1. A different answer to humanity’s fears and doubts.
THE MODERN AGE ( )
A different answer to humanity’s fears and doubts.

2. BEFORE THE WAR
In the early 20th century many Victorian doubts and fears about society and man’s place in the Universe were confirmed and many optimistic hopes were disappointed.
Economic depression in the 1870’s and 1880’s had caused serious unemployment among the working class and shown that “laissez-fair” would not necessarily produce benefits for everyone or serve the public good.
By 1890 modernization has been successful in Japan, France, Germany and USA.
International competition for raw material markets and the control of trade routes made conflicts seem inevitable sooner or later.

3. WAR CONSEQUENCES
The I World War came in 1914: it shocked a whole generation, making many lose their faith in liberal democracy, capitalism and the Victorian idea of progress.
Science and industry had not produced a better world, they had only brutalized men and made their powers of destruction greater. The war seemed to destroy European self-confidence.
War marked the beginning of the end of European domination of the world.
Governments accepted state’s control of economy and it’s responsibilities towards poorer citizens: it laid the basis of the modern Welfare State.
1917: Communism development in Russia.

4. THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM
Victorians were afraid that man was only a superior animal, isolated in an indifferent mechanical universe, living a life without a meaning and without God.
Sense of man’s isolation, of his spiritual vulnerability in a world which did not seem to obey any divine principles or to be part of any divine plan.
The only sure point of reference that any individual had was himself: it was for him to decide what was right and wrong and to act accordingly.

5. CULTURAL INFLUENCES Science Philosophy Medicine and Psychology
Literature

6. SCIENCE
Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics were shown to rest on false assumptions.
1906: Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity  space and time did not exist as separate, absolute phenomena. They changed according to the point of view of the observer.

7. PHILOSOPHY
Henri Bergson and William James rejected conventional ideas of time: time is not an independent medium which contains events in a certain sequence.
Past and future exist together with the present in people’s mind.
People’s past and future fuse together: “stream of consciousness”.

8. MEDICINE AND PSYCHOLOGY
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams: people’s behaviour depends very largely on the unconscious part of their minds:
Id: instincts;
Super Ego: social conditioning control
Ego: conscious, so man’s power of reason.
1916: Jung - The Psychology of the Unconscious: a basic element of man’s unconscious mind is formed by his racial memory (primitive memory).
Figures or objects had great symbolic power and people responded to them without realizing it. Only the psychologist or the poet, discovers these hidden, symbolic meanings and understand their importance.

9. LITERATURE Poetry New Dramatic Novel Old Novel T. S Eliot
J. G. Fraser – The Golden Bough
Jesse L. Weston – From Ritual to Romance

10. POETRY
The French Symbolist poets had tried to discover the hidden meanings of the world:
Giving mystical significance to their impressions of the observed world
Using a language which spoke to the irrational in the reader.
The Symbolist poets influenced the writers of the Aesthetic Movement.
English poetry at the end of the 19th century was still under the shadow of the Romantics: it was sentimental, elegiac and often pastoral. But they didn’t copy those who came before them.
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound produced a new poetry. This development began in England with the critical writings of T. E. Hulme: he condemned the Romantic idea that art was only a matter of self-expression on the part of the artist; it should be impersonal in the way that Neo-Classicism had been.  return to Pre-romanticism.

11. NEW DRAMATIC NOVEL Self-told story.
The narrator is always there, but invisible.
Characters tell and represents the story.
Author hidden or doesn’t appear.
The analysis is transferred from the novel to the reader.
Absence of comments, judgments and interference, ambiguity and uncertainty.
Aesthetic values have taken the place of moral values in modern novelists.
The reader must not only reconstruct the characters, but discover his identity, too.

12. OLD NOVEL It’s mostly a narrative structure.
The narrator is omniscient.
Most of the times the protagonist speaks with the same voice of the author.
For a better awareness:
Summary = panoramic vision,
Description = close up (primo piano);
Scene= sonorous (close up).

13. T. S. ELIOT
Myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material): a potential means of ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience.
The Waste Land: Ulysses by Joyce is a classical work and people have underestimated the importance of the Odyssey parallel as a structural device.
A successful artistic creation requires an exquisite balance between, and coalescence of form and matter.

14. J. G. FRASER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH
It was indicative of the new interest in mythology and pre-history which arose, out of the Symbolist Movement but also from the theories of Darwin.
The sources of art lay in the unconscious:
collective unconscious
a personal one.
In writing or painting we follow a set patterns of behaviour .
We use ancient symbols without being aware consciously of what we are doing or why we are doing it.
Fraser pourpose: investigate the solid layer of savagery beneath the crust of society.

15. JESSE L. WESTON
She posits a complex synthesis both historical and geographical behind the 12th century - medieval Grail legends.
The Grail King :romantic literary version of a strange mysterious figure.
The figure of a divine or semi- divine ruler at once God and King, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his lord and people directly depend.

16. BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION TO THE MODERN AGE: