Modernism, Postmodernism and Twentieth Century English Literature

Modernism

Modernism is a revolutionary movement that affected the creative world

from the 1890s to 1900s, a period during which artists and writers sought
to liberate themselves and their works from the conventions and tradition
of the strict Victorian period. Modernism became popular after the World
War I, a very traumatic event that physically devastated, psychologically
disillusioned and affected the economy of the West in an entirely
unprecedented way.
Postmodernism

As a movement, it began in the arts and architecture and just like

modernism, abandons the realist mode of the 19th century.
Postmodernism as a concept improves on modernism and shares
many characteristics with modernism including: absence of
universal or absolute truth, anti-authority and anti-tradition,
disregard for rationality, the belief that human life is complex and
disjointed but could also be celebrated as it cannot be changed.
Literary Postmodernism

Postmodernist disillusionment and its celebration of the

existential nature of life were noticed around 1960 to 1990 in
literary representations. Its characteristics include
decenteredment, pastiche, allegory, ambiguity, irony, parody, dark
humour, fragmentation, especially in dialogue, questionable
narrators, meta-narratives, isolated characters, and the blurring of
the divide between reality (life) and fiction. It is clear that
modernism and postmodernism share a lot in common but they are
different.
 Postmodernist Themes and Techniques

 postmodernist Themes and Concerns

Postmodernist themes are almost the same with those of

modernism. They both look into issues of poverty, oppression
whether it is class oppression, gender subjugation, racism,
aloneness or lack of communication, helplessness, sexuality,
politics, and so on. Just as literature will tend to question and
portray all of the issues that confront man in his day to day
activities, postmodernism also attend to these issues though it
does not mourn these realities but rather engages them playfully
and celebrate these situations.
 Postmodernist Techniques

Postmodernists were concerned about the innovation and

experimentation of the modernists which seems to be purposeless
and regarded as a ‗literature of exhaustion‘. As a result, a
literature that will bridge the gap between modernist innovation
and traditional or conventional form of writing was advocated for,
a ‗literature of replenishment‘.