Modernist Novel

Modernism: Characteristics in Time Shaped by the horrors from the two gruesome World Wars and the drastic societal change brought by the rapid industrialization of urban centers, Modernism marked a period of loss of faith in God, government and human goodness. This shift from the traditional ways of viewing the world shattered the illusion that acting virtuously brought about good. In T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, the main character, Prufrock, internalizes his…

predecessors.” As Modernism began, many writers including T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Ezra Pound began creating poems with this new, innovative style. One such writer, Wallace Stevens, shows an example of the new styles and innovations used in Modernist poetry. According to Paul Mariani, Stevens began writing poems while in Harvard as an editor for the Harvard Advovate (12). Although Stevens went on to become a successful lawyer,…

In Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying the story is told by more than one narrator, and illustrates the challenges of the Bundren family as they head to Jefferson to bury the matriarch of the family, Addie Bundren. By having multiple perspectives, Faulkner is able to present…

2. The Crying of Lot 49: modernism or postmodernism? In my arguing that The Crying of Lot 49 can also be construed as a late-modernist text, I will turn to Harvey’s essay ‘The Cry from Within or Without? Pynchon and the Modern – Postmodern Divide’ where he fervently argues against McHale’s ‘claim’ that The Crying of Lot 49 is fundamentally a modernist text by presenting two core arguments relating to a) intertextuality and b) Oedipa’s search for truth. Before I will dispute any arguments of…

that amount of freedom didn’t come easily, that did not stop these artists from perusing their goal. For instance, Modernism was the most influential literary movement during the 20th century. It surrounded the novel Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. This piece demonstrates what a Modernist writing…

Imagism was a literary movement that began in the early 20th century. This movement has its roots in the artistic world where its main aim was to avoid the old conventions and find new ways of creativity. Poets such as Ezra Pound, H.D. and William Carlos Williams tried to create a way of expressing the imagism in painting through words in poetry. This movement as contemporary art repudiates ‘beauty’ standards, and the Romanticism of the 19th-century while it admires the quotidian, the perceptual…

Edward Estlin Cummings, a 20th century poet, painter, playwright, and novelist, impacted literature greatly. Nearly all of his poems challenged the accepted rules of writing through formatting and grammar choices. The topics of the poems created the most controversy, especially the poems he wrote focusing on nature, religion, and his sexuality. Due to his strict religious upbringing, Cummings conveys his inner strife and difficulties forming connections through his eccentric writing style.…

Twentieth century novel Modern novelist can be divided into those who continue within a broad tradition of realism and those who experiment far more with the form of novel. Writers such as john Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Graham Green, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike and Saul Bellow are essentially realist. They are less interactive then the nineteenth century realists. They present a credible picture in which we are not particularly aware of the novelist presence.…

with, she was the first poet to truly bring the Modernist movement forward. Modernism is breaking away from traditional writing and thought, and writing what you believe to be true personally instead (Whitworth, 2010). Equally, modernist writing has a tendency to take from past works and reprise, incorporate, rewrite, recapitulate, revise, or parody them (Whitworth, 2010). As aforementioned, Avison has done this with her poem “A Story”. Modernist poems tend to also include symbolism, futurism…

Meanings, and Their Place in Novels The contrast between the usage of words and silence in these novels creates two separate ideas of how language works within a novel. As Woolf states in “Craftmanship,” “It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things… But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind” and that is why there is such a radically different approach to them in these two novels (Selected Essays, 89). Words…