Assignmen 110: A Study of the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century Literature

 

Name: - Trushali Dodiya

Roll No: - 19

Semester: - 2(Batch 2022-24)

Enrolment number: - 4069206420220011

Paper No: - 110

Paper name: - History of the Twentieth Century Literature

Paper code: - 22343

Topic: - A Study of the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century Literature

Submitted to: - Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Date of Submission:- 31/03/2023

Email Address: - trushalidodiya84@gmail.com

A Study of the Zeitgeist of 20th Century Literature

Table of Contents:

• Introduction

• Historical Background

• Characteristics of the 20th century

• Literature of the 20th century

• Prominent literary Writers of the 20th century

• Conclusion

Introduction: 

              The 20th century was a time of great change and upheaval in the world of English literature. It saw the emergence of many new styles and movements, as well as the continuation and development of older ones. The century saw the emergence of many new literary movements and styles, including modernism, postmodernism, and the Beat Generation etc.

Historical Background:

 

          The Twentieth century marks the end of the rule of Queen Victoria(1837) and beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II(1952-2002). The first fifty years of the 20th century remain barren in rule as there was no ruler during half a century. But  in the first fifty years of the twentieth century the human race moved through a remarkable series of upheavals than during perhaps fifty generations in the past. The two great World Wars (World War I from 1914 to 1918 and World War II from 1939-1945) took place during the first half of the twentieth century. The advent of scientific inventions changed the whole of the century and thus human life.

Characteristics of the Twentieth Century:

The 20th century stands out from previous centuries due to the profound impact of scientific inventions.  This century witnessed twofold speeds in the development:

• Progress in Man's growing mastery of the physical world and its material resources. 

• Progress and regress, both are the fruits of the Scientific Revolution 

• Science has led to a dual outcome with its numerous inventions. On one hand, it has saved countless human lives and provided us with tools like medical advancements, vehicles such as aeroplanes, cars and motorcycles, making life easier. On the other hand, some inventions such as mass slaughter weapons and nuclear bombs have resulted in the taking of human lives. These inventions have played a catastrophic role in two world wars, and with the development of nuclear power, there is the potential for universal destruction. However, these weapons also hold the possibility of world protection, as nations fear the mutual annihilation that would result from using them.

Fall of Victorian Values and ways of living

• The 20th century also marked a departure from Victorian values and ways of living. As A. C. Ward notes,

“Young men and young women during the twentieth century looked back upon the Victorian age as dull and hypocritical. Victorian ideals appeared mean and superficial and stupid.” (Ward)

• The Voice of authorities and its permanence which was prevailing in the 19th century, no longer exist in this century. This voice of authority is being questioned. 

• Victorian beautiful thought being considered hideous.

Due to the growth of mass production, standards of aesthetics, craftsmanship and of aesthetic appreciation began to change fundamentally and resulted into the death of Craftsmanship.

            During the 19th century, there was a firm belief in the permanent nature of institutions, both temporal and spiritual. These institutions were considered to be built on unshakable foundations and established in perpetuity. The home, the constitution, the Empire, and the Christian religion were all seen as final revelations, and it was not acceptable to suggest that any or all of them might be displaced or superseded by the natural processes of change. However, as the century drew to a close, this belief was displaced by a sense of universal mutability. There was a revolt from Victorianism, which rejected its sense of stability, its striving for order, and its consciousness of dignity. This revolt left a spiritual vacuum for the masses, as they struggled to find meaning in a world where the old certainties were no longer certain.

           The 19th century witnessed a rise in scepticism, which emphasised the importance of critically examining information before accepting it as true. This movement was exemplified by Charles Darwin's "The Descent of Man," which advocated for scepticism in the face of new ideas. As a result, many individuals began to question religious beliefs, which often rely on faith rather than empirical evidence, as they were not conducive to a sceptical mindset.

All of these developments had a lasting impact on literature in the 20th century.

