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The Twentieth Century/The Twenty-first Century in American Literature The twentieth century cannot be labeled neatly. It was a century influenced by

strife and war. The Victorian Age actually extended into the 1900s, but World War I

brought America and western Europe into the modern age with violence and suffering on

a scale never seen before.

The following are some of the literary trends, which are strong influences on the

literature of the twentieth century.

1. Reaction against the Victorian ideas of progress, morality and social

responsibility, which were seen as hypocritical and smug. The twentieth century

emphasized instead individual freedom to experiment in life in diverse ways.

2. Cultural fragmentation: social, moral and religious institutions were

seen to collapse or at least to fragment so that no single unifying ethic appeared to have

universal force. Reconciling the self to an orderless, often self-destructive world.

Isolated self.

3. Marxist theories, influencing leftist writers who advocated a

reconstruction of society to eliminate capitalism; important during the 1930s, leftist

writers were critical of laissez-faire economics, democratic institutions, and imperialism.

Supported the struggle of the masses. Reaction to Marxism, beginning in the late 1930s

and continuing through the century, centered around opposition to totalitarianism.

4. Freudian/Jungian psychology, most influential during the 1920s but

continuing throughout the century, centered around depth analysis of the unconscious;

emphasis upon motivation, upon the irrational and the instinctive; exploration of

psychological symbols expressed in actions or dreams. Also anti-Freudians who rejected

the principles of depth analysis.

5. Existentialism, most influential during the later 1940s and 1950s but

continuing throughout the century, emphasized the importance of individual freedom to

make moral choices, to define the self, in the absence of universally accepted norms to

serve as patterns of behavior. Also reaction to existentialism among writers who favored

traditional religious and cultural values.

6 Absurdism, most influential as a literary type of drama and fiction during

the 1950s and 1960s but continuing throughout the century, emphasized the meaningless

aspects of institutions and values; nihilism, often treated humorously, in which life, void

of significance, is viewed as both terrible and comic.

7. Naturalism, most influential during the first two decades but continuing

throughout the twentieth century.

8. Technological and scientific discoveries result in cultural shock.

Changes from new social sciences with increased understanding of sociological, political,

psychological, and economic pressures upon the individual.

9. Imagism, most influential during the second two decades of the twentieth

century, emphasized the sharp, clear image of poetry and rejected sentimentalism.

10. Impressionism, most influential during the second decades but

continuing throughout the twentieth century, emphasized the isolation of significant

impressions; stream-of-consciousness techniques in fiction reveal the moment-by-

moment flux of impressions, the "interior monologues" of the subconscious mind.

11. Symbolism emphasized the use of symbolic representations from dreams,

religious archetypes, visionary and mystic states of consciousness.