A  NEW  ERA

or…

CHANGE  IS  INEVITABLE  EXCEPT  FROM  A  VENDING  MACHINE

(The Drums of) WarSoldiers  digging  trenches  during  the  First  World  War  (1914–18).

1. The Edwardian and Georgian AgesWhen Queen Victoria died, the royal house took the Germanic surname of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

Victoria’s son Edward reigned until 1910 as Edward VII.

Edward II.

He was succeeded by George V, his son (1910-1936).

George V

1. Children from poor families

1906: Free school meals.

The Liberals won the general elections in 1906.They introduced reforms to help three groups of people:

1907: Free school medical inspections.

1. The Edwardian and Georgian Ages

2.  Old  people  

1908: The  Old-­‐Age  Pensions  Act,  which  introduced  pensions  for  people  over  70.    

3.  Workers

1. The Edwardian and Georgian Ages

Soldiers parade to intimidate workers, Liverpool 1911.

• 1910–14: A series of strikes was called because of high prices and low wages. They were remarkable for the number of men involved and for the violence which often accompanied them.

1. The Edwardian and Georgian Ages

2. The Suffragettes

WSPU leaders Annie Kenney (left) and Christabel Pankhurst.

• At the beginning of the 20th century only men were allowed to vote.

• A few educated ladies had been arguing in favour of voting rights for women since the 1860s.

• In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel founded the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union).

• The Suffragettes, as they were called, protested that women should be able to vote.

2. The Suffragettes

• The Government dealt with the protests harshly and sent many Suffragettes to prison.• In prison some women

went on hunger strike to draw attention to their campaign. Prison

authorities began force-feeding them.• In 1918 women were finally

allowed to vote -> universal suffrage.

3. World War I

• Britain declared war on Germany on 4th August 1914.

• The war ended on 11th November 1918.

• Almost 8,000,000 people died. • Almost 22,000 were wounded.• The war was known as ‘the war

to end all wars’, but it could be better named as “the war to change all wars” due to the technological advancements and the new attitude to warfare.

3. World War I: in English painting

THE MENIN ROAD, 1919, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London..  

The most individual and expressive of the artists who recorded the battlefields of World War I

Paul Nash

His first-hand experience gave his work immediacy and brutal honesty. It took a message from the trenches tothe firesides back at home.

3. World War I: in English poetryMany British soldiers

wrote about WWI, often from the trenches,

among them Wilfred Owen and Siegfried

Sassoon.

S.Sassoon  was  one  of  the  first  to  unveil  the  hypocrisy  

of  the  war  and  of  the  propaganda.  As  it  can  be  

seen  in  this  sonnet  (also  on  Millennium  p.422)

GLORY  OF  WOMEN  (1916)  

You  love  us  when  we're  heroes,  home  on  leave,Or  wounded  in  a  mentionable  place.  You  worship  decorations;  you  believe  That  chivalry  redeems  the  war's  disgrace.  You  make  us  shells.  You  listen  with  delight,  By  tales  of  dirt  and  danger  fondly  thrilled.  You  crown  our  distant  ardours  while  we  fight,  And  mourn  our  laurelled  memories  when  we're  killed.  You  can't  believe  that  British  troops  “retire”  When  hell's  last  horror  breaks  them,  and  they  run,Trampling  the  terrible  corpses—blind  with  blood. O  German  mother  dreaming  by  the  fire,While  you  are  knitting  socks  to  send  your  son His  face  is  trodden  deeper  in  the  mud.

3. The War Poets

The War Poets: • experienced the fighting• in most cases lost their lives in the conflict

Content of their poetry ➔ the horrors of modern warfare represented in an unconventional, anti-rhetorical way

Aim of their poetry ➔ to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war

Language employed ➔ violent, everyday

Their poetry ➔ a definite move away from the 19th-century poetic conventions.

• 1916 Easter Rising

• 1918 Sinn Féin won the elections everywhere except Ulster

• 1919-1921 Irish war of independence

• 1922-1923 Civil War between IRA and the Irish Free State Army

• 1937 official creation of Eire •••••Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins ————————>

4. Ireland

The Great Watershed

Henry Matisse, La danse, 1910.

The Great Watershed

1. A cultural crisis• The First World War left the country in a

disillusioned and cynical mood. • Stability and prosperity belonged only to

the privileged class.• Consciences were haunted by the

atrocities of the war.• The gap between the younger and older

generation grew wider and wider.• Beginning of the slow dissolution of the

British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations

• New views of man and the universe emerged

2. Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis

ID EGO SUPER-EGO

The set of instinctual

impulses lacking organisation

The coordinated realistic part

Has a critical and moralising role since it

includes the constraints imposed on the

individual by society, education and moral laws

2. Effects of Freud’s theory

Freud painted by Andy Warhol (1980).

