It is very hard to get perspective on and characterize, let alone evaluate, the literature of our own time because:

• We are too close to it.
• It is still writing itself.
• Literary historians' labels and generalizations about works are most often attached after the period in question is long over.

Literary historians describe two general phases of 20th century literature, divided by World War II:

• Modern literature--roughly 1900 or 1914--1945
• Contemporary literature--1945 to the present

The great overshadowing events of the 20th century include:

• World War I
• The Great Depression
• World War II, including the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
• The Cold War
• The launch of Sputnik and advent of space flight
• The end of colonialism and the rise of Third World countries
• The reshaping of the face of world Communism

A number of key thinkers have influenced the novels of the 20th century. They include:

• Charles Darwin,whose Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) described man as simply the occupant of the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder and who promoted the idea of survival of the fittest
• Karl Marx, who in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Capital (1867) saw history as the struggle between capitalist owners and the non propertied proletariat with the revolution ultimately won by the workers
• Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work valued instinct over intellect and insisted on the complete freedom of the individual in a world that lacks transcendent law ("God is Dead")
• Sir James Frazier, whose recounting of myths in The Golden Bough (1890) showed the continuity and similarity between primitive and civilized culture
• Sigmund Freud, who in Interpretation of Dreams (1899) put forth a new model of personality governed in large part by irrational and unconscious survivals of infantile fantasy
• Carl G. Jung, who described the concepts of the collective unconscious, a buried level of universal experience tapped by myth, religion, and art, and the concept of archetypes, the master patterns revealing the common experiences of the human species

• Max Planck whose quantum theory (1900) described the unpredictability of atomic and subatomic particles
• Albert Einstein whose theory of relativity (1905) abandoned concepts of absolute motion and absolute difference of time and space and proposed that reality consisted of a four-dimensional space-time continuum
• Werner Heisenburg whose Uncertainty Principle (1927) proclaimed that scientific measurement (specifically the measurement of electrons) was a matter of approximation emphasizing the approximate nature of reality
• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) who saw the human condition as absurd because man exists in the world without any understanding of his fate
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), developer of existentialism, the belief that man is totally responsible for his own actions and that he ought to reject external laws

Albert Einstein

In the 20th century man confronted emptiness and doubts about:

• the existence of God
• the primacy of the human race in creation
• the supremacy of reason in human affairs
• the perception that life is self-evidently worth living
• the nature of reality

The 20th century, like the Victorian era, is a period characterized by the dizzying rapidity of change.

With the advent of air and space travel and the development of telecommunications, and with such sociological developments as the rise of multinational corporations and the growing equality of the sexes, the planet has truly become a Global Village.

The change that characterized the Victorian era was most prominently the concept of progress caused by the new industrialization.

By the modern era the erosion of the fundamental principles of science and religion begun in the 19th century had taken full effect. The fundamental modern change was massive disillusionment.

Most modern writers looked within themselves for a principle of order.

The literature of the 20th century has an overwhelming preoccupation with the self, the nature of consciousness, and the processes of perception. Literature is often subjective, and personal and internal.

Authors are concerned with the fragmentation of both experience and thought. Many employ stream-of-consciousness: the fluid, associational, often illogical, sequence of the ideas, feelings and impressions of a single mind as seen in the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Genres overlap and disappear; we see the rise of metafiction, i.e., self-reflexive literature about literature.

FRANZ KAKFA (1883-1924, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia

Noted for his surrealistic fiction such as the novella "The Metamorphosis" (1915, tr. 1948) and The Trial (1925, tr. 1937)

ERICH MARIE REMARQUE (1898-1970)

German journalist and novelist

Wrote All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), the best known and best example of World War I anti-war literature

THOMAS MANN (1875-1955)

German novelist and essayist, known for his narrative psychological studies of the artistic temperament and for his exploration of mythology.

Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927; he became an American citizen in 1944 after fleeing the Nazis.

Major Works:

• "Death in Venice" (1912), a novella
• The Magic Mountain (1924) a Bildungsroman set in a sanatorium

MARCEL PROUST (1871-1922)

French novelist whose works attempt to find the true meaning of past experience in involuntary memories stimulated by some object or circumstance

His masterwork is Recherche du Temps Perdu (literally, in search of lost time); English title Remembrance of Things Past) (16 volumes, 1913-27); includes Swann's Way

ANDRE MALREAUX (1901-76)

French novelist and critic who wrote novels of political and social involvement filled with pessimism about the destiny of Western man.

Man's Fate (1933), based on the Shanghai insurrection of 1927 in which Communists take over the city and are then rebuffed by former ally Chaing-Kai Shek

JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)

Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet and practitioner of experimental narrative techniques.

Major Works:

• The Dubliners (1914), a short story collection
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916),largely autobiographical
• Ulysses (1921)
• Finnegan's Wake (1939)

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1935)

English novelist and essayist, whose fiction featured stream-of-consciousness technique

Major Works:

• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• A Room of One's Own (1929) a book-length essay about a woman's need to find a space to do her own creative work

D.H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930) whose novels often glorified nature and featured frank sexuality.

