Literature of English Modernism 1930-1980

Unit 8 LITERATURE OF ENGLISH MODERNISM 1930-1980 Sob, heavy world, Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist, remote from the happy. Wystan Hugh Auden. The Age of Anxiety The Age of Anxiety The early years of the 1930s started a red turbulent decade for English Modernism. That “low, dishonest decade,” according to W. H. Auden (1907-1973), started with the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The civil war of 1936 in Spain, the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Hitler’s pact with the Soviet Union in August of 1939, and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fell heavily not only on the British political and literary elite, but also on people worldwide. Despite winning the war, Great Britain completely lost its dominions; the jewel of the Empire Crown, India, gained its independence in 1947, together with the newly formed Muslim state of Pakistan. The Irish Republic withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1949, as did the Republic of South Africa in 1961. In 1982, however, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher managed to keep the remnants of the empire, the Falkland Islands, from Argentina’s takeover. The inside of Britain, beginning from the reign of George V (1910- 1936), on to George VI (1936-1952) and into the time of Elizabeth II, who came to the throne in 1952, 80 changed too; the primary role shifted from the royalists to the commoners and rebels, from the queen to the prime minister. To such positive image of non-royal leadership added the courageous and inspiring prime minister, Winston Churchill, who led the country through World War II. London, as the capital of the former empire, had long been in control over the culture, politics and the economy of the United Kingdom. London used to broadcast for Britain in perfect Queen’s English with the southern English intonations of its radio announcers of the British Broadcasting Corporation, or the BBC. But, beginning in the 1960s, regional dialects and later even foreign accents were heard on the air. The Arts Council, which had long financed the nation’s drama, literature, music, painting and plastic arts from London, redirected much of its grants to regional arts councils. When Great Britain elected its first socialist government in 1945, the country was on the way from the former ideal of individual freedom to the new form of social security. This government undertook its responsibility for public housing, pensions, unemployment, and the nation’s infrastructure, such as railroads and mines. It was a period of remarkable political Brave regeneration of British society after the horror of the 1930s and World War II. Yet, its possible consequences as well as the threat of Communism, were exposed to their first edition UNIT extreme in George Orwell’s (1903-1950) novels Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the state controls every aspect of human life and the individuals 8 obey it. Similarly life may become awful under those who exercise New World, their technological culture to its extremes, as shown in Brave New Aldous Huxley and World (1932) by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Literary Moods Political tensions within Great Britain and on the Continent found their reflection in the literature of the period, especially in its poetry. English literature widened its scope not only in content and form, caused by a new way of seeing the world; it also spread geographically, due to a fresh flow of literature from Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Britain’s former colonies, like Australia, India, South Africa, were also productive in English literary output. In this period flourished such genres as short story, the new short-short story, drama worthy of the Shakespearean tradition, novel, boldly experimenting with content and form, and restless poetry attempting to cover the most sublte spiritual and intellectual values. The themes writers chose changed too. The stress of the war, the immense technological advances in sciences, telecommunication and space exploration, and greater social freedom, made the literati feel more liberated towards the treatment of their art and the choice of subject matter. Anything could be represented in fiction: low and high-brow topics, dignified or contemptible, familiar or exotic. Most of the British poets of the 1930s were born at the beginning of the 20th century and grew up in the war atmosphere and the Great Depression, and these experiences resurrected in their poetry, such as Edmund Charles Blunden’s (1896-1974) Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), Siegfried Sassoon’s (1886-1967) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). LITERATURE OF ENGLISH MODERNISM 1930-1980 In poetry a notable trend was abandoning traditional forms and metres; poets searched for new rhythms, new possibilities of free verse, guided by the idea that meaning should dictate the choice of rhythm and not vice versa. Such poets as W. H. Auden, Christopher first edition Isherwood, and Stephen Spender, wrote and sought their ideal under the various influences from John Skelton (1460-1529) to Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Siegfried Sassoon and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 81 Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), both expatriate Americans, had an enormous influence on the whole European culture. Pound was fond of Browning and various Italian and French poets of the Middle Ages; Eliot, satirizing the puritanical world of New England, produced a highly complex and masterful poem The Waste Land (1922). Ezra Pound The great poet who emerged before the War was Dylan Thomas (1914- 1953), a Welshman with a keen musical expressiveness and a technique that borrowed much from Hopkins, Joyce, and the Bible. His poetry celebrates the unity of life and the innocence of childhood. He curiously mixes the erotic and the biblical images, and presents them in very concise romantic language. Subsequent English poetry rejected the bard-like romanticism of Thomas but he still stands out alone in 20th century English poetry. With the exception of C. P. Snow (1905-1980), most British writers concentrated on artistic and social rather than political or economic issues; among the novelists were Henry Green (1905-1973), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), Joyce Cary (1888-1957), and Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990); among the poets — Robert Graves (1895-1985), Edwin Muir (1887-1959), Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973), Cecil Day Lewis (1904-72), Stephen Spender (1909-1995), and Edith Sitwell (1887-1964). In addition, novelists and playwrights of the 1950s, often referred to as the Angry Young Men, voiced their discontent with contemporary British society. Yet, every author tended to nurture their own unique voices against the general background of anxiety and search. Later, after the 1950s, a new generation of poets, such as Donald Davie (1922-1995), Thom Gunn (1929-2004) and Philip Larkin (1922-1985), reacted against the verbal tricks of the Welsh language lover Dylan Thomas, and others. This new group came to be called “The Movement” and promoted a neutral tone and a clear diction. Its most ardent exponent, Philip Larkin, was opposing the imported modernism of Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) in favour of a native tradition represented in the 20th century by Thomas Hardy. This tradition still flourishes in the work of Tony Harrison (b. 1937) and Seamus Heaney (b. 1939). As Standard English was giving way to regional and non-canonical dialects in literature, on the BBC, and the Houses of Parliament, so the writers tried to find their simple accessible speech for truthful representation of reality. The long Cold War between the former superpowers, the USA and the USSR, had its influence on literary output in such playwrights as Harold Pinter (1930-2008), in his Harold Pinter highly innovative plays like The Caretaker (1960), which ranked in the popular Theatre of the Absurd, as well as in The Homecoming (1965), Silence (1969), No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978). The novelists set out to build their own set of values. They mostly departed from a chronological narrative, instead they followed the flow of human mind, both conscious and subconscious. Part of the spirit lay in the pioneer explorations by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961). The outstanding novelists include Kingsley Amis (1922- 1995), Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), William Golding (1911-1993), Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Muriel Spark (1918-2006) and others. Anthony Powell (1905-2000) and Richard Hughes (1900- 1976) continued the generous 19th century tradition and wrote realistic novels describing life in England in the 20th century. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), who wrote in Hungarian and German before he turned to English, is famous for historical novels, among others The Gladiators (1939), about the revolt against Rome led by the gladiator Spartacus, and Arrival and Departure (1943), dealing with morality and political responsibility. This period is rich in anti-utopian or dystopian fiction, including Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) with Facial Justice (1960), where citizens are forbidden to be either beautiful or ugly, only something in between. Here belongs the most frightening social forecast in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). William Somerset Maugham (1864-1965) told good stories about the paradoxes in human behaviour. 82 The English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist Graham Greene (1904-1991), was preoccupied with the problem of good and evil, and his books are a mixture of theology and reality. Some of his novels are The Heart of the Matter (1948) Our Man in Havana (1958), The Comedians (1966), The Human Factor (1978), and The Tenth Man (1985). The Quiet American (1956) deals with the Indo-China War and examines a moral theme in the context of contemporary political settings.

Load more