Modern Britain

Introduction

We refer to the literature written between the WWI, the booming years[1] of the 1920’s, the Great Depression[2] decade, to the catastrophic years of the WWII as the Modernist Literature. It came as a reaction to the romantic escapism[3] and objective realism[4]. Let us first have a look at the preceding literature known as Victorian Literature, then, we move to the counter modernist literature and its main concerns.

Britain and the Modern Age

Great Britain was not the only affected country by the aftermaths of the WWI but being an empire has its own benefits and hindrances. When the world was enjoying the Industrial Revolution around the first decade of the twentieth century; politics and economy changed and so did society and the individual living in it. The destruction the War caused a collapse in religious faith, government laws reliance, and human kindness. The financial and human loss made people question the values they strictly believed in. The economic, political, and psychological aftermaths of the War caused individualism, alienation, luck of communication, and disillusionment. People started to think of who should live and who should die and the survival of the fittest motto started to become a lived experience rather than a Darwinist theory.[5] Other theories and philosophies emerged, notably Freud’s psychological theory of the unconscious mind, which made the pre-World War I period look like the Dark Ages, leaving people who survived it full with doubt and skepticism.

Victorian or 19th Century Literature

19^th Century Literature was named after Queen Victoria. There were great changes in the political and social life in England during her reign. The early Victorian period witnessed a sum of scientific and technological innovations especially the Industrial Revolution and colonisation of Africa and the Middle East. The fact that many nations or countries were under the British rule established Britain as an empire and not just a country. The Industrial Revolution changed the socio-economic and political life in England and there were massive Rural/ Urban migration aided by the new railways as many people left the villages for the cities. Because there was a large concentration of people in the cities, this causes unemployment, poverty, child labour and riots.

Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist was set in this historical background. In the mid-Victorian era, there was a change for economic improvement, and stability and there was optimism in the British Empire and new ideas of scientific inventions and investigations influenced literary production. The literary production of the period was realistic. Writers created fictional heroes and heroines who reflected the roles of the individual in the society as they strive for love, social position, or success. There was a focus on the description of characters’ surroundings, speeches, actions, and depiction of real life issues. Plots were linear and coherent; the stories of the heroes and heroines were well structured and finished; and there were unified or well patterned representations of life. The novel became the dominant genre of the Victorian period. Among the writers of the period were Robert Browning, Emily Bronte and her sister Charlotte Bronte, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. Unlike the Victorian literature; the so called modernist literature varies in form, style of writing, and thematic concerns. 

Conclusion

With the coming of any new age, new philosophies occur, and with them come the changes that swing people’s lives. The modern age has been no exception; still, it has been a revolutionizing era.