Negotiating Identity and Social Change in British Literature: From Victorian Realism to Modernist Fragmentation

Abstract

The present study explores the negotiation of identity and social change in British literature from the Victorian realism to the modernist fragmentation. It examines the portrayal of identity through class, gender, poverty, industrialisation, education, morality, family and social institutions by Victorian writers including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and by modernist writers including Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Qualitative and comparative analyses of selected primary texts are used, such as Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Middlemarch, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waste Land. The analysis illustrates the difference between the Victorian realism, in which the individual experience is related to larger social contexts, and modernist literature, which used stream of consciousness, non-linear narratives, multiple perspectives, memory, and complex inner experience. The study proposes that fragmentation is not a rejection of the Victorian realism but an extension of its preoccupation with issues of identity, social inequality, gender, alienation and social change.