British literature

Contents:

 

Introduction……………………………………………………………...........3

1. Major trends in British literature since 1900s…………………………….5
1. British literature in XX century……………………………………..5
2. British literature in XI century………………………………………20
2. Main genres of modern literature………………………………………..23
1. Poetry and drama…………………………………………………...23
2. Novels and general prose…………………………………………...26

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….29

Literature……………………………………………………………………...30

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

The object of my term paper is British literature, and the subject is contemporary British literature.

First of all what is literature? The word itself connected to words like “letter”. It means any form of communication which is written down.

But we use the word to describe a certain kind of writing, a certain category of written communication.

Another way of defining literature is to limit it to "great books", books that, whatever their subject is, are outstanding for literary form or expression.

One of the things we think literature is different from other kinds of writing is that it has many meanings close to it, so that we may interpret a piece of literature. There are often some layers of meaning; or, we have to read between the lines to get to the true meaning of a poem or a play. Twentieth century English literature is remarkable for a great diversity of artistic values and artistic methods. The present age being what it is — a welter of contradictions, conflicts and confrontations only too often leading to small and large scale wars, a paradoxical age where the greatest triumphs go along with dire catastrophes — literature naturally responds to its spirit and presents an unprecedented variety of social, ethic and aesthetic attitudes. Following the rapid introduction of new modes of thought in natural science, sociology and psychology, it has naturally reacted to absorb and transform this material into literary communication.

Widely different trends — the philosophy of Henry Bergson, Sigmund Freud's psychology, its development in the works of his disciples, the philosophical implications of Albert Einstein's theories, the great progress in most branches of biology, the later popularity of Existentialist thought and at the same time, the widening recognition of the Marxist interpretation of history and society have all had their impact on British fiction and art. While mirroring the drastic changes in the larger world, contemporary writers have not only revolutionized literary form, but also adhered to a great many traditional modes of expression, thus making it obvious that tradition and innovation are twin substances. The interplay of the traditional and the new goes pretty far to determine the distinctive nature of twentieth century English literature, but its difficulties and complications are the difficulties and complications of the age, and, to be more explicit, of the upheavals of Britain's history and her new position in world affairs.

In my term paper I’ll study English literature of XX and XXI centuries, study main genres of modern literature in Britain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.  Major trends in British literature since 1900s

 

1. British literature in XX century

 

The XX century had been marked by Great Britain's unparalleled colonial and industrial expansion. Colonial expansion transformed the economic structure of British capitalism. Instead of the old and vanishing industrial monopoly, there was a more complex large-scale colonial and financial monopoly, an extension of British state power over vast distant regions of the earth.

In the last years of the nineteenth century the ideology of this highly industrialized and world-ruling Britain was being inculcated at home and was taking hold of the national consciousness. However, with the advance of the new system came the realization that the working people gained nothing from those much advertised triumphs. The decline of small-scale industry crushed by imperialist monopoly was the cause of mass unemployment. During the last years before World War I the number of unemployed was seldom below a million. Another striking sign of the weakness of the capitalist system and the inconsistency  of bourgeois ideology was the growing frequency of cyclical crises.

The depression of the period brought widespread misery to the attention of the nation. The illusion of permanent progress under capitalism was shaken; there was a new rise of popular interest in the ideas of socialism. Among those who had then contributed to its popularity were the Fabian Socialists. The most prominent of them — Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw and, later, H. G. Wells — formulated the theory of gradual infiltration of socialist ideas into the state machine and the existing bourgeois parties until the system was slowly changed to socialism. The theoretical arguments of the Fabian Society were accepted and used by the leaders of the Independent Labour Party whose influence was steadily growing. In the General Election of 1906 the Tories were swept out by an overwhelming Labour vote.

In the first years of the present century open class conflicts took the form of a large-scale strike struggle led by the miners of South Wales and supported by dockers and seamen, transport and engineering workers all over Britain. Growing mass protest was the spirit of the age.

Fundamental political, social and economic changes on the British scene deeply affected the creative writing of the new century. Men-of-letters of different generations and aesthetic views were critical of the new era; they were spiritual explorers voicing their discontent with life. For a number of these writers an understanding of the artist's duty towards society, an earnest desire to give expression to the feelings and thoughts of the British people was at the basis of their approach to literature; their work therefore became a new investment in the heritage of English realism and stimulated its further development. We find this brilliantly exemplified in the art of H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and others.

