MODERNISM

Queen Victorias Jubilee in 1887 was felt by many to represent the end of an era. Charles Darwins
On the Origin of Species puts the existence of God into radical question. Society became more
fragmented and individual identities more fluid. The Boer War (1899-1902), which was fought by the
British to establish control over the Boer republics in South Africa, marked the beginning of rebellion
against British imperialism. Liberal beliefs in the gradual transition to a better world began to be
questioned. The mass destruction of the First World War led many towards more extreme affiliation,
and both Fascism and Marxism held attractions for many intellectuals and workers, particularly during
the 1930s. Increasing access to literacy, and to education in general, led to profound changes in the
reading public. The Education Act of 1870 made elementary education compulsory for everyone
between the ages of 5 and 13, and that led to the rapid expansion of a largely unsophisticated literary
public, the rise of the popular press, and the mass production of popular literature for semi-literate
low-brow readership. Some writers reacted to this situation by concerning on a narrow, highly
educated audience who would understand their alienation from this changing world, thus, the avant-
garde era in writing began. This intellectualization has been criticized as restricting literature to a
cultural and academic elite. Isolation and alienation, together with experimental forms of expression,
came to characterize serious literature. Modern begins to define the twentieth century. Modernism is
one of the key words of the first part of the century. It is a search to explain mankinds place I the
modern world, where religion, social stability and ethics are all called into question. This resulted in a
fashion for experimentation, for the tradition of the new as one critic, Harold Rosenberg,
memorably put it. The workings of the unconscious mind become an important subject. What went out
was narrative, description, rational exposition; what emerged focused on stream of consciousness,
images in poetry, anew use of universal myth, and a sense of fragmentation both of individuality and
of such concepts as space and time. T.S. Eliot even furnished footnotes to help the reader with his
Waste Land. The 1890s the decade of Aesthetic and Decadence. It was largely a poetry of urban
themes. In 1899, Arthur Symons, one of the poetic aesthetes of the 1890s, published his study The
Symbolist Movement in Poetry, which would have great influence on modern poets like W.B. Yeats
and T.S. Eliot. He brought home to British poets the significance of French experimental symbolists
like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue and Marallme . Yeats himself quickly drew the lesion that We must
purify poetry. Throughout the Victorian and Georgian periods the language of poetry was felt to have
a special decorum and to be different from everyday language. Modern poetry contains language that
is closer to the idioms of everyday speech and to a more diverse range of subject matter. Dialect words,
colloquial expression, specialist terminology, poeticism, and foreign words may be found in the same
poem. The language mix reflects a sense that there is no longer a fixed language of poetry just as there
is no longer one English. Among the voices which can be more clearly heard in the novel in resent
years are those of the young and the lower classes, the voice of the new educated middle classes, the
voices of women, racial minorities, gays, and outsiders and many other types. Various subgenres of
novel have become bestseller while retaining intellectual acceptability- for example, the working-class
novel, the Hampstead novel, the academic novel, the Scottish novel, the womens novel, the magic
realist novel. At the same time there have been numerous bestseller which have never reached
intellectual acceptability-for example, romances, thrillers, and historical novels. Some genres, like the
detective story and the spy story, have, however, begun to receive critical acclaim, and to be
recognized as major contribution to literature. The growth in cultural studies has meant that many
previously unconsidered areas of written expression have come under scrutiny in the late twentieth
century. Throughout all the Greens fiction he remained fascinated by people who are capable or
incapable of judging between good and evil. His novels are carefully constructed, with powerful plots
and a strong sense of place. The fascination with guilt and salvation is reflected in his thrillers just as
much as in his more serious novels. In the world of spies violence, betrayal, treachery and human
weakness are bought into play in terms of plot before they become moral or spiritual issues. Do,
although his shockers are superficially novels of escape, like Maughams influential Ashemden stories
or Buchans Richard Hannay novels, they reveal a more serious purpose. His works creates an
identifiable Greenland- a world od constant anxiety rather than easy excitements. Greens technique-
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his strengths in plotting and cutting from one scene to the next-and the sinister atmosphere of the
thriller were influenced by his time spent as a cinema critic in the late 1930s.

