The Modern Period (1914-1945 CE)

INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERN PERIOD

Modern literature is written in the contemporary period. When modern literature began is hard to define and varies from country to country, but it covers at least the 20th and 21st centuries. Literature covers all written works including letters and journals, but is best known for novels, poetry and non-fiction articles as found in magazines and newspapers. It should not be confused with modernist literature, even though the two groups are contemporary.

It is difficult to decide the exact boundaries of the modern age of literature. Like with defining any era, such delineations are fraught with overlaps and differences between regions and cultures. In Britain, the modern era began in 1901 with the end of the Victorian era and Victorian literature. In Japan, the modern era could be traced back to the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s, but after 1945 may be more realistic. Others may consider Victorian literature to be a sub-division of modern literature and would instead date the modern period back to the 1700s.

In America, a different time would mark the beginning of the modern literature. The breaking point could be the advent of modernism around 1900. Steven Byrd of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke says “whereas previous American literary periods were best defined by certain stylistic conventions or popular schools of thought, the modern period of American literature is better defined by the traditions it broke.”

Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To FindIn Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen. In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost and Flannery O'Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age, 1914-1929) such as Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

The Harlem Renaissance marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison. Realism is the dominant fashion, but the disillusionment with the World Wars lead to new experimentation.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN LITERATURE

1. Individualism
2. Experimentation
3. Symbolism
4. Formalism 
5. Absurdity

WRITERS AND POETS IN THE MODERN PERIOD

1. Ezra Pound
2. T.S. Eliot
3. Sylvia Plath
4. Emily Dickinson
5. Dylan Thomas

Ezra Pound

T.S. Eliot

Dylan Thomas

MODERN LITRERATURE

end of content