The Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century in Prose, Poetry and Drama

Overview of Significant Events – 20th C.

• Following Victorian era of great technological progress

• Decline of religious belief• Yet interest in Greek/Roman mythology• World War One – upheaval of values• Decline of colonies (post-colonialism) &

rise of multiculturalism• Modernism, psychoanalysis• Genres: autobiography, science fiction• The Internet, interactivity and

digitisation

Modernism

• Interest in myth• Focus on identity• The subconscious mind• Traditional narrative structure

subverted• Stream of consciousness

Post-modernism

• Fragmentary form• Cross-genre• Stories within stories• Unreliable narrators• Allusive• Open endings• Making the reader work (‘writerly’)

Themes/Genres

• Modernism & Post-modernism

• Post-colonialism

• Socialism

• Psychoanalysis

• Feminism

Prose

• Key texts: Modernism: Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Sons and Lovers, A Passage to IndiaPost-modernism: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Enduring Love,

• Genres: science fiction, post-modern novel

Poetry

• Key texts: The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot), W.H. Auden’s poetry, E.E. Cummings, the Beat poets

• Experiments with form & diction

Drama

• Genres: Kitchen sink drama, Theatre of the Absurd, Naturalism, Brechtian drama

• Key texts: John Osbourne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’, Brecht ‘Caucasian Chalk Circles’, Pirandello ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, Pinter ‘The Caretaker’, Brecht ‘’

The Twenty-first Century

• Genres diversify – hit-lit (tragic life stories), celebrity, the post-modern novel

• The digitisation and accessibility of otherwise obscure books

• Renewed interest in existing genres: horror and children’s literature

• The world of the common reader much wider: American literature prominent from 1st half of 20th C, and books from Japanese (Murakami) and Afghan (Hosseini) authors can be bestsellers