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20
Part VIII.
Century
Literature
Historical Background
Literary Tendencies
1. Realism
2. The Irish Dramatic Movemen
3. Modernism
Realism
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Joseph Conrad
Henry James
Katherine Mansfield
Thomas Hardy
Galsworthy
John Galsworthy
A Survey of Modern and
Contempotary British
Literature
Modern British Literature
(1914-1945)
 Social Background
 Major Writers
Novelists
Poets
Dramatists
Historical Background
• Natural and social sciences emormously advanced
• Capitalism came into its monopoly stage
• Gap between the rich and the poor was
further deepened
• World Wars I and II
• Economic Depression beginning in 1929
Philosophical Backgrounds
• Karl Marx: scientific socialism
• Darwin’s theory of evolution: “survival of the fittest”
• B. Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis
-psychological determinism
-man behavior from forces INSIDE the self
-self-analysis
• F. Nietzsche
-God is Dead
-economic and psychological determinism
-no divine patterns, search for meaning
Modernism
1. It originated from skepticism and disillusion of Capitalism
2. The French symbolism announced modernism
3. It takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. The major themes are the
distorted, alienated and ill relationships.
4. The literature in this period is defined by its rejection of
the literary conventions of the nineteenth century and by its
opposition to conventional morality, taste, traditions, and
economic values.
Difference Between Modernism
and Realism
Modernism is a reaction against realism in
many aspects:
• 1. Modernism rejects rationalism, which is
the theoretical base of Realism
• 2. Modernism rejects the source of
Realism, i.e. the external, objective,
material world
• 3. Moernism rejects almost all the
traditional elements in literature
The Novels
• End of the 1910s-the 1920s
• The 1930s
• The 1940s
End of the 1910s-the 1920s
• Relatively freer form
• Break of reticence
• New voyage into consciousness
 Which was a reaction
»to the fragmentation of culture,
»to a catastrophic history,
»to the pervasive sense of psychic crisis,
»to modern violence and dislocation.
directions :
 Realistic modern writers:
Ford Madox Ford,
W. Somerset Maugham,
E. M. Foster
The Psychological Novel
 Modernist writers:
James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf
F. M. Ford (1873-1939)
• The Good Soldier
A Tale of Passion
His literary activities built an
experimental bridge between
the old writers of the 1890s
and the younger innovators.
His literary theory:
Impressionism
• “we accepted the name of impressionists
because we saw that life did not narrate
but made impressions on our brains.” “We
in turn, if we wished to produce an effect
of life, must not narrate but render
impressions.”
E. M. Forster
(1879-1970)
• A novelist who tried to
“connect” people of different
backgrounds and different
cultures.
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•
•
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Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
A Room with a View (1908)
Howards End (1910)
A Passage to India (1924)
Style:
realism combined with symbolism (He
liked to use images and symbols to
express his concerns for the social morals
and humane values.)
satire and humor
Symbolism
• The symbolists emphasize the
suggestiveness of poetic language, but
though this emphasis on suggestiveness
makes much of the poetry obscure, their
care for the organization and operation of
language keeps it from vagueness.
A critical work:
Aspects of the Novel (1927): “round” and
“flat” characters
The Psychological Novel
• While modernist poetry arose as a break
with 19th –century Romanticism,
modernist fiction represented a trend
drifting away from the tradition of 19thcentury realism. Modernist fiction put
emphasis on the description of the
characters’s psychological activities, and
so has sometimes been called modern
psychological fiction.
D. H. Lawrence
James Joyce
(1882-1941)
• One of the most innovative
novelists of the 20th century
and one of the great masters of
“the stream of consciousness”.
Stream of Consciousness
• A phrase coined by William James in his
Principle of Psychology(1890) to describe the
flow of thoughts of waking mind, and it was first
applied to literature in 1918. Since then it has
been used to describe the narrative technique
which attempts to render the consciousness of a
character by representing as directly as possible
the flow of feelings, thoughts and impressions
without resorting to objective description or
conventional dialogue. The term “interior
monologue” is also sometimes used.
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916)
• Ulysses (1922)
• Dubliners (1914)
• Finnegan’s Wake (1939)
Ulysses
• Life experiences of 3
main characters on a
single day (June 16, 1904)
in Dublin. The principal
characters are Leopold
Bloom, an advertisement
canvasser, his wife Molly
and the wanderings of Stephen and Bloom
through Dublin and their eventual meeting.
