At the turn of the last century, the insistent, discordant throb of industrialization, urbanization, and cultural dislocation incited a new generation with the urge to diverge, to express their discontent and vision of a new order. Innovative writers like James Joyce,... [more]

At the turn of the last century, the insistent, discordant throb of industrialization, urbanization, and cultural dislocation incited a new generation with the urge to diverge, to express their discontent and vision of a new order. Innovative writers like James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf played fast and loose with conventions of time, space, and human consciousness, preferring the fragmented to the unified, the simultaneous to the linear, the abstract to the concrete. Traditional narratives and sequential plots were thrown out along with the baby and the bathwater by a raft of avant-garde poets, novelists, and playwrights. Cutting-edge artistic movements with disturbing names like Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Imagism, and Vorticism mushroomed in this fertile new ambience, revolting against bourgeois values, middle-class morality, and the blithe embrace of new political and social institutions. In turn, Modernist writers plumbed the depths of their collective souls for the existence of some overarching Truth that could somehow be exhumed by breaking with convention or exploring emergent scientific vistas, like those provided by anthropology and evolution. To celebrate these shocking new discoveries and confound the status quo, writers like Joyce, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, and T.S. Eliot gloried in serving up complex metaphors and allusions, difficult stylistic devices, and disjointed narratives, mirroring the collapse of traditional society under the weight of a new and complicated century. The Modernist vision is that of the auteur: a solo voice wrestling with contemporary demons and personal angels, its singularity conjuring the universal. [show less]