Romantic, Modern and Postmodern Literature Thesis

" (Hendricks) Truth and culture are therefore seen to be created and destroyed by others for their own ends.

In conclusion, the three literary works discussed above are in many respects very different but also indicate certain continuities of intention and discourse between romanticism, modernism and postmodernism. What links them all is the search for reality and truth that exists beneath the facade of everyday life and reality. As we progress from the romantics to modernism we find that the literature becomes more open to the interrogation and questioning of certain suppositions. The acceptance of human nature as innately good is put into doubt by the modernist view of the contemporary wasteland which we find in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This doubt and questioning is extended in postmodernism, and in Things Fall Apart, where all assumptions about the underlying order and certainty of existence are disturbed and "…the center cannot hold."

Bibliography

Abrams, et al., The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th edition. Vol 2. New York: Norton, 2000 Chapter 5 - Modernism and the Subject. April 19, 2009. Conrad, Joseph. Youth: Heart of Darkness, the End of the Tether; Three Stories. London J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1946. Keynes, Geoffrey, Ed. Blake: The Complete Writings, with Variant Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hendricks C. Foucault's Prophecy: The Intellectual as Exile. April 19, 2009. Introduction to Romanticism. April 19, 2009. Modernist literature. April 19, 2005. http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/1255865 Orr L. Yeats and postmodernism. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Unterecker, John. A Reader's Guide to W.B. Yeats. London: Thames and Hudson, 1959......