Modernism and the break with traditions
Modernism responded to a world in which confidence in progress and stable values had been deeply shaken, especially by the First World War. Its literature often presents subjective experience rather than a single, objective reality. Plots may be less central, endings open, and inner time more significant than clock time. Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and William James’s image of thought as a flowing stream helped shape new ways of representing the mind.
New forms and major writers
The stream of consciousness represents the flow of thought; the interior monologue puts a character’s thoughts into words, either through a narrator or more directly. In Dubliners, James Joyce explores paralysis and moments of epiphany. Ulysses reworks Homer’s epic through a day in modern Dublin and follows Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom. Virginia Woolf also foregrounds characters’ inner lives and psychological time.
War and Modernist poetry
- The War Poets express contrasting responses to conflict: Rupert Brooke presents patriotic sacrifice, while Siegfried Sassoon condemns the brutal reality of war. Imagism, associated with Ezra Pound, favours free verse and precise, concrete images. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land combines fragments, languages, and literary references to portray a sterile modern world. Its objective correlative evokes emotion through objects, situations, or events rather than naming the emotion directly.