Jane Austen uses comedy of manners and ironic wit to portray the social world that she is born into and lives with. There is a loss of a secure sense of a common world when the public view of what is considerable in human action is altered and cannot be defined anymore. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the altruistic sense in imperialism increasingly becomes unwarrantable. The demand for a welfare state and increasing class-consciousness at home even furthers this growing separation between altruism and imperialistic designs. Who allegorises this better than Joseph Conrad in his Nostromo? It is Joseph Conrad’s political novels that bring us into the twentieth century with this problem. Conrad’s early novels are set in isolation from the society but beginning with Nostromo, he starts to deal with the themes of society. The most striking feature of Nostromo is Conrad’s use of language to convey a rhetoric obscurity and loud presentation of events. His style in this novel express the disturbing changes which dominate this era of modernism and acts as a prototype for the other modernist styles, to be employed by different writers, which will completely change the scene of the novel and the English language as a whole, later in the century. “Conrad at his best thinks, as a poet does, in grand symbols” …show more content…
The difference in private thoughts and public gestures obviously heightens men’s loneliness in a time of war and revolution. With the mainstream institutions and public gestures becoming increasingly meaningless, the individuals couldn’t communicate on a genuine basis. The loss of a world of public values and the search for the true identity of an individual is captured by James Joyce in his bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Joyce, psychological mechanisms instead of the interactions that control normal language become a means of achieving ultimate reality. The protagonist Stephen Dedalus’s strongest emotional responses are evoked by Joyce’s clever use of words. But the language through which Joyce describes what Stephen feels or speaks comes with Stephen’s train of great mental struggle bound by his upbringing and surrounding and the things that he wants and later comes to accept. In the novel, language is a very important counterpart of the child’s feelings and experience. It is Joyce’s choice of language that rings finality in Stephen’s own understanding through words. The kiss of a prostitute feels like “the vehicle of a vague speech” (Joyce 108). Of course it is Joyce who is speaking these words but the reader is to understand these words as Stephen’s emotions. An autobiographical element like this gives Joyce the freedom to use language to