routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

394 The twentieth century: 1900–45
Jung, writers came to believe that we are our memories, that the present
is the sum of our past and that the form and style of the novel have to
capture this understanding. One result was that the novel concentrated
less on a social, public world and more on the inner world of unique
and isolated individuals or the shapeless, unstructured sensations of
life. In all, the novel became a less rigid, plotted and naturalistic form.
The themes which preoccupied many of the major novelists in the
period 1900–1930 were accordingly themes of loneliness and isolation
and the difficulties of relationships both with other individuals and
with a wider social and cultural community. Humans are unique
individuals and need privacy; they are also social beings and need
communion. This is a dilemma which was explored extensively in the
works of the greatest novelists and short-story writers of the period
against a background of cultural crisis and social dislocation.
Yet it would be inaccurate to suggest that the period of the modern
novel was one of total change. Many writers continued the traditions of
the nineteenth century without making a radical departure from the main
themes or from the main forms which sustained that tradition. The novels
and short stories of Rudyard Kipling, for example, were written with a
confidence that readers would accept much the same values and points
of view as the writer. Many of Kipling’s prose works are set not in England
but in the countries of the British Empire. Born in India and intimately
acquainted with the workings of Empire and colonialism, Kipling wrote
about areas of experience new to literature – the psychological and moral
problems of living among people who are subject to British rule but of a
different culture. Kipling confirmed the importance and value of an Empire
and the white man’s responsibility to create a single rich civilisation among
diverse races, cultures, and creeds. In Kim (1901), the Indians are treated
with an equal sympathy to the Victorian ruling classes.
THE KAILYARD SCHOOL
In the 1890s there was a flowering of the Scottish provincial novel in
a highly sentimental and romanticised form which came to be known
as the Kailyard School. The kailyard was the cabbage patch at the
back of a village house, and it designates the small-town preoccupations
with which the novelists dealt. Much more limited in scope than the