20th century in literature  

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See 19th century in literature, 20th century, French literature of the 20th century , contemporary literature,Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels

Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) the 1900s through the 1990s.

As compared other media

Since the advent of sound film in the 1930s, the consumption of written fiction suffered. Still due technological advancements in the printing industry, there was a rise of pulp fiction.

From the 1950s onwards reading as solitary entertainment suffered greatly from the advent of television.

Periodization

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 early-1970s cutoff point.

Technological advances

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 development in music. The division of "popular literature" and "high literature" in the 20th century is by no means absolute, and various genres such as high fantasy or science fiction fluctuate between the two.

Technological advances

For the most part of the century mostly ignored by mainstream literary criticism, these recently canonized genres such as science fiction develop their own establishments and critical awards, such as the Nebula Award (since 1965), the British Fantasy Award (since 1971) or the Mythopoeic Awards (since 1971).

Towards the end of the century, electronic literature (hypertext fiction, interactive fiction) rises to some significance with the advent of the internet.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is 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 works of the 20th century are estimated to be Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966, 900 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies), And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies) and The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 100 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys.

Perry Rhodan (1961 to present) boasts as being the best-selling book series, with an estimated total of 1 billion copies sold.

1900-1918

The Fin de siècle movement of the Belle Époque persisted into the 1900s, 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 warm; the movement heralded the Surrealism movement of the 1920s.

• Thomas Mann publishes Buddenbrooks in 1901
• Joseph Conrad publishes the novella Heart of Darkness in 1902, after the serial release in 1898 and The Secret Agent in 1907
• Jack London publishes The Call of the Wild in 1903
• Serbian writers use the Belgrade literary style, an Ekavian writing form which set basis for the later standardization of the Serbian language
• D. H. Lawrence publishes Sons and Lovers
• Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
• Thomas Mann publishes Death in Venice
• Dadaism

Interwar period

interwar literature

The 1920s were a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable author 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.

• Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One's Own
• T. S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land
• James Joyce publishes Ulysses
• Franz Kafka publishes The Trial
• Hermann Hesse publishes Siddhartha
• Alexey Tolstoy publishes Aelita
• George Bernard Shaw publishes Back to Methuselah
• Eugene O'Neill awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922, and Strange Interlude in 1928.
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is often described as the epitome of the "Jazz Age" in American literature.
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque recounts the horrors of WWI and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front.
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the lives and morality of post-World War I youth.
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is about a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s.
• W. H. Auden publishes Poems.
• Aldous Huxley publishes Brave New World.

World War II

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• Orson Welles
• George Orwell
• J. R. R. Tolkien writes The Lord of the Rings (published 1954/55)

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.

Cold War period

• Umberto Eco Il nome della rosa (1980 - English translation: The Name of the Rose, 1983), Il pendolo di Foucault (1988 - English translation: Foucault's Pendulum, 1989)

1990s

• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
• Harry Potter series
• Boris Akunin
• slam poetry

See also

• 20th century#Literature
• History of modern literature
• Modern Library's selection of best 20th century novels
• Museum of Modern Literature, Germany
• Experimental literature

by language

• French literature of the 20th century
• 20th century Italian literature
• 20th century American literature