Odlomak

MODERNISM
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 was felt by many to represent the end of an era. Charles Darwin’s ‘’On the Origin of Species’’ puts the existence of God into radical question. Society became more fragmented and individual identities more fluid. The Boer War (1899-1902), which was fought by the British to establish control over the Boer republics in South Africa, marked the beginning of rebellion against British imperialism. Liberal beliefs in the gradual transition to a better world began to be questioned. The mass destruction of the First World War led many towards more extreme affiliation, and both Fascism and Marxism held attractions for many intellectuals and workers, particularly during the 1930s. Increasing access to literacy and to education in general, led to profound changes in the reading public. The Education Act of 1870 made elementary education compulsory for everyone between the ages of 5 and 13, and that led to the rapid expansion of a largely unsophisticated literary public, the rise of the popular press, and the mass production of ‘popular’ literature for semi-literate ‘’low-brow’’ readership. Some writers reacted to this situation by concerning on a narrow, highly educated audience who would understand their alienation from this changing world, thus, the avant-garde era in writing began. This ‘’intellectualization’’ has been criticized as restricting literature to a cultural and academic elite. Isolation and alienation, together with experimental forms of expression, came to characterize serious literature. Modern begins to define the twentieth century. Modernism is one of the key words of the first part of the century. 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. What went out was narrative, description, rational exposition; what emerged focused on stream of consciousness, images in poetry, a new use of universal myth, and a sense of fragmentation both of individuality and of such concepts as space and time. T.S. Eliot even furnished footnotes to help the reader with his ‘’Waste Land’’. The 1890s –the decade of Aesthetic and Decadence. It was largely a poetry of urban themes. In 1899, Arthur Symons, one of the poetic ‘aesthetes’ of the 1890s, published his study ‘’The Symbolist Movement in Poetry’’, which would have great influence on modern poets like W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. He brought home to British poets the significance of French experimental symbolists like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue and Marallme. Yeats himself quickly drew the lesion that ‘We must purify poetry’’. Throughout the Victorian and Georgian periods the language of poetry was felt to have a special decorum and to be different from everyday language. Modern poetry contains language that is closer to the idioms of everyday speech and to a more diverse range of subject matter. Dialect words, colloquial expression, specialist terminology, poeticism, and foreign words may be found in the same poem. The language mix reflects a sense that there is no longer a fixed language of poetry just as there is no longer one English. Among the voices which can be more clearly heard in the novel in resent years are those of the young and the lower classes, the voice of the new educated middle classes, the voices of women, racial minorities, gays, and outsiders and many other types. Various subgenres of novel have become bestseller while retaining intellectual acceptability- for example, the working-class novel, the Hampstead novel, the academic novel, the Scottish novel, the women’s novel, the magic realist novel. At the same time there have been numerous bestsellers which have never reached intellectual acceptability-for example, romances, thrillers, and historical novels. Some genres, like the detective story and the spy story, have, however, begun to receive critical acclaim, and to be recognized as major contribution to literature. The growth in cultural studies has meant that many previously unconsidered areas of written expression have come under scrutiny in the late twentieth century. Throughout all the Green’s fiction he remained fascinated by people who are capable or incapable of judging between good and evil. His novels are carefully constructed, with powerful plots and a strong sense of place. The fascination with guilt and salvation is reflected in his thrillers just as much as in his more serious novels. In the world of spies violence, betrayal, treachery and human weakness are bought into play in terms of plot before they become moral or spiritual issues. Although his shockers are superficially novels of escape, like Maugham’s influential Ashemden stories or Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, they reveal a more serious purpose. His works creates an identifiable ‘’Greenland’- a world of constant anxiety rather than easy excitements. Green’s technique- his strengths in plotting and cutting from one scene to the next-and the sinister atmosphere of the thriller were influenced by his time spent as a cinema critic in the late 1930s.

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