Early Modernism (~1900 – 1930)
Thirty years in which the novel turned inward, the First World War blew the 19th century apart, and Freud convinced the West that the mind has a basement.
What Defined It
Two movements happening at once. The interior turn: writers stop describing society from the outside and start tracking consciousness from within. Proust’s [[swanns-way|Swann’s Way]] (1913) is seven volumes of memory reassembling itself. Mann’s [[buddenbrooks|Buddenbrooks]] (1901) maps the slow metaphysical exhaustion of a bourgeois family. Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner push stream-of-consciousness to its limits. Kafka in Prague invents a flat, bureaucratic hallucination the world still calls “Kafkaesque.”
Then the war. 1914–18 annihilates the 19th-century confidence in progress. Hemingway’s stripped-down prose is a direct response — the old elaborate sentences can’t be trusted anymore, only nouns and verbs can. Remarque writes All Quiet on the Western Front from the trench. Bulgakov, inside the Russian revolution, starts writing supernatural satires of the new Soviet reality.
Freud is the era’s silent organizer. Once he has written about dreams, slips, the unconscious, and the death drive, literature can’t pretend the surface of the mind is the whole mind.
Key Figures
Proust, Mann, Kafka, Hemingway, Bulgakov, Joyce, Woolf, Rilke, Musil, Pound, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Freud; the avant-gardes (Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, the Bauhaus).
Why It Matters
Everything we now call “serious literature” runs on modernist operating system. The fragmented narrator, the unreliable memory, the surface that hides a depth, the suspicion of plot and closure — all standard issue after 1930, all invented here.
Connections
- Proust — Swann’s Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Sodom and Gomorrah, The Sweet Cheat Gone, Finding Time Again
- Mann — Buddenbrooks
- Kafka — The Trial, A Hunger Artist
- Hemingway — A Farewell to Arms
- Bulgakov — The Heart of a Dog, The White Guard, The Fatal Eggs
- Freud — the era’s unconscious
Lineage
- Predecessors: 19th Century realism; Russian Realism; symbolism
- Successors: Late Modernism; Lost Generation; Dystopian Fiction