Priect virginia woolf
26202 mots
105 pages
Chapter One - ModernismModernism - Context
The period of modernism, in its broadest sense, stretches from the 1850s to the present and represents one of the major shifts in the cultural thought and values of Western culture. The beginning of the modern period marks the end of the Renaissance period of humanism and optimistic individualism prevalent since the mid-seventeenth century[1]. Defined more narrowly, the term modernism applies to the twentieth-century literary movement whose period of greatest activity began in 1909 with the founding of the English Review; peaked in 1922 with the publication of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Aaron's Rod, Jacob's Room, and Anna Christie; and ended, or began to end, in approximately 1930[2]. We say "began to end" because determining the ending date of a period whose practitioners partly defined it as literature of the present can be a difficult task[3]. Powerful historical forces such as the rapid increase and expansion of industrialization, urbanization, and technology; the onset of a new century; and the horrible experience of the First World War shaped the intellectual attitudes and, subsequently, artistic products that defined the period we call modernism.[4] The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx’s political writings and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious – Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism and later Cubism were also important inspirations for modernist writers. Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and the Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement’s attitudes appeared in the mid of late nineteenth century. Many of the modernists told fragmented stories which reflected the fragmented state of society during and after First World