What Modernism Broke and Kept

The idea

Modernism broke the forms the Victorians trusted and kept, in fragments, the tradition they had inherited. Shaped by Freud, Frazer, Nietzsche and the slaughter of the First World War, its writers made it new. Conrad's Heart of Darkness opened the century with a frame narrative on the Thames and a journey to Kurtz's horror, a novella Achebe later called racist. Yeats moved from Innisfree's bee-loud glade to the terrible beauty of Easter nineteen sixteen, the rough beast of "The Second Coming" and the golden bird of Byzantium. Joyce, an exile writing only of Dublin, replaced the climax with the epiphany in Dubliners, traced an artist's growth in A Portrait, and set a Homeric day in Ulysses. Woolf followed minds through a London day in Mrs Dalloway, let time pass in To the Lighthouse, and argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own. Lawrence wrote of mothers, miners and the body; Forster asked us to only connect, in England and under the Raj; Mansfield refined the short story. Eliot's Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, and The Waste Land shored fragments against its ruins, while his essays called for tradition and impersonality. The war poets turned from Brooke's idealism to Owen's old Lie and Sassoon's satire. Imagists sought the precise image against the Georgians' tradition; Synge and O'Casey made the Abbey a national stage. To answer a Modernist question, identify the voice, trace the fragments or the stream of consciousness, and ask what pattern beneath the disorder the work proposes.