Charles percy snow

1905—1980

C.P. Snow is both a famous novelist and a well-known scientist (physicist). This defined the main ideas of his creative work and social and politic activities as eliminating the gap between scientists and humanitarians in the age of scientific and technical revolution. He is a persistent follower of realism as opposed to modernism. Snow treats the novel as a complex description of man and a society in social, moral, psychological and intellectual interrelated aspects.

His first novel, Death under Sail (1932), was a conventional piece of detective fiction. The Search (1934) looked forward to his later work in its concern with power and the ethics of science. Snow is best known for the dramatic social epic of eleven books Strangers and Brothers, which began in 1940 with a novel of that name (subsequently retitled George Passant) and continued with The Light and the Dark (1947), Time of 'Hope (1949), The Masters (winner of the James Tail Black Memorial Prize, 1951), The New Men (1954). Homecomings (1936), The Conscience of the Rich (1958), The Affair (1959), Corridors of Power (1963), The Sleep of Reason (1968) and Last Things (1970).

Modernism is a term used to distinguish early experimental 20th-century writing from the narrative, descriptive and rational frameworks and conventions of 19th-century writing. The Spanish critic and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset felt the 'modernism' took us towards chaos and dehumanisation, away from the 'all too human elements predominant in romantic and naturalistic production'.

Modernism, a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader: the conventions of realism, for instance, were abandoned by Franz Kafka and other novelists, and by expressionist drama, while several poets rejected traditional metres in favour of free verse. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the row of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favored techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms. In English, its major landmarks are Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922).