Literature and modernism

In this unit you will examine some of the major writers and texts of modernist literature from the Anglophone world from 1900 to 1940. You will discuss the famous works of 'High' modernism (e.g. Mrs Dalloway, The Waste Land), the literature produced by expatriate writers (e.g. Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys) as well as modernism's afterlife in contemporary literature. Our focus will be on the way modernist experiments revolutionised the depiction of character, rejected formal and stylistic literary conventions and responded to the various crises of the time (e.g. World War I, the 1929 stock market crash).