Literary modernism
[2] The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed,[3] and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century.
In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
As a philosopher of science, Ernst Mach was a major influence on logical positivism, and through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Many prior theories about epistemology argued that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it were, on an individual—for example, John Locke's (1632–1704) empiricism, which saw the mind beginning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690).
[citation needed] Another major precursor of modernism was Friedrich Nietzsche,[17] especially his idea that psychological drives, specifically the "will to power", were more important than facts, or things.
Important literary precursors of modernism were Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)); Walt Whitman (1819–1892) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–1891); Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) (Madame Bovary (1856–1857), Sentimental Education (1869), The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), Three Tales (1877), Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881)); Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) (Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–1891) (Illuminations, 1874); Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) (Hunger, 1890); August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907).
Initially, some modernists fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, physics and psychoanalysis.
The poets of the Imagist movement, founded by Ezra Pound in 1912 as a new poetic style, gave modernism its early start in the 20th century,[22] and were characterized by a poetry that favoured a precision of imagery, brevity and free verse.
[23] The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary movements, including Imagism, Symbolism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Dada.
[24] They also attempted to address the changing ideas about reality developed by Charles Darwin, Ernst Mach, Freud, Albert Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson and others.
It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen 1910 as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf, who declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910".
[25] But modernism was already stirring by 1902, with works such as Joseph Conrad's (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarry's (1873–1907) absurdist play Ubu Roi appeared even earlier, in 1896.
Among early modernist non-literary landmarks is the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Expressionist Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, the rise of fauvism, and the introduction of cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and others between 1900 and 1910.
James Joyce was a major modernist writer whose strategies employed in his novel Ulysses (1922) for depicting the events during a twenty-four-hour period in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, have come to epitomize modernism's approach to fiction.
The poet T. S. Eliot described these qualities in 1923, noting that Joyce's technique is "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history....
"[26] Eliot's own modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) mirrors "the futility and anarchy" in its own way, in its fragmented structure, and the absence of an obvious central, unifying narrative.
[29] The questioning spirit of modernism, as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of a broken world, can also be seen in a different form in the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1928).
In this poem, MacDiarmid applies Eliot's techniques to respond to the question of nationalism, using comedic parody, in an optimistic (though no less hopeless) form of modernism in which the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.
T. S. Eliot's poetry sacrified lyrical grace for the sake of fragmented narrative while Virginia Woolf's novels (such as Mrs Dalloway and The Waves) have been described as poetical.
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in 1929.
European modernist poets include Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Anna Akhmatova, Constantine Cavafy, and Paul Valéry.
[34] Beckett is a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of modernism, who produced works from the 1930s until the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), En attendant Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961) and Rockaby (1981).
Another example of post-1945 modernism, then, would be the first modernist work of Reunionnais literature entitled Sortilèges créoles: Eudora ou l'île enchantée (fr), published 1952 by Marguerite-Hélène Mahé.
[37][38] The term Theatre of the Absurd is applied to plays written by primarily European playwrights, that express the belief that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down.
Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), Jean Genet (1910–1986), Harold Pinter (1930–2008), Tom Stoppard (b.
