lecture 6

Impact of World War I
The literature of 1930s
The literature of World War II (1939-1945)
The literature after 1945
4.1 Fiction
4.2 Poetry
4.3 Drama
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1. Impact of World War I
Cut the ties with the past;
Brought discontent and disillusionment;
Humankind was plunged into gloom;
A shift from novels of the human comedy to novels of characters;
Fiction followed the twisted, unnatural development of a single character or a group of related characters.

1. Records in literature
Rupert Brooke - a thin performance in poetry; (a war casualty)
Wilfred Owen – a realist about the heroism and idealism of the soldier; (a war casualty)
Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden – violent accounts of the horrors and terror of war (survivors of the carnage)

1. Aldous Huxley
He set the cynical and bewildered tone in prose (‘Crome Yellow”);
He best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in “Point Counter Point’ – the events of the plot form a dual pattern;
He worked with the external world – false, brutal, and inhuman.

1. William Somerset Maugham
He achieved the greatest popular success;
‘The Moon and Sixpence’ – was based on the life of the artist Paul Gauguin;
‘Cakes and Ale’ – shows how the real self is lost between the two masks – public and private.

1. James Joyce
Language – was the means by which the inner, subconscious feelings gained expression;
Stream of consciousness – reading the characters’ thoughts exactly as they occur, without a moment by the author;
‘Ulysses’ – based on Greek mythology;
‘Finnegan’s Wake’ – a whole vocabulary of puns and merged words from the elements of many languages.

Women novelists
Virginia Woolf – reality is a stream; life is immersion in the flow of that stream;
V. Woolf transformed the treatment of subjectivity, time, and history; traditional forms of fiction – were no longer adequate;
Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Bowen – were concerned with the realities of the mind.

1. David Herbert Lawrence
Famous for experimental novels – a return to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the race;
Symbolism of plots and forceful message broke the bonds of realism and replaced them with the direct projection of the author’s own creative spirit;
Rejection of fixed forms to achieve a freer, more natural expression of perceptions.

1. Evelyn Waugh
Satirized the ignorance of society;
Later novels showed a deepening moral tone – ‘Brideshead Revisited’;
Together with Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley, E. Waugh investigated serious problem of evil in human life.

2. The literature of 1930s
WW I created a profound sense of crisis in English culture;
The worldwide economic collapse of the late 1920s, the rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War intensified the sense of crisis;
Much of the writing was bleak and pessimistic;
The turbulent 1930s – turned many writers towards traditional values.

2. Fiction
Divisions of class and the burden of sexual repression – common and interrelated themes in fiction;
Writers neglected the modernist revolution in technique, returned to the realist modes;
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) gives a panoramic account of Scottish rural life;
G. Greene produced desolate studies of the loneliness and guilt of people;
George Orwell wrote recollections of lower middle-class existence;
Elizabeth Bowen made a sardonic analysis of upper-class values.

2. Poetry
Poetry – as the authentic voice of the new generation (despair with defiance);
Wystan Hugh Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender expressed extremely liberal political ideas in verse; criticized injustices in an unequal society by means of different genres, rapid shifts of tone and mood, strange juxtapositions of the colloquial and esoteric;
Dylan Thomas – experimented with metaphorical poetry; expressed his passionate love of life in vivid images.

3. The literature of World War II (1939-1945)
An end of an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance;
The rationing of people affected the production of magazines and books;
The poem and the short story – the favoured means of literary expression;
The New Apocalypse movement (poetry is written in a surreal and rhetorical style) – Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins;
Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, Keith Douglas gave detached accounts of the battlefield;
No important new novelists or playwrights appeared.

4. The literature after 1945
Increased attachment to religion:
W. H. Auden turned to Christian commitment;
Christopher Fry’s verse was suffused with Christian beliefs;
G. Greene and E. Waugh’s Roman Catholicism was reflected in novels;
Eastern mysticism was found in A. Huxley’s works.

4. Peculiar features of 1950s
Two groups of writers:
young writers, who are ready to keep up the standard of wholesome optimism,
mature writers, who have passed through a certain creative crisis

4. ‘The Angry Young Men’
Most of writers were of lower middle-class backgrounds;
Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, John Osborne – best known;
They had in common an outspoken irreverence for the British class system and the pretensions of the aristocracy;
They strongly disapprove of the elitist universities, the Church of England, the darkness of the working class life;

‘The Angry Young Men’
They are conservatives: modernist writers are taken as museum pieces;
The style is close to the straightforward narrative of 19th century fiction;
They are not interested in the philosophical problems of men’s existence;
Characters are angry with everything and everybody, as no one is interested to learn what their ideas on life and society are.