Ulysses
• Artistic features:
1. Parallel to Homer’s “Odessey” in
character, structure and language
2. Striking realistic skill: vitality of “felt life”
and innovative use of “interior monologue”
3. Joyce’s stream of consciousness
Joyce’s contributions
• His novels changed the conventional
conception of fiction in the sense that
there were no longer, in the conventional
sense, the characters, actions and events
in the novel. Instead there was just a
stream of consciousness flowing through
the whole novel.
Virginia Woolf
One of the most innovative
novelists of the 20th century
and one of the great masters of
“the stream of consciousness”.
• A woman must have
money and a room of
her own if she is to
write fiction.
• Unlike Joyce, whose stream of
consciousness is both aesthetic
(Stephen’s reflections) and subterranean
(Molly’s soliloquy), her stream of
consciousness is flowing, poetic, feminine
and above all, painting-like and aesthetic.
Bloomsbury Group
• An exclusive intellectual circle that
centered on the house of the publisher,
Leonard Woolf, and his wife, the novelist,
Virginia Woolf, in the district of London. It
flourished notably in the 1920s.
• avant-garde
The 1930s
 More practically-oriented
Communist revolutions
Advent of Fascism
Rise of Nazism
 Satirists:
Evelyn Waugh,
Aldous Huxley,
George Orwell,
Jean Rhys
Evelyn Waugh
(1903-1966)
• A leading satirical
novelist in the 1930s.
I have seen fear in a
handful of dust.---T. S. Eliot
About Evelyn Waugh’s Writing
• His works are rich in colloquialisms, yet full
of characters who are characterless,
deliberately lacking of psychological depth,
and who were swept along by
circumstances over which they had no
control. So we feel, behind the farce and
hopelessness the solidity of a permanent
tragedy.
Aldous Huxley
• A satirist in the 1930s.
A fable
about a
future
society
旋律与对位（ 1928 ）
George Orwell
(1903-1950)
• A political satirist.
• His best-known novel, a
fable satirizing Russia and
setting Stalinist totalitarianism
in a farmyard, which make
Orwell world famous.
“all animals are equal but
some animals are more equal
than others”
(1945)
• A political satire, also
a despondent forecast
of what would happen
when totalitarianism
was able to take over
not only the body but
the soul.
The 1940s
• More religiously-oriented (disillusionment
and dissatisfaction with the drift of material
civilization)
• Graham Greene
Graham Greene
(1904-1991)
• A leading exponent in
English of the existentialistpsychological fiction which
has dominated European
literature since the 1940s.
Existentialism
• A modern school of philosophy which had a
great influence on European literature since
World War II. It was generally associated with
German philosopher Hedegger (1889-1976) and
French philosopher Sarte. It emphasizes the
uniqueness and isolation of the individual
experience in a hostile or indifferent universe,
regards human existence as unexplainable, and
stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for
the consequences of one's acts.
• 在格林的作品中，读者看到的并不是艾略
特(T.S.Eliot)诗作中那种一片干旱的荒原，
而是一个被评论家称作“格林之原”
(Greeneland) 的世界，一个由多种信仰、
多种性格、多种经历的人组成的错综复杂、
扑朔迷离的精神世界。正是由于格林在他
的作品中创造了这样一个复杂的、常常是
自相矛盾的、但更接近现实的世界，才使
他成为二十世纪最受读者欢迎，同时在评
Poets: T. S. Eliot
A pioneer of the Modernist
poetry and one of the
greatest poets in the world.
When the evening is spread out against the
sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
I have measured out my life with coffee
spoons
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and
ways?
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question.
I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear
The bottoms of my trousers rolled.
W. H. Auden
(1907-1973)
• The most important poet
immediately after T. S.
Eliot.
Contemporary British Literature
• From 1945-the 1960s
• From the 1970s to the End of the Century
From 1945 - the 1960s
• Political situations:Cold War after World War 2;
economic difficulties
• Ideological and intellectual spirit:
1. A moral concern:the men of letters showed the
absurdity and emptiness of existence, the
human anguish and despair and the inner
vacancy of self on the one hand and showed a
serious concern for the future and affirmed the
need for a moral regeneration on the other.
2. The cultural revolution:Deconstruction
Novel
• The 1950s: a period of “Angry Young Men”,
following the 19th-century realistic tradition
and focusing on the post-war reality of the
English society.
• The 1960s: rising of self-consciousness
and new experimental novels- “metafiction”.
Kingsley Amis
(1922-1995)
• The most important
representative of the
“Angry Young Men”.
