The twentieth-century novelists have laid great stress on the art form of novels.
They have shown great consciousness of form.
The modern novelist has rejected the irrelevancies of the Victorians, their moralizings, and their direct appeal to the ‘dear reader’ of the story.
Modern novels are not loose and rambling like the novels of Dickens and Thackeray but have a compactness of their own.
Novel of Ideas
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the novel was mainly confined to the discussion of problems confronting us in social life.
The Edwardian novel was essentially a novel of ideas including in its scope a free discussion of all kinds of ideas; scientific, social, political, industrial, and so forth.
The Edwardian novelists considered it to be a sin to escape into a world of romance and psychology when the gaping wounds of social life were clamoring for reform and healthy treatment.
Realism
One result of this preoccupation with problems of life was to give to Edwardian fiction the color and touch of Realism, which the Victorians under the influence of Dickens and Thackeray had so very well employed in their works.
Love of Romance and Adventure
Against the tendency of realism and materialism perceptible in the early years of the twentieth century with an accent on the discussion of social problems, stands the tendency for the criticism of material values, and a love for romance and adventure.
The note of disillusionment against modern realism in fiction and too much engrossment with material values of life was sounded by psychological novelists of the age such as Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, and by a few critics of modern life like Samuel Butler, Aldous Huxley, E.M. Forster.
Sex and Primal Human Emotions
During the Georgian period, a new tendency began to be perceptible in English fiction and it centered around the glorification of sex and primal human emotions and passions.
Victorian novelists and poets frowned on the naked dance of sex in their works and exalted married love over illegal flirtation.
Psychological Fiction
Twentieth-century novels in the later part of the Georgian period began to come under the influence of psychologists, and as the years advanced, the psychological tendency became more pronounced in English fiction.
