A mass society

The first period of the 20th century was called The Belle Epoque. During these years, Britain became a urbanized society. The use of motor car improved the transport and the life in the city, in fact an enormous number of people decided to leave the little and rural structure of the town. The mass communication and entertainment changed the habits of people, who started to read more newspapers and to have interest about international news, communicated by wireless radio. The advent of the cinema represented the death of the live entertainment. The idea had the great advantage to circulate speedily, breaking the geographical barriers. Due to this new atmosphere, Britain conquered a strong international dimension and identity. English accent became the first language spoken in the Europe. The world became smaller and the development of the technologies had a great impact: the men started to create weapons capable to destroy entire cities in a single explosion.

The spirit of rupture

Due to the hypocrisy and the ignorant narrow-mindedness of the Victorian Age and the advent of the Second World War, in this period the people hadnt trust of the humanity and the world. There was a great gap between the rich and the middle and lower class. Some people thought that the causes of the war lay in the past, in the obsolete generation and in the incompetent handling of the war. The traditional values ad family, homeland and religion lost their primacy. Due to the horrors of the war, the people couldnt believe more to the existence of a God.

Modernism

The modernism movement did not emerge suddenly but had its roots in the previous century. The English thinkers and poets criticized the puritanical and imperialistic culture of the Victorian England. The reaction to the art of the immediate past was the base of this revolutionary movement. In the modernism converged a variety elements of the groups, movements and schools in every type of arts, of the same period as Cubism, Decadence, Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, ecc. This movement emerged in the first decade of the century, in which, due to the developments in philosophy, anthropology and technology, the most part of the people lost their faith in the traditional value, criticized the common way to portray the human mind and personality. THE ADVENT OF SOCIOLOGY, PSYCHONALYSIC AND ANTHROPOLOGY The sociology emerged with the intent to mark the rupture with the Victorian way to observe the humanity. The sociology consider the world of men as a part of natural world, applying the scientific investigation to society. Engels was consider one of the most important sociologist. He thought that the urban reality influenced the living conditions of working class people, so underlining that the transformations caused by industrialism. Instead, Freud was considered the father of a new science: the psychology. He considered man as a biological phenomenon, subject to neurotic symptoms and natural instincts, from which derives the desires or the wishes of the men. Generally, the unconscious problems had sexual roots. William James introduced a new way to consider the mental side of men, who did not think in an order sequence of coherent thought, but in an unbroken flow of unordered thoughts, called stream of consciousness. Bergson, also, introduced a new way to consider the time, distinguishing the historical time, linear and measurable by the clock, from the psychological time , subjective and measurable by own emotional intensity.

The emancipation of women

Because of the War, the great part of the male population left home, and so the women had the chance to enter in the men world of work in office, or in the industries. The women conquered power and more freedom: the atmosphere of emancipation was evident. Women started to cut their hair and shorted their skirts. They obtained complete equality with men: at the first, the suffrage was reserved to women over 30, after the voting age was lowered to 21. The group of suffragettes worked for this aim.

Changing role of the writer

The people began to read more than ever before. The majority read magazines and newspaper, but not the novel or poems. The modernists didnt want to be popular. In fact, they have been called the great minority. The most important reason of their unpopularity was connected to their waste of traditional values and conventional literary models. Most of them, published in small magazines, and in fact, this is the period of little magazines.

Cosmopolitans and exiles

Modernist was indebted to the Americans Eliot and Pound, and Irishman Joyce. This is the period of the literature in English, rather than English literature. The majority of the modernists writers decided to escape the suffocating influence of the convention and tradition of their countries of origin. They travelled towards Paris, London and Berlin, using as meeting point, caf, cabarets, bars and galleries. The modernism became an international movement, thought the spread of new ideas, languages and values. The American writers wrote in Europe their Masterpiece: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Williams. This group was known as lost generation, because of their rejection of the conventions, the corruption and the trauma of the I World War.

Prose fiction

The most important prose fiction was influenced by the new way with men experienced and ordered the reality. The novelist of this period were introspective. They tried to understand the human nature in relation with the nature and itself. As Lawrence, interested in a fuller account of human nature and in the effects of mechanization on the men, or Forster, an experimenter that explored individual psychology and the suffocating effect of the traditional conventions.

Prose: the Thirties and after

The novelists had social and political interests, and a new genre revealed this: the anti-utopia or dystopia. Most of this writers wrote about the uncertainties in post-war society. George Orwell published 1984, in which he expressed his point of view about the dangers of the totalitarianism, while Animal Factory is a pessimistic satire about political tyranny in a Communist state.