• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Big Site of History

History of Civilization

Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

Summary: Twentieth Century Thought and Letters

Views of history change constantly. As historians view the last forty years, they face the difficulty of evaluating recent historical trends, such as economic cycles or the worldwide impact of the arms race. Today Western civilization can no longer be seen as separate from world culture.

Filed Under: Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

Dual Goals, Dual Models In The Twentieth Century

Many observers feared that there had been a slow breakdown in what was once understood to be the social contract. Much of humanity was struggling with dual goals: to achieve freedom and to create equality, to protect the rights of the individual and to meet obligations to others.

Filed Under: Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

The Other Arts In The Twentieth Century

Pop sculpture featured plaster casts of real people surrounded by actual pieces of furniture in a three-dimensional comic strip of devitalized, defeated humanity. At the other extreme, sculpture in the grand manner experienced a rebirth, in good measure due to the work of two British artists.

Filed Under: Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

Painting In The Twentieth Century

No painter could better serve as a representative of the endless variety and experimentation of twentieth-century painting than the versatile and immensely productive Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

A native Spaniard and adopted Frenchman, Picasso painted in many styles and periods. For example, the paintings of his “blue period” in the early 1900s, with their exhausted and defeated people, had a melancholy, lyrical quality that reflected the

Filed Under: Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

Literature In The Twentieth Century

Twentieth-century writers surprised the prophets of doom. Poetry remained, for the most part, what it had become in the late nineteenth century: difficult, cerebral, and addressed to a small audience.

An occasional poet broke from the privacy of limited editions to wide popularity; representative was the attention given to T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). His difficult yet moving symbolic poem, “The Waste Land,” or his invocation to “The Hollow Men,” which closed with the lines

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper

Filed Under: Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

Modern Literature and the Arts

As societies became more and more literate, reading matter changed, becoming both simpler and much cheaper and also more complex and symbolic in its more elite expressions.

This was true of painting and the other arts as well. A wider gulf opened between those who read, or viewed, for entertainment and those who sought information, analyses, or complexity of emotional expressions.

Filed Under: Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Featured Posts

  • The Burgundian Threat and King Louis XI, 1419-1483 | The Rise of the Nation
  • Visigoths, Vandals, Anglo-Saxons, 410-455 | The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
  • Protestant Founders: King Henry VIII, 1509-1547 | The Protestant Reformation
  • The Catholic Reformation | The Protestant Reformation
  • Transport and Communication | The Industrial Society
  • Bourbon France | The Problem of Divine-Right Monarchy
  • The US Federal Union, 1787-1861 | The Modernization of Nations
  • Summary | Judaism and Christianity
  • The Weimar Republic: Germany, 1918-1933 | Between The World Wars
  • The International Balance in Review | The Old Regimes

Categories

  • Between The World Wars
  • Byzantium and Islam
  • Church and Society in the Medieval West
  • European Exploration and Expansion
  • Judaism and Christianity
  • Modern Empires and Imperialism
  • Romanticism, Reaction, and Revolution
  • The Beginnings of the Secular State
  • The Democracies
  • The Early Middle Ages in Western Europe
  • The Enlightenment
  • The First Civilizations
  • The First World War
  • The French Revolution
  • The Great Powers in Conflict
  • The Greeks
  • The Industrial Society
  • The Late Middle Ages in Eastern Europe
  • The Late Twentieth Century
  • The Modernization of Nations
  • The Non-Western World
  • The Old Regimes
  • The Problem of Divine-Right Monarchy
  • The Protestant Reformation
  • The Renaissance
  • The Rise of the Nation
  • The Romans
  • The Russian Revolution of 1917
  • The Second World War
  • The Written Record
  • Twentieth-Century Thought and Letters

© 2018 bigsiteofhistory.com · About · Contact · Privacy · Terms