1. Prepared by: Khushbu Lakhupota
MA Sem 2 Batch 2020-2022
History of English Literature
From 1900 to 2000
TRENDS & MOVEMENTS
Email Id: khushbu22jan93@gmail.com
Department of English, MKBU
2. MODERNISM
● Origins in the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
● A self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in
both poetry & prose fiction.
● Cayalyst - Horrors of WWI
● Raised questions about the rationality of human mind.
● Inner self & consciousness.
● “In sharp contrasts to traditional art, modern art
does not hide the fact that it is something made and
produced: on the contrary, it underscores the fact.”
By THEODOR ADORNO
3. STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
● Captures & narrates the natural flow of thoughts.
● The phrase first used by William James in ‘Principles of
Psychology’.
● Technique used in modern novel also known as Subjective
novel or Psychological novel.
● PURPOSE “To portray life and character by setting
down everything that goes on in the hero's mind,
notably all those important and chaotic thought
sequences which occupy our idle and somnolent moments
and to which, in real life, we pay ourselves, little
attention.”
4. William James writes:
“Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in
the free water that flows round it. The significance, the
value of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that
surrounds and escorts it. Consciousness does not appear
to itself chopped in wits….It is nothing jointed, it
flows...Let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness or of subjective life.”
5. Psychological Novelists
Makers of the Stream of Consciousness novel in England
1. Dorothy Richardson - Painted Roofs
1. James Joyce - Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist As a
Young Man
1. Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
The Waves.
6.
7. EXPRESSIONISM
● According to R. G. Hagger, Expressionism, “is a form of
romantic art in which emotion or emotive elements,
expressed through violent distortions and exaggeration,
are taken to the point of excess. It is a characteristic of
art which emerges and becomes dominant in times of social
and spiritual stress.”
● An expressinoist paints life not as it is visible to him on
the surface, but life as he or his character passionately
feels it to be. State of mind.
● The external appearance of his object is consciously
distorted in order to represent the object as it is felt.
● Kurt Hiller was the first to apply the term “expressionism"
to German literature in 1911.
8. SURREALISM
● The founder of the movement was Andre Breton, who in
1924 issued the Surrealist manifesto, which explained
that a higher reality could be captured by freeing the
mind logic and rational control.
● Expression of imagination as realised in dreams and
presented without conscious control.
● Exploration of mind.
● Aimed at synthesizing the workings of the unconscious
mind with those of the conscious mind.
● The Surrealist is non-logical, anti-rational, anti-realist.
● There was a point in the mind, he thought, where, beyond
realism, is attained a new knowledge.
9. ● Surrealism spread all over the world. Belgium,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Holland, Scandinavia,
Britain, Japan, and the whole continent of South
America.
● Influenced the novel, the theatre, the cinema, the
painting and sculpture.
● In his second manifesto, which appeared in 1929
Breton explained how the surrealist idea was to
revitalise the psychic forces by a “vertiginous
descent" into the self in quest of that secret and
hidden territory where all that is apparently
contradictory in our everyday lives and consciousness
will be made plain.
10. SYMBOLISM
● Origin in France in the latter half of the 19th
century.
● Edgar Alan Poe pioneered Symbolism in poetry.
● His poems The Raven, Ulalume, Lenore, The Haunted
Palace etc. are full of abundant symbols.
● A symbolist uses words “to describe a mode of
literary expression in which words are used to suggest
states of mind rather than for their objective,
representational or intellectual content.”
● According to Poe the chief aim of the poet is to
catch a glimpse of the supernatural beauty which can
be provided by the employment of symbols.
11. FUTURISM
● A style developed by a group of Italian artists in the 20th
century.
● The Futurists were revolutionary and radical in their
approach to art and literature.
● Futurism stood for a complete break with tradition and
the exploration of new forms, new subjects and new
styles, all in keeping with the advent of mechanistic age.
● Principles: dynamism, the cult of speed and machine,
rejection of the past, and the glorification of patriotism
and war.
● It includes free verse, phonetic poetry, and a telegraphic
language without adjectives or adverbs or much syntax.
● It stood for liberty of language.
12. DADAISM
● Dadaism was founded in Zurich in 1916 by Tristan
Tzara with the avowed object of perverting and
demolishing the tenets of arts, philosophy and logic and
substituting them with conscious madness as a protest
against the madness of war.
● It was opposed to form and order.
● The artists & poets used collage to arrange objects &
words into meaningless & illogical patterns.
● It wished to destroy art along with bourgeois society.
● In this mostly were collage effects: the arrangement of
unrelated objects & words in a random fashion.
13. Works Cited
● José Manuel Campos N, José. "A Guide to Modernism
in Literature." EnglishPost.org, 29 July 2020,
englishpost.org/literary-movements-modernism/.
● Narain, ‘Ages, Movements and Literary Forms’,
Lakshmi Narain Agrawal Educational Publishers, Dr.
Satish Kumar.
