The Modernist Period (roughly between 1914-1939)

Prepared by Luisa L. Gomez

GUIDE QUESTIONS
1. What are the various changes in the Modernist Period that can illustrate why Auden calls this
time as an Age of Anxiety?
Answer:
a. the altered position of women
b. scientific revolution
c. intellectual anxiety
d. the development of mass communications systems (radio, inexpensive automobile,
airplane, theater, phonograph, typewriter, telephone, telegraph)
e. international politics: World War I; the rise of anarchism, socialism, and communism;
the breakdown of the British Empire; increasing conservatism in America
2. What are the key socio-political publications that changed the landscape of the Modernist
Period?
a. Freuds works on psychoanalysis such as The Interpretation of Dreams;
b. Darwins account of human evolution in The Origin of Species, 1859;
c. Einsteins theory of relativity;
d. Philosophical works by the likes of Heidegger and Wittgenstein;
e. Anthropological works by anthropologists such as Sir James Frazers The Golden
Bough and Jessie Westons From Ritual to Romance
3. How did the publications influence or shape key literary works of the modernist period?
a. Some of the works welcomed the annihilation of traditional faith that was brought
about by all these scientific and philosophical movements (1222). These works include W.H.
Audens Sunday Morning, T.S. Eliots The Wasteland, and Ezra Pounds Cantos.
b. The sense of political anxiety caused by the haunting of World War I and political
conflict were also articulated in Hemingways novels (e.g., For Whom the Bell Tolls).
c. The modernist period is an age of exuberance for a woman as she was gradually
finding a room of ones own as inspired by writers like Virginia Woolf.

d. Writers produced manifestos on their artistic works, which were gradually becoming
more experimental: Ezra Pound had advised all his contemporaries to make it new and paid
tribute to Walt Whitmanwho pioneered the free verse (1226).
e. Freuds psychoanalysis inspired writers to probe the life of the mind of their
protagonists with more innovative dramatizations (1228) such as in James Joyces Ulysses.
f. F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby portrayed a decadent America in the 1920s that
captured the socio-economic spirit of its time.
4. What is the position of women during the modernist period ?
a. Women had the right to vote after decades of struggle and hard work (1234).
b. Women worked outside the domestic space. They were even invited to work as nurses
and ambulance drivers at the front itself (1235).
c. Between 1914 and 1921, the birth-control movement as well as the free-love and
child-care movements came into considerable prominence (1235).
d. Still, Elaine Showalter calls this period as feminisms awkward age because of the
limits in the changes in the social order that women found themselves in. One example: women
as academicians rarely achieved the status of a full professor (1237).