What is Modernism in Literature?

Modernism or Modernist movement (Definition and Explanation):

In the 19th Century, a new movement started to emerge that had its initial influence in the works of the people living in the European region, especially in North America. The modernist movement continued till the mid of the 20th century. This movement brought a huge change, not just in the field of literature but also in science, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, painting, and much more. According to Virginia Woolf, the nature of human beings changed and their relations shifted and as a result, we see that in that period of time there is a huge change in religion, conduct, and also politics as well.

Modernism was the reaction to the Victorian era. What happened during modernism was that in this period mankind saw huge progress in science and technology and because of this, people started to lean towards reasoning so much so that they started to question their own faith. This sudden change had a lot of reasons such as the change in culture, industrialization, globalization but the main reason for this was wars, especially WWI and WWII. Their destruction and chaos started to make people believe in the notion that there is no God. They started to adopt a nihilistic attitude and then eventually they rejected God. Unlike the Victorian era writers, they questioned the authorities and believed nothing.

Impact of Modernism in Literature:

In literature, we saw that the writers experimented with different sorts of modernist techniques in their writings. Their works definitely weren’t like the ones that wrote before them. The stories, novels, or any other sort of literary work they wrote didn’t have a systematic or chronological order in it. One example of a modernist writer is, if a story starts in a present time then there is a chance that it could end in a time that happened past before that present (where the story started), or the writer could take both of those timelines and write them paralleled.

The narration system also changed in this period. Before modernism stories were narrated in the third person but in modernism, we see that the writers either narrated stories themselves or used their characters to narrate the entire story. For example, in The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, we see that most of the narration is done by the character of the story i.e. Marlowe, and not the writer himself.

Another modern technique was the stream of consciousness in which the writer introduces his flow of thoughts to his/her readers. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf used this approach in their books Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses respectively. They also used the associative technique where they gave different sorts of references to the historical, philosophical, religious, and literary allusion so that the audience could recall the old and lost coherences.

Famous Modern poets include:

1) William Butler Yeats (The Second Coming, A Vision, Sailing to Byzantium, etc)
2) Ezra Pound (ABC of reading)
3) T.S Eliot (Waste Land, Lovesong of J.Alfred)
4) Emily Dickson (Because I could not stop for death, “Hope” is the thing with feathers)

Famous Modern novelists include:

1) James Joyce (Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man, Dubliners)
2) Virginia Woolf (The voyage out, Jacob’s Room, To the lighthouse, Orlando: A Biography)
3) D.H Lawrence (Kangaroo, The White Peacock, Sons of lovers)

Other modernists include William Carlos William, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, etc.

FAQs

1.      What is meant by modernism in literature?

Ans. The change that came in the way of expression of the poet and writers, their new experiments and techniques that they introduced in their works in the late 19^th century till the mid of 20^th century, especially after the First World War is said to be modernism in literature.

2.      What are the five characteristics of modernism?

Ans. 1) The free flow of thoughts of the writer (or the characters)
         2) The main idea or the theme
         3) Imagery (using a sort of language to create an actual physical scene)
         4) Non-Chronological or unsystematic narrative/timeline
         5) The influence of World Wars (especially WWI)

3.      What is the main idea of modernism?

Ans. The main idea of modernism was to make men realize the real meaning of progression, success and to understand the reality of the world through every means possible, either through art, literature, or any other field that shows human creativity.

4.      What influenced modernism?

Ans. Modernism was influenced by many things, top of which was the World Wars, especially WWI where more than 40 million people died. The new innovations in science and technology and the emerging era of industrialization, capitalism, and their psychological impacts on the people also influenced modernism.