World War I is quite possibly the most influential event of the 20th century world-wide. Britain was no exception. The global powerhouse had seen copious amounts of loss in the forms of death, destruction, and economics to name only a few. In the rubble of aftermath, the people of the world’s greatest empire were starving for explanation, solace, and hope. In a response to the trauma of the Great War, the people of Britain created new cultures that utilized the new idea of modernism to push forward and forge a new path into the future. From the phenomenon of the radio and BBC, to the London Underground, Commonwealth, and recreation of the youth, it is clear that the interwar period in Britain was something different entirely. There’s nothing …show more content…
Modernism was the word of the era because it was the opposite of the last. People pined for new and exciting ways to make up for time lost to the war. This feeling of looking ahead through the ambiguity of the time permeated through all tiers of society from the working class to the elites. In Judith Walkowitz’s “A Jewish Night Out,” we find a dance hall catering to Jewish youth. One can rent a dance partner and learn how to dance well. It was suddenly important to be able to charm the opposite sex in talent, attitude, and appearance because sex wasn’t just for procreation anymore. Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods, she gives a look into architecture and material things. There’s a clear clash between the older and younger generations, and the younger ones enjoy modernism. “Advocates of the modern insisted that the new era required a new style. They deplored the vogue for reproductions, which, in the psychological language of the day, they analysed as evidence of an ‘inferiority complex’.” As well, stream of consciousness writing emerges from the depths of collegiate, middle class bohemia. The Bloomsburry Group were named after the London neighborhood they inhabited and were an artist collective, living life according to art and the new fragmentation of life after war. Virginia Woolf’s writing reflects the general feeling of the interwar period: confusing, ambiguous, hopeful, and moral-less. The Bohemians took the disassociation of the era and put it into new and modern art. All of these cultural ideas and forms of recreation were a result of the Great War because there was a generation of young people who were lost and needed a future meaningful to them, so they created
World War I is marked by its extraordinary brutality and violence due to the technological advancement in the late 18th century and early 19th century that made killing easier, more methodical and inhumane. It was a war that saw a transition from traditional warfare to a “modern” warfare. Calvary charges were replaced with tanks; swords were replaced with machine guns; strategic and decisive battles were r...
In 1912, Great Britain was the place to be. With a mighty empire spanning the globe, Great Britain was the richest, the most technological, and the most powerful country on the planet. For everyone fortunate enough to be British, it was the perfect time to be alive. Or was it?
In the 1940s, much was changing in the world due to the effects of World War II, specifically in the parts of Europe. Suffused with dictators and totalitarian governments the artists of the era wanted to escape the environment and embark upon a new journey and a fresh start. America during that time was a capitalist with a culturally and ethnically rich background in music, films and fashion. This was the best opportunity for the artists to visit America. Thus a group of artists with their modernistic approach, went to New York City and started a new wave known as the “The New York School”. To come up with originality, the American designers inspired by the European Avante Grante/Modernistic art, added new techniques and concepts which created a complete new direction in art and design that shifted the world’s attention.
During the early 1900s a new era of warfare emerged as governments began to employ all economic, technological and psychological resources available to defeat their enemies. This concept of Total War altered the direction of humanity and governments understanding in their allocation of resources. This essay will examine the relationship between propaganda used during World War I, its effect on the masses and the absolutely essential need for the success of such campaigns in obtaining military victory. While leaflet propaganda used during the war will be the main focus, considerations will be given to other forms to illuminate the necessity of understanding and utilizing the tools of this very powerful weapon.
What comes almost as a fascinating insight in Sally’s world of songs, lovers, cigarettes and lonesomeness is a magnified view of the city, where destitution predominates and one never fails to turn a deaf ear, to the midnight calls from the street corners. Isherwood ponders in the opening lines of Goodbye to Berlin, this idea of being a disjointed wanderer upon a sensitive landscape. In the section, ‘Sally Bowles’, Isherwood traces acutely the problematic disposition of a woman, who also breathes the foreign air of the city and decides to live. If that is all it takes to be herself. In this paper I intend to look into the changing dialectics of hedonism and melancholia that traces the structure of Sally’s mind and experience. Her fragility, desperation, neuroses and her ingenious art to conceal them all, provides a fitting prelude to the reigning socio-cultural structure of Berlin under the Nazi regime.