Literature of the 20th century:

Literature of this century likewise its background moved away from Victotian values and ideals. A. C. Ward notes that,

"From 1901 to 1925, English literature was directed by mental attitudes, moral ideals and spiritual values at almost the opposite extreme to the attitudes, ideals and values governing Victorian literature.  The old certainties were certainties no longer. everything was held to be open to question." (Ward)

        In the early twentieth century, writers began to reject the Victorian idea of the permanence of institutions and instead embraced a sense of universal mutability. One of these writers was H.G. Wells, who spoke of "the flow of things" and described a group of people haunted by the idea embodied in the word "Meanwhile." Wells believed that as people saw life more clearly, the world ceased to be a home and became a mere sight of a home, on which people camped. They were unable to live fully and completely in this world. Wells also believed that all of human history up to that point was merely a prelude to a true civilization that was yet to come.

         George Bernard Shaw was one who advocated for change in the early twentieth century. He attacked both the "old superstition" of religion and the "new superstition" of science. However, his attacks were not motivated by a general opposition to either religion or science. “In his view, every dogma is a superstition until it has been personally examined and consciously accepted by the individual believer”. And Question! Examine! Test! These were the watchwords of his creed.

         The  Voice of Authority and the Reign of the expert were also questioned. G. B. Shaw in Shaw  Major Barbara states: “That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won't scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions”. Which connotes the creed of the twentieth century.

          During the Victorian era, writers held the belief that art should be created for the sake of life or for the betterment of the community. This was in contrast to the idea of "art for art's sake," which held that art should be created purely for its own sake.

However in the 20th century also two groups were holding up two different ideologies regarding art.

Bloomsbury Group

         The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of English writers, philosophers, and artists who met regularly between 1907 and 1930 in the Bloomsbury district of London. They discussed aesthetic and philosophical issues and were influenced by G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica and Whitehead's and Russell's Principia Mathematica. They questioned conventional ideas and had an irreverent attitude towards societal norms and values. The group included notable members such as Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Clive Bell. (“Bloomsbury group | History, Members, & Facts | Britannica”)

This group’s major concern was to take ‘art for the sake of art’.

The Fabian Society

        The Fabian Society was a socialist organisation founded in London in 1884. Its main objective was to establish a democratic socialist state in Great Britain. The society included prominent members such as G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, Edward Pease, and Graham Wallas.

The Fabian Society believed in the concept of "art for life's sake" or for the betterment of the community. (Lamb)

Modernist literature is Esoteric- very obscure and incomprehensible to grab its core. It connotes the hidden or complicated ideas which can be understood only by a few learned people. 

       The impact of two world wars and the growth of the mass production method industry brought the death of individual skills and Craftsmanship. Simultaneously, during the 1950s, there was a growing disregard for the importance of form and style in writing. The focus shifted towards creating works that were intentionally chaotic and lacked any clear artistic vision. Thus the anti-art movement gained popularity and became widely accepted, with chaos as a new form of artistic expression.

Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are notable examples of this.

Modernism:

           The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War I (1914-18). (Abrams)The modernist movement was influenced by intellectual predecessors who challenged the established certainties that had underpinned traditional social structures, religious beliefs, moral principles, and notions of individual identity. Among these influential thinkers were Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and James G. Frazer. Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1915) emphasised the similarities between key Christian doctrines and pagan rituals, many of which were considered primitive and savage.Modernism in Literature marks many anti-art movements. Like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Absurd Theatre. (Kuiper)

Dadaism:

            Dadaism was a movement of young artists and writers in Paris during and after the first world war. It aimed at suppressing the relationship between ideas and statements. An absolute freedom held meetings at bars and theatres and delivered itself of numerous nonsensical and semi-nonsensical manifestos. It was meant to signify everything and nothing. It became popular in Peris immediately after the first world war. Nothing was the basic word in the vocabulary of Dadaism. (“Dada | Definition & History | Britannica”)

           In art and literature manifestos of this esthetic were mostly collage effects. The arrangement of unrelated objects and words in a random fashion. Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it- including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. It was opposed to forming an order.  

