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20th Century
Global war is one of the defining features of twentieth-century experience, and the first global
war is the subject of one of this period’s topics, “Representing the Great War.” Masses of
dead bodies strewn upon the ground, plumes of poison gas drifting through the air, hundreds
of miles of trenches infested with rats—these are but some of the indelible images that have
come to be associated with World War I (1914-18). It was a war that unleashed death, loss,
and suffering on an unprecedented scale. How did recruiting posters, paintings, memoirs, and
memorials represent the war? Was it a heroic occasion, comparable to a sporting event,
eliciting displays of manly valor and courage? Or was it an ignominious waste of human life,
with little gain to show on either side of the conflict, deserving bitterly ironic treatment? What
were the differences between how civilians and soldiers, men and women, painters and poets
represented the war? How effective or inadequate were memorials, poems, or memoirs in
conveying the enormous scale and horror of the war? These are among the issues explored in
this topic about the challenge to writers and artists of representing the unrepresentable.
Another of the twentieth century’s defining features is radical artistic experiment. The
boundary-breaking art, literature, and music of the first decades of the century are the subject
of the topic “Modernist Experiment.” Among the leading aesthetic innovators of this era were
the composer Igor Stravinsky, the cubist Pablo Picasso, and the futurist F. T. Marinetti. The
waves of artistic energy in the avant-garde European arts soon crossed the English Channel,
as instanced by the abstraction and dynamism of Red Stone Dancer (1913-14) by the London-
based vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Other vorticists and modernists include such
English-language writers as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Mina Loy, who also
responded to the stimulus and challenge of the European avant-garde with manifestos, poems,
plays, and other writings. This topic explores the links between Continental experiment and
the modernist innovations of English-language poets and writers during a period of
extraordinary ferment in literature and the arts.
Another of the defining features of the twentieth century was the emergence of new nations
out of European colonial rule. Among these nations, Ireland was the oldest of Britain’s
colonies and the first in modern times to fight for independence. The topic “Imagining
Ireland” explores how twentieth-century Irish writers fashioned new ideas about the Irish
nation. It focuses on two periods of crisis, when the violent struggle for independence put the
greatest pressure on literary attempts to imagine the nation: in the aftermath of the Easter
Rising of 1916 and the later outbreaks of sectarian violence from 1969 (known as the
Troubles) in Northern Ireland. How do poems, plays, memoirs, short stories, and other literary
works represent the bloodshed and yet the potential benefits of these violent political
upheavals? Do they honor or lament, idealize or criticize, these political acts? And how do
these literary representations compare with political speeches and treaties that bear on these
defining moments in modern Irish history? “Imagining Ireland” considers these and other
questions about literature and the making of Irish nationality, which continue to preoccupy
contemporary writers of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the Irish diaspora.