H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw held the public attention for more than half a century. While Shaw essentially expounded the intellectual, social and moral problems of his time, Wells laid heavier stress on the consciousness of his changing compatriots and analysed the feelings and ambitions of the present in the light of the nation's future. Wells believed that the very existence of civilization was in jeopardy unless men of the highest intelligence seized the initiative, or communicated their wisdom to the masses until they reached the point where they would be capable of governing themselves. Being a scientist he turned his knowledge into science fiction in which he emphasized the social implications of the problems of space, time and technical revolution. When presenting his imaginary picture of the future he is really concerned with the present. Wells depicts the old order seeking in vain to perpetuate itself in a changing world and the new one rising assertively, chaotically in cities which grow and throw out their suburban tentacles far into the country-side.

The beginning of the century was an epoch of incessant debates, of criticizing, evaluating and rejecting old conceptions of life. Bernard Shaw was increasingly involved in these activities, castigating social defects in his plays, essays, lectures and letters to the papers. His surgical frankness in uttering plain truths to the nation was all , the more impressive as they reached the public through the medium of the theatre. In Mrs. Warren's Profession he demonstrated that it was society which was to blame for the evils of prostitution rather than the procuress; in Widower's Houses again it was society rather than the individual landlord, who created abuses of the right to property that proved disastrous to the lower classes. Shaw's contemporaries never failed to take in his message because apart from being an expert in stagecraft, he was a master of forceful simple English and an irresistible wit. His plays may be said to have won the day for realism in the theatre.

John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett worked in the best novel-istic traditions of English literature. Both were exact contemporaries, born in the same year (1867) and destined to react to the same ferment of ideas about society. In their books both wrote about the particular spheres of life known to them, observing the passage of time and contrasting the successive generations. In his Forsyte chronicles Galsworthy depicts the life of the people of property and inherited wealth against the background of England's pre-war depression and post-war decay, while Bennett described the humbler middle class in the sprawling industrial region of the Potteries, the Five Towns which were the scene of his boyhood and early manhood, of the years of dullness and frustration when he saw the town grow bigger, blacker and more drab and squalid. Both Galsworthy and Bennett were concerned with the persistence of change which was altering not only the outward shape of England but also having its devastating effect on character, moral values and individual destinies. Both novelists were devoted to the concept of literature as an art which has a social and moral function to fulfill.

In the short-story genre the art of Katherine Mansfield is a significant contribution to the enduring tradition of English realism. Her stories, largely inspired by Chekhov involve a narrow social setting and limited area of human experience, yet, they are expressive of a vast range of moral and social problems treated with great subtlety and penetrating insight. Katherine Mansfield unfolds her themes in the sphere of the everyday and the trivial which is least expected to suggest a subject for poetic presentation. However, her material yields a most impressive comment on life's bitter reality, on the thwarting of hopes and ideals, the betrayal of trust, the difficulty of communication between human beings, the tragedy of loneliness, the ironic discrepancy between the charmed world of youthful illusion and the adult world of insincerity and corruption. Katherine Mansfield achieved a high degree of excellence in the story of ' atmosphere, emotional experience and subterranean probing, which is still, almost sixty years after her death, dominant in the work of English and American short-story writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, H. E. Bates, Susan Hill and a great many other gifted contemporary authors.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century English literature was also greatly influenced by writers and poets who made persistent attempts to break away from established literary conventions. The new century heralding changes in every sphere of life and human knowledge and foreshadowing the inevitability of more profound upheavals — all this, the writers felt, called for a different, a new approach to literary representation. These trends gained an especially strong impetus after the holocaust of World War I. And many of those who wanted to express their disillusionment and hopelessness, their loathing of the revolting realities of bourgeois society, felt it their duty to reject traditional literary forms. Unable to form a clear conception of how to change things, they limited their protest to extravagance of form, relegating the rational meaning to the background.

The writers experimenting with poetic form have received the much debated and still not clearly defined title of "modernists", as distinct from traditionalists. This term cannot be accepted without certain reservations. To begin with, we must distinguish between the earlier modernists (those belonging to the first decades of the present century), who were certainly critics both of social and literary conventions, and the later ones in whose art experimentation with form became a convenient device to impart an aura of novelty to unclear or even reactionary ideas. It should also be emphasized that modernism cannot be used as a universally disparaging designation of all that was negative in literature. Some of the innovations introduced by modernists exercised a certain influence upon the realistic trends of twentieth-century art and were accepted by progressively minded artists.