• Lucky Jim
Angry Young Men
• A term which is loosely applied to a number
of British novelists and dramatists of the 1950s including
John Wain, Kinsley Amis, J. Osborne, John Braine, Sillitoe
and C. Wilson. They created a series of anti-heroes
educated out of the working calss and expressed a sense
of dissatisfaction and revolt against established social
morals and described various forms of social alienation.
They followed the 19th century realistic traditions in their
writing techniques and were against the modernist
experimentalists of the 1920s and 1930s. This literary
phenomenon disappeared in the 1960s.
Anti-hero
• The term antihero has a variety of definitions,
ranging from unconventional heroes, a
protagonist lacking heroic qualities or even
one possessing traits antithetical to the
traditional hero.
William Golding
(1911-1993)
• A Nobel Prize winner who created modern
myth.
“The theme is an attempt to
trace the defects of society
back to the defects of human
nature”
Golding often presents
isolated individuals or small
groups in extreme situations
dealing with man in his basic
condition, creating a quality of
a fable.
He is concerned with the fundamental questions of
good and evil: deep and timeless idea, universal and
diverse modern myth.
Iris Murdoch
(1919-1999)
• Her contributions: her characterizationthose memorable characters do have a
realistic psychological and philosophical
basis.
• Under the Net (1954)
• The Bell (1958)
• The Sea, the Sea (1978)
Muriel Spark
(1918-2006)
Doris Lessing
(1919-1999)
• One of the most famous
experimentalist writers of the
1960s.
• Her style: traditional narrative
language, multi-points of view
• Her significance: bold experiment
in the form of writing, deep insight
into the contemporary social
affairs.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
• It is considered her
masterpiece and is admired
for its formal and thematic
complexity and it is also
considered a milestone in
Feminist literature.
• It is a “meta-fiction”, a story
within a story.
Metafiction
• It is applied to fictional writing which
question the relationship between reality
and fiction through deliberately and selfconsciously drawing attention to its own
status as a linguistic construct.John
Fowles’s “The French Lieutenant’s
Woman”.
John Fowles
(1926-2005)
• A master chronicler of the second half of
the 20th century and also a great
experimentalist writer.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969)
Poetry
• The 1950s: heyday of the so-called Movement.
Revival of the English tradition, but concerned
with the contemporary human experience: life’s
emptiness, death, transience. Philip Larkin is the
most important Movement poet.
• The 1960s: mixture of traditional style with
Modernist and Post-modernist styles of the US
and of Europe. Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, etc.
Philip Larkin
Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill
• Poets of the 1960s against Movement
• Ted Hughes: original in the sense that he
celebrates the instinctual and the brutal,
depicted cataclysmic or desolate scenery
and gives us a cartoonery of human
struggle and destiny though the images of
the animal world.
Drama
• 1. the New Drama revolution began in
Britain when John Osborne’s play Look
Back in Anger opened in 1956. It is a
movement wherein the genteel comedy of
manners that dominated the stage for
decades would be replaced by a radical
social consciousness that challenges both
the previous aesthetic preferences and
social order that supports the aesthetic.
• 2. An allied revolutionary movement
occurred slightly before. In 1955, Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot found its way
to the London stage. If social disruption
was the key to kitchen sink realism,
philosophical disruptions were key to
Beckett’s theatre of the absurd.It was later
developed by Harold Pinter and Joe Ortin.
John Osborne
(1929-1994)
• His work marked the turning point of the
Modern stage.
Arnold Wesker (1932-)
• A great playwright of the
“Kitchen sink realism”
Chicken Soup with Barley
Samuel Beckett
(1906-1989)
• A great playwright who
revolutionized English
plays.
Waiting for Godot
Theatre of the Absurd
• A name given by the critic Martin Esslin to
describe the work of a number of dramatists.
These and other such authors did not belong to
any “school” but their plays often had in common
the sense that human existence was without
meaning. The idea was reflected in the form as
well as the content of the plays, by the rejection
of logical constrution, and the creation of
meaningless speeches and silences.
Harold Pinter (1930-)
• One of the most important and influential
playwrights of the 20th century.
From the 1970s to the End of the
Century
Martin Amis(1949-)
• Money: A Suicide Note
• Time’s Arrow
Seamus Heaney (1939--)
• He was rightly awarded
the Nobel Prize in 1995
“for works of lyrical
beauty and ethical depth
which exalt everyday
miracles and the living
past”.