The coming of modern age

5. The coming of Modern Age.
Queen Victorias reign ended in 1901, but the Victorian age ended about twenty years earlier. That peculiar spirit called Victorianism began to disappear with men like Swinburne the rebel, Fitzgerald the pessimist, Butler the satirist, and others. The literature produced from 1880 to 1914 is characterised either by an attempt to find substitutes for a religion which seems dead, or by a kind of spiritual emptiness, a sense of the hopelessness of trying to believe in anything.
There were many possible substitutes for religion. One was Art. Walter Pater was its prophet. Art for Arts sake was the theme of books like Marius the Epicurean. It was ones duty to cultivate pleasure, to drink deep from the fountains of natural and created beauty. In other words, he advocated hedonism as a way of life.

5.1. The nineties.
Hedonism was the thesis of some of Oscar Wildes witty essays, as also of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde seems to be concerned, however, with showing the dangers of asking for too much from life. This book prepares us for those later works of his, written under the shadow and shame of his prison-sentence, which lack the old wit and contain a sombre seriousness, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Profundis.

George B. Shaw
-A desire to shock, alienate and unsettle the audience.
-The Spirit of Ibsen.
-A social reformer and a supporter of Education.
-Plays and The New Drama.

5.2. Edwardian literature.

Colonial literature and modernism
Joseph Conrad brought a new quality into the novel. Conrad was a Pole born in the Ukraine, in love with the sea from an early age. This led him eventually to a British merchant ship, a Masters certificate, and a mastery of the English language. Conrad produced his first novel at the age of forty. He normally writes of the sea, of the Eastern islands, of the English character as seen against a background of the exotic or faced with difficulties.
Conrads finest book is perhaps Lord Jim, where moral conflict is admirably presented in the character of the young Englishman who loses his honour through leaping overboard when his ship seems to be in danger. A good brief introduction to Conrad is the short Youth. Other novels are Typhoon, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness.

Rudyard Kipling was the great singer of Empire. Born in India, Kipling knew the British Empire from the inside, not merely, like so many stay-at-home newspaper-readers, as a series of red splashes on the map of the world. This concern with Empire expresses itself in many forms. Kiplings reputation as a poet has always been precarious among the intellectuals: he is not a great poet, but he sums up for all time a certain phase in English history. He is a poet who knows the East, and certain lines of his evoke the sun and the palm-trees, and the oriental nostalgia of many repatriated Englishman, with real power. As a prose writer, Kipling is known for one novel, Kim, and a host of excellent short stories, also for a school-bys classic, Stalky and Co.