Modernism vs. Victorian novel

Influenced by English romanticism, developments in modern art, in the changing

and the and a changing intellectual milieu that questioned the possibilities of
universal values or objective truth, modern novelists erased the boundaries
between art and life. They realized that each man perceived a different reality
and lived in a closed circle. They wrote not only to urge their perspectives upon
their audience but to create their own identities and values. On the other hand,
the artist doubts that he can change the world, but, on the other he tries to
convince himself and his audience that he can. 20th century British writers
invented ways of seeing the human psyche in a more subtle and complex
manner. While the Victorian novel focused upon man and his social aspect,
Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf isolate their characters from the social
community by focusing on the perceiving psyche. The English novel from 1890
-1930 made self-consciousness and self-awareness its subject, and the stream of
consciousness within the soliloquy and the interior monologue - both direct and
indirect became more prominent. Since characters are often versions of the
author who either does not or cannot achieve the traditional distance between
the author and the characters, the experience and self- consciousness of the
characters reflect those of the author.
In the traditional novels we are more conscious of the characters, actions,
themes, and rhetoric and less conscious of the authors presence. While reading
Emma is the discovery of a finished three - dimensional imagined world, reading
the major British novelists in the period 1890-1930 involves participating in their
process of struggling to define their values and their concepts of the novel. The
authors struggle with his subject becomes a major determinant of novel form.
Telling becomes a central action in these novels. Sometimes a character will
become the spokesman for values that the omniscient voice articulates. The
structure of a novel is no longer a preconceived pattern in which characters move
towards discovering values held by an omniscient voice who is a surrogate for the
author. To read the novel is to participate in the process by which, through his
characters, the novelist proposes, tests, examines, and discards moral and
aesthetic values. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult for writers to remove
themselves from the text. The stream of consciousness, which has been thought
of as a movement towards objectivity, is actually often a disguise for authorial
presence rather than a means for the author to absent himself. (We know a great
deal more about Joyce from a portrait and Ulysses than we know about Austen
from Emma and P&P.)
A novelist lives in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world,
among imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only
writing about himself. He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a
suspected rather than a seen presence a movement and a voice behind the
curtains of fiction.

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BRITISH LITERATURE QUESTIONS

Some of the possible exam themes

Trensc Poets

I. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) Matfield, Kent

The Effect, They

II. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) Oswestry, Shropshire

Strange Meeting, Anthem for the Doomed Youth, Spring Offensive, Dulce and Decorum Est,
The Letter, Exposure

III. Issac Rosenberg (1890 1918) Bristol

IV. Dead Man's Dump, Break of Day in the Trenches

ANTI-WAR MESSAGE IN THE POETRY OF TRENCH POETS

Unlike Georgian poets who presented was as glorious, noble thing, where Vritish army
was celebrated and British young men were becoming heroes, the war poets questioned
traditional ideas that were earlier taken for granted. Although their poetry was labeled as
WAR POETRY, it would be more correct to call them TRENCH POETS who wrote
ANTI-WAR POETRY. Their poetry was direct, open and full of authentic details, irony,
sarcasm and cynicism. Thousands of them died in battles or in trenches and those who
survived became wise and suspicious of the purpose of the war . Many of those people
turned to writing and in that way tried to cope with their experience showing the reality of
war, about which the official war policy propaganda kept silent.
As a result of the fact that for many of these poets their daily experience destroyed their
image of war as something great, the reader is offered strong anti-war messages in great
poems full of naturalistic horror scenes and brutalities of war, showing physical and
mental hardships, fear of death and compassion for the enemy soldiers. For example.
S.Sassoon wrote poetry in Georgian style in the beginning of the war. It was artificially
romantic, empty and sweetend, but war experience soon sobered him up. In the Effect,
Sassoon uses a quote from a war correspondent as an epigraph upon which to base his
poem. The correspondent had observed the effect of our bombardment was terrific. One
man told me he had never seen so many dead before. He juxtaposes the news from the
war reality. The people engaged in war hate what they are doing. In this very poem, the
pilot does not like the effect of his bombardment. For example, his anti-war feelings are
reflected in the poem They, which is a direct attack upon the Bishop for supporting the
war and in the same time not participating in the war himself. He contrasts Bishop who
represents tradition with the reality of war. Brutal pictures were deliberately used to make
people think, and the purpose was to reveal the cruelty of war to those who stayed at
home.
In the poem Dulce et Decorum est, Wilfred Owen put the title which is deliberate
allusion to the famous Roman poet Horace, who said that it is sweet and fitting thing to
die for one's country (Dulce et Decorum est per Patria Mori). Owen reveals all the horror
of war traumatic experience by showing very maturalistic and detailed images of the blind
and devastated soldiers looking for a shelter after being attacked. Marching soldiers are so

