From social disintegration to individual fragmentation: Early steps of modernism in Charles Dickens' Hard Times and H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

The process that started with the individual coming to the forefront as a result of the regressed scholastic thought and dogmas with the onset of the modern age and the age of reason continues with the problem of social disintegration in the 19th century. In the Renaissance thought that emerged after the Middle Ages, individuals began to question the facts about the Church, a thought process that paved the way for new social rules and norms in society. As a result of the human and knowledge-centred world view, the 19th century degenerates into a struggle between the powerful and powerless among states and societies such as imperialism, capitalism, colonialism and materialism, and the nations that wanted to hold the power tried to justify themselves with such arguments in order to have and maintain power by resorting to almost any means. On the other hand, developments in science and technology during the 19th century caused the transformation of social dynamics and each of these transformations showed how rules and norms were destroyed. When the power struggle of nations pervaded among individuals in the social sphere, it resulted in the individual's alienation from human values and feelings towards another individual. As a result, corruption of values paved the way first corruption of deep-rooted institutions and then of individuals who had already been accustomed to living under these institutions for centuries; and consequently, especially western social structures got disintegrated and western individuals got fragmented by getting lost in their deteriorating social order or becoming alienated from both their society and the individuals with whom they shared that society. In this study, considering the existence and formations underlying the realities of social disintegration and individual fragmentation, Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Herbert George Wells's The Time Machine were analysed with focus on a direct connection between dogmatism and rationalism through the motives of the characters to make their choices, decisions and actions. Within this scope, the social changes that took place with the age of reason and the industrial revolution ultimately revealed the conflict between the classes encouraged by capitalism and the members of these classes. This thesis aims to shed light on the reflections of social disintegration and individual fragmentation through the characters and situations in the two novels analysed. These two novels emphasize fundamentally related concepts of social disintegration and individual fragmentation during the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries. In this regard, it was concluded that these two events are the events that form the basis of modernism that appeared in the 1910s.