Modernism
an umbrella term for a number of artistic
tendencies prominent in the first half of the 20th Century. In British
literature it is primarily associated with T.S. Eliot, Pound, Joyce, V.
Woolf, Yeats, Ford and Conrad.
Some general points:
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reflects the impact of Freudian psychology
upon literature
-
shows the influence of anthropologist Sir
James Frazier (The Golden Bough)
-
shows a sense of cultural relativism--an awareness
of the irrational and of the unconscious mind
-
is marked technically by experimentalism--rejects
the traditional framework (narrative, description, exposition) in favor
of "stream of consciousness"
-
views the poetic image as the essential vehicle
of aesthetic communication
-
uses myth as a characteristic structural principle
-
is, in general, marked by an emphasis on the
individual, a sense of intellectualism, a restricted time frame, an impression
of chaos, a feeling of dehumanization, a sense of urbanity, an interest
in the everyday, even, occasionally, a preoccupation with bodily functions.
To many, Modernist literature is a literature
of discontinuity, both historically (being based upon a sharp reflection
of the procedures and values of the immediate past, to which it adopts
an adversary stance) and aesthetically.
Some useful texts on Modernism include:
Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank
Joe Boone's Libidinal Currents:
Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism
William Everdell's The First Moderns
Astruder Eysteinsen's The Concept of
Modernism
Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era
and his three smaller books on American, British, and Irish modernists:
A Homemade World, A
Sinking Island, and A Colder Eye.
Michael Levenson's A Genealogy of Modernism
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