Modernist Literature

In response to an advancing "machine age," a World War, and great economic upheaval, a group of visionary writers in the early twentieth century (roughly 1895-1940) broke from Romanticism in an attempt to experiment with forms more true to the period's radically shifting values. Examine how these writers conveyed the anxieties of modernity, and further, expanded horizons for the literature that was to follow. Close readings may include the work of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Vriginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams and Zora Neale Hurston.