British Literature between the Wars

The years between the outbreak of the 1st WW and the beginning of the 2nd WW (1914-1918;
1939-1945). Its main feature is the appearance of the lit. school “modernism”. Modernists
wanted to show a new view on a human which had emerged due to deep social changes and
discoveries in physics, philosophy, and psychology.
1. Social changes – 1st WW was a terrible shock to the Br. Society who had not expected
such destruction of property and life. The war made people wonder if Western
civilization and culture would continue to exist. Modernism rejected the naturalistic
point of view on man in which man is shaped by environment. It rejected the socialist
point of view that man is determined by the society. A change is society would change
people who live in it. Modernism rejected the Christian notion of man who can be
saved only by God.
2. The new conception of the human self emerged in the works of French philosophers
Henri Bergson. The Austrian psychologist S. Freud and the Swiss psychologist Carl
Yung. Bergson declared the world unknowable, institution primary, and mind
secondary. Freud came to the conclusion that human behavior is deeply affected by the
unconsciousness. According to Freud the human psyche consists of 3 elements:
• The ID is the name for the unconscious, the biological instincts.
• The EGO is the conscious. The most rational part of a person’s self.
• The Super Ego is the hereditary part of the Ego, so to speak the representative
of society with psyche.
All the psychic energy is based on the ID which is covered by primitive aggressive
and sexual drives and directed by the pleasure principle. Freud stressed that ID plays
the dominant part in the mental life. The Ego is based on the reality principle. The Ego
must protect itself from unacceptable demands of the ID and the moral reproaches of
the Super Ego. Thus, the contradictions between the society and the individual to hold
his emotions in the check and that leads to neurosis.
Carl Yung’s theory dealt with archetypes ( with the original model of something, with
others, or with copies). Yung believed that archetypes are universal and inherent in all
mankind. The fundamental facts of human existence are archetypical: birth, growing
up, love, family, death, struggle between children and parents. Certain characters of
personality types are archetypical: Christ, Don Juan.
These theories show that human is not a rational, balanced creature but very
contradictory. That made writers come to the conclusion that WW1 had been caused
by the perversity of human nature. Fear of the future is seen in the mood of
desperation that fills the modernist world. A wish to reflect the new vision of the world
and the complex processes that take place in the human consciousness finds an
expression in the modernist world against traditional literary forms and topics,
particularly those of realism. The modernist works are characterized by the loosely
built plot or no plot altogether. The modernist novels exploit the stream-of-
consciousness technique which is special manners of narrations that tries to capture a
mental process in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious or half-conscious
thoughts, memories; ex. expectations, feelings, and random associations.
The modernists often break the narrative continually (going back and forward in time).
The use of new ways in representing character. They violate the traditional syntax.
They use myth to help understand and order the chaos of 20th century experience. They
employ complex allusiveness. Many modernists were conscious that literary works
could not be interpreted and didn’t believe that their thus works could change society
or people.