20th Century to the Present
What this domain covers
1900 to the present. The exam samples modernist and post-1945 texts and asks you to identify technique (interior monologue, free verse, juxtaposition without connective tissue, allusion), movement, and historical pressure - world wars, empire and decolonization, gender and identity.
Core rules and concepts
- Imagism (1912–). Direct treatment of the thing, no superfluous word, rhythm by musical phrase rather than metronome; Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro', H.D.
- Eliot's vocabulary. Objective correlative ('Hamlet and His Problems', 1919); impersonality and tradition ('Tradition and the Individual Talent', 1919); the mythic method ('Ulysses, Order, and Myth', 1923) behind The Waste Land (1922).
- Consciousness. Woolf's stream of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse; Joyce's epiphanies in Dubliners (1914) and interior monologue in Ulysses (1922).
- Yeats. Celtic Twilight beginnings, then 'Easter 1916', the gyres of A Vision, and the Byzantium poems.
- Poetry after modernism. Auden's public political voice in the 1930s; the Movement's plainness (Larkin, 'Church Going', 1955); Hughes's animal energy; Heaney's bog poems and 'Digging'; confessional poetry (Lowell, Plath).
- Drama. Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953) and the Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin's term); Pinter's menace and pauses; Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956); Stoppard's verbal games.
- Postcolonial and contemporary. Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) answering Conrad's Heart of Darkness; Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) and magical realism; Walcott, Naipaul, Coetzee, Ishiguro; postmodern metafiction (Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1969).
Worked example
An excerpt describes fog that rubs its back against the window-panes and licks its tongue into the corners of the evening. How does the image work, and what does it reveal? Name the vehicle (a cat) and the tenor (the fog, and by projection the speaker's indolence); observe that the simile performs emotional work the speaker never states; connect this to Eliot's objective correlative. Then note the irony that a man who dares nothing imagines an animal moving with intent. Answers that only label the figure miss the character argument.
Traps that cost marks
- Not everything post-1945 is postmodern; Movement poets are deliberately plain and anti-experimental.
- Modernism is not only difficulty - impersonality and a reworked tradition are central.
- Confessional poetry is crafted persona, not transcript.
- In Godot, 'nothing happens' is the subject, not a defect to name.
- Date anchors: The Waste Land and Ulysses both 1922; Godot 1953; Look Back in Anger 1956.