Eng426 20th century english literature

English Literature in the Twentieth Century

Between the renaissance of English literature and the Twentieth Century Literature, there was the Victorian literature which has been discussed in the previous unit. The Victorian writers retained the traditions of the renaissance literature, only that the industrial revolution and the resultant economic and scientific advancement widened the scope of people’s life experiences and living became a bit more complex. There were still linear and coherent plots. Individual experiences were still being represented. Morals were still serious considerations among the writers, and representations of life, heroes and heroines were done in unified pattern. In the Victorian literature, what basically changed from the earliest tradition was the kind of real life experiences being represented. The complexities of modern life outdid the kind of experiences Crusoe has in Robinson Crusoe. For example, the home Crusoe grows up and the kind of experience he has at the Island of despair are different from the kind of home and experience someone in an industrial British setting would have. Victorian writers represented this kind of new experiences, but do not bother about the inner feelings of the character.

In Twentieth Century Literature, there were moves and breakaway from the traditions that the Victorian had retained. There was also a breakaway from the kind of real life experiences being represented. More complex experiences were occurring making writers rethink deep the present and future of humanity. The Twentieth Century English Literature began in the post-Victorian period and got to its peak with the Modernist movement.

0. The Post-Victorian Literature

The Victorian literature ended sometime around 1901 and the modernist movement began after the First World War which ended in 1918 and officially in 1919. This means that there was a literary period between the Victorian and the modernist movement. This literary period is the post-Victorian literature and it marked the beginning of the Twentieth Century Literature. Between 1901 and 1914, Edward VII and George V reigned in Britain. The literary works produced in these periods are most times referred to as the Edwardian literature. In the Post-Victorian literature (the Edwardian literature),
writers were already forming new ideas that were different from the literary traditions of the Victorian period.

Technological development had advanced more than it did in the years before and experiences became more complex and the British were beginning to observe the adverse effects of industrialisation. The Post-Victorian writers depicted how the beautiful landscape of Britain was being disfigured by the establishment of industries and how industrialisation diminished the lives of the people who struggled to survive in mining towns, for example. This is because with the emergence of industries, machines took over some of the jobs that were usually done by human beings and the lush Greenland gave way to industrial buildings. Instead of linear and coherent plot of the Victorian literature, the Post-Victorian literature employs disjointedness. Disjointedness is not only a style to the writers. It is a way of showing that the life people live in this world is not an ordered sequence. In poetry, the writers used unrhymed verse. Morals were no longer considered. Unlike the morality in Robinson Crusoe, there is no moral in E.M. Forster’s Howards Ends (1910). The representation of the real experiences of life in unified pattern stopped.

Women became more prominent in the Post-Victorian literature than in the Victorian literature. The industrial revolution of the Victorian period had brought empowerment to a lot of women; instead of just remaining at home as housewives and farmhands, women got jobs in garment industries, food processing industries and so on. As a way of representing reality, Post-Victorian English Literature depicted women in terms of the opportunities they had for self-development in modern world. For example, Helen Schlegel in Howards Ends becomes a single mother with no intention of marrying. She is able to take care of herself without a husband. In short, writers in the Post-Victorian period represented the individual and actual experiences that were in Britain, and which resulted from the high level of economic development and the new ways and social struggles of the people living in Britain. Themes were developed around issues such as the importance of landscape and the earth, the mechanised, industrial world and the role of women in a changing world.

One of the aspects of the Victorian literature that was retained was the representation of heroes and heroines. Writers still saw reasons to applaud individual achievements in different endeavours. Also, Post-Victorian writers failed to consider the inner feelings of characters, they focused less on the mind of the individual; they concentrate on describing the immediate environments of the characters. Post-Victorian writers still used the omniscient narrator who knows everything about the character and his environment. These preoccupations of the Post-Victorian literature only continued to assume other shapes to reflect the actual life experiences of the people after the First World War.

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