Literary modernism facts for kids

Literary modernism is a style of writing that started in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It's known for breaking away from old, traditional ways of writing poetry and stories. Modernist writers wanted to "Make it new," as the famous writer Ezra Pound said. They tried new ways to express ideas and feelings.

This movement was a response to big changes in the world, like new technologies and the horrors of First World War. Writers felt that old ways of thinking and writing didn't fit the modern world anymore. They wanted to show how complex and changing the world had become.

How Modernism Started

In the 1880s, people started thinking it was time to completely change old ideas, not just update them. Some important thinkers influenced early Modernist literature:

New Ideas About the Mind

• Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) suggested that our minds have an unconscious part. This part is full of hidden drives and instincts that shape how we see the world.
• Ernst Mach (1838–1916) believed that our minds have a basic structure. He thought our personal experiences came from how different parts of our mind worked together.
• Before these ideas, many people, like John Locke (1632–1704), thought our minds started like a "blank slate." They believed the outside world simply wrote itself onto our minds.
• Carl Jung (1875–1961) added to Freud's ideas. He suggested a "collective unconscious," a shared pool of human experiences.
• Charles Darwin's work also changed how people saw humans. He showed humans as part of the animal kingdom. Jung then suggested that some human urges came from our basic animal nature.

New Ideas About Time and Power

• Friedrich Nietzsche believed that inner drives, like the "will to power," were more important than simple facts.
• Henri Bergson (1859–1941) focused on the difference between scientific clock time and our personal, felt experience of time. His ideas greatly influenced modernist writers who used the "stream of consciousness" technique. This technique shows a character's thoughts and feelings as they happen. Writers like Dorothy Richardson (Pointed Roofs), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse) used this.
• Bergson also talked about élan vital, a "life force" that drives creative evolution. He valued intuition alongside intellect.

These thinkers all shared a distrust of the old, certain ways of thinking from the Victorian era. Modernism in literature also reacted to the rise of factories, big cities, and new technologies.

Important Writers Before Modernism

Some writers who came before the main Modernist movement helped set the stage:

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81): Crime and Punishment (1866)
• Walt Whitman (1819–92): Leaves of Grass (1855–91)
• Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880): Madame Bovary (1856-57)
• Charles Baudelaire (1821–67): Les Fleurs du mal
• Knut Hamsun (1859–1952): Hunger (1890)
• August Strindberg (1849–1912): A Dream Play (1902)

Modernist literature scholar David Thorburn saw connections between literary style and impressionist painters such as Claude Monet. Modernist writers, like Monet's paintings of water lilies, suggested an awareness of art as art, rejected realistic interpretations of the world and dramatized "a drive towards the abstract".

At first, some modernists had a hopeful spirit. They were excited by new discoveries in science, psychology, and philosophy. The Imagist movement, started by Ezra Pound in 1912, was an early part of modernism. Imagist poets focused on clear, precise images and used free verse (poetry without a regular rhyme or rhythm).

However, this hopeful feeling changed with World War I. Writers became more cynical and showed a sense of disappointment. Many modernists also didn't trust powerful institutions like governments or religions. They rejected the idea of absolute truths.

Modernism includes many related art and literature styles. These include Imagism, Symbolism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Dada.

Key Modernist Writers

Early modernist writers, especially after World War I, changed how artists connected with the public. They often used "unreliable narrators" (storytellers you can't fully trust). This showed the irrational side of a world that was supposed to be logical.

They also tried to explore the new ideas about reality from thinkers like Charles Darwin, Freud, and Albert Einstein. This led to new writing techniques:

• Stream-of-consciousness: Showing a character's thoughts as they flow, without much order.
• Interior monologue: A character's inner thoughts spoken to themselves.
• Multiple points-of-view: Telling a story from several different characters' perspectives.

These techniques helped writers show a deeper, more psychological kind of realism.

It's hard to say exactly when modernism began. Some say it was around 1910. For example, Virginia Woolf famously said that human nature changed "on or about December 1910." But some works like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896) showed modernist ideas even earlier.

In other arts, there were also big changes. Music became more experimental, like Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music in 1908. Paintings became more abstract, like Wassily Kandinsky's Expressionist works and the rise of cubism from artists like Pablo Picasso.