The effects of Freud’s theories were deep:

•the relationship between parents and children was altered•the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality focused attention on the importance of early developments and childhood •the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readjusted•his method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of ‘free association’ influenced the modern writers

3. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Between 1907 and 1915 Einstein developed a new theory called

‘general relativity’ (GR) to distinguish it from the original

theory of special relativity.

A theory of gravitation according to which the observed gravitational

attraction between masses results from the warping of

space and time by those masses.

•1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis because he wrote four papers on:

1. the photoelectric effect;2. Brownian motion;3. special relativity;4. the equivalence of mass and energy E = mc2

where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light.

4. A new concept of time

our mind records every single

experience as a continuous flow of ‘the already’ into

‘the not yet’

distinction between historical time and psychological time

William James (1842-1910)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

4. Historical vs psychological time

Historical time Psychological time

• External• Linear• Measured in terms of the

spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock

• Internal• Subjective• Measured by the

relative emotional intensity of a moment

5. ModernismA powerful international

movement reaching through Western cultures

gave shape to the modern consciousness

expressed the desire to break with established forms

and subjects George Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908. Museum of Fine Arts Berne.

5. ModernismCOMMON FEATURES

• The intentional distortion of shapes and genres (in literature).• The breaking down of limitations in space and time. • Emphasis on subjectivity, on how perception takes place, rather

than on what is perceived. • New literary techniques such as the stream-of-consciousness.• The use of allusive language and the development of the multiple

association of words.• The importance given to the ‘sound’ of words as conveying ‘the

music of ideas’.• The intensity of the isolated ‘moment’ or ‘image’ to provide a true

insight into the nature of things.

5. ModernismCOMMON FEATURES

• The substitution of the mythical for a realistic method and the parallelism between the contemporary and antiquity.

• The importance of unconscious as well as conscious life.

• The need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life in an artistic form.

• A rejection of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, both in the choice of materials used to produce art and in the methods of displaying, distributing and consuming art.

At the beginning of the 20th century under the influences of the French Symbolists (Stephane Mallarmé), and the American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, many poets: rejected the 19th-century regular metre and employed free verse.

6. Poetry

Modern poetry officially began with Imagism, a movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917. The name ‘Imagiste’ was invented by the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972).

T.S. Eliot is closer to Symbolism. He stated that:

April  is  the  cruellest  month,  breeding  Lilacs  out  of  the  dead  land,  mixing  Memory  and  desire,  stirring  Dull  roots  with  spring  rain.  Winter  kept  us  warm,  covering  Earth  in  forgetful  snow,  feeding  A  little  life  with  dried  tubers.  

T.S.Eliot  The  Waste  Land

• Absence of the traditional metre • Lack of regular rhyme scheme • Use of alliteration and assonance• Metre and sound determined by a correspondence

between feeling, impression and poetic form and not

by the conventional rules of poetic diction• The unifying element is the use of the poetic line• Flexibility of verse line length

6. Free verseFeatures of free verse:

The Modern NovelPablo Picasso, Still Life with Mandolin and Guitar, 1924.

7. The English novel: the beginning

The English novel bourgeois in its origin.

Its favourite theme

The novelist

Events and incidents

the gain or loss of a social status.

a mediator between his characters and the reader.

related in a more or less objective way in chronological order.

8. From the Victorian to the modern novel

the pressing need for different forms of expression

They forced novelists into a position of moral and

psychological uncertainty. The novelist ➔ became a mediator between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present.

This new ‘realism’ shifted from society to man ➔ a limited creature whose moral progress was inferior to the advances in technology.

a gradual but substantial transformation of British society

It was caused by

9. The birth of the modern novel

10. A new concept of timeTime was perceived as subjective and inner ➔

the distinction between past and present was meaningless in psychological terms.

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.

Absence of a well-structured plot with a chronological sequence of events.

It was not the passing of time that revealed the truth about

characters.

It was the American psychologist William James who coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’ (1890): “the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterise the human mind.”

11. The stream of consciousness and the interior monologue

Writers, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, adopted the interior

monologue ➔ to represent the unspoken activity of the mind.

• It’s immediate• It has no introductory expressions like ‘he thought, he remembered• There are two levels of narration: outside and inside the character’s

mind.• It has no chronological order • It uses subjective time• The rules of punctuation are not followed• There is no formal logical order