Outlines of English Literature [antikvár]

CHAPTER I THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY The literature of any period or country is the expression of the social and intellectual conditions which surround it, or which have just preceded it. Indeed, the careful student of literature must also be a student of sociology, of history, of philosophy, if he is fully to comprehend his subject. Thus it is of the utmost importance to know the main currents of thought in the nineteenth century, in order to understand the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century was an epoch of great changes in the material as well as in the intellectual world. The invention of textile machinery inaugurated the era of great factories, of armies of labourers, of tremendous accumulations of capital. Other inventions followed in bewildering succession. Steam and electricity enabled men to produce goods in quantities hitherto undreamed of, with miraculous speed, and to transport thern to the ends of the earth. Even greater than these material changes, was the scientific development which accompanied them. The most profound influence upon the thought of the times was Darwin's theory of evolution, with its corollaries, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. From Darwin's theory grew also the idea that the institutions which man has built up and cherished so carefully, are, after all, themselves mere matters of evolution and expediency; that they are not sacred, immutable things.