art of cave paintings, showing how very early primitive people instinctively distorted the form of an animal but did so with far more intelligence than bourgeois Victorian artists who were simply replicating the look of an animal down to every hair on its head. He really shifted the sense of what it is to be an intelligent artist.
The 10 Best Modernist Books (in English)
He famously draws attention to African and South American art, so there is a challenging of the European supremacy as well. That goes right across modernism — from Picasso looking at African masks to DH Lawrence talking about African sculpture — but Fry very seriously makes people in London think about South American forms and the dynamic of African sculptures.
Your next choice is a broad and critical account of British literature in the s. This is a treasure trove book. What I love about it is how it gathers together a huge number of writers from the s and shows that they are using similar kinds of imagery and behaviour. What fascinates me here is to do with fashion — to do with what holds a generation of people together.
This book is a very brilliant form of literary criticism that shows you how certain ideas gather currency and become significant for particular milieux and generations. The book is arranged thematically. You have, for example, a chapter on the movement of the masses which is full of ideas about people moving in mass — about the way people get about, and how the individual related to power and being a part of something big in the thirties. But you also have chapters on how certain people become the ring leaders.
He begins with a chapter called Vin Rouge Ordinaire , which is about WH Auden as a vintage wine label of the thirties — how everything is a kind of response to Auden, either arguing with him or flattering him in some way.
The Best Books on Modernism | Five Books Expert Recommendations
How did British literature of the thirties compare to that of the twenties and to what extent did the rise of fascism in Europe affect British literature? The Spanish Civil War was a great rallying call to the younger generation of literary and political people. If you were a young poet in the thirties, you had to take sides in the Spanish Civil War. There was a book called Writers Take Sides — you had to say what you thought of the war, and if you were going to intervene then you needed to get yourself to the front, which a great many writers did.
You were defined in that period by having either military interventionist politics or various forms of passivism — that would go through to Munich and the Second World War itself. Which a great many did. Which leads in to your first question about the difference between the literature of the thirties and the twenties. The difference is largely politics. The pressure to either intervene or step back from politics is so great that the whole artistic scene is defined by it in a way. In the face of violence and tragedy, what does the artist do?
That is one of the great questions of the s. Cunningham reads their whole lives as part of their art, which I find rather inspiring.
He writes about a culture, not just about what gets typed up on paper. Tell us a little about Woolf, who was the subject of your own last book. Her novels are timeless in many ways. A great deal of interpretation tries to put us back into the historical context of those novels, which is tremendously important. There is also the way in which they have a universal significance as novels. I was shocked when I was first read her that it was possible to write a novel [ To The Lighthouse ] about a little boy going to a lighthouse and for that to be the central plot. Nothing else really happens at all yet it left me absolutely reeling, with a sense that I needed to reorder my life and that life was now going to be a different experience.
What she does is all to do with style, form, structure and symbolism. That was one of the great mysteries that I wanted to keep getting at, and which sent me back to read more. Another thing I tried to emphasise in my book on Woolf was her capacity for enjoyment of all kinds of things in the world.
But what strikes me most about her novels, diaries and letters is her garrulousness, her gossipyness — her relentless capacity for living and looking at the world. She was certainly relentless in her opinions. Do you think you would have liked her if you had met her? I would have been absolutely terrified to meet her, but I would have been absolutely seduced if what comes out on her paper in her novels came out of her mouth at me. I would be just bewitched by the speed of her figurative language, the precision with which she captures people, a street, the setting of the sun, the kind of wind.
Woolf was able to tell the same story 50 times without repeating herself. She will report the same anecdote to three friends in different letters and never use the same word twice. That limitless exercise in reformulating the world — in seeing how life is so very multi-faceted — is an inspiration for the people who came after her to keep talking about her work. This was really her first experimental novel.
We have a hero, Jacob, at the centre of the book who keeps going missing. Then we chase him through his life, but we really never get to sit down and talk to him as you would in a Victorian novel where you would look at every facet of a character. So we look around and see the invitation cards on his mantelpiece, the books on his table and his empty chair.
What can we tell about them just from meeting them for a moment? What can we tell from going into their room? How much of a mark do people leave on the world? What is a room like when they go out of it? These are questions which in a way are ordinary, because we all experience someone going out of a room, someone leaving a house. At the end his surname, Flanders, comes into its own and he dies in the First World War. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter. Woolf captures this sense of an upper middle class young man with certain expectations in life, all the stereotypical things that he is likely to do — go to university, go on boating trips with his friends, or trips to the British Library.
She looks for the social panoply around him. The book is seen as an important modernist text.
No novel sets out to be traditional. So one has to be careful about condemning everything that came before modernism as stuck in the mud.