Modernist Literature - Modernist Literature After 1939

Modernist Literature After 1939

Though The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism ending by c.1939, with regard to British and American literature, "When (if) modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred". Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in 1947. In fact many modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960, including Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot published two plays in the 1950s, while Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965. Then there is Samuel Beckett, born in 1906, who produced works from the 1940s until the 1980s, including Waiting for Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961), Rockaby (1981). While Beckett is a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of modernism, there are those who see him as a post-modernist