How did literature change in the 20th century?

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How did the more dynamic and complex view of the universe affect the literature, art, and composition of the early twentieth century?

How did literature change from previous eras in the 20th century?
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1. How did the more dynamic and complex view of the universe affect the literature, art, and composition of the early twentieth century?

The literature, art and composition began to change and reflected new ideas and themes of the changing worldview (e.g., Modernism), and there was a move away from Victorianism. According to Virginia Wolfe, “old truths came to seem hollow in the face of modern technology and industry, urban squalor had long since become a reminder that laissez-faire capitalism was not an unmitigated good, and the various conflicts of imperialist nations had already made people aware of the horrors of modern warfare.” http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/ludington_modern.html

“Make it new,” blared Ezra Pound, and a generation of Americans took heed, but they would have even if he had not worked assiduously for modernism. Americans had many European examples: Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque, for instance, were but three of the artists who had a profound influence. Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and other painters saw the Europeans’ works, understood them, more or less, and wove into their own efforts the elementalism of Cézanne and the simultaneity and three-dimensionality of Picasso and Braque. Modernists in one field influenced the new generation in other mediums. Cézanne, for example, not only affected visual artists; he affected Gertrude Stein, for one, who early on bought his paintings, explained them later to others such as Ernest Hemingway, and drew from them in her own avant-garde writing. Writer John Dos Passos, whose best works of the 1920s and 1930s–Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the trilogy USA (1930-36)–were as modernist as any by an American, wrote an introduction in 1930 to his translation of a long poem by French poet Blaise Cendrars. See full article below, which is also available on-line …