The Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century in Prose, Poetry and Drama

Overview of Significant Events – 20th C. Following Victorian era of great technological progress Decline of religious belief Yet interest in Greek/Roman mythology World War One – upheaval of values Decline of colonies (post-colonialism) & rise of multiculturalism Modernism, psychoanalysis Genres: autobiography, science fiction The Internet, interactivity and digitisation

Modernism Interest in myth Focus on identity The subconscious mind Traditional narrative structure subverted Stream of consciousness

Post-modernism Fragmentary form Cross-genre Stories within stories Unreliable narrators Allusive Open endings Making the reader work (‘writerly’)

Themes/Genres Modernism & Post-modernism Post-colonialism Socialism Psychoanalysis Feminism

Prose Key texts: Modernism: Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Sons and Lovers, A Passage to India Post-modernism: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Enduring Love, Genres: science fiction, post-modern novel

Poetry Key texts: The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot), W.H. Auden’s poetry, E.E. Cummings, the Beat poets Experiments with form & diction

Drama Genres: Kitchen sink drama, Theatre of the Absurd, Naturalism, Brechtian drama Key texts: John Osbourne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’, Brecht ‘Caucasian Chalk Circles’, Pirandello ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, Pinter ‘The Caretaker’, Brecht ‘’

The Twenty-first Century Genres diversify – hit-lit (tragic life stories), celebrity, the post-modern novel The digitisation and accessibility of otherwise obscure books Renewed interest in existing genres: horror and children’s literature The world of the common reader much wider: American literature prominent from 1st half of 20th C, and books from Japanese (Murakami) and Afghan (Hosseini) authors can be bestsellers