The Development of World Literature, 1907-1927 T

The story of literature is not one of slow incremental growth, of literary decisions arrived at after deliberate and calculated innovation. Literature grows in spurts, evolving within the context of remarkably fecund periods, in which a number of factors converge to take the art of writing in a markedly different direction. These paradigmatic shifts include periods such as the Renaissance, during which William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe were writing, and the Restoration, which saw the emergence of William Congreve, Richard Sheridan, William Wycherly, and Christopher Sly.

One such period of transition, in which the art of literature took a decidedly different turn, was the period before and after World War I. In the late 1880s, literature was still largely in the sway of the Romantic era. The late Romantics, such as Algernon Swinburn, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, were the dominant figures, and the style and substance of their writing still adhered to Romantic ideals. These ideals included heightened emotion, idealized and imaginative situations, and heroic, larger-than-life characters.

However, while the Romantics were pursuing the Romantic philosophy, events were conspiring to change the direction of literature permanently. This was the period in which the Industrial Revolution was reordering society, and writers began to see that literature needed to address the changes tha

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rature to expose societyÆs less glamorous aspects. Each book was attacked fiercely by critics who thought that the works were more like exposed sewage than literature. Nonetheless, in the 10 years immediately preceding World War I, literature was in a transitional mode, abandoning idealism and embracing gritty pragmatism. However, literature had not fully entered into the modern era. It may have chronologically moved into the 20th century, but, philosophically, the philosophy of modernism was still in an inchoate form. The tools of Realism were still being sharpened. World War I changed this situation. Poetry in wartime was often used as propaganda. Throughout the wart, censorship reigned. Many poets, however, were enlisted in the war, and the war turned many soldiers into poets. The result of this was an outbreak of deeply anti-war poems, in spite of cultural censorship. The author Robert Graves saw action and used his battle experiences as inspiration: ôIn the last month or so an inspiration seems to have come to me of what the New Poetry is to be and I feel that given a good rest and congenial society to settle my shaken mind I could write something really goodö (Graves, as cited in Graham 123). Wilfrid Owen became the
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Approximate Word count = 2073
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)