Famous Modernist Authors and Works

• Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is an early modernist work. It's known for its simple writing style and deep look into characters' minds.
• James Joyce is a major modernist writer. His novel Ulysses (1922) shows a single day in a character's life. It uses many modernist techniques to capture the feeling of modern life.
• T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) is another key modernist work. It has a fragmented structure and no clear story. This reflects the poem's theme: the breakdown of Western culture.
• In Italy, poets like Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti broke away from old traditions. They wanted to renew literature for the 20th century.
• Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, like Tender Buttons (1914), are often compared to the fragmented paintings of her friend Pablo Picasso.

Modernist writers also blurred the lines between different types of writing. Poetry sometimes read like prose, and novels sometimes felt like long poems. For example, Virginia Woolf's novels like Mrs Dalloway and The Waves are often described as poetic.

Other Early Modernist Writers

• Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936): Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926): The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
• Franz Kafka (1883–1924): The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925)
• Karel Čapek (1890–1938): R.U.R. (1920)
• Italo Svevo (1861–1928): Zeno's Conscience (1923)

Modernism Continues: 1920s and 1930s

Modernist works continued to be written in the 1920s and 1930s.

• Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson wrote more novels.
• The American playwright Eugene O'Neill created many important plays in these decades.
• Other key playwrights were Bertolt Brecht and Federico García Lorca.
• D. H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928.
• William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury came out in 1929.
• In poetry, T. S. Eliot published The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday.

In the 1930s:

• William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying and Light in August.
• Samuel Beckett published his first major novel, Murphy (1938).
• James Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared in 1939.
• Poets like E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens continued to write.
• T. S. Eliot started his final major poetic work, Four Quartets. He also wrote plays like Murder in the Cathedral.

While many famous modernist poets were American, like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, there were also important British poets, such as T. S. Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid. European modernist poets included Federico García Lorca and Anna Akhmatova.

Modernism After 1939

Some experts believe that modernism mostly ended around 1939, especially in British and American literature. However, many modernist writers lived and continued to publish into the 1950s and 1960s.

Late Modernism

The term "late modernism" is sometimes used for modernist works published after 1930. Writers still publishing after 1945 included Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound.

• Basil Bunting published his important modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965.
• Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil came out in 1945.
• Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus was published in 1947.
• Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, is often called a "later modernist." He wrote works from the 1930s to the 1980s, like Molloy (1951) and En attendant Godot (1953). His later works are sometimes called minimalist or post-modernist.

Some critics use "late modernism" for works written after 1945. This idea suggests that World War II, especially events like the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, greatly changed modernist thinking.

Theatre of the Absurd

The "Theatre of the Absurd" describes plays, mostly by European writers, that show human life has no real meaning or purpose. In these plays, logical talking often breaks down into illogical speech or silence.

• While there were earlier examples, the Theatre of the Absurd is usually seen as starting in the 1950s with plays by Samuel Beckett.
• Critic Martin Esslin created the term in 1960. He connected these plays to the idea of the "Absurd," meaning humanity's reaction to a world without clear meaning.
• These plays often mix broad comedy with sad or scary images. Characters are stuck in hopeless situations, doing repetitive or meaningless actions. The dialogue is full of clichés and nonsense. Plots can be circular or strangely long. They often make fun of or reject realistic plays.

Playwrights linked to the Theatre of the Absurd include:

• Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
• Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994)
• Harold Pinter (1930–2008)
• Tom Stoppard (b. 1937)
• Edward Albee (1928–2016)

See also

Images for kids

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  In Spanish: Literatura modernista para niños

Sources

• Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Print.
• Bryne, CJ. "Understanding Modernism and PostModernism" Writing.com
• Goldman, Jonathan. Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. Print.
• "Modernism in Literature: What Is Modernism?" Bright Hub March 23, 2011..
• "Some Characteristics of Modernism in Literature" Fakultet for Sprog Og Erhvervskommunikation – Handelshøjskolen I Århus. March 23, 2011
• Literary modernism at Curlie
• Absurdist Monthly Review – The Writers Magazine of The New Absurdist Movement
• Picturing Literary Modernism Photographs of artistic and literary Americans at home and abroad throughout the Modernist period from the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University