 Re: literary periods
I forgot about Heart of Darkness.
I think it first appeared in 1899. I would call it "early modernist": although Conrad's writing is technically fairly traditional, his presentation of character and narrative has modernistic leanings. (And I would certainly give H. of D. an asterisk.)
To fill in another gap:
The period from c. 1885 to c. 1900 is sometimes called the "Decadent" period, or simply "the 90s".
Writers of this period included the minor poets Dowson, Symons, Davidson, and Lionel Johnson, and fiction-writers such as Egerton, Crackanthorpe, and George Moore. Yeats, Bennett, and Wilde were also associated with this group; Beardsley represents the pictorial element. Many of their short stories and poems appeared in a magazine called The Yellow Book. Their works were influenced by the poetry of Swinburne and the French Symbolists (Laforgue, Rimbaud, Verlaine, etc.) and the fiction of Gautier and Maupassant. Philosophically, they owe much to Walter Pater, and especially to his writings on the Renaissance.
Although their writings are now not generally well known, except for a few anthology pieces, they had a great deal of influence on later modernist writers, such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
In terms of literary technique, the "decadent" writers are not strictly speaking modernistic writers. But in terms of subject matter (sexual and psychological intricacies, etc.), they prefigure the modernists. So it's possible to think of them as "honorary early modernists".
(Once again, literary periods are only a convenient rough guide, of course. There's a great deal of spillage.)
MrP
PS: I forgot to mention the poet Edward Thomas, among the Georgians.  |