20th century in literature
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See also: 19th century in literature, other events of the 20th century, 21st century in literature, list of years in literature.
Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) the 1900s through the 1990s.
The main periods are captured in the bipartite division, Modernist literature and Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1960 to 1990[1] respectively, divided, as a rule of thumb, by World War II.
The somewhat malleable term of contemporary literature is usually applied with a post-1960 cutoff point.
Technological advances during the 20th century allowed cheaper production of books, resulting in a significant rise in production of popular literature and trivial literature, comparable to the development in music. The division of "popular literature" and "high literature" in the 20th century is by no means absolute, and various genres such as detectives or science fiction fluctuate between the two. For the most part of the century mostly ignored by mainstream literary criticism, these genres develop their own establishments and critical awards, such as the Nebula Award (since 1965), the British Fantasy Award (since 1971) or the Mythopoeic Awards (since 1971).
Towards the end of the century, electronic literature develops as a genre due to the development of hypertext and later the world wide web.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually throughout the century (with the exception of 1914, 1918, 1935 and 1940-1943), the first laureate (1901) being Sully Prudhomme. The New York Times Best Seller list has been published since 1942.
The best-selling works of the 20th century are estimated to be Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966, 900 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies), And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies) and The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 100 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys.[2][3][4][5] Perry Rhodan (1961 to present) boasts as being the best-selling book series, with an estimated total of 1 billion copies sold.
1900-1918
The Fin de siècle movement of the Belle Époque persisted into the 1900s, but was brutally cut short with the outbreak of World War I (an effect depicted e.g. in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published 1924). The Dada movement of 1916-1920 was at least in part a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war; the movement heralded the Surrealism movement of the 1920s.
- Thomas Mann publishes Buddenbrooks in 1901 and Death in Venice in 1912
- Joseph Conrad publishes the novella Heart of Darkness in 1902, after the serial release in 1898 and The Secret Agent in 1907
- Jack London publishes The Call of the Wild in 1903
- Serbian writers use the Belgrade literary style, an Ekavian writing form which set basis for the later standardization of the Serbian language
- D. H. Lawrence publishes Sons and Lovers
- Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
- Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
- Knut Hamsun publishes Growth of the Soilin 1917
- Marcel Proust publishes In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927)
Interwar period
The 1920s were a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable authors appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a scandal at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex.
- Alexey Tolstoy publishes Aelita
- George Bernard Shaw publishes Back to Methuselah
- T. S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land (1922)
- James Joyce publishes Ulysses (1922)
- e e cummings publishes The Enormous Room (1922)
- Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929)
- The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and America (1927) by Franz Kafka, who died in 1924, are published.
- Thomas Mann publishes The Magic Mountain (1924).
- Hermann Hesse publishes Siddhartha (1927).
- Andre Gidé publishes The Counterfeiters (1926).
- Marcel Proust publishes the 2nd through 7th parts of Remembrance of Things Past aka In Search of Lost Time.
- Eugene O'Neill awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922, and Strange Interlude in 1928.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), which is often described as the epitome of the "Jazz Age" in American literature, and Tender is the Night (1934), which portrays the lives and morality of post-World War I youth.
- Erich Maria Remarque publishes All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), which recounts the horrors of WWI and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front.
- Ernest Hemingway publishes In Our Time (1924), short stories, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which is about a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s, Men without Women (1927), short stories, A Farewell to Arms (1929) and To Have and Have Not (1937).
- Aldous Huxley publishes Crome Yellow (1920), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), Point Counterpoint (1928), Brave New World (1932), Eyeless in Gaza (1935) and After Many a Summer (1939).
- Alfred Doblin publishes Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928).
- W. H. Auden publishes Poems.
- Evelyn Waugh publishes Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), the classic British novel about the 1920s, Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938).
- Christopher Isherwood publishes All the Conspirators (1928), The Memorial (1930), Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), the first of his Berlin novels, and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the second. Featuring Sally Bowles, this was adapted into the play and film I Am a Camera and the film musical Cabaret.
- George Orwell publishes Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and Burmese Days (1934), both personal reminiscences, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), both novels, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia, about social conditions in England and the Spanish Civil War, and his last 'straight' novel, Coming Up for Air (1938).
- William Faulkner publishes The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) and Absalom Absalom (1936).
- Henry Miller publishes Tropic of Cancer (1934) in France. When published in the United States in 1961 it results in a groundbreaking obscenity case before the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed its publication. He also publishes Tropic of Capricorn (1936).
- Zora Neale Hurston publishes Their Eyes Were Watching God
- John Steinbeck publishes his Great Depression classics, Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
World War II
- Orson Welles
- George Orwell
- J. R. R. Tolkien writes The Lord of the Rings (published 1954/55)
Postwar period
The intermediate postwar period separating "Modernism" from "Postmodernism" (1950s literature) is the floruit of the beat generation and the classical science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein.
Cold War period
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
- Umberto Eco Il nome della rosa (1980 - English translation: The Name of the Rose, 1983), Il pendolo di Foucault (1988 - English translation: Foucault's Pendulum, 1989)
1990s
References
- ^ Lewis, Barry. "Postmodernism and Literature." The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism NY: Routledge, 2002, p. 121.
- ^ Seiler, Andy (December 16, 2003). "'Rings' comes full circle". USA Today. Retrieved 2006-03-12.
- ^ Diver, Krysia (October 5, 2004). "A lord for Germany". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2006-03-12.
- ^ Cooper, Callista (December 5, 2005). "Epic trilogy tops favourite film poll". ABC News Online. Retrieved 2006-03-12.
- ^ O'Hehir, Andrew (June 4, 2001). "The book of the century". Salon.com. Retrieved 2006-03-12.
See also
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- 20th century#Literature
- History of modern literature
- Modern Library's selection of best 20th century novels
- Museum of Modern Literature, Germany
- Experimental literature
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