Memory and Modernity: Transatlantic Transformations in Twentieth-Century Literature

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which modernist literature in England, Ireland, and America redefined memory as both a theme and a narrative technique, transforming the representation of personal, cultural, and historical experience in the early twentieth century. Emerging in the aftermath of industrialization, urbanization, and the trauma of World War I, modernist writers grappled with dislocation and fragmentation by experimenting with new literary forms such as stream of consciousness, mythic frameworks, and fragmented structure. In England, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot explored memory’s role in shaping identity and cultural continuity, with Mrs. Dalloway reflecting the lingering trauma of war and The Waste Land portraying collective cultural disintegration. In Ireland, James Joyce’s Ulysses reimagined everyday life through myth and memory, while W.B. Yeats infused poetry with national memory and mythic resonance, linking personal identity to political and cultural revival. In the United States, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury depicted fractured memory within the context of Southern decline, and Ezra Pound’s Cantos sought to capture civilization’s memory in an encyclopedic form. By comparing these transatlantic traditions, the study argues that modernism’s central innovation lay in transforming memory into a literary method for reconstructing meaning amid upheaval, offering a shared yet diverse response to the crisis of modernity.