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This website offers a fully revised and enlarged edition of my [Martin Travers] Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism, first published in 1998. I have checked all sources, making corrections as necessary, and have added five new sections (one per chapter) on Romantic Travel Literature, Popular Literature in the Age of Realism, Modernist Drama, Socialist Realism, and Contemporary Writing. Because this is a website, I have prefaced each chapter with a short summary of the literary movement discussed, simply to make the contents of that chapter immediately visible on the internet browser.

This is a website and not a book publication, and I regard it as an ongoing project to which I will add further material over time. I will indicate when this new material is available in this About section, specifying the general nature of the changes made, and in which section they can be found

Each section of the website is divided into subsections with their own headings. These sections are:

Romanticism =

Radical Energy: The Context of European Romanticism.
The Way Within: Romanticism: Goals and Programme.
Self and World: The Literature of Romantic Individualism.
Revolt and Declaration: Romantic Drama.
‘All things are sentient’: Romantic Nature Poetry.
‘What exile from himself can flee?’ Romantic Travel Writing and the Theme of the Journey in Romantic Literature.
The Darker Self: Romantic Gothic.
‘Hymns to the Night’: The Longing for Transcendence.
Romanticism: An Annotated Bibliography.

Realism =

‘Force and Matter’: The Context of European Realism.
‘All is True’: The Aesthetic of Literary Realism.
Vox populi: Popular Literature in the Age of Realism.
‘Lost Illusions’: Realism and the Experience of the City.
The Limits of Subjectivity: The (Female) Self and the Realist Novel.
Integration and Community: Poetic Realism and the Bildungsroman.
The Problem of Action: Drama in the Age of Realism.
The Literary Laboratory: Naturalism.
Realism: An Annotated Bibliography.

Modernism =

‘The Will to the End’: The Context of European Modernism.
Modernism: Between Experimentation and Tradition
The Literature of Aesthetic Revival: Symbolism and Romantic Decadence.
Hearts of Darkness: The Self as Other.
Memory, Time and Consciousness: Modernism and the Epistemological ‘Breakthrough’.
Libido and Body Culture: Sexuality in the Modernist Novel.
The Transformation of Illusion: Modernist Drama.
Fragments of Modernity: Modernist Poetry
9. Modernism: An Annotated Bibliography.

The Literature of Political Engagement =

Literature in the Age of Political Commitment: The Context.
Writers and Politics: Programme and Practice.
Writing as the Triumph of the Revolution: Socialist Realism.
The Politicisation of Modernism: Between Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit.
The Imperative of Commitment: The Literature of Radical Humanism.
‘The God that failed’: Disillusion/Dystopia.
The Attractions of Fascism: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution.
The Leap of Faith: The Literature of Catholic Revival and Existentialism.
The Literature of Political Commitment: An Annotated Bibliography.

Postmodernism =

After All: The Context of European Postmodernism.
Postmodernism: A Theoretical Project.
The Self-Conscious Text: From the Nouveau Roman to Metafiction.
The Politics of Ritual: The Theatre of the Absurd.
Self, History, Myth: The Literature of Magic Realism.
Structures of Subjectivity: Postmodernism and the Poetic Text.
Written as the Body: Feminist writing and Post-Modernism.
Pressing To Be Said: Contemporary Writing in Europe.
Postmodernism: An Annotated Bibliography

Introduction

“Modern European literature”. But which Europe? Which literature? The shifting historical borders of the former admit of no easy classification. ‘Europe’, as a geographical, geopolitical reality, is a changing construct, the product of military and diplomatic struggles that have characterised European history for more than a thousand years. What we understand as ‘European’ has changed through the centuries. It has traditionally included Iceland, in the North, and Greece, in the South, but not Turkey, or what is now known as Israel; while Russia, then the Soviet Union, and now Russia again, has hovered around the edges of the continent, politically and spatially important, its central state included, but its neighbouring countries, such as Georgia and Armenia, often excluded.