The first modernists to put forward a program of some consistency were the "imagists" — a group formed shortly before World War I and listing among its members E. Pound, T. E. Hulme, R. Aldington, and others. The theoretical concepts of the group were put forth in the writings of Т. Е. Hulme. The imagists scornfully rejected melodious, rhythmically flowing verse abounding in poetic imagery or a logical, straightforward prose style, in short, all that is commonly denoted by poetic and prose diction.

A modernist writer or poet feeling isolated in the reality of bourgeois society, where faith in progress seems meaningless and naive, is inclined to identify this society with humanity as a whole. The outcome of his precarious attitude, of his inner uncertainty, and a kind of protest against a hostile world is the obscurity of his art. He does, indeed, "learn a style from a despair".

For the purpose of enhancing obscurity, intricacy of utterance, the modernists favored a number of stylistic devices, the most typical being unmotivated allusions to mythological and literary personages, to quotation, sometimes altered out of recognition, as well as omission of connecting links between successive ideas, use of words of specific terminological character, foreign place names, words or entire lines in a foreign language. Preference is given to metaphors devoid of any poetical connotations or emotional undertones, thus producing an image of deliberate prosaic implications.

The two most prominent figures in modernist literature were Thomas S. Eliot in poetry and James Joyce in prose. Eliot's major poetic creation The Waste Land was a model for poets, for it became a symbol of the world's sickness, of a civilization gone to seed. The waste land is a world of spiritually displaced people of every nationality and creed, of people emotionally and intellectually starved and hopelessly alienated from decency and dignity in a barren land of rock and stone with dry bones strewn everywhere. Eliot's influence was strongly exerted on several generations of poets, among whom were such diverse talents as Robert Graves, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.

In prose fiction James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are especially representative of a writer's reaction to man's alienation from life and society. Joyce depicts the psychic movement of his characters by creating a chaotic play of sensations and emotions in arbitrary succession without seeming relevance to a unifying idea. To present the workings of the human mind he evolved a special technique defined by literary criticism as the "stream-of-consciousness" technique disregarding linguistic norms in an attempt to approximate mental processes below the level of consciousness. Deliberate obscurity has rendered Joyce's books practically unintelligible to all but the most zealous and scholarly students. And while Joyce's influence on later writers has been considerable, they have refrained from competing with his inaccessibility. Even Virginia Woolf, one of the leaders of the modernists and an experimentalist herself admitted how difficult she found it to read Joyce. Though she evolved methods and techniques distinctly different from those of conventional fiction, her works never went far beyond the cultivated readers' comprehension.

Virginia Woolf sees the duty of the new generation of writers (formulated metaphorically in her short essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown) in "breaking the windows" of stifling and stuffy over-furnished rooms of contemporary middle-class fiction and letting in the fresh air of experiment. The products of this approach are her novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, etc., all of them demonstrating that the events and happenings of practical living are for Virginia Woolf the least part of life. Her problem is the projection of mental processes, the subordination of observable actions to private thoughts and feelings, which, in her understanding, form the real flux of living.

 

Criticism of modern civilization also finds a very strong and peculiar expression in the work of D. H. Lawrence. Often accused of obscenity and immoral treatment of sex, Lawrence devoted his great literary talent to the pursuit of a life more full, free and intense than the contemporary world could grant to men and women. The underlying purpose of his art was to restore the natural balance in living destroyed by the evils of industrialism. His novels and short stories, his verse, essays and travel books reveal that to him sex was the creative affirmation of life as opposed to a deadening, sordid and mechanical age.

There were some writers of the twenties who reflected the prevailing disillusionment by giving a satirical picture of their time. Thus, Aldous Huxley used the powerful weapon of satire to castigate his contemporaries, to depict the follies and hypocrisy of a reckless corrupt society, of a world grown increasingly callous and meaningless. The satirist's bitterness was partly inspired ^by disgust for the hopeless futility of human effort. If his disgust was only implicit in Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point, it became quite explicit in Brave New World. It was succeeded by more altruistic motives in his later works, but these were sacrificed to his unacceptable abstract creeds and obscured by his lack of interest in man as he really is.

