We were talking about the 20th century. I would not quite equate it with the modern world (too much of the world is not yet modern). However, in response to your claim about the 19th, I did state that the effects of modernization on the advanced countries did not become overwhelming until the 20th century, and therefore "the modern world" truly began then. If mass education, urbanization, industrialization, rapid technological change, and so forth did not encompass the bulk of even the populations of Europe and America until the turn of the century, then the unsettlement evidently was most felt entering the 20th, especially after the First World War abolished the last major traces of the Ancien Regimes....
You are welcome to make a list of your own, as I have said, and even one of the 19th century....
I think that there were too many American literateurs who took Hemingway seriously, and that it not only harmed prose narrative in this country, but criticism as well. Also, the cult of machismo he promoted had a deleterious effect on many people....
I have no personal feeling for many of the people on the list, for example, the inventors. I positively dislike some of them, like Henry Ford. Therefore, it would not be apt to call it "My Favorite People". I have distinct reasons for discrimination, but of course whether or not someone has been constructive or even important enough may be subject to dispute. I have more than adequate reason to exclude Hemingway. Whether I should include Chesterton or bump him in favor of someone else, I have not yet decided. However, Chesterton and Lewis are definitely at least cult figures in the English speaking world, and a work like "The Abolition of Man", which addresses morality independently of religion, has had a very wide influence.... |
