While 20th century literature is a diverse field covering a variety of genres there are common characteristics that change literature forever. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) might be said to enact both the disintegration of Western culture and a search into previous mythology and tradition for forms of reintegration and spiritual regeneration. The philosophes created ruptures in traditional social relations of 13th century. Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927) registers the impact of the war in the sense of loss and destitution that pervades the last third of this novel. New Criticism is an approach to literature made popular in the 20th century that evolved out of formalist criticism. The work of modernists such as Proust, Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, and Woolf was marked by an intense awareness, derived from the French symbolists, of the limitations of language and its inadequacy for expressing the highest truths and the most profound strata of experience. An important concern of American critics such as John Macy, Randolph Bourne, and Van Wyck Brooks was to establish a sense of national identity through tracing a specifically American literary tradition. In this blog I'm going discuss about general characteristics of 20th century or modern age literature.It is part of my study task and activity. The early 20th century artistic social movements had a wide-ranging impact, most clearly felt in the world of design and decoration. The increasing primacy attached to the role of language is effectively an acknowledgment not only of the constructed nature of all of the above terms, but also of the need to examine our own perceptual apparatus and the constitution of our own perspectives. In poetry, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens; in the theatre, George Bernard Shaw, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht; and in fiction, Marcel Proust, D.H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann have contributed to criticism in the act of justifying their art. Hello readers! This century witnessed two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Holocaust in Europe, the Cold War, revolutionary social equality movements, and the exploration of space. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. The conclusion of World War II formalized the opposition between the Western powers and the Soviet bloc of nations. As literature’s place in society has become more problematic and peripheral, and as humanistic education has grown into a virtual industry with a large group of professionals serving as one another’s judges, criticism has evolved into a complex discipline, increasingly refined in its procedures but often lacking a sense of contact with the general social will. General characteristics of the literary criticism of 18th century. 20th century. The historical sense leads one to study the succeeding ages. History repeats itself and time records the events through its lenses of zeitgeist. 2.Great Britain – Intellectual Nearly all of these critical movements see human subjectivity as a function of language, as a position within a network of signs which spreads ultimately across numerous registers – of culture, politics, aesthetics, ethnicity, class, and gender – in both time and space. It was marked by a crisis of belief, by a questioning and exploring of the categories of subjectivity, objectivity, and time, as well as by a withdrawal into preoccupation with literary form, into the past, into tradition and myth. 12 Publishers. The philosophes created ruptures in traditional social relations of 13th century. For example, the impulse to make literary criticism a scientific discipline – as in Northrop Frye, much structuralism, and New Criticism – is part of a widespread positivistic trend in bourgeois society: science achieved an exaltation whereby other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, philosophy, and literary criticism, sought to found themselves on scientific principles. Which among many approaches—linguistic, generic, formal, sociological, psychoanalytic, and so forth—is best adapted to making full sense of a text? Source: A History of  Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present Editor(s): M. A. R. Habib, Categories: Anthropology, Cultural Materialism, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Existentialism, Feminism, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Marxism, Modernism, New Historicism, Philosophy, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Psychoanalysis, Reader Response Criticism, Structuralism, Tags: A. C. Bradley, Allen Tate, Anthony Blunt, Axel’s Castle, Benedetto Croce, C. S. Lewis, Calverton, Charles Eliot, Christopher Caudwell, Clement Rosset, DH Lawrence, Eastman, Edmund Wilson, Elder Olson, Fabian Society, Floyd Dell, FR Leavis, Frank Kermode, Frank Norris, G. E. Moore, G. Wilson Knight, George Saintsbury, George Santayana, Granville Hicks, H. L. Mencken, Hamlin Garland, Herbert Read, I A Richards, IA Richards, Jacques Bouveresse, James Gibbons Huneker, John Carey, John Dewey, John Macy, John Middleton Murry, John Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, Literary Criticism and Theory in the Twentieth Century, Matthew Arnold, Max Eastman, New Humanism, New York intellectuals, Norman Foerster, Paul Elmer More, Paul Valéry, Philip Rahv, Practical Criticism, Principles of Literary Criticism, R. P. Blackmur, R.S. , Jean-Pierre Richard ( b Function of criticism were laid by figures as! International Brigade, Tel Quel moved from an initial aesthetic emphasis toward activism 82077 4 hardback. 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