Modernism
TRANSFORMATION/CHANGE 
TEMPORALITY/SPATIALITY
Epiphany
Death
Fragmentation
ART/ARTIST
The "Canon"
Value of Poetry
Posterity
Destruction
CONSCIOUSNESS
Perspective
Experimentation with Literary Form
Class
"The Garden Party" emphasizes class consciousness through Laura, a girl from an affluent family, as she is confronted with the death of a lowerclass man
JAMES JOYCE
Stretching and Suspending Time
The Second Coming Yeats
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Yeats uses the imagery of apocalypse, an inherited and fated destruction biblically prophesied
H.D.
Mourning
Spirit
In Woolf's "To The Lighthouse", the narrative style allows her to change the temporal experience of time passing. One conversation may take up several chapters, or one section may represent the passage of many years.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
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"To the Lighthouse"
"[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsayhaving died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]" (132)
Autumn
Uses collage artist Pauline Boty to discuss what is or is not deemed worthy to be art or a part of the canon
Ali Smith
Bowen's Heat of the Day utilizes a sense temporality which fractures time, disrupting it, akin to a bomb
Political
In the Heat of the Day, Bowen uses a love triangle to represent political alliances between European countries.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
"Prelude" Mansfield explores the perspectives of the child, of the unwed woman,and the mother
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Yeats wished to add a distinctly Irish voice to the literary canon
Autumn
"He looks along the shore at the dark line of the tide-dumped dead. Some of the bodies are of very small children. He crouches down near a swollen man who has a child, just a baby really, still zipped inside his jacket, its mouth open, dripping sea, its head resting dead on the bloated man’s chest."
The text uses imagery of dead bodies which have been politicized, refugees who have died on a foreign shore
Leda and The Swan
uses Greek mythology in a new fashion, building on the canon and making it modern
"Tradition and the Individual Talent"
"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists."
The Wasteland relies on the literary canon, but shows a future which degrades it simultaneously.
T.S. Eliot
The Walls Do Not Fall In the face of destruction what is left? H.D. explores the continuity of the human spirit and the importance of art and spirituality in the face of death
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" The Second Coming
“Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?” Autumn
Easter, 1916
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The Wasteland uses a fragmented style, no dedicated narrator, spanning many different stories and perspectives. The stylistic choice creates a disorientation which Eliot wishes to associate with post-war reality
"On Being Ill"
"We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest, tangled, pathless, in each; a snow field where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so."
"At The Bay"
"Why did Uncle William have to die? He wasn't old."
The discussion of death between Kezia and Mrs. Fairfield explores the perspective of death both in a child, but also the adult. The death is far enough away not to truly impact either party. The distance from death creates space to allow life to continue.
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." The Dead
In The Dead Gabriel realizes that he does not have access to the internal space of his wife. All people are inherently unknowable.
"While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another." The Dead
"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Araby
In Joyce's stories, epiphany leads to disappointment
Stagnation/Paralysis
In Eveline, Eveline Hill is paralyzed to move forward, belief of a good life and future are not enough to propel her towards it. She is stuck.
The Tiredness of Rosabel explores the internal world of dreams and hopes of a working class woman, dreams which are doomed to stay unfulfilled