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I would describe Wells not as modernist but as a hangover of a certain strain of Victorian thinking: a basically rationalist, socialist worldview, optimistic ab
by dri_ft 6y ago
I would describe Wells not as modernist but as a hangover of a certain strain of Victorian thinking: a basically rationalist, socialist worldview, optimistic about the prospect of improving the world if we could just drop all our silly prejudices. John Stuart Mill, George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian Society.... This perspective didn't fare very well in the early twentieth Century. Orwell describes Wells somewhere as 'too sane to understand the modern world'.
I'd count Joyce as a canonical modernist. (If he isn't, who is?)
- yutopia 6y agoThanks, so Finnegans Wake is considered a modernist novel? Interesting. Totally out of my depth here but it seems so much at odds with modernist ideas in other artistic disciplines, e.g., architecture.
- dri_ft 6y agoDefinitely. Yes, there are lots of modernisms. Modernism in literature really has very little in common with modernism in architecture, for instance. Even more confusing, each of these modernisms has its own postmodernism, all 'post' their respective modernisms in different ways. The sort of fragmentation of language and narrative that we see in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is a pretty central modernist trait, I'd say. An even more central example would be something like Eliot's The Wasteland.
- hsitz 6y agoRelevant Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_literature