自考《英美文学选读》现代文学时期2　

　　1. What is Modernism？

　　Modernism was a complex and spanerse international movement in all creative arts， originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. After the First World War， all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared： symbolism， expressionism， surrealism， cubism， futurism， Dadaism， imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the 1920s， these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement， which swept across the whole Europe and America. It has also been called "the tradition of the new"-a conscious rejection of established rules， traditions and conventions， and "the dehumanization of art"-pushing into the background traditional notions of the inspanidual and society. The major figures that were associated with Modernism were Kafka， Picasso， Pound， Webern， Eliot， Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after the Second World War， a variety of modernism， or post-modernism， like existentialist literature， theater of the absurd， new novels and black humor， rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that "the world was absurd， and the human life was an agony."

　　Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted， alienated and ill relationships between man and nature， man and society， man and man， and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public， more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an inspanidual. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation， Modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story， plot， character， chronological narration， etc.， which are essential to realism. As a result， the works created by t

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