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The Twentieth Century, Modernisms and Modernity

Timeline

TEXTS   CONTEXTS

1899
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

1899–1902
Boer War in South Africa

 

1900
Max Planck proposes quantum theory, the first step in the discovery of the atom

1903
Henry James, The Ambassadors

1903
Wright brothers invent the powered airplane

1904
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism • Private publication of poems by Constantine Cavafy

 

1905
Sigmund Freud, “Dora” (Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria)

1905
Modern labor movement begins with the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

1907
August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata

1907
Japanese immigration to the United States prohibited

1908
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

 

1909
F. T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto

1909
Commercial manufacture of plastic begins • NAACP founded in the United States

 

1910
Mexican Revolution begins

1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (eleventh edition)

 

1912
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

1912–1913
Balkan wars

1913
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, first volume of Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27) • D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

 

1914
James Joyce, Dubliners, which
includes The Dead

1914–1918
World War I involves Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and the Pacific

1915
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis • T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

1915
Albert Einstein formulates general theory of relativity • First transcontinental phone call in America

1916
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 
 

1917
Russian Revolution overthrows the Romanov dynasty

1918
Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto

1918–1919
Global influenza epidemic; more than 20 million die

1919
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West • Paul Valéry, The Crisis of the Mind • Alfonsina Storni, Irremediably

1919
League of Nations formed (U.S.
Senate rejects membership, 1920)

1920
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

1920
Mahatma Gandhi leads India’s struggle for independence from Britain • Women given the vote in the United States

1921
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

1921–1935
Harlem Renaissance, black literary and artistic movement

1922
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land • Paris publication of James Joyce, Ulysses (imported copies burned in U.S. Post Office) • Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

1922
Irish Free State established • USSR formed • Discovery of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb

1923
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

1923
Turkey becomes a republic

1924
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain • André Breton, First Surrealist Manifesto

1924
Insecticides first used

1926
Franz Kafka, The Castle • Paul Éluard, Capital of Pain

 

1927
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse • Sigmund Freud, The Future of an
Illusion

 

1928
William Butler Yeats, The Tower • André Breton, Nadja

1928
Sixty-two nations sign the Kellogg- Briand antiwar pact in Paris • First Five-Year Plan in USSR • Penicillin discovered • First scheduled television broadcasts • Women given the vote in Great Britain

1929 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

1929
Stock market crash heralds beginning of world economic crisis; Great Depression lasts until 1937

1930
Katherine Anne Porter, Flowering Judas

 

1932
Zuñi Ritual Poetry published by anthropologist Ruth L. Bunzel

 

1933
Federico García Lorca, Blood
Wedding

1933
Adolf Hitler given dictatorial powers in Germany • Nazis build first concentration camps

 

1934
Stalin begins purges of Communist party

1937
Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar

 

1938–1940
Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan

 

1939
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

1939
Germany invades Poland; all Europe is drawn into World War II

1940
Richard Wright, Native Son

 

1941
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of
Forking Paths

1941
United States formally enters World War II

1942
Albert Camus, The Stranger
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

 

1943
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets • Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

 

1944
Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, which includes An Unwritten Novel

 

1945
Hannah Arendt, Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility

1945
World War II ends with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United Nations and Arab League founded

1946
George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature • Tadeusz Borowski, Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber

1946
Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech marks beginning of Cold War • Pan-African Federation formed

 

1947
Religious massacres accompany partition of India and Pakistan into independent states • Transistor invented

1948
Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos

1948
Creation of Jewish state in Palestine

1949
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex • George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

1949
Communist People’s Republic of China established • Apartheid Instituted in South Africa

1950
Pablo Neruda, General Song

1950–1953
Korean War involves North and South Korea, the United Nations, and China

1951
Doris Lessing, The Old Chief Mshlanga

 

1952 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1952
Revolution in Egypt, which becomes a republic in 1953 • First hydrogen bomb

1953
Joyce Mansour, Screams

1953
Discovery of DNA structure launches modern genetic science

1955 Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur

 
 

1956
First Congress of Black Writers meets in Paris

1957
Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, which includes The Guest • Samuel Beckett, Endgame

 

1958
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

1958
European Common Market
established • Algerian War of
Independence (ends in 1962)

1960
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon
amour

1960–1962
Independence for Belgian
Congo, Nigeria, Tanganyika, and Uganda

1961
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth
1961
Soviet astronaut orbits Earth
 
1961–1973
United States engages in the Vietnam War

1962
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook • Alain Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots, which includes The Secret Room

 

1963
Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, published • Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Matryona’s Home

 
 
1966
First Dakar Arts Festival provides showcase for African culture

1967
Gabriel García Márquez, One
Hundred Years of Solitude

 

1968
Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades, which includes Walker Brothers Cowboy

 
 

1969
American astronaut is first man on
the moon

1970
Gabriel García Márquez, Death Constant beyond Love

 

1972
Ingeborg Bachmann, Three Paths to the Lake, which includes The Barking • Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

 
 

1973
Arab oil producers cut off shipments to nations supporting Israel; ensuing energy crisis reshapes global economy

1977
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

 

1978
Edward Said, Orientalism

 

1981
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children • Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller, which includes Yellow Woman

1981
AIDS virus identified and named; kills 6 million worldwide by 1996
1984
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, which includes Age,Race,Class, and Sex
 
 

1986
Nuclear disaster in Chernobyl
spreads radiation contamination
throughout Europe

 

1987
World stock market crash

1989
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native,
Other

1989
Mikhail Gorbachev restructures the Soviet state • Berlin Wall demolished

1990
Derek Walcott, Omeros

1990
East and West Germany united

 

1991
United States and USSR agree to arms reduction • Economic chaos and nationalist unrest bring end of Soviet Union

 

1992
Rio Earth Summit: 172 nations discuss global environmental damage and disagree on economic responsibility • Fighting between Christian Serbs and Muslim Croats marks beginning of ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia; UN troops intervene and effect temporary peace

 

1993
European Community, the West’s largest trading unit, formed; talks begin on a common currency

 

1994
Nelson Mandela becomes president of South Africa after first multiracial elections • Israel and PLO sign peace agreement and begin negotiating its conditions

 

1996
Scientists in Scotland create Dolly, the clone of an adult sheep

  1997
Death of Mother Teresa
 

2001
Terrorists attack the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11

2002
Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line

2002
Euro banknotes and coins introduced as legal tender for members of European Monetary Union

 

2004
Death of Yasser Arafat