Modernism

Modernism

“An inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie.”

-Barth, “Literature of Replenishment” (www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html)

Modernism was rebellion against not only the repressive principles of the Victorian era but also the emergence of the fast-changing, materialistic corporate society. The period preceding modernism held up Victorian virtues, which accepted the worldview of everything being ordered, neat, stable, and meaningful. While fundamentally optimistic, Victorian culture featured hypercritical moralism as it had a very narrow, strict viewpoint.

Modernism eschewed such an absolute, clear-cut apprehension of the world. The movement was fueled by the First World War and led by that devastating war’s intellectual casualties, Gertrude Stein’s ‘the Lost Generation’ whose loss of faith in absolutes led them to search for new morals and ideals. Disillusionment, pessimism, and apathy towards society and the popular consensus colored the works of these artists, the literary leaders of whom were T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.

Literary modernism challenged the accepted norms of writing on almost every front. It trod away from traditional narrative structure, clean resolutions, and bourgeois morality that marked the preceding literature. Writers tackled the ordinary notions about writing and communication itself, questioning the ability of language to convey meaning, and experimental writing that broke off from tradition marked the movement’s most famous and exemplary works. Instead...

... middle of paper ...

...ing his lifetime, both of these writers very much catered to the mass-market audience. The fame, wealth, and celebrity were issues with which these men struggled as their hearts belonged to the modernist ideals of the period’s intellectuals while their reputation and success were out of sync with modernism. But ultimately, Hemingway and Fitzgerald occupy important spots in literary modernism as popular culture’s symbols for their generation.

Works Cited

Knapp, James F., Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work, (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL:1989).

www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html

Additional Material

Willison, Ian, Gould, Warwick, Chernaik, Warren, ed., Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, (MacMillan Press, London:1996).

www.ils.unc.edu/%7Ekaisn/pathfind.html

www.class.uiadho.edu/eng258_1/modernists/homepageL.htm