Overview
Modern and contemporary English literature reflect an era of experimentation, disillusionment, and global transformation. From World War I to the digital age, writers responded to war, fragmentation, identity, and postcolonial realities. Literature became increasingly diverse in form, voice, and theme.
Key Themes and Characteristics
- Modernism: Emphasis on form, fragmentation, and subjective consciousness.
- Postmodernism: Irony, metafiction, and skepticism of grand narratives.
- War and Trauma: Literature as witness to conflict and cultural loss.
- Postcolonial Identity: British Empire’s legacy explored through language, migration, and resistance.
- Social Justice: Race, gender, class, and sexuality come to the forefront.
- Formal Innovation: Nonlinear narratives, stream-of-consciousness, and genre blending.
Major Authors and Works
- Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
- James Joyce – Ulysses (though Irish, major influence on British modernism)
- George Orwell – 1984, Animal Farm
- Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
- W.H. Auden – September 1, 1939
- Seamus Heaney – Digging, North
- Chinua Achebe – Things Fall Apart (British colonial legacy)
- Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children
- Zadie Smith – White Teeth
- Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go
Quick Tip
Focus on how 20th and 21st century literature reflects both fragmentation and connection. Pay attention to experiments in voice, form, and cultural hybridity.