Modernity and Progress

Between the 1920s and the 1930s, long-held ideas about time, place and civilization were challenged by a rush of new theories. Ronald Berman examines three writers who engaged with these upheavals in ways that still matter.

The book's argument turns on how each writer handled time. Hemingway's prose dwells in an unbroken present, Fitzgerald keeps returning to paths not taken and futures that never came, and Orwell is preoccupied with the idea of advancement. Through these three figures, the study considers how the period's shifting ideas of time and progress played out in literature.