4. Representatives
John Osborne, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe – crystallized the trend of the period;
Kingsley Amis – the best of the writers to emerge from the 50s; his ‘The Old Devils’ won the Booker Prize;
Iris Murdoch gained recognition as one of the foremost novelists of the generation;
Angus Wilson portrayed the emotional crisis of WW II;

Representatives
Anthony Burgess’s fictional exploration of modern dilemmas combines wit, moral earnestness, and touches of the bizarre;
Doris Lessing was acclaimed for her mastery of the short story;
Muriel Spark’s novels were characterized by a humorous fantasy.

4. 1960s
The criticism was revealed in the ‘working-class novel’;
Characters come from the working class;
Alan Sillitoe – the best known writer of the period

4. Contemporary literature
New heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works;
The variety of genres and styles;
The symbolic method takes place and develops further;
Themes concern global problems: the Peace and the War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and Universe;
Themes concern the duties and obligations of the individual man, the psychology of the human nature, the life’s situations, the ways of solving problems, the power and money.

4.1 Fiction
Allegory and symbol set wide resonances – short books make large statements;
William Golding and Muriel Spark – the two most innovatory novelists; short spiritual stories;
Henry Green wrote stylized novels, the precursors of the compressed fiction;
Iris Murdoch’s fiction combine allegory and symbol with realistic rendition of character; she is famous for elaborately artificial works;
Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym continued the tradition of depicting emotional and psychological nuance – comedies of sense and sensibility;

4.1Fiction
A type of fiction, produced by writers deeply influenced by ‘Angry Young Men’ – Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, David Storey – novels ruggedly autobiographical in origin and near documentary in approach;
Anthony Powell inspected social mobility;
Charles Percy Snow wrote novels about a man’s journey from the lower class to London’s ‘corridors of power’;
Angus Wilson’s ‘No Laughing Matter’- the most inspired fictional work of social and cultural life in 20th-century Britain;
A mood of growing self-consciousness in fiction – thoughtfulness about the form;

4.1 Fiction
1980s – widening social divides were registered in works that purposefully imitate the Victorian ‘Condition of England’ novel – David Lodge’s ‘Nice Work’;
Margaret Drabble wrote about ‘Two Nations’ of an England cleft by regional gulfs and gross inequalities between rich and poor;
Feminist novelists took to Gothic, fairy tales, and fantasy as countereffects to rationality and logic narrative – Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Doris Lessing;

4.1 Contemporary Irish novelists
John Banville (the pseudonym – Benjamin Black) writes detective novels; ‘The Sea’ won the Booker Prize in 2005, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2011;
Colm Toibin – a novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, and, most recently, poet

4.2 Poetry
A shift from traditional forms to experimental verse and new techniques; the leader is Thomas Sterns Eliot;
‘yea-sayers’ poets – had hope but little optimism, experiments with rhyme, rhythm, imagery, language, symbolism, and allusion- an uneven poetry that represented the unevenness of life (Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Wystan Hugh Auden);

4.2 Poetry
The stream-of-consciousness poets – sought to escape from the world of ideas and problems – vivid imagery – William Empson, Dylan Thomas represented the world through the confused, the irrelevant, and the inexact;
Robert Graves advocated ‘pure’ impersonal poetry.

4.2 Poetry
The British Poetry Revival movement – a wide-reaching collection of groupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry (Jeremy Halvard Prynne, Eric Mottram, Denise Riley, Lee Harwood);
The Mersey Beat poets – wrote poems in protest against the established social order, and the threat of nuclear war ( Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Roger McGough);
Later 20th-century poets – Ronald Stuart Thomas, Charles Tomlinson and Carol Ann Duffy – the current poet laureate;

4.2 Poetry
In the place of New Apocalypse poetry emerged The Movement – urbane verse in an antiromantic vein – irony, understatement (Dennis Joseph Enright, Donald Davie, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings);
Philip Larkin and John Betjeman (poet laureate from 1972 to 1984) depicted intense consciousness of mortality and gracefully versified nostalgia;
Ted Hughes’s poetry is in contrast to sad traditionalism of Larkin and Betjeman – capture of vitality and splendour of the natural world.

4.3 Drama
The early 20th-century – the Irish Renaissance movement – Sean O’Casey;
James Matthew Barrie, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, Sir Noel Coward – best known playwrights;
1940s-1950s – ‘well-made’ play movement – the focus was on the middle class audience; carefully crafted, conventional looking plays – Terence Rattigan;

4.3 Drama
1956 John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’ initiated a move towards ‘kitchen-sink’ drama (naturalism);
Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker gave further impetus to the movement;
John Arden wrote historical plays; provided a model for later left-wing dramatists to follow;
The Theatre of the Absurd – a reaction against naturalism – Samuel Beckett – minimalist plays (30-second-long drama); Harold Pinter – a surreal atmosphere contrasts with dialogue of tape-recorder authenticity ;