MK University_ Biskra Academic Year: 2019/20

Faculty of Arts and Languages Lecturer: H. SEKHRI

Department of Foreign Languages/ English division

Course: British Literature Level: Master 01

Lecture one:

The Challenge of Modernism: Social and Political Context

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The roots of modern literature are in the late nineteenth century. The aesthetic
movement, with its insistence on "art for art's sake," assaulted middle-class
assumptions about the nature and function of art. Rejecting Victorian notions of the
artist's moral and educational duties, aestheticism helped widen the breach between
writers and the general public, resulting in the "alienation" of the modern artist from
society. This alienation is evident in the lives and work of the French symbolists and
other late-nineteenth-century bohemians who repudiated conventional notions of
respectability, and it underlies key works of modern literature, such as James Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and T. S. Eliot's Waste Land.
The growth of public education in England as a result of the Education Act of
1870, which finally made elementary schooling compulsory and universal, led to the
rapid emergence of a mass literate population, at whom a new mass produced popular
literature and new cheap journalism (the "yellow press") were directed. The audience
for literature split up into "highbrows," "middlebrows," and "lowbrows," and the
segmentation of the reading public, developing with unprecedented speed and to an
unprecedented degree, helped widen the gap between popular art and art esteemed
only by the sophisticated and the expert. This breach yawned ever wider with the
twentieth-century emergence of modernist iconoclasm and avant-garde experiment
in literature, music, and the visual arts.
The reaction against middle-class Victorian attitudes that is central to
modernism was already under way in the two decades before the queen Victoria's
death in 1901. Samuel Butler savagely attacked the Victorian conceptions of the
family, education, and religion in his novel The Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884,
posthumously published in 1903), the bitterest indictment in English literature of the
Victorian way of life. And the high tide of anti-Victorianism was marked by the
publication in 1918 of a classic of ironic debunking, Lytton Strachey's collection of
biographical essays Eminent Victorians.
A pivotal figure between Victorianism and modernism, Thomas Hardy marked
the end of the Victorian period and the dawn of the new age in "The Darkling
Thrush," a poem originally titled "By the Century's Deathbed" and postdated
December 31, 1900, the last day of the nineteenth century. The poem marks the
demise of a century of relative conviction and optimism, and it intimates the
beginnings of a new era in its skeptical irresolution, its bleak sense of the modern
world as "hard and dry"—favorite adjectives of later writers such as Ezra Pound and
T. E. Hulme:
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
This poem and other works by Hardy, A. E. Housman, and Joseph Conrad exemplify
the pessimism of imaginative writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century and
the first decade of the twentieth. Stoicism—a stiff-upperlip determination to endure
whatever fate may bring—also characterizes the literature written in the transitional
period between the Victorian era and modernism, including the work of minor authors
such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, traditional stabilities of society, religion,
and culture seemed to have weakened, the pace of change to be accelerating. The
unsettling force of modernity profoundly challenged traditional ways of structuring
and making sense of human experience. Because of the rapid pace of social and
technological change, because of the mass dislocation of populations by war, empire,
and economic migration, because of the mixing in close quarters of cultures and
classes in rapidly expanding cities, modernity disrupted the old order, upended ethical
and social codes, cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self,
community, the world, and the divine. Early-twentieth-century writers were keenly
aware that powerful concepts and vocabularies were emerging in anthropology,
psychology, philosophy, and the visual arts that reimagined human identity in
radically new ways. Sigmund Freud's seminal Interpretation of Dreams was published
in 1900, and soon psychoanalysis was changing how people saw and described
rationality, the self, and personal development. In his prose and poetry D. H.
Lawrence adapted the Oedipus complex to interpret and present his relationships with
his parents, though rejecting Freud's negative definition of the unconscious. By the
time of his death in 1939, Freud had become, as W. H. Auden wrote in an elegy for
him, "a whole climate of opinion / / under whom we conduct our different lives." Also
in the early twentieth century, Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (1890—1915) and
other works of anthropology were altering basic conceptions of culture, religion, and
myth. Eliot observed that Frazer's work "influenced our generation profoundly," and
the critic Lionel Trilling suggested that "perhaps no book has had so decisive an effect
upon modern literature as Frazer's." For both anthropologists and modern writers,
Western religion was now decentered by being placed in a comparative context as one
of numerous related mythologies, with Jesus Christ linked to "primitive" fertility gods
thought to die and revive in concert with the seasons. Furthering this challenge to
religious doctrine were the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century
German philosopher who declared the death of God, repudiated Christianity, and
offered instead a harshly tragic conception of life: people look "deeply into the true
nature of things" and realize "that no action of theirs can work any change," but they
nevertheless laugh and stoically affirm their fate. W. B. Yeats, who remarks in a 1902
letter that his eyes are exhausted from reading "that strong enchanter," greets death
and destruction in a Nietzschean spirit of tragic exultation.
These profound changes in modern intellectual history coincided with changes
of a more mundane sort, for everyday life was also undergoing rapid transformation
during the first years of the twentieth century. Electricity was spreading, cinema and
radio were proliferating, and new pharmaceuticals such as aspirin were being
developed. As labor was increasingly managed and rationalized, as more and more
people crowded into cities, as communications and transportation globalized space
