What is Modern Literature?

The Modern Period in English literature (1914-1944) occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. Particularly after the destruction of the Great War (World War I), writers in the English language were increasingly concerned with themes of alienation and existentialism.

Writers of this generation and their characters found themselves detached—i.e. alienated—from the traditional institutions and moral codes that seemed to have failed them. In response, Modernist writers experimented with new literary forms just as their characters experimented with new ways of living.

What are Representative Works of Modernism in Literature?

After the horrors of the Great War, modern writers became increasingly disenchanted with the modern world. Global imperialism, industrial technology, and scientific discovery seemed to have led to the First World War’s unprecedented death and destruction, captured movingly in the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

The generation who fought the war—dubbed by Ernest Hemingway’s friend and mentor Gertrude Stein “The Lost Generation” in the epigraph (i.e. quotation preceding a literary work to suggest its theme) for his novel The Sun Also Rises—were understandably disillusioned. Modern fiction of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s typically features characters who are alienated and nihilistic, while poetry of the period often depends on irony and cynicism. 

Modernists such as Hemingway and William Faulkner wrote about alienated individuals struggling to assume responsibility for their moral choices without the aid of traditional moral codes. This existentialist literary movement led to the development of the antihero, a protagonist who does not uphold the traditional values of his society, but who instead creates his own moral code, such as the self-invented Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Modernists Make it New: Experiments in Style

While rejecting traditions and institutions of the modern world developed at least since the Enlightenment, writers increasingly experimented with new literary styles. Faulkner and James Joyce, for example, often presented their characters’ thoughts and sensations directly, mimicking the so-called “stream of consciousness” identified by psychologist William James.

In his groundbreaking Modern novel Ulysses, for example, Irish author Joyce follows a single day in the life of a Jew named Leopold Bloom, his antihero, whose misadventures while wandering through Dublin parallel Odysseus’ (Latin, Ulysses) misadventures while wandering the sea in Homer’s Odyssey.

While Faulkner and Joyce often wrote sentences of great length and complexity, Hemingway pared his prose down to the shortest, most direct statements possible.

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

6-word short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway¹

Modernist poets, also, experimented with new forms. Gertrude Stein, for example, used words and phrases in her poems the way modernist abstract painters used lines and colors to paint expressions.

This type of prose poetry, what Ezra Pound referred to as “free verse,” would seem to be characteristic of modern literature. Modernism features a tremendous variety of styles, however, and some of its best poets wrote in traditional verse, as in the work of Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost.

Diversity in Modernism

New voices from oppressed and colonized people of the English-speaking world also made profound statements during the Modern period, such as in the work of American Indian writer Zitkála-Šá, Zora Neale Hurston and the writers of America’s Harlem Renaissance, and the Pakistani modernist Ahmed Ali and other writers from Britain’s global colonies. The diversity of voices would increase during the next period: Postmodernism.

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Representative Works of Modern Literature

James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dubliners; Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s Sister” and Orlando; Zitkála-Šá, American Indian Stories; poetry of Wilfred Owen, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas; E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi; D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and poems; Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and stories; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and “Babylon Revisited;” William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and “A Rose for Emily;” poetry of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot; Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men