Mortality And Darkness In British Modernism

In Robert Coates short story ;"The Darkness of the Night" Fred is mislead by his love for Flora because she pretends to be someone that she is not, and he is naive enough to want to commit on her behalf. I will be proving that of how Fred was mislead into committing the murder by evoking certain emotions, the rejection of solution to her problem, and threatening of the relationship between each other.

At one point or another in one’s lifetime, people let go one thing to try and move on to something bigger and better, whether it’s a new job or new way of life. In its entirety, modernism is similar. It can be defined as moving away from the traditional creations and activities towards news tasks formed by the individualism and freedom within a man or woman. For instance, in the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, the speaker eventually moves on from his previous set of ideas to something new. Similarly, in “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E.E. Cummings, the main character doesn’t feel comfortable with the repetitious structure of the society he’s placed in. This leads the main character to form his own opinion, uncommon to his society,

Modernism was the most influential literary movement in England and America during the first half of the twentieth century. It had works such as The Waste Land(1922), by T. S. Eliot, Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. Also included The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Modernism started during the opening decade of the century, a time of large experimentation in the arts. Artists at the turn of the twentieth century thought that the previous generation’s way of doing things was done.

Thomas, as his home is one of the only houses in the neighborhood that survived the late WWII bombings. It is almost as if the young boys are acting out of jealousy more than simply showing Mr. Thomas that they do not take bribes. T knows that Mr. Thomas’s house is sentimental to him but his young mind does not understand the value of the two hundred year old construction of the home. ‘”It’s got a staircase two hundred years old like a corkscrew. Nothing holds it up.”’ (107). Piece by piece, the twelve gang members completely stripped the inside of Mr. Thomas’s historical home. Then news comes of Mr. Thomas’s unexpected early arrival. “Old Misery came limping off the common. He had mud on his shoes and he stopped to scrape them on the pavement’s edge. He didn’t want to soil his house, which stood jagged and dark between the bombsites, saved so narrowly, as he believed, from destruction.” (114). The gang was not finished with their task at hand, so they trapped Mr. Thomas in his own outhouse for the

Modernism brought a new era to fiction as a whole. With World War One raging distress and fear to people worldwide, the modernists as a whole were very angry. They were angry with the propaganda of the time telling them that war was good; those who’d seen the battlefield knew better. They despised their didactic Victorian predecessors, who taught clear divisions between right and wrong. Modernists instead believed that authority figures were corrupt and that morality is often unclear. This comes to light especially within the poems of Eliot and Yeats, and especially in the modernist manifesto Blast.

As he approaches Kurtz and continues down the river and further into the Congo, Marlow accumulates around thirty native Congolese people working on his steamboat, and without a real thought he makes the assumption and conclusion that they are all cannibals. He notes that they bring Hippo meat with them, which according to him quickly goes rotten and has to be thrown overboard. He then says, “Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they were thirty to five—and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with strength, even yet... I saw that something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there.” This is one of the only times that Marlow describes the native Congolese people as human. Only through first basing this off several racist stereotypes, Marlow is able for a moment to view the natives as human beings, because, in his own skewed and ridiculous view of them, he believes that they have an incredible amount of restraint to the ‘darkness’ that seems to emanate from the Congo. Their self control and resistance to the savage urges is the quality Marlow believes makes them equal to himself in the sense that they are human beings like himself. This is also telling of the grand misunderstanding of Marlow with his entire experience and

Modernism means a style or movement that aims to break with traditional forms. Fitzgerald wrote during the time period of modernism. Modernism partook primarily in Europe from the early to mid twentieth century. Modernism symbolizes the introduction of new ways to express oneself as well as the separation from traditional ways. One major idea that was corroborated throughout many written items during this time period was the idea of self awareness. Self awareness also known as self consciousness, is when one is extremely aware of their own actions, feelings, and thoughts. One of the biggest driving factors for this belief of self consciousness was the devastating effects from World War One. Many artists and authors were striving to cut ties with the previous beliefs and traditions in their specific field. They wanted to stand out and start new trends. In the Victorian age there was a massive increase in the overall knowledge of the general population due to education reforms. This increase in knowledge led to a constant hunger for more and more knowledge. One way people cured this craving was with literature.

Modernist themes can be seen all throughout American Literature beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The idea that the traditional values of old were no longer relevant in a modernizing, industrialized world were prevalent in modernist writings. The modernist writers felt as if something inside of them had been lost. They were constantly asking the question “what am I supposed to believe in now”? As if they felt this void inside of them that they could not seem to fill. Many of these writers saw life as fragments lying on the ground waiting for someone to come along and make sense of them, but it seems as if no one ever did for them. They began to have a negative outlook on life which reflected in their work. Works such as

Considering the historical approach and the biographical approach, provide the reader with the historical and personal details about the author, it allows the reader to connect specific events as well as the author’s life experiences with the text, thanks to this information; the reader can create an association to identify the motives why the author wrote the literary work. The darkness out there is a short story from the 20th Century, it was published in 1984, written by Penelope Lively, a British writer, Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt on March 17th, 1933, at the age of twelve she moved to England to go to school in Sussex, and she graduated from St. Ann’s College, Oxford.

The poverty and depression that was experienced turned to cold, hard realistic views and hatred when it came to new perspectives on the world. No longer did humans look at the world from a calming, beautiful and picturesque view because of the personal experiences that were encountered. Writers now use cold, hard, real details to depict different aspects which translated into using modernism, instead of romanticism.

The Modernist period which took place roughly between the 1910s and the 1960s can be described as breaking away from traditional ways of writing and focusing more on the inner self and consciousness. The pre-Modernist period was a time in which many people defined their sense of self and purpose through religion and faith. However due to the rise in industrialization, new technology, and the events such as World War I and World War II, many questioned: “What was becoming of the world?” Many writers took this as an opportunity to answer this question in their literary works by using Modernist views, this is how the Modernist period came to be.

In the heart wrenching story, “The Dead” the main characters Gabriel and Gretta take readers on an emotional twist of events. During the story author James Joyce show how the dead affects the environment and mood of the living. During an eventful high profile party Gretta, Gabriel's wife, hears a song that takes her back in time causing her to be lost in thought. When arriving home from the party and discussing Gretta’s lost thoughts, it gives Gabriel a sense of lost pride and triggers Gabriel to have a somber epiphany. In the story James Joyce portrays a sense of insecurity, love and guilt from character to character; leaving readers with a regrettable taste.

What further contributed to the rise of modernism was the First World War, which shell-shocked many. People lost their sense of certainty and it made them change their points of views. It made modernists question civilisation. This is seen in T.S Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” which questions

At this point of the novella, his marlin is completely ripped up and he returns home on a lighter skiff. Even still, he remains calm instead of reacting with despair. He even looks forward to come back home. It is evident here, “He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind. He was past everything now and he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well and as intelligently as he could. ... The old man paid no attention to them and did not pay attention to anything except steering” (120). Instead of reacting with despair, as most people would, he remains calm. Remaining calm would mean that

In a class-based society, where your class will determine the rest of your life and who you will marry, what is better to improve in social class, hence improving all aspects of your life but at the price of sacrificing your moral code and ethics towards the people that are there for you and love you or to be honest, gentle, loyal, and respectfully to everyone around you even if you don’t get the thing you cherish and hold dearly? That’s the theme of the novel, Great Expectation by Charles Dickens, mocking the class-system that British empire utilized during the Victorian Era that he lived in. Stating that