A hundred years ago saw the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, and T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. It was also a year when modernist poets such as Rilke, Paul Valery and Wallace Stevens produced important works. Both among novelists, from Virginia Woolf to Hermann Hesse and playwrights from Brecht to Pirandello, there was an explosion of innovation. We will look at what these writers had in common and how they responded creatively to the sense of a civilisation in decline.