By the early twentieth century, many writers felt that the confident realist novel no longer fit a world of world wars, crowded cities and new ideas about the mind. The movement called modernism broke old forms apart. Stream of consciousness is a technique that imitates the flow of a character's thoughts, feelings and associations, jumping as real minds do. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) follows one day in Dublin through the minds of its characters. Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) moves between a society hostess and a war veteran still shattered by the trenches. Franz Kafka, who died in 1924, left stories of people trapped by systems they cannot understand, such as The Trial, in which a man is arrested and prosecuted without ever learning his crime.

New voices, new languages

Modernism was not only European. Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" (1918) was a key early story in modern vernacular Chinese, written in everyday language rather than the classical style. Its narrator, apparently insane, reads the old moral texts and finds the words "eat people" between the lines, a fierce image of a tradition devouring its own. In 1913 the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In Japan, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "In a Grove" (1922) told a crime through conflicting witness accounts, none fully trustworthy.

Writing back to empire

In the decades after the Second World War, dozens of colonies won independence, and their writers began telling their own stories in their own ways. Postcolonial literature is writing from and about societies shaped by colonial rule and its aftermath. Critics describe much of it as "writing back": answering the stories that empire had told about colonized peoples.

The most widely read example is Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), about Okonkwo, a proud man in an Igbo village in what became Nigeria, at the moment British missionaries and officials arrive. Achebe took his title from W. B. Yeats's 1920 poem "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Achebe shows Igbo society as complex, with its own law, religion, poetry and faults, rather than the empty darkness of colonial adventure stories. In a 1975 lecture he went further and called Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) racist. Achebe argued that Conrad's novel denied Africans full humanity, treating them as scenery for a European's crisis. Others defend Conrad's book as an attack on imperial greed, and the argument is still taught as a model of how to debate a classic.

A second debate concerned language itself. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o began his career in English, then Ngugi chose to write in Gikuyu rather than English, arguing in Decolonising the Mind (1986) that a language carries a people's memory and that writing in the colonizer's tongue keeps the mind colonized. Achebe disagreed, holding that English could be bent to carry African experience and reach readers across a continent of many languages. Both writers raised real questions about who a book is for.

Many centers

The Nobel Prize, long dominated by Europeans, gradually widened. Wole Soyinka of Nigeria became the first Black African laureate in 1986, and Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt the first writer in Arabic in 1988. In Latin America, Jorge Luis Borges wrote stories of infinite libraries and impossible maps, and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) became the best known work of magical realism, which presents fantastic events in a matter-of-fact, realistic way: a woman rises to heaven while folding sheets, and the town barely blinks. The Caribbean poet Derek Walcott retold Homer among fishermen of St. Lucia in Omeros (1990). Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), drawn from the true story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1856, made a ghost story into a reckoning with what slavery did to love.

Critics of the postcolonial label note that it can flatten very different writers into one category defined by Europe, as if their main subject were always empire. Many of these authors resisted being read only as representatives of their nations.

Worked example: the last paragraph of Things Fall Apart

At the end of Achebe's novel, after Okonkwo's death, the point of view suddenly shifts to the British District Commissioner. He reflects that this story might make an interesting chapter, or perhaps just a reasonable paragraph, in the book he plans to write, and he has already chosen a title about pacifying the primitive tribes of the Lower Niger. Read closely, the shift is devastating. For nearly two hundred pages the reader has lived inside a full human world; now an outsider shrinks it to a footnote and calls it primitive. The irony depends on structure: Achebe saves the colonial point of view for last so that we can measure exactly what it leaves out. The novel itself is the answer to the Commissioner's book, a whole people's life restored to its proper size.