Modern Age in British Literature Essay Example

Literary Periods: The Modern 1914-1945 Literature has been written for millennia. Stories, poems, and sonnets have all been written by a spectrum of authors since the creation of written languages. Over time the world has begun to divide literature into different eras based on the age and events of the times. The content of this paper will describe modernism, a literary age based between the years 1914 and 1945. Also, this paper will contain research on a writer of the time by the name of Dylan Thomas, including some information on his personal background as well as his works such as Do not go gentle into that good night. To begin, at its time, modernism brought more literature to the stage than most if not all other eras preceding it. A perk of the Victorian Age was the greatly increased literacy rate, and with that came a higher demand for all kinds of literature. The influx of upcoming authors was looked down upon by those more sophisticated and well known, but the public found the newcomers more interesting. “Writers who refused to bow to the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream of society” (Rahn 1). Even though most of these refined novelists and poets were not well spoken of, they still made large literary contributions that society took in. Eventually populism returned to the mainstream of modern literature.
On the topic of upcoming authors, society was not seeing the common majority of works by only Caucasian males anymore. More variety was seen in this era as women, the unwealthy, and several minorities were publishing their works and being noticed. Langston Hughes, an African-American poet and females like Amy Lowell were publishing works and breaking the literary barriers for minorities. This age was the beginning of racial/sexual diversity in literature.
Characteristics of modernism have been seen as far back as the 19th century. Modern age thinkers were largely contrasting of the most recent