In terms of the literary history of the continent, however, matters are less confounded. Culture may be the expression of the symbolic and moral values of an individual nation; but it is equally true that once a culture is exported it enters into a complex but by no means mysterious relationship with cultures of other nations: shared readerships, common markets, publishing houses, journals and literary movements provide a network in which certain authors, styles and genres become dominant, while others do not. It is for this reason that this present introduction to modern European literature is structured around the schools or movements which have provided the nodal points for writers in Europe over the past two and a half centuries: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, to which we must add (in a welcome departure from ‘ismism’) the literature of political engagement that emerged during the interwar years, between 1918 and 1945.

Certainly, we cannot claim that every writer of significance during this period belonged to a school or movement. British writers, in particular, have seemed (and seem) to share a common abhorrence of labels, categories and classifications, and have often consciously held themselves distant from the trends of their age. I have, obviously, not attempted to allocate writers to a school or movement where such an allocation was clearly inappropriate. In the final analysis, noting, for example, that Tennyson wrote in the age of Realism tells little about Realism and even less about Tennyson. Focussing upon such schools or movements also serves to privilege certain nations, such as England, Germany and Italy (but most notably France, in which most of these movements originated), whilst relegating other nations, for example, Greece and the Scandinavian countries, to the cultural periphery. In writing this book, however, I have tried to remain aware of the invidious politics of cultural canonicity, consciously bringing into the picture (as far as space would permit) writers who are normally excluded from such studies, such as the great poet of Greek Romanticism, Dionysios Solomos, or (at other end of the temporal spectrum) the Serbian poet, Vasko Popa, or the Hungarian, László Nagy, whose works were not only central to the nations from which they came, but who also made an important contribution to the broad development of European literature during this period.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that many writers did see themselves as part of a literary movement, and framed both the theory and the practice of their work accordingly. If we bear these caveats in mind, and others, such as the fact that many of the authors that we will speak of occupied transitional positions between these movements (James Joyce, for example, who straddles late Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism in his Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, respectively, or Flaubert, whose novels arguably trace a trajectory between Realism and Romantic Decadence), approaching European literature in terms of its major cultural formations not only allows us to identify the common project that bound the writers of these respective periods together and to establish a comparative framework for their work, it also enables us to tie their creative writing to the wider philosophical and political issues of the historical periods of which they were a part. Adopting this perspective, we can see that Romanticism, for example, was not just the invention of Rousseau in Paris, the Schlegels in Berlin or Coleridge in London; it was a broad movement of ideas that was formed by, and helped form, European history between 1770 and 1848, which was a period of revolutionary change, propelled by the boundless energies, utopian expectations and almost monomaniacal presentations of self, which informed literature and politics alike. The same might be said of Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism: they are short-hand signatures for the intellectual paradigms in which successive stages of European culture have formed their distinctive identities.

I have devoted a chapter to each of the main movements in European literature between 1790 and 1990 (apart from Realism, which is discussed in conjunction with Naturalism). Each chapter begins with a delineation of the historical context of that movement, before moving on to a consideration of its theoretical goals and aesthetic. The bulk of each chapter consists of readings of the major stylistic and thematic aspects of the movement in question. In choosing texts to represent these movements, I have been fully aware of the pitfalls of canonicity, and have tried to avoid the imperative of ‘these texts and no other’. And yet, inclusion and exclusion, discussion and silence, are as unavoidable in literary scholarship as they are in teaching and general reading. I have, nevertheless, attempted to remain sensitive to the existence of figures who traditionally have been marginalised from such discussions, whilst maintaining the necessary focus upon those writers who helped create the literary movements that figure in this study. Finally, each chapter is followed by a chronology listing a selection of the most representative texts from that period, with titles given both in the original language and in their common translation. In the annotated bibliography which ends this study, I have restricted myself to those studies which represent the main directions in scholarship to date.

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