and accelerated time, literature could not stand still, and modern writers sought to
create new forms that could register these profound alterations in human experience.
This was a period of scientific revolution, as exemplified in German physics by Max
Planck's quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (1905), and
T. S. Eliot reflects the increasing dominance of science when he argues that the poet
surrenders to tradition and thus extinguishes rather than expresses personality: "It is in
this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science," he
claims, adding that "the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum" that catalyzes
change but itself remains "inert, neutral, and unchanged" ("Tradition and the
Individual Talent").
The early twentieth century also brought countless advances in technology: the
first wireless communication across the Atlantic occurred in 1901, the Wright
Brothers flew the first airplane in 1903, and Henry Ford introduced the first mass-
produced car, the Model T or "Tin Lizzie," in 1913. Not that modern writers
univocally embraced such changes. Although some were more sanguine, many
modern writers were paradoxically repulsed by aspects of modernization. Mass-
produced appliances and products, such as the "gramophone" and canned goods
("tins"), are objects of revulsion in Eliot's Waste Land, for example. Because
scientific materialism and positivism, according to which empirical explanations
could be found for everything, were weakening the influence of organized religion,
many writers looked to literature as an alternative. His "simple-minded" Protestantism
spoiled by science, Yeats says in his autobiography, he "made a new religion, almost
an infallible church of poetic tradition." Whether or not they welcomed the demise of
tradition, habit, and certitude in favor of the new, modern writers articulated the
effects of modernity's relentless change, loss, and destabilization. "Things fall apart,"
Yeats wrote, "the centre cannot hold." Eliot describes in Four Quartets his quest for
the "still point of the turning world." The modernist’ drive to "make it new"—in Ezra
Pound's famous slogan—thus arises in part out of an often ambivalent consciousness
of the relentless mutations brought by modernization.
The position of women, too, was rapidly changing during this period. The
Married Woman's Property Act of 1882 allowed married women to own property in
their own right, and women were admitted to universities at different times during the
latter part of the century. Since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft, women in Great
Britain had been arguing and lobbying for the right to vote, but in the first decades of
the twentieth century, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel encouraged
suffragettes, as they were known, to take a more militant approach, which included
boycotts, bombings, and hunger strikes. The long fight for women's suffrage was
finally won in 1918 for women thirty and over, and in 1928 for women twenty-one
and over. These shifts in attitudes toward women, in the roles women played in the
national life, and in the relations between the sexes are reflected in a variety of ways
in the literature of the period.
Britain's modern political history begins with the Anglo-Boer War (1899—
1902), fought by the British to establish political and economic control over the Boer
republics (self-governing states) of South Africa. It was an imperial war against which
many British intellectuals protested and one that the British in the end were slightly
ashamed of having won. The war spanned the reign of Queen Victoria, who died in
1901, and Edward VII, who held the throne from 1901 to 1910. This latter decade is
known as the Edwardian period, and the king stamped his extrovert and self-indulgent
character upon it. The wealthy made it a vulgar age of conspicuous enjoyment, but
most writers and artists kept well away from involvement in high society: in general
this period had no equivalent to Queen Victoria's friendship with Tennyson. The
alienation of artists and intellectuals from political rulers and middle-class society was
proceeding apace. From 1910 (when George V came to the throne) until World War I
broke out in August 1914, Britain achieved a temporary equilibrium between
Victorian earnestness and Edwardian flashiness; in retrospect the Georgian period
seems peculiarly golden, the last phase of assurance and stability before the old order
throughout Europe broke up in violence. Yet even then, under the surface, there was
restlessness and experimentation. The age of Rupert Brooke's idyllic sonnets on the
English countryside was also the age of T. S. Eliot's first experiments in a radically
new kind of poetry, James Joyce's and Virginia Woolf's in radically new forms of
fiction.
Edwardian as a term applied to English cultural history suggests a period in
which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age—country houses with
numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class, a strict hierarchy of
social classes—remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change
and liberation existed. Georgian refers largely to the lull before the storm of World
War I. That war, as the bitterly skeptical and antiheroic work of Wilfred Owen,
Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and other war poets makes clear, produced major
shifts in attitude toward Western myths of progress and civilization. The postwar
disillusion of the 1920s resulted, in part, from the sense of utter social and political
collapse during a war in which unprecedented millions were killed. By the beginning
of World War I, nearly a quarter of the earth's surface and more than a quarter of the
world's population were under British dominion, including the vast African territories
acquired in the preceding hundred years.
Some of the colonies in the empire were settler nations with large European
populations, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in 1907 the empire
granted them the new status of dominions, recognizing their relative control over
internal affairs. Over time these largely independent nations came to be known as the
British Commonwealth, an association of self-governing countries. The twentieth
century witnessed the emergence of internationally acclaimed literary voices from
these dominions, from the early-century New Zealander Katherine Mansfield to the
late-century Australian Les Murray and Canadians Alice Munro and Anne Carson.
The rest of the colonies in the British Empire consisted primarily of indigenous
populations that had little or no political power, but nationalist movements were
gaining strength in the early years of the century—as when, in 1906, the Congress