The Great War

the British Empire and its allies. But as the years passed and the casualties mounted into the
millions, it became clear that this conflict was quite different from its predecessors. With
nearly nine million soldiers killed (one in five of those who fought) and survivors afflicted
with prolonged physical and mental suffering, the war marked a sea-change in the course of
military and political history. It also represented a challenge to anyone wishing to give
meaning to the enormity of the death toll and the futility of trench warfare. Soldiers living in
rat-infested and water-saturated trenches fired machine-guns at unseen soldiers in other
trenches; when they went “over the top” into no-man’s-land, they became completely
vulnerable. The use of the term “Great War” suggests the challenge of representing something
so new and awful, so vast and traumatic.
Once it became clear that both sides had settled into their trenches, which stretched from
Switzerland to the North Sea, people naturally wondered what had gone wrong. Patriotic
poems and songs from previous wars, such as Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (1897-98),
linked the British soldier’s fighting prowess with his moral superiority, fairness, and skill.
World War I also elicited representations that blurred the line between war and athletics, such
as Jessie Pope’s jingoistic poem “The Call” (1915) and the recruiting poster “The Army Isn’t
All Work.” But as soldiers’ expectations of a just, valorous, sporting war gave way to
hideous, anonymous carnage, characteristic expressions of irony emerged. For soldier poets
such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, irony proved a useful means of representing the
gulf between expectation and reality, the murderous war and the unsuspecting nation, the
soldier’s comrades in the trenches and the unseen enemy across no-man’s-land. Bitterly ironic
statements such as Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Soldier’s Declaration” helped call attention to the
rage and bewilderment of the trench soldier; but their chilly reception by an equally
bewildered reading public reinforced cultural divisions. Some readers at home condemned the
war poets’ attacks as unpatriotic, and opinion remained divided between those who had
fought and knew, and those who preferred not to know.
Some poets also disliked the soldier poets’ graphic and caustically ironic depictions of the
war. In the words of W. B. Yeats in his 1936 preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse,
the bitterness of war poets was an unconstructive “passive suffering.” Yeats refused to include
in his anthology combatant poets such as Owen and Sassoon. He preferred in poetry a more
active heroism, such as that he invented for the speaker of “An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death.”
As casualties from both the Allied and Central Powers ran into the millions, military tactics
became increasingly desperate. These included the deployment of mustard gas, submarine
attacks on shipping lines, and howitzer shelling and zeppelin bombings of cities miles behind
the front lines. Such tactics signaled a breakdown of the rules of warfare in favor of
indiscriminate killing of both the soldiers and the civilians they protected. Civilian artists now
found they had an authentic, lived experience of war they could express. The involvement of
millions of women in the war effort, such as those depicted in the poster “We Need you,
Redcross,” eroded the distinction between civilian women and the men who went off to save
the country. Munitions, factory, and textile jobs were vacated by enlistees and quickly filled
by women for whom the war represented an economic opportunity. Although recruiting
posters such as “Women of Britain say—GO!” associated women with the English
countryside that valiant soldiers ought to defend, poems such as Jessie Pope’s “War Girls”
represent women as empowered by the challenge of their wartime jobs. Frustrated by the
war’s length and carnage, some poets, such as Sassoon and Ezra Pound, allude disparagingly
to the women and the civilization soldiers were supposedly protecting. Pound’s Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley, for example, refers to Britain as “an old bitch gone in the teeth.”
Because of its massive scale and controversial impetus, monuments to the war often indicate
the difficulty of representing it. Commemorative physical structures tend to look like a
mixture of massiveness and stripped-down, minimalist gestures, as if trying to speak volumes
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and remain silent at the same time. The Menin Gate and the Cenotaph of Whitehall both stand
in mute remembrance of a massive loss that can barely be imagined, much less represented.
The spareness of the Cenotaph, meanwhile, allowed two contemporaries to draw different
conclusions about its significance: Henry Morton’s Heart of London records his impression of
the monument as a symbol of unity and communal reverence, while Charlotte Mew cannot
help but notice, in her poem “Cenotaph,” how incongruous this great static symbol of grief
appears in the middle of a degraded mercantile hub. Like the divergences between jingoists
and satirists, soldiers and civilians, feminists and antifeminists, these differences over war
memorials reflect competing views over how to represent a war that ultimately defies
representation.

