Representations and Visions of the Future in Modernist Literature
Several examples of literature produced from the late Victorian age narrate great concerns about the future and the destiny of humanity, concerns that would be significantly exacerbated in the twentieth century by the First World War, soon followed by the Second, the unspeakable savagery of Nazis, the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, last but not least, by the terror of a nuclear apocalypse during the long Cold War. Modernism appears thus as a cultural movement that, as Vincent Sherry maintains, “works most indicatively within an imaginative concept of time interrupted”, of a time that presents itself basically as provisional and utterly deprived of a future.