I. Transition Period (1880-1920)

A. Multiplicity of fictional forms

1. Adventure fiction (Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island)

2. Agnostic fiction (Thomas Hardy, James Joyce)

3. Mystery & Detective fiction (Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Sherlock Holmes; Wilkie Collins, Woman in White; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)

4. Colonial expansion fiction (Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

5. Social fiction (E. M. Forster, Howards End)

B. Pre-war poetry prefigures fatalism of the modern era

1. Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and A. E. Housman are major poets

II. Modern Period (1920-1945)

A. Search for reason in an unreasoned world; loss of past v. hope for a new start

B. Characteristics of modernism

1. imagery and symbolism are typical and frequent

2. colloquial language; self-conscious language

3. literature as art: form, style, and technique are important

4. intention is often to challenge the way readers see the world and to change the readers' understanding of what language is and does

C. Major forms and writers

1. Poetry

a. William Butler Yeats uses conventional lyric forms but explores the connection between modern themes and classical and romantic ideas.

b. T. S. Eliot uses elements of conventional forms within an unconventionally structured whole.

c. W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Dylan Thomas come to prominence in the inter-war period with a revival of romanticism.

2. Fiction

a. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf challenge traditional narrative methods of viewpoint and structure.

b. D. H. Lawrence explores human relationships with an eye to psychology and his own acute observation, presenting working-class characters as serious and dignified.

c. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell explore the idea of finding order in a chaotic modern world.

d. Evelyn Waugh explores social and cultural themes.

D. An age of -isms

1. Impressionism tries to portray the psychological impressions objects and events make on characters, emphasizing the role of individual perception and exploring the nature of the conscious and unconscious mind.

2. Expressionism tries to express the inner vision, the inner emotion, or the inner spiritual reality that seems more important than the external realities of objects and events.

3. Surrealism tries to liberate the subconscious, to see connections overlooked by the logical mind, to deny the supreme authority of rationality and so portray objects and events as they seem rather than as they are.

4. Absurdism tries to duplicate in literature the absurd conditions of contemporary life: nameless millions dying in wars, commonplace horrors such as the Holocaust, a world in which "God is dead" cast mankind afloat in a chartless and unknowable world void of a spiritual center

III. Post-modern Period (1945+)

A. Characteristics of post-modern literature

1. rejects Western values and beliefs as only a small part of the human experience

2. is suspicious of being "profound" because such ideas are based on one particular Western value system

3. prefers to dwell on exterior imagery and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects or events

4. sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific reality possible

5. "open" works in which the reader must supply his own connections, work out alternative meanings, and provide his own unguided interpretation

B. Major forms and writers

1. Poetry: Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, John Betjeman, Stevie Smith, Seamus Heaney

2. Fiction: Graham Greene, William Golding

3. Drama: John Osborne and imports from America (Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller), France (Jean Anouilh, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre), and Germany (Bertoldt Brecht); often focuses on issues of social unrest