A History of Literature

The Modern Era 1914 - 1945

1914
The outbreak of World War One in
1914 marked a harsh departure
from the idyllic days of the fin de
siècle decadence in Europe and
the post-Victorian merriment of
the Edwardian era in the UK.
Poets like Wilfred Owen were
important chroniclers of the
destruction that ravaged Europe
and the world.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
1927
Dorothy Sayers is best known
1940
Gertrude Stein was an important
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
for her mysteries, a series of
novels and short stories set
between the First and Second
modernist poet, but was arguably
more important because of the
connections she facilitated among
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
World Wars that feature English other artists. The gatherings in the
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
aristocrat and amateur sleuth Stein home in Paris "brought
from "Anthem for Doomed Youth", Wilfred Owen
Lord Peter Wimsey. As a crime together confluences of talent and
writer during the "Golden Age of thinking that would help define
Detective Fiction", Sayers was modernism in literature and art".
considered one of its four Dedicated attendees included Pablo
"Queens of Crime", alongside Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Agatha Christie, Margery Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Modernism rose from the ashes of World War
Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. and Gavin Williamson. One, and lasted until the destruction of World

“Facts are like cows. If you look

1920- War Two. Hemingway's novel, set during the
Spanish Civil War, forced readers to once again
them in the face long enough,
they generally run away.”
30 consider the atrocities of war and the extremes
of human behaviour it produces.

Books are the “I like shape very

mirrors of the
Langston Hughes'
poetry was central
to the Harlem
“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality
of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come
1936 much. A novel has to
have shape, and life
across four or five times in life. It faced, or Good Morning, doesn't have any. ”
soul Renaissance, an seemed to face, the whole external world for an Midnight: Jean

1925 intellectual and

cultural revival of
Black American
instant and then concentrated on you with an
irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood
you just as far as you wanted to be understood,
Rhys

Virginia Woolf is considered to be one of the more important 20th music, dance, art, believed in you as you would like to believe in
century novelists. A modernist, she was one of the pioneers of fashion, literature, yourself.”
using stream of consciousness as a narrative device, alongside theatre, politics
contemporaries such as Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and and scholarship from "The Great Gatsby", F Scott Fitzgerald
James Joyce. Woolf's reputation was at its greatest during the centred in Harlem,
1930s, but declined considerably following World War II. The New York City.
growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s helped re-establish her
reputation.
1926 1927
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Siegfried Sassoon's powerful poems were written, in part, as a way for the poet to deal with the horrors he had seen as a soldier in Jacques Vache wrote to Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement: "[Apollinaire] marks an epoch. The beautiful things
World War One. "Counter-Attack and Other Poems" collects some of Sassoon’s best war poems, all of which are “harshly realistic we can do now!" In 1917 Guillaume Apollinaire delivered the lecture "L'esprit nouveau et les poetes," a modern art manifesto in
laments or satires,” writes Margaret B. McDowell in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. which he called for pure invention and a total surrender to inspiration.