Historical And Clutural Influences On Twentieth Century Writ

2 Pages 572 Words

Many different factors affected writing in the twentieth century including two world wars, industrialisation and changes to the social climate. Challenges on ‘The Origins of Species’ by Charles Darwin and the way the human mind works by Sigmund Freud also affected writing.

Industrialisation provided large numbers of jobs for the general public. With the increase in employment came an increase in people’s disposable income. As a result of this more people started to enter the education system and standards of education rose.

As the country became more literate novels could be written and read by a wider range of people. Up until this time novels had always been written by the upper-middle class who wrote about their experiences. This, therefore, gave novels at the time a very biased viewpoint.

Novels in the twentieth century soon began to take on all aspects of life like ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ by Alan Sillitoe. In this novel Sillitoe looks at the life of a working class man and uses colloquial language and obscenities, which would never have been used in books before this time.

The novel ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell has been strongly influenced by the Russian revolution so much so that the characters can almost be interchanged with key figures at the time.

The two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century had major effects on writing in this period. Women became viewed on a much more equal level to men and religious beliefs came under threat as people realised their own mortality to a greater extent.

Many of the novels written in the second half of the twentieth century were directly influenced by the wars. Books like ‘Goodnight Mr Tom’ and ‘The Silver Sword’ are products of the Second World War as they detail how people lived through this period. They could not have been written without these events.

The Second World War also influenced how enemies are perc...