Dr. Agnes Yeow Swee Kim
Drama of the Modern Era
2 December. 2012
Modern Drama;
The spectacle of language breaking down and the explosion of the hysteria underlying the polite banalities of social intercourse To be modern is to be, in many important ways, different from anyone who ever lived before. This idea does not mean that human being has undergone a change; man’s nature is always the same, but his perception of himself has distorted in a way that is significantly new. There have been revolutions in the history of art before today. There is a revolution with every new generation, and every century we get a wider or deeper change under special circumstances, which affect our life. Modernism is the biggest revolution in western literature of the first half of the twentieth century. The development and rapid growth of industrialized societies, followed by the horror of world war one, were the most important factors which formed modernism that not only produced a break with all former historical conditions, but also is characterized by an immortal process of fragmentation and uncertainty within itself. Modernism came with the idea of change and said that traditional forms of art, literature, religion, social conditions and daily life, in this emerging industrialized world has became out dated. Therefore, writers tried to give birth to new forms of art and in the late 19th and 20th century there came an overflow of new kinds of drama called modern drama. This kind of drama was different from traditional ones and clearly was different in form because it contained unlimited forms and this is why it is called drama of fragmentation that results in writers having their own impact on literature. By the social, economic and scientific changes that happened during the period, people’s attitude changed crucially and Just like every age in literature and arts, those things that take place at the time seriously affected the works
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