Movements and schools
Modernism
The great formal break at the start of the twentieth century.
Between 1910 and 1930, a series of writers with no shared manifesto decided that consciousness cannot be told in order. A single day in Dublin becomes a book of eight hundred pages, a woman buys flowers and crosses thirty years of memory, a madeleine opens a cathedral of time. Narrative follows the inner flow, changes voice without warning, leaves the reader the work of stitching it back together. The break is also an answer to a world that has just lost its certainties: Vienna, Dublin, London, Paris, Trieste, Lisbon, each city produces its own version.
works 8
- NovelIn Search of Lost TimeÀ la recherche du temps perduMarcel Proust · 1913Seven volumes that follow a narrator from childhood to the age of writing, in which memory, jealousy and society life are examined under the same magnifying glass.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelUlyssesJames Joyce · 1922A day in the life of a Dublin advertising canvasser, captured as close as possible to his thoughts.Literature
- NovelZeno's ConscienceLa coscienza di ZenoItalo Svevo · 1923Novel set in Trieste in which a man tells his life to his psychoanalyst while lying to himself on every page.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelThe Magic MountainDer ZauberbergThomas Mann · 1924A sanatorium in the Swiss Alps before 1914, where everything is discussed because there is time, and where time itself ends up coming undone.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelMrs DallowayVirginia Woolf · 1925A single summer day, and two lives that never cross.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelThe Sound and the FuryWilliam Faulkner · 1929This novel tells the story of a single Mississippi family through four voices, out of chronological order, and leaves the reader to piece it together.Literature
- NovelThe Man Without QualitiesDer Mann ohne EigenschaftenRobert Musil · 1930A man who takes a year's leave from his own life, in a Vienna busy preparing celebrations for 1918.LiteraturePublic domain
- DiaryThe Book of DisquietLivro do DesassossegoFernando Pessoa · 1982An assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon keeps a diary in which nothing happens, and which he will never finish.Literature