The Modern Age2 Marks Questions with Answers · Authors & Works · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

In one year appeared Joyce's Ulysses (published in Paris on his fortieth birthday), Eliot's The Waste Land (in the first issue of his own journal The Criterion), Woolf's Jacob's Room and Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party. The novel and the poem that define Modernism arrived together, making 1922 literature's 'miracle year'.

Stream of consciousness is the narrative technique that renders the continuous, associative flow of a character's thoughts and sense-impressions. The phrase was coined by the psychologist William James (Principles of Psychology, 1890) and first applied to fiction by May Sinclair in 1918, reviewing Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Joyce's Molly Bloom soliloquy and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway are the canonical examples.

In 'Hamlet and His Problems' (1919), T. S. Eliot defined the objective correlative as 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events' that serves as the formula for a particular emotion, so that the external facts evoke the emotion directly. Eliot judged Hamlet an 'artistic failure' because Hamlet's disgust exceeds any objective correlative the play provides.

In 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), Eliot argued that in Donne's generation thought and feeling were fused — a thought was an experience — but that 'in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered': after Milton and Dryden, English poets thought and felt 'by fits'. The phrase rehabilitated the Metaphysicals and is among the most-quoted in all criticism.

Imagism (c. 1912–1917) was the first organised Modernist poetry movement, drawing on T. E. Hulme's ideas and led by Ezra Pound, whose two-line 'In a Station of the Metro' is its showcase. Its principles: direct treatment of the 'thing', no word that does not contribute, and rhythm by the musical phrase, not the metronome. When Amy Lowell took it over, Pound mocked the movement as 'Amygism'.

The poets of the First World War trenches: Wilfred Owen ('My subject is War, and the pity of War' — killed one week before the Armistice, 1918), Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged Owen at Craiglockhart hospital and edited his Poems (1920), Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas; Rupert Brooke ('The Soldier') represents the early idealistic phase before the slaughter of the Somme.

Conrad's novella (serialised in Blackwood's, 1899) sends his recurring narrator Marlow up the Congo to find Kurtz, whose dying words — 'The horror! The horror!' — became Modernism's verdict on imperial 'civilisation'. It is also central to postcolonial criticism: Chinua Achebe's lecture 'An Image of Africa' (1975) attacked it as racist, making the novella a permanent exam pairing with postcolonial theory.

The Bloomsbury Group was the circle of writers, artists and thinkers who met from about 1905 at the Stephen sisters' houses in Bloomsbury, London: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, the economist J. M. Keynes and the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The famous quip says they 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'.

In 'Modern Fiction' (1919, revised 1925), Woolf attacks Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy as 'materialists' who record externals and miss life itself: 'Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope.' In the companion essay 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' (1924) she declared that 'on or about December 1910 human character changed'.

In his review 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth' (1923), Eliot praised Joyce for 'manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity' — using Homer's Odyssey to give shape and significance 'to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history'. Eliot's own Waste Land, structured on the Grail legend via Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance, uses the same method.

In A Vision (1925), Yeats systematised history as two interpenetrating spinning cones or 'gyres': as one age's gyre widens to its limit, its opposite begins, so civilisations reverse roughly every two thousand years. 'The Second Coming' (1920) dramatises the idea — 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold' — the line that gave Achebe his title.

The Georgian poets were the writers anthologised in Edward Marsh's five Georgian Poetry volumes (1912–1922), named for the new king George V: Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, W. H. Davies. They wrote accessible rural lyric verse, and 'Georgian' soon became the Modernists' dismissive label for tame, conventional poetry — the foil against which Pound and Eliot defined themselves.

Ulysses was serialised in the American Little Review (1918–20) until an obscenity prosecution in 1921 stopped it; no British or American publisher would touch it. Sylvia Beach of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company published it in 1922. It remained banned in the United States until Judge Woolsey's landmark decision of 1933 cleared it.

The Waste Land (1922) is a poem of 434 lines in five sections — 'The Burial of the Dead', 'A Game of Chess', 'The Fire Sermon', 'Death by Water' and 'What the Thunder Said' — unified, Eliot says in his Notes, by the blind seer Tiresias, 'the most important personage in the poem'. Pound's drastic editing cut it by half, earning the dedication 'il miglior fabbro' (the better craftsman).

In 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919, The Egoist), Eliot argues that the poet must surrender the individual personality to the tradition of European literature — 'a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality'. Using the platinum catalyst analogy, he argues that the poet's mind is a 'shred of platinum' that catalyses emotion without itself being affected. The essay is the theoretical foundation of Modernist impersonality and the most quoted in all of Eliot's criticism.