movement in India first demanded swaraj ("self-rule") soon to become the mantra of
Indian nationalism. In Britain imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiments often met
head on in Parliament and the press, the debate involving writers as far apart as
Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster.
A steadily rising Irish nationalism resulted in increasingly violent protests
against the cultural, economic, and political subordination of Ireland to the British
Crown and government. During the Easter Rising of 1916, Irish rebels in Dublin
staged a revolt against British rule, and by executing fifteen Irish leaders, the British
inadvertently intensified the drive for independence, finally achieved in 1921—22
when the southern counties were declared the Irish Free State. (The six counties of
Northern Ireland remained, however, part of Great Britain.) No one can fully
understand Yeats or Joyce without some awareness of the Irish struggle for
independence, and the way in which the Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries (with Yeats at the forefront) reflected a determination to
achieve a vigorous national life culturally even if the road seemed blocked politically.
Depression and unemployment in the early 1930s, followed by the rise of Hitler and
the shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat of another war, deeply
affected the emerging poets and novelists of the time.
While Eliot, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats, Pound, and others of the
older generation turned to the political right, the impotence of capitalist governments
in the face of Fascism combined with economic dislocation to turn the majority of
young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1930s to the political left. The
1930s were the so-called red decade, because only the left seemed to offer any
solution in various forms of socialism, communism, and left liberalism. The early
poetry of W. H. Auden and his contemporaries cried out for "the death of the old
gang" (in Auden's phrase) and a clean sweep politically and economically, while the
right-wing army's rebellion against the left-wing republican government in Spain,
which started in the summer of 1936 and soon led to full-scale civil war, was regarded
as a rehearsal for an inevitable second world war and thus further emphasized the
inadequacy of politicians. Yet though the younger writers of the period expressed the
up-to date, radical political views of the left, they were less technically inventive than
the first-generation modernists, such as Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf. The outbreak of
World War II in September 1939—following shortly on Hitler's pact with the Soviet
Union, which so shocked and disillusioned many of the young left-wing writers that
they subsequently moved politically to the center—marked the sudden end of the red
decade. What was from the beginning expected to be a long and costly war brought
inevitable exhaustion. The diminution of British political power, its secondary status
in relation to the United States as a player in the Cold War, brought about a painful
reappraisal of Britain's place in the world, even as countries that had lost the war—
West Germany and Japan—were, in economic terms, winning the peace that
followed.
In winning a war, Great Britain lost an empire. The largest, most powerful,
best organized of the modern European empires, it had expropriated enormous
quantities of land, raw materials, and labor from its widely scattered overseas
territories. India, long the jewel in the imperial Crown, won its independence in 1947,
along with the newly formed Muslim state of Pakistan. The postwar wave of
decolonization that began in South Asia spread to Africa and the Caribbean: in 1957
Ghana was the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to become independent, unleashing
an unstoppable wave of liberation from British rule that freed Nigeria in 1960, Sierra
Leone in 1961, Uganda in 1962, Kenya in 1963; in the Caribbean, Jamaica and
Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, Barbados and Guyana in 1966, and Saint Lucia in
1979. India and Pakistan elected to remain within a newly expanded and reconceived
British Commonwealth, but other former colonies did not. The Irish Republic
withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1949; the Republic of South Africa, in 1961.
Postwar decolonization coincided with and encouraged the efflorescence of
postcolonial writing that would bring about the most dramatic geographic shift in
literature in English since its inception. Writers from Britain's former colonies
published influential and innovative novels, plays, and poems, hybridizing their local
traditions and varieties of English with those of the empire. The names of the Nobel
Prize winners Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, and J.
M. Coetzee were added to the annals of literature in English.
While Britain was decolonizing its empire, the former empire was colonizing
Britain, as Louise Bennett wryly suggests in her poem "Colonization in Reverse."
Encouraged by the postwar labor shortage in England and the scarcity of work at
home, waves of Caribbean migrants journeyed to and settled in "the motherland," the
first group on the Empire Windrush that sailed from Jamaica to Tilbury Docks in
1948. Migrants followed from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Africa, and other regions
of the "New Commonwealth." Even as immigration laws became more restrictive in
the 1960s, relatives of earlier migrants and refugees from these and other nations
continued to arrive, transforming Britain into an increasingly multiracial society and
infusing energy into British arts and literature. But people of Caribbean, African, and
South Asian origin, who brought distinctive vernaculars and cultural traditions with
them, painfully discovered that their official status as British subjects often did not
translate into their being welcomed as full-fledged members of British society. The
friction between color-blind and ethnically specific notions of Englishness prompted a
large-scale and ongoing rethinking of national identity in Britain. Among the arrivals
in England were many who journeyed there to study in the late 1940s and 1950s and
eventually became prominent writers, such as Bennett, Soyinka, Kamau (then
Edward) Brathwaite, and Chinua Achebe. In the 1970s and 1980s a younger
generation of black and Asian British writers emerged—some born in the U.K., some
in the ex-empire— including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, John Agard, and Caryl
Phillips, and in the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium, still younger
writers including Jackie Kay and Zadie Smith.

