Key Ideas

• Experimental break from tradition
• Response to World War I

Many works in the Modern Period, especially the earlier works, served as an experiment of what could be done by refusing to acknowledge pre-existing structures. Slang and more formalized rhetoric could now mingle. Post-war issues that seemingly everyone experienced were dealt with in literature. The established authority sent soldiers off to a violent and terrible war. These soldiers came back and questioned the value of the war by exposing what it had done to the men who fought. The human mind and the implications posed by Freud could be experimented with as subject of literature as well. The work of Virginia Woolf proved that  literature did not have to be linear in terms of story telling. She explored the minds, memories, and relationships of her characters, which some could interpret as a critique of the authority figures and policy makers to whom responsibility would fall. The Modern Period delved into the mind, the taboo, and the results on the people of the destruction of World War I.