Following the shell shocked feelings that permeated many European cultures after World War I, the 1920s were a time of rejuvenation for much of the world. While America had their Roaring Twenties, the name for this era in Paris was known as the Crazy Years. With the prospect of war behind them, the citizens of Paris took on new and exciting ventures that were thought too extreme just a few years prior. Great strides were made in many sectors including music, fashion, behavior, and much more, all driven by this human instinct to feel alive after surviving the brutal horrors of war. What Mary McAuliffe is able to bring to life in When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends, is the vibrant life of the 1920s told by a multitude of characters. From writers to entertainers, engineers to politicians, McAuliffe inspects many facets of Paris’ culture to show the reader the new course Parisians were pursuing to shake the terrors of World War I.
Unlike Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Kästner’s Fabian, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Age of Innocence (1920) is not set after World War I. In fact, her work is set prior to it at the turn of the century. She describes Old New York from late 19th and early 20th century in great detail, “New York society and customs…are described with an accuracy that is almost uncanny: to read these pages is to live again.” She also looks at the upper class, instead of middle and lower class society with its dance halls of debauchery and improper solicitations. The threat of modernity after war and depression are not factors in her work. Yet, not all of the elements and motifs seen in Kästner and Fitzgerald are absent. Wharton pays particular attention to women and social change; especially in the context of Victorian virtues and expectations. To Wharton, Old New York forced its members to follow dogmatic rules and expectations for nearly ever course of actions including: mannerisms, popular fashion, and behaviors. Scorn and exile were reserved for those that violated the social codes. These virtues and social rules were the very same rules that Flappers and the New Woman specifically debased after World War I, “Mrs. Wharton is all for the new and against the old: here, at all events, her sympathies are warm. She would never … fear youth knocking at the door.”
Following the Second World War, Modernism was taking a stroll down hill towards failing. Politics was one of the main reasons ...
The modernist period was a time of change. After World War II many people found themselves unhappy, lonely, and depressed. With the groundbreaking influences of Karl Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, many people began to question their own reality. What did it mean to exist? What was life, and what was death? The modernist author reflected this change, and confronted these questions with enthusiasm. Together modernist artists became the representative voice of the people. This voice transcended all forms of art, but was most successful in the written word. Through the experimentation of language and form, the modernist author managed to convey the meaninglessness felt by many, and created a light in the darkness of an uncertain world. Ernest Hemingway's short stories titled "A clean well-lighted Place", and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" are two notable examples of literary art during the modernist period.
We live in a world which is constantly changing in a wide variety of aspects. These changes create a line between traditional and modern values. Many past ideas and habits, which were once a common belief, has become inappropriate in the current public eye. This change in ideas and values can be expressed in things such as art, literature and media. Art has always been used for an artist to express themselves. Although “modernism” contains the word”modern” in it, causing people to be easily confused, it does not only have to apply to contemporary events. Modernism is a term that can be used to describe any time a major change occurs. Modernism can be used to describe the changes in a society 's values which is often expressed through art.
With World War II finally over and a chapter in history written, the next chapter is about to begin. The twentieth century brings with it a new literary movement called postmodern, where poetry is "breaking from modernism" and taking on a whole new style Within postmodern poetry emerge confessional poets whom remove the mask that has masked poetry from previous generations and their writings become autobiographical in nature detailing their life's most intense personal experiences, therefore becoming the focus of their work.
The world of modernism is still an exciting world to visit, even today. Though some of the ideas no longer seem new to us, one must imagine what it must have been like to live in a world of so much change and creation. To imagine what it would have been like to read a literary work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S Eliot, or Virginia Woolf, for the first time, and honestly say you had never in your life read anything remotely similar, as. Writers alike stepped away from traditional values, and radically changed the rules of perception, and literature, as we now know it. Without the modernist period, many of the great authors, painters, and musicians of the world today may not have been inspired, and life as a whole would have suffered. Modernism is a very important, not only in the history of Literature, but in humanity itself.
122. - 25. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Goldman, Jane. A. A. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge, U.K., New York, USA. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 100-115 Gualtieri, Elena.
Modernism is the most intense philosophical development in Western culture in the late nineteenth and mid twentieth hundreds of years with bounty modernists. D. H. Lawrence has been delegated modernist by countless, and his work indeed assumed an imperative part in modernism improvement in western writing, particularly the work Women in Love . Presently, I might want to discuss the modernism method reflected in the book in the following three