        The word Dada was accidentally discovered by Hugo Ball which means wooden horse. Dadaism was founded in ZURICH in 1960 by Tristan Tsara about the object of poverty and demolishing the tenets of art, philosophy and logic and substituting them with conscious madness as protest against madness of war.

Surrealism:

Surrealism ("superrealism") was launched as a concerted artistic movement in France by André Breton's Manifesto on Surrealism (1924). (Abrams) Surreal means beyond reality. It became popular in the 1920s and lasted till the 1940s. Andre Breton published the "Manifesto of Surrealism'' in 1924 where he explained this new movement in detail. It was a movement which was mainly inspired by the phycho-analytical theories by Sigmund Freud. 

Expressionism:

               Expressionism is a German movement in literature and the other arts (especially the visual arts) which was at its height between 1910 and 1925—that is, in the period just before, during, and after World War I. (Abrams) Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Expressionism developed as an Avant Garde style - started before World war I (1914-1918). Later the movement was attributed to literature, theatre, dance, film, music, etc. Its chief precursors were artists and writers who had in various ways departed from realistic depictions of life and the world, by incorporating in their art visionary or powerfully emotional states of mind that are expressed and transmitted by means of distorted representations of the outer world. Among these precursors in painting were Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and the Norwegian Edvard Munch. 

         The main aim of expressionism is to express inner world subjectivity, emotions rather than the external world and the physical reality. The term refers to an "artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person". Expressionism is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect. This term refers to imitating reproducing or repeating existence. 

Absurd Theatre:

          Absurd drama as M. H. Abrams notes, "works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd”. (Abrams)

Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting For Godot’ is one of the best examples of the Absurd play.

Postmodernism:

The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-45), when the effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation. (Abrams)

        Postmodernism, both continuous and breaks away from the counter traditional experiments of modernism, while also challenging the art. Works of postmodern literature, such as those by Borges, Beckett, Nabokov, and Pynchon, resist classification by blending genres, cultural and stylistic levels, and serious and playful elements. 

Prominent Literary writers of the 20th century:

Virginia Woolf - A prominent modernist writer known for her stream-of-consciousness writing style and exploration of feminist themes. Her notable works include "Mrs. Dalloway," "To the Lighthouse," and "The Waves."

James Joyce - Joyce is known for his complex and experimental narrative techniques. His most famous work, "Ulysses," is often considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

T.S. Eliot - A major figure in the modernist movement.  His notable works include "The Waste Land".

George Orwell - Best known for his political and social commentary, Orwell's works often explored themes of totalitarianism, oppression, and the corrupting influence of power. His most famous works include "1984" and "Animal Farm."

D.H. Lawrence - Lawrence was known for his exploration of human sexuality and relationships. His notable works include "Sons and Lovers," "Women in Love," and "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

Samuel Beckett - Beckett's works deal with themes of existentialism and the absurdity of human existence. His most famous work, "Waiting for Godot," is a classic of modern theatre.

Conclusion:

             Thus, English literature underwent significant transformations during the 20th century, marked by the emergence of new literary styles and movements alongside the continued development of older ones. This period was characterised by a great deal of change and upheaval in the literary world.

          

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Works Cited

Abrams, Meyer Howard. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.

“Bloomsbury group | History, Members, & Facts | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bloomsbury-group. Accessed 30 March 2023.

“Dada | Definition & History | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 February 2023, https://www.britannica.com/art/Dada. Accessed 30 March 2023.

Kuiper, Kathleen. “Modernism | Definition, Characteristics, History, Art, Literature, Time Period, Postmodernism, & Examples.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 March 2023, https://www.britannica.com/art/Modernism-art. Accessed 30 March 2023.

Lamb, Peter. “Fabian Society | socialist society | Britannica.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 March 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fabian-Society. Accessed 30 March 2023.

Ward, Alfred Charles. Twentieth Century Literature. Shubhi Publications, 2015.