School of Distance Education

School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
61 
Woolf, James Joyce, D. H Lawrence ,Ford Maddox 
Ford, Joseph Conrad manifested A general tendency to 
center Narrative in the consciousness of its characters, 
and to create those characters through the representation 
of their subjective thoughts and feelings rather than by 
describing them objectively. The most important factor 
in this shift Of emphasis was the introduction of 
psychoanalysis the influence of Freud and Jung. It was 
Freud who introduced the reasonable and pervasive 
nature of humans and the secret recesses of human 
psyche. . The idea of subconscious or unconscious 
motivation, of suppressed or repressed drives and desires 
which lie behind overt behavior, and which may be 
traced in the jumbled and enigmatic narratives of 
dreams, was 
immensely 
stimulating to literary 
imaginations. Another potent idea for writers was that of 
a collective unconscious that connects us to the earliest 
stages of our evolutionary history and manifests itself in 
the archetypes of myth and legend. D. H Lawrence had a 
strong connection to fraud's theories, especially Oedipus 
complex which found its way to his novel sons and 
lovers. Virginia Woolf also had affiliations with the 
British psycho analytical movement.
Freud’s idea of the unconscious anticipated the 
discovery of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists that 
much of the brain activity that produces the effect of 
consciousness is hidden from us. V S.Ramachandran 
says: “Freud’s most valuable contribution was his 
discovery that your conscious mind is simply a façade 
and that you are completely unaware of what really goes 
on in your brain.” The Freudian model of the mind was 
structured like geological strata: unconscious, ego, 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
62 
superego. It therefore encouraged the idea that 
consciousness had a dimension of depth, which it was 
the task of literature to explore. For modernist writers, 
the effort to plumb these depths, to get closer to 
psychological reality, entailed an abandonment of the 
traditional properties. Ambiguity and obscurity permeate 
human behavior in the stories of Henry James, Joseph 
Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford. The play of human 
memory disrupts and shuffles the chronological order of 
events in the minds of Joyce’s characters, and Virginia 
Woolf’s. D.H. Lawrence uses an incantatory symbolist 
style to base character on some deeper level than that of 
the ego.
The terms “postmodern” and “postmodernist” 
entered the English language in the second half of the 
twentieth century. The key figures in the first 
postmodern generation of English novelists were, I 
would suggest, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry 
Green, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood, and 
George Orwell. They all began to write in the daunting 
shadow of James, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf. 
They admired them imitated them, But also in due 
course reacted and rebelled against them. They reverse 
the modernist privileging of depth over surface.
There is a return in their novels to objective 
reporting of the external world, and a focus on what 
people say and do rather than what they think and feel. 
There is a striking readjustment of the ratio of dialogue 
to narrative, of direct speech to the rendering of 
characters’ unspoken thoughts. When he walked through 
postmodern novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s