823GOL.
Introduction
Years the author considers pivotal in history: 1492, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1945, 1968.
He adds this year, 1922, for literature.
The authors mentioned as we begin.
Willa Cather
begin her 1936 book of essays, Not Under Forty
she made the melancholy remark: "The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
Cather was thinking of:
Ulysses, February, 1922
The Waste Land, October, 1922
All at once these two books seemed to herald a new modernist era in which the form of story telling she prized, and had excelled at, was no longer of signal importance.
Personal comments:
This is incredibly important and incredibly interesting for me. Years ago I put together my "history" of literature which I use to discuss literature with the grandchildren. In my "diary" it is chapter 24 and runs to 43 pages. I occasionally add to it but most additions are now elsewhere. I wanted the "chapter" to show my thoughts when I first wrote it back in 2006 or thereabouts.
If the author chooses 1922 as the year the world (literature) broke, then the author needs to pick the year Romanticism began: 1749, with Rosseau’s essay. That period ended with the death of Goethe. But I digress.
Cather's own novel of the war, One of Ours, was published in 1922 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. But her novel was not a modernist novel; she knew at the time she had become a relic of an old literature the value of which had not been preserved against the new literature that Joyce and Eliot represented.
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