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tired and their senses dulled to run away from granades. For the first time modern images
entered literature wherein the poisoned gas was presented as a green sea. Green colour
symbolizes death, i.e. the poetic voice, which is at the same time the protagonist, sees his
fellow dying under a green sea. He shows that dying is not sweet but choking. Finally,
after presenting the traumatic experience and helpless sight that has been reflected in all
his dreamsm the poetic voice highly ionizes traditional views expressed in the title calling
it the old lie and saying that war is anything but sweet and honorable. Owen tries to
prevent young men from dying, he addresses the reader on behalf of those who were like
himself, in position to see a fellow soldier gasping for air while dying of choking or to
look at his hanging face while standing behind the wagom where his corpse was flung,
by saying that the odl lie which kept soldiers for fighting for centuries should not be
repeated to children ardent for some desperate glory.
A recurring theme in Owen's poetry is the notion of unseen scars for many of the
surviving soldiers who, not able to help a dying man, carry remediless guilt with them.
Though soldiers may return alive or injured, their lives will never be the same. In the
poem Strange Meeting, we have a strange notion of escaping into hell from war which
is presented from a perspective of a soldier who has just died in combat and goes to the
underworld. Owen goes beyond social irony AND RAISES EVERYTHING ON a
metaphysicall level by showing compassion that a dead soldier feels about his enemy I
an the enemy you killed, my friend, realizing that they are humans just like them, and
that is what was a taboo for war propaganda. He remembers himself before the war, he is
mourning because of the undone years. He regrets that the truth about his suffering dies
with him and the truth about the war will stay concealed in the underworld. There are no
inbfluences from the upper world on the underground world and there is no battle there. It
is worse onb the Earth than in hell another anti-war message.
In the poem Anthem for the Doomed Youth, Owen also condemns the war showing that
there is nothing glorious in dying in battle. The young people who died in battles as cattle
will not receive ordinary funerals and instead of the usual rituals, their weapon will be the
last thing they will hear; only the weapon will say their last prayer.
In Exposure, as time goes on, the poem becomes more unsettling and each stanza shows
the life of the soldiers becoming worse. The repetition of the line But nothing happens
at the end of each stanza is particularly poignat because it shows the pain and suffering
combined with a hope that something might change and finally disappointment over the
fact that none of these things that were waited for with extreme anticipation will ever take
place.
In the poem Dead Man's Dump, Isaac Rosenberg juxtaposes images of uninterested
living people and apocalyptic elements of dead people. He uses irony to indicate his
compassion for young soldiers in the war. To show the misery of war, he uses images of
dead bodies being overrun by the wheels and writes about trauma that such images leave
on those who survive. The important moment is when he reveals that people on both sides
are afraid of dying.
In the poem Breask of Day in the Trenches poetic voice is a soldier who addresses a rat
and gives him human characteristic. The soldier envies the rat because of his freedom to
constantly change sides and it is very ironic that people cannot do what the rat can. The
poet has an impression that the rat perfectly understand the situation amd he mocks the
soldiers. The poet soldier feels that nature also suffers because of war, human beings are
doing violence to the Earth by digging trenches.
War poetry is no longer a hobby or composition of sweet verses used to escape from
reality: on the contrary, it is a call for awareness, it has a purpose to sober up the reader in
a very shocking way and receal that the war is brutal, unnatural, and that there can be no

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winners. One of the goals is tro use very sharp, shocking detailed images, and present
ironic contrast between the officially produced norms and reality based on personal
experience.

CRITICISM OF IMPERIASL AND COLONIAL POLICY IN HEART OF

DARKNESS

Hear of Darkness was first published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1899, and than in 1902
in book-form. It can be read on two levels: on the surface level it is a story on imperialsm,
which starts in London and continues in Congo.
The end of the 19th century brought one of the most famous examples of imperialism and
genocide in modern memory. King Leopold of Belgium secured the Congo region of
Africa sa a Belgian colony. The king said that the natives should be grateful to them for
bringing Christianity and European civilization but the Africans were exploited. The
belgians performed cruel punishment, they terrorized and despised the savages. When
we combine all those things, we get the Congo that Heart of Darkness portrayed as horror.
There is no doubt about Conrad's attitude towards Imperialism. He tries to tell the readers
that imperialism and colonial policy are immoral. He believes that Europeans are too
arrogant in dealing with these uncivilized people; he indicates that the whites are too
materialistic and they don't understand how spiritually advanced the natives are. On the
other hand, the Company is a collaboration of imperialistic notions, hides its core of
darkness behind noble ideas of civilization and commerce. The Trading Company is a
model of colonialism. This writer uses colonization to wake and explore the universal
questions about man's vcapacity for evil and horror.
In this book, Marlowe symbolizes the positiveness of imperialism. When He says: I've
got heavenly mission to civilize you, he expresses his good intentions to help the African
progress and advance. He grows cynical with the Company's ideas and sees the
imperialists as trying to conquer something much more immense than could be conceived.
This is the world of suffering and opression to a false power imperialistic Europe.
Marlowe compares the Romans with the British people. Romans brought the flash of
lightening civilization. They were not colonists, they were killers, thieves. They missed
something; they missed a plan how to change their own space and learn to be like the
British. Kurtz is hidden by the socio-political message here, it winds up controlling you.
The Western civilization that Kurtz presented in HOD is the logical fulfilment of
Western religious memory. That's the idea that the Earth is a gift to the specific people.
Kurtz a symbol of Europe (his mother and father were half French-half English). His
only work was to exploit the Africans for their ivory. His terminal illness amd later death
represents the eventual death of imperialism due to inability to respect the culture and the
people of the invaded country. The Accountant was described as a white in a sptless dree.
It symbolizes the Company's desire to seem morally spotless to the rest of the world. He
lost his soul on the way of greed for money. Ironically, this money is supposed to be used
to help the natives that the company is destroying.