The Modern Era in Literature

Manet and the Post-Impressionists1910 London, England

Most Londoners had never seen a Post-Impresssionist painting in 1910 when art critic and Bloomsbury Group artist Roger Fry organized an exhibition for the Grafton Gallery in London.

Virginia Woolf, also a part of the collective of avant-garde writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group, captured the massive impact of the show on the British imagination when she wrote: “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”

Edwardian Period (1901-1912)

• The Edwardian Period in the United Kingdom covers the reign of King Edward, (Queen Victoria’s son).

• King Edward ruled during a time of relative peace and prosperity for the nation of England, and a time of leisure for the elite.

• While some British painters’ work shows the influence of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the vast majority of art being produced during this time period was an extension of Victorian sensibilities. English painters catered to middle-class taste and created “traditional” paintings as taught at the Royal Academy.

WHAT THEY EXPECTED

Here are some examples of the paintings being produced during the Edwardian Age in England.

Most of the people who attended the 1910 Grafton Gallery Exhibition organized by Roger Fry and featuring many Post-Impressionist painters, were accustomed to seeing paintings like these.

What they saw offended their expectations and brushed against their definition of fine art.

What They Saw Instead

How The Critics and the Public Responded to What They Saw

• Sir Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery and a sponsor of the Grafton Gallery, asked that his name be removed from publicity surrounding the exhibit.

• The Duchess of Rutland, another sponsor, was “horrified” at having her name associated with the exhibition.

• Art Critic Sir Blake Richmond wrote that “Cezanne mistook his vocation; he should have been a butcher.”

• Critic Robert Ross claimed the show indicated a “wide-spread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting.”

• An anonymous critic wrote for a local paper expressed dismay that “men of talent… should waste their lives in spoiling good acres of canvas when they would have been better employed at stone breaking for the roads.”

• And a writer for a London newspaper described the public’s response to the paintings as follows: “Some who point their finger of scorn, some who are in blank amazement or stifle the loud guffaw; some who are angry; some who sleep.”

Modernism in Art and in Literature

Modern Period in Art: 1860-1975

Modern Period in Literature 1910-1965

Works created during these years and the period itself are also referred to as Modernism; the artists and writers are called Moderns or Modernists.

Literature: Modernism (1910-1965)• A break from tradition

• Experimentation with language was encouraged and pursued

• A deliberate and self-conscious adoption of modernist point of view

• A focus on the inner self and the working of human consciousness

• A vision of decay and fragmentation and alienation

• A new avenue for new voices

• “Modernists gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.”

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style “What now takes the place of those things, I wonder,

those real standard things? Men, perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists…”

• long, complex sentences• single sentences can contain multiple ideas and tones• frequent use of commas, semicolons, dashes, ellipses• syntactic deviance• associative leaps• metaphor, allusion, and image are prominent • narrative subjectivity• stream of consciousness

A Sampling of Modernist Writers, Poets, Essayists, and Playwrights

T.S. EliotVirginia Woolf

Ernest HemingwayF.Scott Fitzgerald

e.e. cummingsGertrude Stein

Ralph EllisonKatherine Mansfield

Joseph ConradJames Joyce

Henrik IbsenAnton Chekhov

D.H. LawrenceMarcel

ProustEzra Pound

Ford Maddox Ford