Hello friends,
The modern Age – It is one of the most turbulent ears in the history of English literature. It transformed the whole fabric of private and social life and wrought a revolutionary change in the thought and outlook of English Nation.
Modern Age makes a shape and clear departure from the self-complacency, compromise and stability of the Victorian period. The change from the old to new, from blind to rational thinking is very interesting. So we can say that, The modern Age has a twirly distinctive or unique characteristics. Let’s see each in details.
(1)Anxiety and interrogation
Called Age of scientific revolution and rational and thinking had shaken man’s faith in the authority of religion
The old restraints and heroes are rejected
Men – Women shows extra- ordinary enthusiasm for speculation, experiment and reform
Modern man doesn’t accept everything without testing on touchstone of reason.
Mood of persistent skepticism and interrogation has increased new set of values.
Everybody wants to come out successful in the rat race but only a few are bowed.
The failure coupled with the complexities of modern life has resulted in frustration, anxiety and cynicism.
Thinkers like… Shaw, Samuel Butler and wells assumed the role or social heretic and iconoclasts.
(2)Art for Life’s sake
People rejected the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake.’
They evolved the creed of ‘art for life’s sake’ or at least, for the sake of community.
Concentrated their attention on the problem of modern life.
Modern literature is full of realism and has an inherent purpose.
Enhanced by scientific discoveries.
According to W.H.Hudson,
“In these circumstances many writers become convinced that literature was useless if it did not serve a define social and political purpose, and those who failed to share this conviction were thought to be sulking in the ivory tower of mere literary art.”
Poetry and prose of this period turned to serious mood and had a definite purpose. The rapid growth of science and materialism disgusted many poets and writer.
Butler and Huxley are the prominent writers of the modern age, who have attacked in their works the modern craze for materialism and machinery.
Seediness of modern life has found expression in novels of James Joyce and Graham Greene.
Masefield has given expression to the dirtiness of modern trade and commerce in some of his poems.
H.G.Wells – with science fiction and Rudyard Kipling with his empire building and steam eniginees.
The rise of the problem is a significant development in the realistic literature of the modern age.
(3)Growing Interest in the poor and the working classes
Years 1900 marks ‘the beginning of the end of the supremacy of the middle classes and middle class standards of thought and writing.'
Poor were no more helpless creatures. They had grown conscious of their sad predicament. They posed great challenge to the social conscience. They became the raw material of realistic novel and drama without purpose.
Mid-Victorian writers – Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell etc were critical of the injustice done to the poor working classes.
Were not profoundly critical of the fundamental bases of human life and society as were Galsworthy and Shaw.
Merely spirit of interrogation and rational inquiry.
Early twentieth century writers….
“Put everything in every sphere of life to the question and secondly, in the light of this skepticism, to reform, to reconstruct, to accept the new age as new and attempt to mould it by conscious purposeful effort.
Barnard Shaw, who questioned everything, spread for at least a generation,
“the interrogative habit of mind.”
(4)Impact of socio – economic conditions on Literature
Literature is influenced by economic and social changes of 20th century
Industrialization and its profound human implications have been mournfully expressed in writings of Hardy, Jefferies, Edward Thomas and others.
Literature becomes urban.
Marxism was the most powerful influence on literature
Manifestations of socialism came into existence and influenced the authors.
(5)The Impact of two world wars
The post-war period was an era of ‘depression’ and of want and unemployment.
The two world wars, especially the second, had a devasting influence on man and human life.
(6)Psychology and Literature
Freud put great emphasis on the power of the unconscious to affect conduct.
Intellectual convictions appeared to be rationalizations of emotional needs.
The modern age may be termed as the age of rationalism in sexual behavior.
The new theory of psychology and sex gave us ‘the stream of consciousness novel’.
(7)International character of literature
Literature of the Victorian era was mainlypreoccupied with the condition of England, and was permeated by a spirit of non-violet humanitarianism. But… literature of the early decades of the 20th century has international characters.
“The writings of 19th century, however, were as much preoccupied with the condition of the whole world, for air travel had made the world appear as small a place as Britain a century before and humanitarian hopefulness had been displaced by partisan propaganda which, by implication if not explicitly, offered some particular political doctrine as a means to world- salvation.”
(8)The influence of radio, cinema and television
The development of radio, cinema and television had an enormous impact on literature.
“In so far as the radio brought literature into the home, in form of broadcast stories, plays and literally discussions and opened up an entirely new field for authors, its influence was for the good…At the same time it must be remembered that film techniques are the basis of a number of experiments in the novel.”
Epilogue
The literature of the new age is the literature of challenge and of the reconstruction of new values. It is,
“an exciting age of for writers an age which marked a definite break with the past, a challenge, to authority, an assertion in the right to be anarchistic in thought and inform romantic, realistic, passionate – a self- conscious age when writers were intensely critical of the composition of society and were beginning to be critical of individual soul”.
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