English Literature: Modernist, Post-Modern, & Contemporary

The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.

Works Cited

"Modernism." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 23 May. 2024. academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Modernism/474688. Accessed 9 Jan. 2025.

*Note from Librarian: Modernist, Modernism, Modern, and Post-Modern literatures bleed over into current Contemporary Works. While there is a noticable difference in subject matter, scholars have not decided on what to call the latest literary period. Contemporary is considered 1945-present.

• Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson
• Zadie Smith
• Bernardine Evaristo
• Malorie Blackman
• David Olusoga
• Patrice Lawrence
• Diana Evans
• Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman 
• T.S. Eliot in full Thomas Stearns Eliot 
• J. K. Rowling
• Virginia Woolf
• Doris Lessing
• D. H. Lawrence in full David Herbert Lawrence
• James Joyce in full James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
• W.B. Yeats in full William Butler Yeats
• E. M. Forster
• Samuel Beckett 
• Aldous Huxley
• Anthony Burgess
• Henry James
• Joseph Conrad

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