The Twentieth Century to 1939

Chronological landmarks1901 Queen Victoria dies1901-10 Edward VII1910-1936 George V (first monarch of the House of Windsor)1936 Edward VIII1936-52 George VI

The Edwardian period (1901-1910)1899-1902 Boer War: first 20th century imperial crisisSuffragist and suffragette movementsTrade unionism and revolutionary socialism1906 Labour PartyAnxiety about rising German power

First World War to Great Depression: the 1920sIreland1916 Easter Rising. Irish Republic proclaimed1919-1921 Anglo-Irish War1921 Partition Treaty: Irish Free State and Northern Ireland (six Protestant majority Ulster counties)

1917 Russian Revolution1918 Representation of the People Act: extension of the electorate (all men over 21; some women over 30)1928 All women were allowed to vote for the first time1929 Wall Street Crash

1929-1932 Great Depression. Cultural effect: sense of inertia, immobilism and fatalismA sense of moral bankruptcy and cultural crisisSudden end of Victorian ethical certaintiesSpread of Freudian psychologyThe war as a moment of transition into a new, modern consciousness

Inflation, decline of traditional industries (northern England, Scotland, Wales); emergence of new technological industries (southern England)Rise of structural unemployment

Depression to Second World War: the 1930sRise of communism and fascism1922 Mussolini in Italy1931 Japans attack on China1933 Hitlers rise to power in Germany1936 Rome-Berlin-Axis agreement between Hitler and Mussolini

1936-1939 Spanish Civil War1936 Edward VIIIs abdicationSeptember 1939 German attack on Poland. Outbreak of Second World War

LiteratureArtists felt they had to express their ideas very differently in new formsRevolt against Victorianism and Victorian literary modelsAttempts to formulate a new, modern identity, the seed of Modernism

Questioning of the representational function of literatureThe work of art as autonomousInfluence of Freud, the discoherent, neurotic self

The novelThe novel of the twentieth century has more personal, individual themesUse of different points of view, different settings and quick moves from scene to scene.Psychological approach, going deeply into the thoughts of the charactersStream of consciousness technique

Joseph ConradLord Jim (1900), Nostromo. Both are novels of the sea, and they explore the dangers, the questions of honour and the moral conflicts of mans struggles at seaHeart of Darkness (1902), one of his most famous novels, focuses on Africa and deals with issues of colonialism and human behaviour

E.M ForsterHowards End (1910), A Room with a View (1908), and A Passage to India (1924). In this last novel, we can see the tensions between the British way of life and the local culture of India.

D.H. LawrenceSons and Lovers (1913), an autobiographical novelHis novels The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928) caused some scandal as their subjects were mens and womens roles in sexual relationships

James JoyceHe cultivated different genres. He used the technique of stream of consciousness to follow a characters thoughts in a very free way. Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15), Ulysses (1922)

Ulysses caused great controversy. The novel is about one day (16 June 1904) in Dublin. The main characters are Sthephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly BloomJoyce uses a wide range of references and the styles of many works of literature. He wanted to write the novel that was the climax of the traditions of English literature

Virginia WoolfShe came from a literary family and her home in Bloomsbury became the centre of literary interest among the intellectuals and artists of her timeThe Bloomsbury Group lasted for many years, and was at its highest point in the 1920s

Virginia Woolf wanted to leave realism and move into a new kind of expression which would allow a more internal exploration of the events and emotions described.

She used stream of consciousness techniques

This can be seen in her novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927)

The Waves (1931) is her most experimental novel. She shows six different characters, all at different points in their lives, and explores how they are each affected by the death of someone well known to each of them

Katherine Mansfield was another important woman writer of the period.

She was born in New Zealand but educated in London

Mansfield wrote short stories. Her main collections are In a German Pension (1911), Bliss and Other Stories (1920), and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)

Theatre and Drama

G.B. Shaw was the leading figure in English drama from the 1890s until his death in 1950

He used the theatre for discussion, not only for entertainment

Some of his major works in this period are Man and Superman (1905), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923)

PoetryGerard Manley Hopkins. He died in 1889, but most of his poetry was not published until 1918His poems celebrate nature, question mans relationship with God and try hard to find faith and belief in the modern worldHis best-known single poem is The Wreck of the Deutschland

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)He began his poetic career in 1880s and was an important literary figure until his death in 1939He shows in his poems many of the changes which were happening in the world he lived in

He was Irish, and was closely involved in the struggles for independenceHe wrote over twenty volumes of poetry in his long career, as well as many playsYeats was very important in the revival of Irish writing in the early years of the century, known as the Celtic Revival

His first book of poem was The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)

Other well-know works are Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower

In 1908 the volume Collected Works (eight volumes) came out.

The Second Coming (1921) and Sailing to Byzantium (1927) are two of his most famous poems

Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923

First World War PoetryThe FWW was the first war in which the soldiers from the lower classes could read and write

They wrote home describing the horrors and the uselessness of the war they were fighting

The soldier-poets did not try to present the soldiers as heroes

They describe their own suffering and the horrors of war: fear of death, cold, miserable conditions of life

This is very different from the heroism of epic poetry of war

Some of these poets are Wilfred Owen (Dulce et Decorum Est, Anthem for Doomed Youth), and Isaac Rosenberg (Break of Day in the Trenches, Dead Man Walking)

Sigfried Sassoon survived the war and his war poems were the first to criticize the way the war was planned, as we can see in the poem The General

T.S.Eliot (1888-1965)

He was born in the United States, but came to live in England befor the FWW.He published his first volume in 1917, Prufrock and othe Observations, which includes the famous poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The poem is about time and wasted time. It shows Eliots way of writing: he uses images, fragments and memorable phrases to build up a broad picture of the character, his anxieties and his time

In 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land

This book has been considered one of the most important single poems of the twentieth century.The poem is full of references to other texts, and is very complex, with a wide range of intellectual reference

The main theme is a diagnosis of contemporary life as spiritually sterileFrom the formal point of view, Eliot uses the collage techniqueThe image of the wasteland has come to be one of the most common images of modern times

In his book Four Quartets (1943), the passing of time is seen as positive and offers hope for spiritual rebirth

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948