What are the features of British modernist literature?

What are the features of British modernist literature?
What are the features of British modernist literature?

What are the features of British modernist literature?
Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines.In the wake of Modernism,and post-enlightenment,metanarratives tended to be emancipatory,whereas beforehand this was not a consistent characteristic.Contemporary metanarratives were becoming less relevant in light of the events of World War I,the rise of trade unionism,a general social discontent,and the emergence of psychoanalysis.The consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the political importance of culture.
Modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal,stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism,examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane--a prime example being The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock by T.S.Eliot.Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism,a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature.But the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen,less elegaically,as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of a broken world.An example is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid,in which the individual artist applies Eliot's techniques to respond (in this case) to a historically fractured nationalism,using a more comic,parodic and "optimistic" (though no less "hopeless") modernist expression in which the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.
However,many Modernist works like T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land are marked by the absence of a central,unifying figure.In rejecting the solipsism of Romantics like Shelley and Byron,such works also reject the association of the subject with Cartesian dualism,collapsing narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.
Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical change.These themes are prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing.Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway,James Joyce's Ulysses,Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas,Jean Toomer's Cane,William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury,and others.
Modernism as a literary movement is seen,in large part,as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society.Furthermore,an early attention to the object as freestanding became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form.The dyadic collapse of the distance between subject and object represented a movement from means to is.Where Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience,Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings.In Modernism the object is; the language doesn't mean it is.This is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or,in simpler terms,a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic.This shift is central to Modernism.Archibald MacLeish,for instance,said,"A poem should not mean / But be."