The+Twentieth+Century

=The Twentieth Century=

 toc **//On or about December 1910, human character changed//.**~Virginia Woolf

**//It appears likely that poets in our civilization,//** **//as it exists at present, must be difficult. . . .//** **//The poet must become more and more comprehensive,//** **//more allusive, more indirect, in order to force,//** **//to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning//.** ~T.S. Eliot

**Introduction**
 I t's safe to say (at least for a little while longer) that if you're reading this page you were born in the twentieth century. Moreover most of your life to date has been lived during the twentieth century. While it is, thus, the period we are most familiar with in terms of our personal experience, the one closest to us in time, it is also a period that saw immense changes in society and literature. It was a period that was marked by two world wars, by a great, worldwide economic depression, by the dissolution of the British Empire, by increasing democratization of society, and by the advent of new technologies.

 Not surprisingly, the literature of the century is just as varied. At the turn of the century the Georgians and the Decadent or Aesthetic movements were two streams of poetry that derived from, and were in reaction to, the poetry of the Victorian era. In fiction, the realistic novel was dominant. But just as World War I shattered many assumptions about society and humanity, the poetry of the first world war and the literature that came afterwards was often unsettling, disruptive and emphasized new interests and approaches. Imagism and Modernism (as distinct from simply modern) flourished in the period between the two world wars. In the post-World War II era, various reactions to Modernism (including Postmodernism) appeared. With all literary periods, what we later come to see as its signal characteristics is not always immediately evident and is not always neatly contained within a set of dates. As products of the twentieth century, we may find it even more difficult to make a definitive statement about the period, especially since in many ways the twentieth century is still with us and still part of us today.

Timeline
1901: Queen Victoria's death 1902: Boer War ends with British Sovereignty, Publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Irish National Theatre Movement founded in Dublin 1903: Women's Social and Political Union founded <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1904: J.M.Barrie's //Peter Pan// first performed, the Abbey Theatre opens its doors in Dublin <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1905: Bloody Sunday massacre in Russia, Albert Einstein publishes his theory of relativity, the Dungannon Club starts (beginning of Sinn Fein) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1906: First women in the world get to vote in Finland, Henrik Ibsen dies <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1907: J.M.Synge's Playboy of the Western World opens and causes a riot in Dublin <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1908: First airplane takes off from English soil, First Congress of Freudian Psychology occurs in Salzburg, Cubism is born <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1909: Anton Chekov's //The Seagull// is first performed in Britain <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1910: Edward VII's death, Filippo Marinetti (the founder of the Futurist movement<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">) speaks in Englan d at a women's club, the first exhibition of the Russian Union of Youth, <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1911: First Portuguese republic, first use of the term 'expressionism <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1912: Titanic sunk, Imagism introduced, August Strindberg dies <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1914: World War I begins, Publication of James Joyce's Dubliners <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1916: The first Dada play is performed in France, the Kingdom of Poland is reinstated <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1917: The October Revolution begins, Hogarth Press is founded <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1918: World War I ends, women are allowed to vote in Great Britain, Russian royal family murdered, Wilfred Owen killed in battle <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1921: Hitler becomes the leader of his party in Germany <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1922: Publication of Joyce's //Ulysses// (in France) and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Mussolini rises to power, the USSR is officially established <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1923: Yeats wins the Nobel Prize for Literature <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1924: Lenin dies <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1925: First Surrealist group art exhibition in France, the first part of Hitler's Mein Kampf and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway are published, Shaw wins the Nobel Prize for Literature <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1926: Foundations laid for British Commonwealth of Nations (former territories of the empire) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1928: Brecht's The Threepenny Opera premieres in Germany <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1929: The Great Depression starts in the USA, resonates through Germany <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1931: Economic crisis affects France <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1932: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is published <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1933: Hitler's party comes into power, Lorca published three new works <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1936-1939: Spanish Civil War <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1936: George V dies, Ulysses is published openly in Great Britain, Lorca assasinated <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">1937: Guernica is bombed, The Great Terror occurs in the Soviet Union <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1939-1945: World War II <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1947: India and Pakistan become independent nations (beginning of decolonization) <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1949: Republic of Ireland <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1972: Britain joins European Common Market <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1982: Falklands War <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> 1998: Hong Kong returned to China

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Twentieth-Century Literary Contexts
<span style="cursor: pointer; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Drama in the Twentieth Century <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Modernists' Perception of the Past <span style="cursor: pointer; font-family: Georgia,serif;">The First World War and Literature <span style="cursor: pointer; font-family: Georgia,serif;">Imagism and Modernism and Beyond <span style="cursor: pointer; font-family: Georgia,serif;">The British Empire: Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, Literature <span style="cursor: pointer; font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Celtic Revival and the Abbey Theatre

Twentieth-Century Authors

 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Joseph Conrad
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Thomas Hardy
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Rupert Brooke
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Wilfred Owen
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Edward Thomas
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">T.S. Eliot
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">D.H. Lawrence
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">W.B. Yeats
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">James Joyce
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Virginia Woolf
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">W.H. Auden
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Ford Madox Ford
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Samuel Beckett
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">John Millington Synge
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Derek Walcott
 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Dylan Thomas

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">**References**


 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> Photo byJoseph Beuys Hat. http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_beuys_hat/page25/


 * <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 14.4px;">Michaelides, Chris. "Chronology of the European Avant Garde, 1900 - 1937."//Www.bl.uk/breakingtherules//. Dec. 2007. Web. 10 June 2011. <[]>.