literary periods

[Mad-ox]

I want to clarify my thoughts about English literary periods.

1837-1901 Victorian age
1914-1945 Modernist period
1945-present (and here is my question) Postmodernist or Contemporary period?

Is there a difference between postmodernist and contemporary? Or are they one and the same?

madox

[MrPedantic]

Hello Mad-ox

I would call post-1945 literature "contemporary", and describe some of the works produced during that period as "post-modernist".

Thus (to my mind) the poems of Larkin are "contemporary"; but the later stories of Borges or Calvino are both "contemporary" and "post-modern".

By the way, you could also add the Edwardian (1901-1910) and Georgian periods (1910-1914).

(Of course, these periods are only for convenience: "Victorian" authors continued to write in a Victorian style into the early years of the 20th century, and Georgian writers continued to Georgianize into the 1920s.)

All the best,

MrP

[Mad-ox]

Thanks MrP,

Can you mention me some (very) important novelists in Edwardian or Georgian periods? In fact are there relevant writers in these two periods?


best wishes

madox

[MrPedantic]

Hello Mad-ox

Here are a few characteristic works, out of the very many that could be listed.

To some extent, the poetry of the period is more "Edwardian" and "Georgian" than the prose, so I've included a few poets too.

I've marked with an asterisk the ones which I myself would read first; though other posters would probably disagree!

Edwardian
Poets
Belloc; De la Mare; Flecker; Hardy*; Kipling; Newbolt; Masefield; Bridges.

Prose
Beerbohm: Zuleika Dobson; Essays*
Bennett: Old Wives' Tale
Butler: Way of All Flesh
Chesterfield: Man Who Was Thursday
Forster: Howard's End; Longest Journey; Room with a View; Where Angels Fear to Tread
Galsworthy: Man of Property
Grahame: Wind in the Willows
Kipling: Kim; Traffics and Discoveries*

Georgian
Poets
Brooke; Davies; Graves (early poems); Lawrence (early poems); Pound (early poems); Sassoon.

Other significant works 1900-1914 (American or early Modernist)
Conrad: Nostromo*; Secret Agent
James, H: Ambassadors; Wings of the Dove
Joyce: Dubliners*
Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Synge: Playboy of the Western World*
Wharton: House of Mirth
Yeats: various plays*; poems*

MrP

[Mad-ox]

hi again,

Thank you for your detailed answer.

Where would you put Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness


best wishes,
madox

[MrPedantic]

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.

[Mad-ox]

hi again,

You seem to be very well informed and I take my hat off to you. I am also puzzeled about William Golding's "Lord of the flies". Our teacher set this writer among modernists. Is it true as I have found on the net that this book was published in 1954.

have a nice day!
madox

[MrPedantic]

Hello Mad-ox

I'm not sure where I'd put Lord of the Flies. It's a curious mixture of allegory and 1930s/1940s realism. On the other hand, it contains many references to Ballantyne's Coral Island, and so has incipient post-modern aspects.

Other novels of this kind are Orwell's Animal Farm, Huxley's Brave New World, and Warner's Aerodrome. You could class them as dystopias, perhaps.

Does your teacher say why he thinks of it as modernist?

All the best,

MrP

[Mad-ox]

hi Mr.P

My teacher has not talked about why it belongs to the modernist period but I will ask her in a weeks time when my university studies starts.


What do you mean by dystopias???

And how about Orwell's "1984"???


madox

[MrPedantic]

Hello Mad-ox

A "Dystopia" is an ideal state (i.e. a "Utopia") which has gone wrong. "1984" would certainly belong the category "Dystopia"!

Have a good Wednesday,

MrP