Modernism and the Modern Novel Essay -- English Literature

Modernism and the Modern Novel==============================The term modernism refers to the radical switching in aesthetic andcultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of thepost-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherentlymeaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S.Eliot, accord with the immense panorama of futility and anarchy whichis contemporary history. Modernism thus marks a distinctive breakwith Victorian bourgeois morals rejecting nineteenth-centuryoptimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culturein disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy andmoral relativism.In literature, the nominal head is associated with the works of (amongothers) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound,Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt tothrow off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writersintroduced a variety of literary tactics and devicesthe radical disruption of linear flow of narrative the frustration of...