Modernist Experiment

The early part of the twentieth century saw massive changes in the everyday life of people in
cities. The recent inventions of the automobile, airplane, and telephone shrank distances
around the world and sped up the pace of life. Freud’s theory of the unconscious and infantile
sexuality radically altered the popular understanding of the mind and identity, and the late-
nineteenth-century thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche in different ways undermined
traditional notions of truth, certainty, and morality. Theoretical science, meanwhile, was
rapidly shifting from two-hundred-year-old Newtonian models to Einstein’s theory of
relativity and finally to quantum mechanics.
At least partly in response to this acceleration of life and thought, a wave of aggressively
experimental movements, sometimes collectively termed “modernist” because of their
emphasis on radical innovation, swept through Europe. In Paris, the Spanish expatriate painter
Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque developed cubism, a style of painting that
abandoned realism and traditional perspective to fragment space and explode form. In Italy,
the spokesperson for futurism, F. T. Marinetti, led an artistic movement that touched on
everything from painting to poetry to cooking and encouraged an escape from the past into the
rapid, energetic, mechanical world of the automobile, the airplane, and Marinetti’s own
“aeropoetics.” Dadaists such as the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp, author of the ready-made
Fountain (1917), a urinal, began a guerilla campaign against established notions of sense and
the boundaries of what could be called art. In music, meanwhile, composers such as the
Frenchman Claude Debussy and Russian-born Igor Stravinsky were beginning experiments
with rhythm and harmony that would soon culminate in the outright atonality of composers
such as the Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.
In England, this outbreak of modernist experiment influenced a loosely interrelated network
of groups and individuals, many of them based in London. In anglophone literature,
“modernism” more nearly describes an era than a unitary movement. But what connects the
modernist writers—aside from a rich web of personal and professional connections—is a
shared desire to break with established forms and subjects in art and literature. Influenced by
European art movements, many modernist writers rejected realistic representation and
traditional formal expectations. In the novel, they explored the Freudian depths of their
characters’ psyches through stream of consciousness and interior monologue. In poetry, they
mixed slang with elevated language, experimented with free verse, and often studded their
works with difficult allusions and disconnected images. Ironically, the success of
modernism’s initially radical techniques eventually transformed them into the established
norms that would be resisted by later generations.
Among the earliest groups to shape English-language modernism were the imagists, a circle
of poets led initially by the Englishman T. E. Hulme and the American Ezra Pound, in the
early 1910s. Imagist poetic doctrine included the use of plain speech, the preference for free
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verse over closed forms, and above all the creation of the vivid, hard-edged image. The first
two of these tenets in particular helped to shape later modernism and have had a far-reaching
impact on poetic practice in English. Shaped by Asian forms such as the haiku, the imagist
poem tended to be brief and ephemeral, presenting a single striking image or metaphor (see
“An Imagist Cluster” in NAEL). Pound soon dissociated himself from the movement, and the
imagists—including the poets H. D., Richard Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher—continued
to publish their annual anthology under the leadership of the American poet Amy Lowell.
Pound, meanwhile, went on to become a literary proponent of vorticism, an English
movement in the visual arts led by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis. The vorticists
championed energy and life over what they saw as the turpitude of European society and
sought to tap into or create the concentration of energies they dubbed a “vortex.” After having
published only one issue of their now notorious journal Blast, the vorticists suddenly found
their often violent rhetoric and their ambivalence about English national identity at odds with
the real violence of World War I and the wartime climate of patriotism. The second issue of
Blast—published behind schedule and dubbed a “war number”—declared the vorticists’
loyalty to England in the fight against German fascism on aesthetic grounds. It also
announced the death in the trenches of one of the movement’s leading lights, the French-born
sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. This loss and the general dispersal of the vorticists mark a
major turning point for English modernism.
As modernism developed, the flashy, aggressive polemics of Lewis and Pound were replaced
by the more reasoned, essayistic criticism of Pound’s friend and collaborator T. S. Eliot.
Eliot’s Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses were technically innovative and initially
controversial (Ulysses was banned in the United States and Great Britain), but their eventual
acceptance as literary landmarks helped to bring modernism into the canon of English
literature. In the decades to come, the massive influence of Eliot as a critic would transform
the image of modernism into what Eliot himself called classicism, a position deeply rooted in
a sense of the literary past and emphasizing the impersonality of the work of art.
In the post-World War II period, modernism became the institutionally approved norm against
which later poetic movements, from the “Movement” of Philip Larkin to avant-garde
Language Poetry, reacted. Nonetheless, the influence of modernism, both on those artists who
have repudiated it and on those who have followed its direction, was pervasive. Joyce, Eliot,
Virginia Woolf, and other modernists provided compositional strategies still central to
literature. Writers as diverse as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Derek Walcott, and Salman
Rushdie have all, in one way or another, continued to extend the discoveries of the modernist
experiment—adapting modernist techniques to new political climates marked by the Cold
War and its aftermath, as well as to the very different histories of formerly colonized nations.
Like the early twentieth-century avant-garde in European art and music, meanwhile, literary
modernism has continued to shape a sense of art as a form of cultural revolution that must
break with established history, constantly pushing out the boundaries of artistic practice.
.
MODERNISM: OVERVIEW
Society and Culture
• The twentieth century introduces a cultural period in which individuals not only reject
the past but also question the very basis of knowledge and consider the possibility that
knowledge and concepts once thought to be fixed and objective are instead constantly
shifting and subjective.
• Philosophers and thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzche, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, and
Sigmund Freud challenged nineteenth-century science and the positivist confidence in
its ability to explain both the physical and social worlds in completely rational terms.
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• World War I had a powerful impact in its aftermath, causing Europeans to reconsider
their very belief systems and leading to widespread dissatisfaction with the authorities
who, many believed, were motivated by greed, class exploitation, and hunger for
power.
• A growing interest in psychology influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud
contributed to a new emphasis on the internal reality of individuals, the importance of
the self, and the alienation of the self in modern society.
• New studies in the relationship between reality and appearance led to the philosophies
of phenomenology and existentialism as represented in the philosophical writings of
Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
• After the Second World War, the rise of Communism, the gradual disintegration of
colonialism, and the exponential development of technology, existentialism flourished
in the 1940s and 1950s as individuals struggled to find meaning in an increasingly
fragmented and confusing world.
• A growing awareness of a variety of other cultures that have differing worldviews than
traditional European or American ones undercut the assumptions of “cultural
parochialism” and led to pluralistic and postcolonial perspectives.
Literature
• Adapting the theories of linguists and philosophers such as Ferdinand Saussure and
Ludwig Wittgenstein, twentieth-century writers began to treat language as a “game,”
creating fragmented word combinations, ambiguous meanings, and experimental
forms.
• Dadaism and Surrealism were among the most influential early-twentieth-century
literary movements. The goal of the Dadaists was to abolish the restraints of authority
by breaking the conventions of literature and art; the goal of the Surrealists was to
express the unconscious mind through dream writing, automatic writing, and fantasy.
• Although the term “modernism” generally refers to the collective literary trend in the
early twentieth century, it more precisely applies to a group of British and American
writers—such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—who crafted carefully
worded images in colloquial language.
• In the broader sense of “modernism,” early-twentieth-century writers broke up the
traditional plot structure of narratives, experimented with language, fragmented ideas,
played with shifting perspectives, and drew self-conscious attention to the very nature
of language itself.
• Despite the experiments with style and content, early modernists continued to hope
that through art they could rediscover the meaning and unity lost in modern society.
By mid-century, a growing number of writers, often referred to as postmodernists,
abandoned that hope and began instead to create literature that celebrates rather than
laments the inability of language and literature to bring conclusion and meaning to the
modern experience.
• Postmodern writers playfully create allusions, contradictions, meta-narratives, and
linguistic games in order to disrupt reader expectations of fixed, objective references.
• At the end of the twentieth century, as geopolitical boundaries blurred and shifted, an
increased recognition of the diversity of cultural identities in ethnic, gender, and
sexual issues led to a correspondent pluralism in writing that depicts the full range of
human diversity. Included in these new perspectives is attention to the efforts of
postcolonial cultures to develop a consciousness apart from that of their colonizers.
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*Killing the Angel: Anxieties about Motherhood for Women Writers

