MODERN BRITISH Prepared by Sulzhyk

LITERATURE Victoria.
Modern British Literature represents a
stark shift from the traditions of the
previous Victorian period. Read further to
explore what makes a work part of the
Modernist literary movement and what
some of its important works are.
BACKGROUND FOR MODERN BRITISH
LITERATURE

it would be too overwhelming to take in the

scope of all of literature ever created. To
make it more manageable, critics group
writing by time of publication and general
characteristics of its writing called literary
movements. We will focus on the Modern
British literature movement coming after
the Victorian period.This period of
literature is marked by change and even
upheaval. Society was changing rapidly in
terms of its technology, manufacturing,
economy, and science. There was great
inequality, which many authors focused on
in their writing.
MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE
CHARACTERISTICS
Modernism began around the turn of
the twentieth century and went roughly
through 1965. There is not a hard and
fast rule for when the Victorian period
ended (outside the death of Queen
Victoria) and when Modernism began.
That is the trouble with literary
movements--though some writers did in
fact work together, authors are generally
connected through consistent trends in
the themes of their works.
Modernism is marked by experimentation
and individualism. This came from the
shocking reality of the Great War, World
War I which lasted from 1914-1918. WWI
forced a more bleak perspective and left
people struggling to understand how such
horrors could take place. Modernist turned
from society to explore the individual
sometimes recording the workings of the
mind, usually the dark workings. The
modernist saw a sense of decay and
growing alienation for individuals. I will
focus on British and Irish writers.
21ST CENTURY LITERATURE
Dame Hilary Mantel is a highly successful
writer of historical novels winning the Booker
Prize twice, for Wolf Hall 2009, and Bring Up
the Bodies. Julian Barnes (1946– ) is another
prominent writer and he won the 2011 Man
Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an
Ending. The perceived success and promotion
of genre fiction authors from Scotland
provoked controversy in 2009 when James
Kelman criticised, in a speech at
the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the
attention afforded to "upper middle-class
young magicians" and "detective fiction" by
the "Anglocentric" Scottish literary
establishment. .
THEATRE
The theatrical landscape
has been reconfigured,
moving from a single
national theatre at the
end of the twentieth-
century to four as a
result of the devolution
of cultural policy
LITERARY PRIZES

British recipients of the Nobel Prize in

Literature include Rudyard
Kipling (1907), John Galsworthy (1932), T. S.
Eliot (1948), Bertrand Russell (1950), Winston
Churchill (1953), William Golding (1983), V.
S. Naipaul (2001), Harold Pinter (2005) Doris
Lessing (2007), and Kazuo Ishiguro (2017).
Literary prizes for which writers from the
United Kingdom are eligible include:
Man Booker Prize
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
International Dublin Literary Award
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION