Bookclub 2025-26

In the Bookclub this year we will discuss the novels in English of modernist writers, focusing on how they created this cultural movement.

Modernism emerged in the late 19th century and continued until the end of the Second World War. Authors continued the tradition of social critique, but they focused on the individual rather than society, also emphasising the writing process over plot. They broke away from Victorian literary themes, as in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which challenged traditional sexual mores and class relationships. Modernist writers reimagined form, style, and structure in response to the profound changes in human perception brought about by the shock of two World Wars. This was expressed in new narrative techniques.

One key technique is stream-of-consciousness, a free-flowing interior monologue, influenced by Husserl's phenomenology. This approach shifts away from mirroring logical thinking, instead portraying the mind at work through fragmented thoughts, non-grammatical prose, and free associations of images and ideas. One author who adopted this technique was James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. Instead of using the traditional plot structure of beginning, middle, and end, he used the interior monologue to select moments in the life of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.

Modernist writers also employed non-linear storylines, featuring events that are not presented chronologically, often through parallel plots, dreams and narratives embedded within the main story. A notable example of this departure from linear order is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Freedom from sexual taboos, conventionalism and the establishment were the dystopian themes in Huxley's Brave New World, also that of modernism.

Another novel approach is the use of multiple perspectives, where several characters narrate in the first person, highlighting their subjectivity and enriching the story through various points of view. For instance, in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf employs three viewpoints centred around the Ramsay couple and the lighthouse. Life is presented through piecemeal epiphanies. Themes of time and loss, shaped by death, tragedy and war, lie at the heart of this often poetic narrative.