Lawrence's major works are Sons and Lovers (1913), his autobiographical Bildungsroman set in Nottinghamshire coalfields; The Rainbow (1915) — immediately suppressed for obscenity — and Women in Love (1920), a linked diptych on love and the will to power; and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), printed privately in Florence and not legally sold in Britain until 1960, after the landmark Penguin obscenity trial.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) takes place on a single day in June: Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party in Westminster while Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran, drifts towards suicide in Regent's Park. The two never meet but are connected by the same chiming of Big Ben. Woolf uses the double strand to embody both the fragility of consciousness and the invisible cost of the war — stream of consciousness deployed to a structural end.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is in three parts: 'The Window' — a pre-war afternoon on the Isle of Skye in which Mrs Ramsay promises her son James a trip to the lighthouse; 'Time Passes' — in which the war intervenes, Mrs Ramsay dies (in parentheses, a single line), and the house decays; and 'The Lighthouse' — the journey at last completed, ten years later. It is Woolf's elegy for her own parents, and 'Time Passes' is stream of consciousness at its most experimental.

The Hogarth Press was founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917 at Hogarth House, Richmond, when they bought a hand-press and set type themselves. It published The Waste Land in England (1923), translations of Freud and Gorky, early Auden and — crucially — all of Virginia Woolf's own novels, giving her complete editorial freedom. The Woolfs had been among those who declined to publish Ulysses.

W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice were the dominant poets of the 1930s, writing politically engaged verse — sometimes called 'Pylon poetry' for Spender's use of electricity pylons as an image of modernity — in response to unemployment, Fascism and the Spanish Civil War. Auden's 'Spain' (1937) and 'September 1, 1939' are the decade's defining political poems. Auden emigrated to the United States in January 1939.

'Easter, 1916' is Yeats's elegy for the leaders of the Easter Rising — Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh and MacBride — executed by the British after the failed uprising in Dublin. The refrain 'A terrible beauty is born' captures Yeats's complex admiration: he was a constitutionalist, not a revolutionary, but the executed rebels had 'resigned their part / In the casual comedy'. Written in 1916, it circulated privately and was published only in 1920.

A Passage to India (1924) is Forster's last novel: its three-part structure — Mosque, Caves, Temple — follows Dr Aziz, whose supposed assault on Adela Quested in the Marabar Caves (described only through their nihilistic echo, 'Boum') exposes the impossibility of friendship under empire. The famous epigraph 'Only connect…' belongs to Howards End (1910), not this novel — one of the most-repeated errors in university exams.

'Dulce et Decorum Est' is Wilfred Owen's most famous anti-war poem: exhausted troops caught in a gas attack, one man drowning in a 'green sea' of gas while his comrades watch helplessly; the narrator then addresses 'My friend' — widely understood as Jessie Pope, who wrote jingoistic recruiting verse — to say that if she could see this, she would not repeat 'the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori' (Horace: 'sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country').

The Criterion (1922–1939) was the literary-critical journal founded and edited by T. S. Eliot; its inaugural issue contained The Waste Land. Broadly conservative in cultural politics, it published European criticism (Valéry, Proust, Hofmannsthal) alongside English writing and gave Eliot the platform for the prose essays that constructed the Modernist canon. He closed it in January 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, declaring the cultural crisis too great.

Ezra Pound was the central impresario of Anglophone Modernism: he launched Imagism, edited The Waste Land ('il miglior fabbro'), and championed Yeats, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. His own major work, The Cantos — a long poem begun in 1915 and unfinished at his death (1972) — is a radical collage of Dante, Confucius, Renaissance banking and American history. The Pisan Cantos (1948), written in a detention cage in Italy after the war, won the inaugural Bollingen Prize and caused a Congressional scandal.

The little magazines were small-circulation periodicals that published experimental writing before trade publishers would risk it: The Egoist (London, 1914–19; published A Portrait of the Artist and early Eliot), Poetry (Chicago, from 1912; Pound as foreign editor), The Little Review (New York, 1914–29; serialised Ulysses until the 1921 obscenity ruling), BLAST (1914–15, the Vorticist organ of Wyndham Lewis) and The Criterion (Eliot, 1922–39).

The Irish Literary Revival (c. 1890s–1920s) aimed to create a national literature from Gaelic mythology. Its driving force was W. B. Yeats; Lady Gregory co-founded the Abbey Theatre, Dublin (1904), which staged J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World (1907) — whose realistic portrait of Irish peasants provoked three nights of riots. The early mystical phase — Yeats's own label 'Celtic Twilight', which he later repudiated — gave way to the tougher post-Rising poetry.

The Waves (1931) abandons conventional narrative entirely: six characters — Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis — speak only in interior soliloquies from childhood to old age, interspersed with lyrical prose interludes describing the sea and sun at different times of day. There is no dialogue, no omniscient narrator, no events described directly. Rhoda's suicide and the death of the seventh figure, Percival, are known only through the survivors' responses — Woolf's furthest point from the 'materialist' novel she attacked in 'Modern Fiction'.