Major Works:

• Sons and Lovers (1913), largely autobiographical
• Women in Love (1921)
• Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928) famously banned for its sex scenes.

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

American novelist and short story writer whose stories set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County of his home state of Mississippi chronicled the decline of the South after the Civil War.

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949

Major Works:

• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• Light in August (1932)

Literature of the contemporary period is also often referred to as post-modern or neo-modern literature.

Even more than the Moderns, contemporary authors reflect pluralism. They are preoccupied with perception, fragmentation, the loss of belief in anything outside the self, pervasive irony.

Many experiment with metafiction, the preoccupation with the text itself.

The era immediately following the end of World War II (1945-1963) was dominated by an awareness of the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Other key events of the era include the McCarthy hearings and Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation (1954) as well as the rise of the influence of television.

The recent past (1963--present) is marked by social unrest and political upheaval.

Domestic upheaval included

• race riots
• assassinations, assassination attempts
• protests against the Vietnam War
• the Stonewall Rebellion (1969) and the rise of the gay rights movement
• the feminist movement marked by the publication of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) and by the appearance of Ms. magazine (1972) as well as the widespread use of the birth control pill
• the Watergate Scandal culminating in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974
• the omnipresence of drugs and both soft and hard core pornography
• the decline of the family and rising divorce rates
• the AIDS epidemic
• 9/11/01 and the war on terrorism

Television is touted as a reason for the decline in national literacy

Novelist Bernard Malamud declared that no one knows how to tell a story anymore.

More and more fiction features the anti-hero, alternately a victim, a rebel, or a bumbling failure.

Surrealism and black comedy become more popular.

There is a strong resurgence of realistic writing, often in support of social change:

• Nadine Gordimer and playwright Athol Fugard in South Africa
• James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison on racism
• Alice Walker and Toni Morrison on racism and sexism
• Alexander Solzhenitzen on Stalinism
• Elie Wiesel on the Holocaust
• Salman Rushdie on Islam
• Yukio Mishima on Japanese imperialism

Other American realists of note include:

• John Updike (b. 1932). author of Rabbit, Run (1960) and several sequels
• John Cheever (1912-82 whose The Wapshot Chronicles (1957) portrayed life in the suburbs
• Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
• Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940), a K-Mart realist whose works such as In Country (1985) relate the drab experiences of the lower middle class

American regionalists include:

• Larry McMurtry ( Texas)
  • Lonesome Dove
  • Terms of Endearment
• Anne Tyler ( Baltimore)
  • The Accidental Tourist
  • Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
• Gail Godwin ( North Carolina)
  • A Mother and Two Daughters
• Pat Conroy (South Carolina)
  • The Lords of Discipline
  • The Prince of Tides

Jewish literature in the United States portrayed the dilemmas of misfit heroes yearning for meaningful lives and moral regeneration

• Saul Bellow (1915-2005), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1976
  • The Adventures of Augie March (1953), winner of the National Book Award
  • Seize the Day (1956)
  • Henderson the Rain King (1959)
  • Herzog (1964)
  • Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)
  • Humboldt's Gift (1975), winner of Pulitzer Prize
• Philip Roth (b 1933)
  • Goodbye, Columbus (1959), short stories that won the Pulitzer Prize
  • Portnoy's Complaint
• Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
  • The Assistant
  • The Natural
  • The Fixer

Writers in English whose work illuminates the Third World:

• Amy Tan (Chinese)
  • The Joy Luck Club (1989)
• Sandra Cisneros (Hispanic) winner of a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation
• Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) (Native American)
  • Love Medicine (1984), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
  • The Beet Queen
• Bharati Mukherjee (Indian)
  • Jasmine (1989)

Experimentalists in the United States include:

• William Burroughs
  • Naked Lunch (1959)
• Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)
  • V. (1963)
  • The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
  • Gravity's Rainbow (1972)
• John Barth (b. 1930)
  • Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

American feminists include:

• Erica Jong
  • Fear of Flying

Other major modern literary writers in the United States include:

• Jane Smiley
  • A Thousand Acres
• Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
  • The Bluest Eye (1970)
  • Song of Solomon (1977)
  • Beloved (1987)
• Alice Walker (b. 1944)
  • The Color Purple (1982)
  • In Search of Our Mother's Garden (1982), "womanist" prose

• John Hersey
  • Hiroshima (1946)
• Truman Capote
  • In Cold Blood (1966)
• William Styron
  • The Confessions of Nat Turner
• E. L. Doctorow
  • Daniel's Song (1971), about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
• Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
  • The Executioner's Song (1979), about Gary Gilmore who refused to challenge his execution
• Alex Haley
  • Roots
• Tom Wolfe
  • The Right Stuff, about the Mercury 7 astronauts

Another trend in contemporary fiction is the rise of serious fantasy, especially as it is embodied in magical realism--the concept that encompasses both the events of everyday life and the dimensions of the imagination.

The leading magical realist is Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.