Conclusion: Larkin and Postmodernism

Abstract

Modernism in the arts is usually assigned a specific historical period, approximately 1890–1940. In the anglophone world it is often said to have peaked in the year 1922. This was the year that saw the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land (commonly considered the definitive Modernist poem in English), Joyce’s Ulysses (often considered the Modernist novel in English), Cummings’s The Enormous Room, Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was also the year in which Proust died, thereby ending, complete but incompletely revised, the greatest Modernist novel in French, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.