A Modern March My Sign Up Post

Allie at A Literary Odyssey is hosting this reading challenge. It starts on March 1 and ends on March 31. The goal is to read at least one book from the Modernist period. I want to reread The Great Gatsby in time for the new movie version coming this summer. I have read books by several of the authors before including Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. So I also want to read one book that I have not read before by one of the Modernist authors. It sounds like fun! Sign up is on her blog: http://aliteraryodyssey.blogspot.com/



If you have no idea what constitutes a piece of "Modern" literature (and whenever I say Modern, I don't mean contemporary lit), it generally refers to literature written between the very late 19th century and the halfway point of the 20th century. In general, Modernist writers experimented with style, form, and theme. They broke away from the traditional viewpoints found in literature until that point and strove to focus on the darker and more unpleasant sides of life. This is also the time period where stream-of-consciousness made its roaring appearance.

Some of the big writers of the Modernist period were:

• William Faulkner
• Virginia Woolf
• Ezra Pound
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ernest Hemingway
• Samuel Beckett
• Gertrude Stein
• e e cummings
• T.S.Eliot
• James Joyce

There are more, of course, but those are the heavy hitters of the period and those most closely associated with the movement.