Literature

In this period several movements developed side by side in world literature. Critical realists portrayed life truthfully and criticised the faults of society: in Russia F. M. Dostoevsky (1821–1881), L. N. Tolstoy (1828–1910) and A. P. Chekhov (1860–1904); in France G. de Maupassant and A. France; in the USA Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser (The Financier, 1912; The Titan, 1914) and Jack London (The Iron Heel, 1908; Martin Eden, 1909); in Germany Heinrich Mann (Man of Straw); and in France Romain Rolland (Jean-Christophe, 1904–1912). In England Bernard Shaw exposed social ills with wit in his plays. Naturalism is linked in France with Émile Zola, who wrote the Rougon-Macquart cycle (20 novels), which includes Germinal (1885); there were naturalists in Italy and the USA too. Decadence and Symbolism appeared in French literature (P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud, S. Mallarmé). Jules Verne pioneered science fiction. In Asia realist and national writers emerged: the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1913), the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke and the Chinese writer Lu Xun. Note: V. Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) and H. Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were written before this period, but they were still widely read in these years and influenced ideas of social justice.