CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN

NOVEL

By Fictional Name: Sarah M Terry

• Changing events and developments such as the world wars and the Great Depression changed fiction.

• Novel’s regular form changed for experimental forms of flux, perplexity, openness, skepticism, freedom, and horror.

• Chapters broken into fragments • Sentences dissolved into the streams and flows of

interior psychic life. • Freudian psychology and Marxism influenced writers.• “Doubt” the dominant mood of modern fiction.• Truth made a relative thing.• Modern novels deal in no absolutes- moral, perceptual,

or cultural. • Traditional narration replaced with subjective narrative.

• “Consciousness” is the modern novels signature field of play.

• Character lost coherence • Plot turned now on decisions, realizations, and

reflections that were more minute and diverse. • The past appears in novels as something to be

discovered only haphazardly, imperfectly, and through much effort.

• No moral preaching.• Novelists took aesthetic experiment to new heights, in

the hope that doing so could reform culture.• Americans of the 1920’s were “the lost generation.” • The sense of the world still at war, or deeply wounded by

the war, hovers over the fiction of the twenties.• Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the

novel.

• The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920’s and 30’s.

• The Harlem Renaissance• Novels of Social Awareness• Most readers wanted escape-writing.• Writers have become more innovative and self-aware. • Fiction in the second half of the 20th century reflects the

character of each decade. • Loneliness was a dominant theme in the 1950’s. • Writers criticized citizens for losing their individualism

and becoming too conformist. • The 1960’s was marked by a blurring of the line between

fiction and fact, novels and reportage that has carried through the present day.

• In the 1980’s-the “Me Decade”- ensued, in which individuals tended to focus more on personal concerns than on larger social issues.

• Concern with setting, character, and themes associated with realism returned.

• The close of the 1980’s and the beginning of 1990s saw minority literature flourish.

Some Writers Of The 20th Century

• Herman Melville (1819-1891)• Mark Twain (1835-1910)• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)• William Faulkner (1897-1962)• Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)• John Dos Passos (1896-1970)• John Steinbeck (1902-1968)• Richard Wright (1908-1960)• Norman Mailer (1932- )• John Gardner (1933-1982)• Toni Morrison (1931-)• Alice Walker (1944-)

SUMMARY

• The novels signature attributes are its skepticism, interiority,absense of moral preaching.

• Faster, fragmentary writing • “Doubt” the dominant mood of modern fiction. • They make truth to be a relative thing.• Traditional narration replaced with subjective narrative.• Emphasis on “Consciousness”• The past is discovered haphazardly, imperfectly, through much

effort.• Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the novel. • The way the story was told became as important as the story itself. • The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme.• Novels of social awareness.• Minority literature flourished.• Escape-writing.• Loneliness was a dominant theme in the 1950’s • An ironic, comic vision also came into view.• novels portrayed moving human dramas. • Concern with setting, character, and themes associated with realism

returned.