The Twentieth Century [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThis book has been compiled with a full sense of the difficulty of writing about the literature of the recent past. The literary historian who deals with earlier periods will be concerned to make fresh valuations and establish new connections, to redraw the map of his period in order to make it more accurate and more usable by the modern reader. Yet his basic landscape is, as it were, given and unchangeable: no more sixteenth century poems or eighteenth century novels are going to be written, no matter how much recent scholarship and criticism can deepen our understanding of the ones that already exist. But as one approaches the 'modern' end of the spectrum, valuations and questions of relative stature, even the choice of what to write about, become much more problematical, particularly when one is dealing with living authors who are still in mid-career. Notoriously, many earlier histories of literature which still have valuable things to say about the past tend to become useless and even absurd as they approach their terminus ad quern. One cannot absolutely exclude such a fate for the present volume: nevertheless, it has been compiled with certain assumptions in mind which seem to be commonly if not universally accepted.As the twentieth century moves into its last third, it has become evident that its first three decades were a period of rich and brilliant literary activity, exemplified by those writers we now think of as the masters of the Modern Movement; with the death of T. S. Eliot in 1965 it was clear that this phase was concluded, and indeed much of its creative energy had been spent by 1930, the year in which D. H. Lawrence died. The nature of Modernism and the possible ways of defining the term are discussed in the opening chapter, which covers the period from 1900 to 1920. The greater part of this book concentrates on the Modern achievement, and there are detailed essays on the four great writers of our time whose stature, fifty years after they produced their most characteristic works.