Historical Background

1. Historical Background • 1901-1910 – Edward VII • 1902 – End of The Anglo-Boer War • 1910-1936 – George V • 1914-1918 – First World War • 1916 – Dublin, Easter Rising • 1917 – Revolution in Russia • 1918 – Vote for Women over 30 years of age in G.B. • 1919-20 – Treatise of Versailles – Society of Nations • 1921 – Irish Free State, Ulster (Northern Ireland) belongs to the U.K. • 1922 – Mussolini in Italy • 1928 – Vote for Women in G. B. • 1929 – Stock Market Crash and Great Depression • 1933 – Hitler in Germany • 1936-39 – Civil War in Spain • 1936 – Edward VIII succeeds George V, but then abdicated in favour of his brother, who became king as George VI • 1939-1945 – Second World War • 1941-45 – Holocaust • 1945 – Hiroshima • 1952 – Elizabeth II

2. WhatisModernism? I do not think that any previous age produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewildering new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure that this is true….of poetry…I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other ‘new poetry’ but new in a new way, almost in a new dimension C.S. Lewis , De DescriptioneTemporum, 1954

3. WhatisModernism? • Modernist art is […] reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenberg calls “the tradition of the new”. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist ‘s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. … We can dispute about when it starts (French Symbolism, decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and whether it has ended (Kermode distinguishes ‘paleo-modernism’ from ‘neo-modernism’ and hence a degree of continuity through the postwar art). We can regard it as a timebound concept (say 1890 to 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne, Donne, Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust, Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner in fiction, Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind, Brecht in drama; Mallarmé, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works are aesthetically radical, contain striking technical innovation, emphasize spatial or ‘fugal’ as opposed to chronological form, tend towards ironic modes, and involve a certain ‘dehumanization of art’ Malcolm Bradbury, A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms

4. Modernism: features in common withothermovements • Bohemiaactive in Parisfrom the 1830s • The artistas a futuristwasactivethroughoutromanticthought • Aestheticofexperimentalism common toNaturalism 1880 • The idea of the multiplicityofconsciousness (Pater 1870) • Responseof the imaginationtoanurbanized world (Baudelaire: unreal city, imaginationproduces the sensationofnewness) • Desecrationofestablishedconventions, wittyimage and anguish (Sterne, Donne, Villon)

5. DatingModernism • 1890-1903 • For Frank Kermode the 1890s are forerunnersofmodernism. Modernism: 1905-1927 • 1922 AnnusMirabilis: Eliot’s The WasteLand, Joyce’s Ulysses • Forothers (Stephen Spender, Graham Hough) periodofenhancedintensitybetween 1910 and WW1

6. Dating Modernism2 • “On or about December 1910 human nature changed… All human relations shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” V. Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, 1924 • “It was in 1915 the old world ended” D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, 1923

7. Flaubert on style • “What strikes me as beautiful, what I should like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which would hold together by itself through the internal force of its style….a book which would have practically no subject, or at least one in which the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible.” Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 16, 1852

8. Key featuresofModernism • Radicalaesthetics • Technicalexperimentation • Spatial or rhythmicratherthanchronologicalform • Self-conscious reflexiveness • Scepticism towards the idea of a centred human subject • Inquiryinto the uncertaintyof reality • Focus on the city • Championing as well as fear of technology

9. Key-featuresof Modernism2 • Anti-representationalism in painting • Atonalism in music • Vers libre in poetry • Stream-of-consciousness in novel

10. Modernism • The sequence of Modernism […] is a very various sequence running through different subversions of the realist impulse: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Vorticism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism. They are not all movements of the same kind […] but one feature that links the movements at the centre of sensibility we are discerning is that they tend to see history or human life not as a sequence, or history not as an evolving logic […] Modernist works frequently tend to be ordered, then, not on the sequence of historical time or the evolving sequence of character, from history or story, as in realism and naturalism; they tend to work spatially or through layers of consciousness, working towards a logic of metaphor or form