Modernism and the Modern Novel

Modernism and the Modern Novel

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The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and

cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the

post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently

meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S.

Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which

is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break

with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century

optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture

in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and

moral relativism.

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among

others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound,

Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to

throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers

introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of

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