The cultural context of the years after the first world war

Before talking about the cultural context I have to tell something about the political and social developments of this period.

When Queen Victoria died, she was succeeded by her son Edward. However, the Edwardian age was a period of transition, of relative calm, characterised by a lot of social reforms in the fields of education and welfare. The period following Edward's death was under the reign of George V. The effect of these social measures was profound: the reforms carried out in the preceding years led to an increase in taxation and conflict. The years 1910-12 saw particularly violent clashes between capital and labour.

So, in 1914 the First World War started in order to Austrian Archduke's death in Sarajevo. Britain was unprepared and the consequences were disastrous. First of all a lot of men died, and those who came from trenches had many psychological and physiological problems. Poverty, unemployment and social unrest arose in the whole country.

So in this context there was a general tendency to question all the past values and beliefs promoted by the Victorian society and the move from objectivity to subjectivity was brought by various new theories.

British intellectuals and writers were greatly influenced by ideas coming from other European countries.

Nietzsche, a German philosopher, proclaimed that God was dead. This crude assertion was symptomatic of the general incapability on be half of intellectuals at the turn of the century to proceed on the old ways. Then he affirmed that the Christians had to lose the faith in God's grace. The conflict over religious belief which had started with Darwin's theory intensified and brought about a general sense of lack of purpose and meaning in life. In fact also Marx, one of the most important figures of the century, had a negative vision of religion and he believed that people used religion to justify injustice and exploitation: he considered religion as the opium of the peoples.

As far as Freud is concerned, he opened the way to the exploration of the unconscious and subconscious which he described as a part of mind that can not be controlled: all emotions, feelings, sensations, memories are free to associate without a precise order. Then Freud revolutionised the way people thought about sex, parent-child relationship and the motivations for human behaviour.  

An other psychologist who studied the mind was Jung. In fact he continued Freud's researches and he introduced the concept of Collective Unconscious, a store of mythic models, and he affirmed that the artist was a person notably gifted in bringing these images and archetypes to the surface.

The theory of relativity, first promoted by the German physicist Albert Einstein, put in discussion scientific entities like space and time, which became subjective dimension without an absolute meaning.

Other two philosopher questioned the idea of time. James said that our mind records every experience in a continuum and Bergson distinguished historical time -external, measured in term of space- from psychological time -internal, subjective, measured by our emotion-.

So, on more general terms, the shattering experience of the First World War brought a further blow to uncritical faith in progress, the social system and the validity of its institutions. The new outlook on life emphasized the individual human being, the individual sensibility as opposed to social order, values and ideas.

As a consequence of this cultural crisis, also in all the areas of art we can see a revolution in terms of themes, form, language. This innovative trend is defined Modernism. Modernistic artist rejected Naturalism, Realism and Aestheticism, in favour of Symbolism. A special interest was placed on the interplay of words, symbols and rhythm. It promoted a new language to communicate beyond conventional use.

Symbolist technique taught:

-the use to convey a complex texture of emotions simultaneously

-the technique of illusions, opposition and association

-the use of correspondences

-the recourse to musical patterns.