Twentieth-century

Twentieth-century English literature

This article is focused on English- language literature rather than the literature of England, so that it includes writers from Scotland, Wales, and the whole of Ireland, as well as literature in English from former British colonies. It also includes, to some extent, the United States, though the main article for that is American literature.

Modernism is a major literary movement of the first part of the twentieth-century. The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post- World War II literature.
Irish writers were especially important in the twentieth-century, including James Joyce and later Samuel Beckett, both central figures in the Modernist movement. Americans, like poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelist William Faulkner, were other important modernists. British modernists include Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. In the mid-twentieth-century
major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth, including several Nobel laureates.

1901–22 modernism

Joseph Conrad, 1904


In the early 20th-century literary modernism developed in the English-
speaking world due to a general sense of disillusionment with the Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the idea of objective truth.^[1] The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809–82) (On Origin of Species) (1859), Ernst Mach (1838–
1916), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), James G. Frazer (1854–1941), Karl Marx (1818–
83) (Das Kapital, 1867), and the
psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), among others.^[2] The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.^[3] Important literary precursors of
modernism, were: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91); Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) (Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–91) (Illuminations, 1874); August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays.^[4]
A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). Though not a modernist, Hardy was an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th century. A major novelist of the late 19th century, Hardy, after the
adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure, concentrated on publishing poetry. On the other hand, another significant transitional figure between Victorians and modernists, the late-19th- century novelist, Henry James (1843– 1916), continued to publish major works into the 20th century. James, born in the US, lived in Europe from 1875, and became a British citizen in 1915.^[5] Another immigrant, Polish-born modernist novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) published his first important work, Heart of Darkness, in 1899 and Lord Jim in 1900. The American exponent of Naturalism Theodore
Dreiser's (1871–1945) Sister Carrie was also published in 1900.