20/11/24
Modern Fiction: Lecture 12 - Reading Literature and its Contexts
CHRONOLOGY and BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUNDS of WRITERS
How can these contexts support my critical writing?
1920s UK: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
● Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class middle-aged woman preparing for an evening
party - based on Kitty Lushington, renowned society hostess and daughter of a
friend of her father Leslie Stephen. An elite, privileged and insular world of exclusive
London society and the Bloomsbury Group.
● But also includes Septimus Warren Smith - a WW1 veteran suffering from ‘shell
shock’, hallucinating over his dead officer and friend Evans and emotionally ‘dead’ -
his wife Lucrezia is a stressed, depressed and homesick Italian.
● Illustrates social elitism, inequalities and diversity of post WWI and early- 1920s
experiences.
1920s USA: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
● The Jazz Age - the American Dream - Class - Gender - Race - Technology - Self-
Identity - even Anti-Semitism
● Title partly inspired by Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) - 15yrs old
narrator François Seurel's friendship with 17yrs old Augustin Meaulnes infatuated
with the elusive Yvonne.
● Both texts reveal a fascination with the challenges of youth and with a mysterious
quasi-hero figure Gatsby v Meaulnes - Grand Meaulnes written just before WW1 and
Gatsby just after WW1.
● Both texts also raise contextual issues over two key areas for texts on this module:
Modernism and Psychiatry.
Modernism and Psychiatry
● Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919) - influence on medicine, psychiatry and
literary styles in which the diverse, random, non-chronological workings of the mind
superseded the great 19C tradition of narrative, plot-driven prose writings.
● Fascination with the subconscious - how our outwardly ordered worlds are
constantly subject to ANXIETY, DISORDER and especially FRAGMENTATION and
Modern Fiction: Lecture 12 - Reading Literature and its Contexts
CHRONOLOGY and BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUNDS of WRITERS
How can these contexts support my critical writing?
1920s UK: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
● Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class middle-aged woman preparing for an evening
party - based on Kitty Lushington, renowned society hostess and daughter of a
friend of her father Leslie Stephen. An elite, privileged and insular world of exclusive
London society and the Bloomsbury Group.
● But also includes Septimus Warren Smith - a WW1 veteran suffering from ‘shell
shock’, hallucinating over his dead officer and friend Evans and emotionally ‘dead’ -
his wife Lucrezia is a stressed, depressed and homesick Italian.
● Illustrates social elitism, inequalities and diversity of post WWI and early- 1920s
experiences.
1920s USA: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
● The Jazz Age - the American Dream - Class - Gender - Race - Technology - Self-
Identity - even Anti-Semitism
● Title partly inspired by Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) - 15yrs old
narrator François Seurel's friendship with 17yrs old Augustin Meaulnes infatuated
with the elusive Yvonne.
● Both texts reveal a fascination with the challenges of youth and with a mysterious
quasi-hero figure Gatsby v Meaulnes - Grand Meaulnes written just before WW1 and
Gatsby just after WW1.
● Both texts also raise contextual issues over two key areas for texts on this module:
Modernism and Psychiatry.
Modernism and Psychiatry
● Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' (1919) - influence on medicine, psychiatry and
literary styles in which the diverse, random, non-chronological workings of the mind
superseded the great 19C tradition of narrative, plot-driven prose writings.
● Fascination with the subconscious - how our outwardly ordered worlds are
constantly subject to ANXIETY, DISORDER and especially FRAGMENTATION and