The ironic sharpness of Huxley's earlier works was to find a counterpart in the novels of the brilliantly witty Evelyn Waugh, who satirized the post-war young people of Britain in a series of comical novels such as Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall- He also made a laughing-stock of the inanities of the British press and politics in Scoop, and of Britain's war effort in his trilogy known under the general title of Sword of Honor. On one occasion Waugh followed Huxley's lead and developed a few passages of his novel After Many a Summer into the devastating satire of The Loved One.

With Waugh literature enters the period with a completely different political and ideological climate. The world economic crisis, the rapid fascination of Germany and Hitler's coming to power in 1933, the launching of his offensives against peaceful neighbors, and, on the other hand, the victories of socialism in the USSR made men-of-letters develop a sense of social responsibility. The feeling that the artist must be as active as his fellow-citizens in doing what could be done to stop fascism and to support the anti-fascist United front actuated the greater part of the literary work of the period.

It was in the thirties that the Communist party of Great Britain came to the fore and exercised a marked influence on British intellectuals. This resulted in an upsurge of Marxist criticism as introduced by Ralph Fox, Christopher Caudwell, Alec West, Thomas A. Jackson and Jack Lindsay, an expounder of Marxian theory and a popular poet and novelist.

Prominent among them was John Cornford, a gifted poet, historian and essayist. Like Fox and Caudwell, he joined the International Brigade fighting fascism in Spain where he was killed when he was barely 21. The heroism of those days is described in John Somerfield’s book Volunteer in Spain (1937).

The chivalrous struggle of Spain for her freedom inspired three gifted young poets to go to the peninsula as reporters and devote some of their best poetry to her and to their indignation at the lack of support she got from capitalist countries calling themselves democratic. These were the so-called Oxford poets W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. Their poetry lost much of its fire when they later left England for the USA and turned from left to right wing.

The cause of democracy, peace and welfare was staunchly upheld by Sean O'Casey, whose international reputation as a playwright had been established in the twenties. A member of the Communist party, he wrote a number of plays of primary political importance bearing upon the crucial problems of our times. Some of these problems found their way into the work of the leading prose writers of the day. Richard Aldington won the world for an audience with his Death of a Hero, and a more limited, but appreciative attention with the acid criticism of English middle-class ways in Very Heaven and other novels of the period. The widespread success of Dr. Archibald Joseph Cronin's novels (Hatter's Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel) revealed a general interest for books that are plain and straight stories dealing with the uphill struggle of common men and women, with the joys and sorrows of ordinary life, with characters who have it in them to fight adverse fate.

Among the writers of the thirties John Boynton Priestley ranks highest. His novels include comically optimistic scenes obviously determined by wishful thinking and the desire to lift the low spirits of British people oppressed by post-war hardships (The Good Companions), but also sad and true pictures of life as it is actually lived by hundreds of Smiths and Browns all over England.

It is as a playwright, however, that Priestley took the popular fancy most. His numerous plays can roughly be divided into five groups: 1) detective plays (The Dangerous Corner, An Inspector Calls and many others) where, however, the technique of detection is used for the sake of a serious social message; 2) realistic psychological plays (Eden End, The Linden Tree); 3) experimental plays based on idealistic theories of time and on highly subjective treatment of consciousness (Music at Night, Time and the Conways, Johnson over Jordan); 4) political pamphlets (Home Is Tomorrow, Treasure on Pelican); 5> light comedies (Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon, etc.). During the war Priestley was staunch in his anti-fascist and pro-Soviet attitude. He had the whole nation for an audience as a radio commentator and wrote a series of novels and plays to stimulate England's power of resistance and her effort as part of the Second front against Hitler's Germany. On the whole English writers devoted comparatively few books to World War II, at least comparatively few books of importance.

Britain emerged from World War II in a weakened position both economically and politically. British industry had been reorganized to satisfy the needs of war and now produced only the bare essentials. In addition the government had sold half of the country's foreign capital investments and borrowed money widely to cover the war expenditures. A further strain on the country was the cost of military bases. In that situation Britain tried to maintain its imperialist position by accepting the role of a junior partner of American imperialism. Popular opinion held that a great part of the trouble was caused by the reactionary Conservative government and, accordingly, in 1945 the majority turned down the Tories and elected a Labour government.