二十世纪的文学作品说明了审美上的转变，其特征是文学作品趋于临时发展。
Twentieth-century literature illustrates an aesthetic shift marked by a tendency of literature to grow more provisional, more anxious, and more self-questioning. The propensity of literature toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination is deeply implicated in socio-historical events which have seen two World Wars, social and political upheavals, the consolidation and expansion of multinational capitalism, the emergence of the information age, the struggle of postcolonial voices after the end of the British empire, and the changing configuration of a new multicultural population. In literary terms, we can speak of two key periods: modernism at the beginning of the century, and postmodernism since 1945. Responding to chaotic historical events and a troubled social order, modernism turned inward to examine the complexities of the subjective consciousness and the processes of literary construction.