20th century in literature  

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"The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths—it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody [in "The Know-Nothing Bohemians] shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce. The trouble is Podhoretz has a great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often."--Allen Ginsberg, responding to "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" (1958) by Norman Podhoretz in an October 1958 interview with The Village Voice, collected in Spontaneous Mind


Chronology: Heart of Darkness (1902) - The Monkey's Paw (1902) - The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (1907) - Hell (1908) - The Phantom of the Opera (1910) - We (1920) - Ulysses (1922) - In Search of Lost Time (1913 -1927) - The Metamorphosis (1915) - The Great Gatsby (1925) - Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) - Histoire de l'oeil (1928) - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) - Solar Anus (1931) - Tropic of Cancer (1934) - Thomas the Obscure (1941) - Madame Edwarda (1941) - No Exit (1944) - Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) - Catcher in the Rye (1951) - The Conformist (1951) - Watt (1953) - Junkie (1953) - Contempt (1954) - Story of O (1954) - Lolita (1955) - The Image (1956) - The Outsider (1956) - Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957) - Candy (1958) - Emmanuelle (1959) - Naked Lunch (1959) - Boredom (1960) - Tears of Eros (1961) - Ma Mère (1966) - Danse Macabre (1981) - The Piano Teacher (1983) - The Voyeur (1985) - The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988) - Time's Arrow (1991) - American Psycho (1991) - Fight Club (1996)

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Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century (1901 to 2000).

In terms of the Euro-American tradition, the main periods are captured in the bipartite division, Modernist literature and Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1960 to 1990 respectively, divided, as a rule of thumb, by World War II. The somewhat malleable term of contemporary literature is usually applied with a post-1960 cutoff point.

Although these terms (modern, contemporary and postmodern) are most applicable to Western literary history, the rise of globalization has allowed European literary ideas to spread into non-Western cultures fairly rapidly, so that Asian and African literatures can be included into these divisions with only minor qualifications. And in some ways, such as in Postcolonial literature, writers from non-Western cultures were on the forefront of literary development.

Technological advances during the 20th century allowed cheaper production of books, resulting in a significant rise in production of popular literature and trivial literature, comparable to the similar developments in music. The division of "popular literature" and "high literature" in the 20th century is by no means absolute, and various genres such as detectives or science fiction fluctuate between the two. Largely ignored by mainstream literary criticism for the most of the century, these genres developed their own establishments and critical awards.

Towards the end of the 20th century, electronic literature developed due to the development of hypertext and later the world wide web.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded annually throughout the century (with the exception of 1914, 1918, 1935 and 1940–1943), the first laureate (1901) being Sully Prudhomme. The New York Times Best Seller list has been published since 1942.

The best-selling literary works of the 20th century are estimated to be The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 150 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies) and And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys. Perry Rhodan (1961 to present) proclaimed as the best-selling book series, with an estimated total of 1 billion copies sold.

Contents

1901–18

The Fin de siècle movement of the Belle Époque persisted into the 20th century, but was brutally cut short with the outbreak of World War I (an effect depicted e.g. in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published 1924). The Dada movement of 1916-1920 was at least in part a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war; the movement heralded the Surrealism movement of the 1920s.

1900

Genre fiction

1901

Genre fiction

1902

Genre fiction

Plays

1903

Genre fiction

1904

Genre fiction

Plays

1905

1906

Genre fiction

Plays

1907

Genre fiction

Plays

Poetry

1908

Genre fiction

Poetry

  • Personae by Ezra Pound (USA, England, Italy) - one of the first examples of 'modernist' poetry

1909

Poetry

Plays

1910

1911

Genre fiction

1912

Genre fiction

Plays

1913

Genre fiction

Poetry

1914

Poetry

1915

Genre fiction

1916

Genre fiction

Poetry

1917

Poetry

1918

Poetry

Non-fiction

Interwar period

The 1920s were a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable authors appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a scandal at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex. James Joyce's novel, Ulysses, published in 1922 in Paris, was one of the most important achievements of literary modernism.

1919

Genre fiction

1920

Plays

1921

Plays

1922

Poetry

1923

Plays

Poetry

1924

Genre fiction

Plays

1925

Genre fiction

Poetry

Non-fiction

1926

Genre fiction

Poetry

Plays

Non-fiction

1927

Plays

1928

Plays

Non-fiction

1929

Non-fiction

Genre fiction

1930

Genre fiction

Poetry

Plays

Non-fiction

1931

Genre fiction

Plays

Non-fiction

1932

Poetry

1933

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1934

Genre fiction

Poetry

Non-fiction

1935

Genre fiction

Poetry

Plays

1936

Poetry

Genre fiction

1937

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1938

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1939

Genre fiction

Poetry

Plays

World War II

1940

Genre fiction

Plays

Non-fiction

1941

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1942

Plays

1943

Genre fiction

Poetry

Non-fiction

1944

Plays

1945

Genre fiction

1946

Poetry

Plays

Non-fiction

1947

Plays

Non-fiction

1948

Genre fiction

Plays

Non-fiction

1949

Genre fiction

Plays

Postwar period

The intermediate postwar period separating "Modernism" from "Postmodernism" (1950s literature) is the floruit of the beat generation and the classical science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein. This period also saw the publication of Samuel Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, which enacted the dissolution of the self-identical human subject and inspired later novelists such as Thomas Bernhard, John Banville, and David Markson.

1950

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1951

Non-fiction

1952

Genre fiction

Plays

1953

Genre fiction

Plays

1954

Genre fiction

Plays

Non-fiction

1955

Genre fiction

Plays

Poetry

1956

Genre fiction

Plays

Poetry

Non-fiction

1957

Genre fiction

Plays

1958

Genre fiction

Plays

Non-fiction

1959

Genre fiction

Plays

Cold War period 1960–89

1960

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1961

Genre fiction

1962

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1963

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1964

Genre fiction

Non-fiction

1965

Plays

Poetry

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1966

Genre fiction

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1967

Non-fiction

1968

Non-fiction and quasi-fiction

1969

Genre fiction

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1970

Genre fiction

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1971

Genre fiction

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1972

Genre fiction

Poetry

1973

Genre fiction

1974

Genre fiction

Genre fiction

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1975

Genre fiction

1976

Genre fiction

Non-fiction and quasi-fiction

Drama

1977

1978

Genre fiction

1979

Non-fiction and Quasi-fiction

1980

1981

Genre fiction

1982

Genre fiction

1983

Genre fiction

1984

Non-fiction

1985

Genre fiction

1986

Non-fiction

1987

Genre fiction

1988

Genre fiction

1989

1990s

1990

Genre fiction

1991

1996

1997

Genre fiction

By language

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "20th century in literature" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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