Overview
In her 1942 address to the Women’s Service League, “Professions for Women,” Virginia
Woolf famously instructed her audience that “part of the occupation . . . of a woman writer”
was to kill the “Angel in the House” (NALW2 246). Woolf borrows the name of this
domestic phantom from Coventry Patmore’s famous nineteenth-century sentimental poem , a
paean to his long-suffering wife, Emily, who, as he saw it, epitomized the perfect Victorian
wife and mother. Woolf describes the Angel as
intensely sympathetic. . . . immensely charming. . . . utterly unselfish. She excelled in the
difficult arts of family like. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg;
if there was a draft she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a
wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.
Above all—I need not say it— she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty
—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its
Angel. (245)

While Woolf was not specifically referring to motherhood per se, her injunction to “kill the
Angel in the House” serves as an illuminating lens to consider other works by women writers
struggling with the mantle of Rousseau’s “cult of true womanhood” that Patmore’s poem
expounds on—that of self-sacrificing motherhood. Woolf describes her own “Angel” as
“always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her” (245), an image that recalls
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic 1892 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (NALW1
1392). Given its immense popularity, Patmore’s poem was likely known to Gilman, who
anticipates Woolf’s essay by almost forty years. After leaving her husband and child, a choice
she described as not “between going and staying . . . but between going, insane, and staying,
sane” (for which she was demonized as unwomanly by the press), Gilman wrote “The Yellow
Wallpaper” as a cautionary tale of what would happen if a woman writer fails to kill the
Angel in the House. Even though the unnamed narrator experiences some reprieve from the
Angel’s typical domestic duties (assumed by her sister-in-law Jenny while she recuperates
after the birth of her baby), she ultimately goes mad trying to free the endlessly proliferating
women from the wallpaper. In the end, she becomes one herself, a prisoner of her own
insanity.
Tillie Olsen is another writer who was inspired by Woolf’s Angel. A working- class writer
who encountered Woolf’s work while educating herself in public libraries, Olsen repurposes
Woolf’s decidedly middle-class phantom in her essay “One Out of Twelve: Writers Who Are
Women in Our Century”:
There is another angel, so lowly as to be invisible, although without her no art, or any human
endeavor, could be carried on for even one day—the essential angel, with whom Virginia
Woolf (and most women writers, still in the privileged class) did not have to contend—the
angel who must assume the physical responsibilities for daily living, for the maintenance of
life. (Silences 34)

Olsen also writes of the essential angel in her widely anthologized short story “I Stand Here
Ironing,” a devastating chronicle of one working-class mother’s meditation while ironing,
during which she recalls the circumstances in which she raised her daughter Emily—as a
nineteen-year-old, Depression-era, unwed mother.
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