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Disciplina: DLC0352 – Tópicos Especiais em Literatura de Língua Inglesa
Professor: Hélio Dias Furtado

THE MODERN AGE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Prof. Bernadete Pasold - UFSC

The turn of the 19th. century is a period in human history that is marked by intense
transformation in all fields. There was an almost total refusal of old concepts and assumptions
in areas concerned with politics, economics, philosophy and science. The arts also went
through a process of change, and the term used to name this period in the arts is Modernism.
The term Modernism has been used to cover a variety of movements contrary to the realist
or the romantic impulse, such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism,
Symbolism, Imagism, Dadaism and Surrealism. This explains why Malcolm Bradbury has
defined it as "the movement of movements". Modernism seems to be the announcement of “a
new era of high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationalism, in which art turns
from Realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spatial form in
pursuit of a deeper penetration of life." (Bradbury, p. 25)
The time span of Modernism cannot be determined precisely. Some authors place its
beginning in the 1870's; others say that Modernism began during the first decade of this century.
However, they seem to agree in two points: it ended in the 1930's, before the beginning of World
War II, and its apogee was in the period between the two world wars.
During the second half of the 19th century Europe experiences profound social, technical and
political changes that begin to modify the convictions and the hopes that had prevailed till then.
The romantic view of nature is subverted by the growth of big cities with their motors, factories
and air pollution. Modernism is very much an urban phenomenon. As Bradbury states, "in many
respects, the literature of experimental Modernism which emerged in the last years of the
nineteenth century and developed into the present one was an art of cities, especially of the
polyglot cities, the cities which, for various historical reasons, had acquired high activity and
great reputation as centres of intellectual and cultural exchange .... They were mostly cities with
a well-established humanistic role, traditional cultural and artistic centres, places of art, learning
and ideas. But they were also often novel environments, carrying within themselves the
complexity and tension of modern metropolitan life, which so deeply underlies modern
consciousness and modern writing.” (p. 96) And he cites Berlin, Vienna, Moscow and St.
Petersburg around the turn of the century and into the early years of the war; London in the years
immediately before the war, Zürich, New York and Chicago during it, and Paris at all times.
There is an erosion of faith not only in religion but in a number of secular principles as well,
as a result of theories and discoveries that imply a revision of traditional western ideas: Marx and
Engels' "Communist Manifesto" (1843) announces the emergence of a new class, the industrial
proletariat, defying the already established bourgeoisie, and presenting a revolutionary and
materialistic vision of history; in 1859 Charles Darwin's Origin of Species shakes man's security
by placing him, in the biological scale, just a stair above the apes, and proposing a theory of
evolution which questions the religious conception of the creation; Sir James Frazer, in The
Golden Bough (1890), strikes a blow against the popular theory of progress by showing the
similarities between primitive and civilized cultures; Max Planck's proposal, in 1900, of the
quantum theory of atomic and subatomic particles contributes to the erosion of faith in ordinary,
cause-and-effect reasoning; Einstein's theory of relativity (1905) also helps to shake man's
conception of the stability of the world.
Together with these changes in science, sociology and politics two events had a great
influence on human history during the modernist Movement: World War I and the Russian
Revolution. The world political structure changed since then. The countries were divided into a
Western block, under the leadership of the United States, and an Eastern block, led by the Soviet
Union.
Concerning the philosophical influences on Modernism, we have at least three important
philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976). Nietzsche's apocalyptic vision of history and his profound conviction
that the history of man has arrived at the end of a long era of civilization and that all human
values must be subjected to total revision find a reverberant echo in the aspirations of western
man in that age. His ideas about the artist and art - no artist tolerates reality and the task of art is
its own self-realization, outside and beyond established orders - will be quite influential.
Henri Bergson's ideas concerning duration and intuition will also exercise a profound
influence on the fiction of the period. For Bergson, chronological time is one thing, and
psychological, real time, is duration which is a continuous flux. He also believes in the power of
intuition as a means of direct and immediate knowledge so that to the discursive knowledge it is
necessary to add, and sometimes oppose, the intuitive knowledge that may go deeper into the
essence of things.
Martin Heidegger sees the individual existence as a determination of the individual himself
and not as social determinism, one of the basic ideas of Existentialism.
Besides philosophy, psychology also played an important role in the arts of the period.
Freud's psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on the unconscious and his Interpretation of
Dreams (1900) will be influential especially after being translated into English and French.
LITERATURE: As a first characteristic of Modernist literature, we may point out the
peculiarity of its writing. It is "marked by strong and conscious break with traditional forms and
techniques” (Holman, p. 274). Thus, the language and technique acquire a foreground role as
opposed to the straightforward traditional content. New ideas and concepts in fact required new
techniques to be expressed. The old-age methods of storytelling such as letters, conversations or
plain narrative are put aside. Instead of them, some writers prefer new techniques known as
"stream of consciousness", a term coined by William James in his work Principles of Psychology
(1890). Through these techniques the writers can deal with the pre-speech levels of
consciousness in the moment of its flow.
Another significant change is the almost total absence of the author from the narrative. His
interference is quite reduced, when it is not eliminated. The role of the reader gains importance
with this change. The figure of the narrator appears now as impersonal and neutral as possible,
giving room to the reader's imagination and demanding his active participation while reading.
Sometimes what one finds is the fusion of the character's point of view with the narrator's.
Action and plot lose their importance as compared to mental states, emotions and the characters'
reactions. The human being as an individual in solitude, eager to communicate with his fellow
beings seems to be at the core of modernist fiction.
Rees still points out that the modernist writer "is sometimes more interested in creating an
atmosphere or expressing some kind of poetic feeling than in telling a story." (p.110) The
borderline between fiction and poetry may become very tenuous.
Summing up, the modern fiction was marked by a persistent experimentalism, in an attempt
to show new delicacies of perception and new subtleties in the human mind and human
relationships.
MAIN FORERUNNERS OF THE MODERNIST FICTION: Marcel Proust (Remembrance of
Things Past- 1913-28), Édouard Dujardin (Les Lauriers Sont Coupés- 1888), Franz Kafka (1883-
924),Henry James (1843-1916), Dorothy Richardson (Pilgrimage, begun in 1915 with Pointed
Roofs, followed by several volumes, all centered on a character, Miriam); the Russian writers,
only translated in our century, into English: Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and Tchekhov.
MAIN ENGLISH MODERN WRITERS: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph
Conrad, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
B DBURY, Malcolm and McFarlane, James (editors). Modernism 1890-1930. England, Penguin
Books, 1981.
C RPEAUX, Otto Maria. História da Literatura Ocidental.vol. VII, Edições O Cruzeiro, R.J.,
1965.
HOLMAN, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. Indianapolis, ITT-Merril Educational Publishing
Company, Inc., 1985.
HUMPHREY, Robert. Stream of Consciousness. in the Modern Novel. USA, University of
California Press, 1954.
REES, R.J. English Literature- An Introduction for Foreign Readers. London: Macmillan
Education Ltd, 1973.