Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Modern Novelist - Coggle Diagram
Modern Novelist
Transitional novel
In this period the novelists began to experiment with new narrative structures and techniques, such as flashbacks, time-shifts, the presentation of different points of view, or with new, subtler ways of portraying human psychology.
- Joseph Conrad was Polish but chose English as his language for writing.
- Heart of Darkness, which a short novel based on Conrad's Congo experience.
The protagonist, Marlow, realizes that when the individual is alone and cannot rely on social institutions, social values collapse and man discovers his dark side.
- David Herbert Lawrence was the first novelist to feel the full impact of new sciences such as psychoanalysis and psychology.
He his first important novel, Sons and Lovers explores the difficult relations between the members of a miner's family
Modernist revolution
During the late 1910s and the early 1920s the English novel evolved with the modernist movement in the arts and literature.
The great modernist writers, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf reflected the novelists' lack of faith in traditional values, the trauma of World War I, and the disillusionment with modern myths such as progress, science and technology.
To compensate for this, classical myths were often freely incorporated intomodern narrative.
James Joyce, for instance, in Ulysses builds his description of a journey through city life on the epic pattern of Homer's Odyssey.
The greatest blow to traditional ways of ordering reality was the breakdown of the division of time.
The writers began to conceive of time as a continuous flux in which only individual consciousness identifies significant moments. The technical solution adopted bymost Modernists was the stream of consciousness.
-
Virginia
-
Her house in London became a centre for the famous Bloomsbury Group, which included artists, writers and philosophers.
In her critical essay Modern Fiction she said that human perception depends not on measurable time but on the way the mind is affected by it.
So in her novels, a single day like that in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway can contain a whole life.
In to the Lighthouse, the intuitive female consciousness of the protagonist, Mrs Ramsay, is contrasted with the vigorously male consciousness ofher husband.
-
Colonial novel
Edward Morgan, a member of Bloomsberry Group Forster shared with the Modernists an inability to believe in accepted values, and the conviction that reality is elusive and many-faceted.
His choice of themes was unconventional in that period: in anti-imperialism in A Passage to India which explores the difficult political and human relations between the British and the Indians, and their different attitudes to life.
Forster has little in common with the experimenters of the modern novel.
His language and style are clear and don't reproduce the naturally, chaotic flow of thoughts in the human mind.
Negative utopias were congenial to the writers of the 1930s and 1940s, who became increasingly concerned with the growing influence of mass media and the development of ever more sophisticated war machines. The most famous anti-utopiannovel is Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell It describes a futureworld in which a tyrannical power, headed by the dictator Big Brother, controls man'sactions and thoughts through telescreens and microphones present in every room and street. The novel and especially Big Brother have become the symbols of modern man'senslavement to mass media