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Twentieth Century Modernism

Twentieth Century Modernism

The twentieth century can be distinguished by the saying, "Beyond the pale". This metaphoric meaning represents modernists standing outside the conformist restrictions of law, behavior, and social class- in a sense, beyond the pale. Modernists wanted to expand their dimensions and represent life in a different way. They were very skeptical of the Victorian age because they did not believe it was possible to have unity in all the world which was what Victorian literature had portrayed. Modernists saw life as a series of non-ordinary actions that were uncontrollable. Victorians wrote their literature with a 1-2-3 story plot which began with an introduction and ended happily ever after. Modernists thought that realistic life was too fragmented to portray it in this form of perfection.
Socially, paradigm shifts were occurring in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and physics. A German Philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that traditional religion was being discredited by advances in the natural and physical sciences. His quote from The Joyful Science states, "God is dead". People began to start believing this and their standards of truth began disappearing. In psychology, a man named Sigmund Freud began a revolution by evolving the theories of influence of the unconscious mind. He said peoples past experiences have a great deal of unconscious influence on their mind. This idea provoked a wide range of responses which were equally adopted and rejected in the world of literature. A few years later, Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity arose. His new ideas about motion and gravity sparked a new understanding of the universe and our relationship to it. His vision was that nothing is relative except humans and that everything in life is absolutely fixed. These new theories in physics, philosophy, and psychology had a profound effect on Modern literature.
Politically, the moral and theoretical turmoil was given...