Modernism is one of the key words of the first part of the century. Among its
influences were the psychological works of Sigmund Freud and the anthropological
writings of Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890–1915), a huge work
which brought together cultural and social manifestations from the universe of
cultures. Modernism is essentially post-Darwinian: it is a search to explain mankind’s
place in 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, and all traditional forms begin to lose their place:
‘a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order’ might, half-
jokingly, sum this up. What went out was narrative, description, rational exposition;
what emerged focused on stream of consciousness, images in poetry (rather than
description or narration), a new use of universal myth, and a sense of fragmentation
both of individuality and of such concepts as space and time. As such, it relates
closely to Impressionism in the visual arts, and shares many structural features with
the new medium of the cinema, which reached great heights of achievement and
influence in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Against Modernism it was said that it produced chaotic and difficult writing,
that it moved beyond the capacity of many readers and became elitist. Indeed, it is
true that readers need a background awareness of psychology, anthropology, history
and aesthetics to master some of the literature of the early years of Modernism: T.S.
Eliot even furnished footnotes to help the reader with his The Waste Land. But all
through what might be termed the period of Modernism there were writers who kept
working away in more traditional modes. Often they enjoyed greater popular success
than the experimenters, but it is largely the innovators who are seen to have defined
the new tastes of the times. Figures like John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett in the
novel tend now to be consigned to history as relics of Victorianism, rather than being
read as contemporaries of Woolf, Joyce and Eliot. What is significant is that both
kinds of writing could flourish at the same time.