What Is Post Modernism

2. The English Novel 1945-1990 The history of the post-war novel in English, and also that of drama and poetry, cannot be understood without reference to the coexistence in the first half of the twentieth century of Modernism and the more traditional approaches to literature inherited from the Victorian period. The Modernist writers reacted against realism in fiction and the remains of Romantic sentimentalism in poetry by introducing technical innovations that could be used to look at reality from the point of view of the irrational, the subconscious, the anti-sentimental, or the highly individualistic. In drama, the revolution followed other lines, with G. B. Shaw 's introduction to the English stage of the naturalistic drama developed by

Post-modernism was born out of this dilemma. Post-modernism can thus be said to be a new cultural atmosphere in which the writer is inevitably aware of this open choice between tradition and experimentalism, rather than a continuation of Modernism or a reaction against it. Post-war novelists cannot escape the shadow of either Modernism or Victorianism and must accommodate both in their work. Some have produced a new synthesis –which is what is really characteristic of post-modernism– while others have openly acknowledged their allegiance to either literary tradition or experimentation.

As far as the post-war novel is concerned, the post-modernist synthesis was relatively slow to come, if it came at all, for there seemed to be a need to first define the new contours of social reality after the war before resuming the project of

Hartley 's The Go-Between (1953) analyse the present by looking backwards, searching for the flaws that cause the desolation of the individual speaking in the present. This return to a personal past shows, above all, why innocence has been the main casualty of war, and suggests that despite its apparent placidity, the best that the pre-war world could offer in social terms was inherently corrupt. The idea that civilisation contains the seeds of corruption is perhaps best expressed in William Golding 's Lord of the Flies (1954). In this novel Golding does not examine a particular moment of the recent past, but childhood, as the site where adult civilised values are implanted, only to find there sheer