The first half of the 2Oth century is divided into clearly labeled decades : the Edwardian age, the war years, the gay Twenties, the Depression Years, the war years again.

• prosperity and glitter one associates with the Edwardian age and the reign of George V. They were doubts about Britain's imperial mission and the state of the nation.
• 1920s or Jazz age : America overtakes Britain (economically and culturally). The American way of life pervaded all aspects of British life : fashion, cinema, music,... and brought new codes of social behavior.
• 1929 crash led to years of depression : class conflict and political extremism. Their idealism turned to disenchantment and anxiety.

Tensions :

-> irish question : resistance to British rules + Celtic revival mvt. 1921 : partition of Ireland (Ulster and New Irish Free state)

-> resistance against the Raj. 1947 : India's independence

+ empire begun to disintegrate → creation of a new status for states which became British Commonwealth of Nations

Modernism : the word began to be used in the 1960s to refer to several literary and artistic mvt. The main characteristics they share are

• a rejection of Victorian values and conventions and of faith in reason and progress
• an oblique response to the mass destruction of WWI
• a rejection of art as representational mimetic
• a rejections of art as conveying the writer's emotions
• Above all, the modernists believed that form carried meaning sometimes better than a description of it did, so that literary experimentation was an essential part of their work (center of consciousness, dislocated syntax, collage, dislocated chronology)

Steam of consciousness : the expression comes from William Jame's Principles of Philosophy and refers to the free, chaotic flow of ideas, impressions, sensations and memories ins someone's mind.

-> Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner

The Bloomsbury group : a set of intellectuals and artists who met at Virginia Woolf's house (Vanessa Bell, E.M Forster, Leonardo Woolf). They celebrated the pleasure of friendship and aesthetic appreciations. They rejected Victorian utilitarianism and Puritanism, particularly the role traditionally assigned to women. They glorified love, including homosexuality, emotions, friendship and loyalty.

Social realism : they portrayed the society of their time. They represented a wide range of sensibilities and reactions to the anxiety of the time (left-wing allegiances, religious belief,...)

-> John Galsworthy, H.G Wells, Arnold Bennett

In the 1930s modernist experimentation was no longer the best way of expressing angst of the times and novelists chose different ways of addressing it, from utopia (Huxley, Orwell), to religious questionings (Greene).