Modernism and the 20th Century

Modernism in English literature is the experimental movement of roughly 1890–1945, characterised by a break with realist conventions, formal innovation, fragmentation, mythic method and the influence of European thought (Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson).

Pre-modernist transition (1890–1914)

• Thomas Hardy — late novels and poetry.
• Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) — Heart of Darkness (1899); Lord Jim (1900); Nostromo (1904).
• Henry James (1843–1916) — The Portrait of a Lady (1881); The Wings of the Dove (1902); psychological realism.
• George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) — Pygmalion (1913); Saint Joan (1923); social drama; Nobel 1925.
• H. G. Wells — early sci-fi.
• G. K. Chesterton.

High Modernist poetry

W. B. Yeats (1865–1939)

Irish; Nobel 1923. Career divides into Celtic Twilight, Modernist, and visionary late phases.

• The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
• Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) — contains "The Second Coming".
• The Tower (1928) — "Sailing to Byzantium".
• Last Poems (1939).

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." — The Second Coming (1919).

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

American-born British; Nobel 1948.

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915).
• The Waste Land (1922) — landmark modernist poem in five sections, dedicated to Pound (il miglior fabbro).
• The Hollow Men (1925).
• Ash Wednesday (1930).
• Four Quartets (1936–42).
• Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
• Essays: Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919); The Sacred Wood (1920).

"April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land." — The Waste Land.

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

American; principal Modernist impresario.

• Personae (1909); founded Imagism (1913).
• Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).
• The Cantos (1917–69, unfinished).

Modernist novel

James Joyce (1882–1941)

Irish; foundational Modernist novelist.

• Dubliners (1914) — 15 stories ending with "The Dead".
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) — Künstlerroman.
• Ulysses (1922) — a day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday).
• Finnegans Wake (1939) — dream-language experiment.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

• Mrs Dalloway (1925).
• To the Lighthouse (1927).
• Orlando (1928).
• A Room of One's Own (1929).
• The Waves (1931).

Master of stream of consciousness and free indirect discourse.

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

• Sons and Lovers (1913).
• The Rainbow (1915) — banned.
• Women in Love (1920).
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928; UK ban lifted 1960 after famous Penguin trial).

Other major modernists

• E. M. Forster — A Passage to India (1924); Howards End (1910).
• Katherine Mansfield — short stories.
• Ford Madox Ford — The Good Soldier (1915).
• Aldous Huxley — Brave New World (1932).
• Wyndham Lewis — Tarr; Vorticism.

War poets (1914–18)

• Wilfred Owen — "Dulce et Decorum Est"; "Anthem for Doomed Youth".
• Siegfried Sassoon — Counter-Attack (1918).
• Robert Graves — Goodbye to All That (1929).
• Rupert Brooke — "The Soldier".
• Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas.

"My subject is War, and the pity of War." — Owen, draft preface.

Auden generation (1930s)

• W. H. Auden (1907–1973) — "The Shield of Achilles"; "Funeral Blues"; "September 1, 1939".
• Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice.
• Politically engaged; Spanish Civil War; left-leaning.

Postwar and contemporary

Drama

• Samuel Beckett — Waiting for Godot (1952); Theatre of the Absurd; Nobel 1969.
• Harold Pinter — The Caretaker (1960); The Homecoming (1965); Nobel 2005.
• John Osborne — Look Back in Anger (1956); "angry young men".
• Tom Stoppard — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966).

Fiction

• George Orwell (1903–50) — Animal Farm (1945); Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
• Graham Greene — The Power and the Glory (1940); The Heart of the Matter.
• William Golding — Lord of the Flies (1954); Nobel 1983.
• Doris Lessing — The Golden Notebook (1962); Nobel 2007.
• Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange).
• Salman Rushdie — Midnight's Children (1981; Booker, Booker of Bookers); The Satanic Verses (1988).
• Kazuo Ishiguro — Nobel 2017; The Remains of the Day (1989); Never Let Me Go (2005).
• Ian McEwan — Atonement (2001).

Poetry

• Philip Larkin — The Whitsun Weddings (1964); High Windows (1974).
• Ted Hughes — Crow (1970); Poet Laureate.
• Sylvia Plath — Ariel (1965).
• Seamus Heaney — Death of a Naturalist (1966); North (1975); Nobel 1995.

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad." — Larkin, "This Be the Verse".

Postcolonial and global English

• Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) — Things Fall Apart (1958).
• Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) — Nobel 1986.
• V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad/UK) — Nobel 2001.
• R. K. Narayan, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy (Booker 1997 for The God of Small Things).
• Pakistani-origin writers — Bapsi Sidhwa (Cracking India), Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 2007), Kamila Shamsie (Home Fire, Women's Prize 2018), Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008).

Critical theory in the 20th century

• F. R. Leavis — The Great Tradition (1948).
• I. A. Richards — Practical Criticism (1929).
• William Empson — Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).
• New Criticism — Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren.
• Structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction — covered separately under literary theory.