Lecture 8. The 20th century English literature

To the English literature of this period we refer prose, poetry, and drama written in English in the 1900s. The century was a period of great artistic change, and is dominated by the impact of World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45), as well as by the artistic concerns of modernism (which affected both themes and methods of writing). Modernist literature was predominantly European movement beginning in the early-to-mid-20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms. Representing the radical shift in cultural sensibilities surrounding World War I, modernist literature struggled with the new realm of subject matter brought about by an increasingly industrialized and globalized world. The range of literature and of its readership, which increased in the 19th-century English literature period, rose even more rapidly in the 20th century.

Early 20th-century novel JOSEPH CONRAD British novelist Joseph Conrad began the crucial transition from sailor to writer by starting his first novel “Almayer's Folly” (1889). Interestingly, he chose to write in English, his third language. A journey to the Congo in 1890 was Joseph's inspiration to write “Heart of Darkness”. His condemnation of colonialism is well documented in the journal he kept during his visit. The major productive phase of Conrad's career spanned from 1897 to 1911, during which time he composed his best works, namely “The Nigger of the Narcissus”, “Youth”, “Heart of Darkness”, “Lord Jim”, “Nostromo”, “The Secret Agent”, and “Under Western Eyes”, among other works. In 1917 he published his short novel “The Shadow Line”. These works combine a vivid and sensuous evocation of various lands and seas with a rigorous, humane scrutiny of moral dilemmas, pitfalls, and desperation. This indicates the questioning nature of the 20th century, which began by doubting the principles on which the Victorians had based their social code, leading to uncertainty and complexity. Conrad's literary work would have a profound impact on the Modernist movement, influencing a long list of writers including T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. JAMES JOYCE While their Victorian predecessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20th century writers such as James Joyce often felt alienated from it, so responded by writing more intellectually challenging works or by pushing the boundaries of acceptable content. Joyce's complex works included “Ulysses”, arguably the most important work of Modernist literature, referred to as "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". In 1905, Joyce completed a collection of eight stories, entitled “Dubliners”, though it was not until 1913 that the volume was actually printed. Joyce's next major work “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” appeared in serialized form in 1914 and 1915, before Joyce was "discovered" by Ezra Pound and the complete text was printed in New York in 1916, and in London in 1917. When “Ulysses” was published in Paris in 1922, many immediately hailed the work as genius. With his inventive narrative style and engagement with multiple philosophical themes, Joyce had established himself as a leading Modernist. The novel charts the passage of one day – June, 16 1904 – as depicted in the life of an Irish Jew named Leopold Bloom, who plays the role of a Ulysses by wandering through the streets of Dublin. Despite the fact that Joyce was writing in self-imposed exile, living in Paris, Zurich and Trieste while writing “Ulysses”, the novel is noted for the incredible amount of accuracy and detail regarding the physical and geographical features of Dublin. Thematically similar to Joyce's previous works, “Ulysses” examines the relationship between the modern man and his myth and history, focusing on contemporary questions of Irish political and cultural independence, the effects of organized religion on the soul, and the cultural and moral decay that produced economic development and heightened urbanization. While Joyce was writing the epic work, there was serious doubt as to whether “Ulysses” would be completed. Midway through his writing, Joyce suffered the first of eleven eye operations to salvage his ever-worsening eyesight. While “Ulysses” was hailed by some, the novel was banned from both the United Kingdom as well as the United States on obscenity charges. It was not until 1934, that Random House won a court battle that granted permission to print and distribute Joyce's “Ulysses” in the United States; two years later, the novel was legalized in Britain. By that time, Joyce was approaching the end of his public career having concluded his work on a final novel entitled “Finnegan's Wake”. Considered to be far more baffling and convoluted than “Ulysses”, “Finnegan's Wake” was a critical failure, ostracizing Joyce from many of his former admirers. Though his prestige had faded towards the end of his life, Joyce regained literary stature in the decades following his death and “Ulysses” now stands as the definitive text of the Anglo-American modernist movement, marking Joyce's creative genius and premier abilities as a stylist of the English language.   D.H.LAWRENCE Important novelist between the two World Wars, Lawrence began writing poetry in college and that turned into “The White Peacock”, his first novel. He did not enjoy the collegiate atmosphere and spent most of his time there writing and learning about socialism. Lawrence continued writing poetry and prose, and he was soon catapulted into London's literary circles, though he never felt comfortable within them. His mother developed cancer in 1910, and as she wasted away, Lawrence began writing "Paul Morel" (later to become “Sons and Lovers”) as an investigation into his relationship with her. “The White Peacock” was published in 1911. In May, 1912 “Sons and Lovers” was published and is considered now to be his masterpiece. Lawrence was prolific in this period, writing more poems, publishing “The Rainbow” in 1915, and working on “Women in Love”. “The Rainbow”'s erotic subject matter and language was met with harsh criticism, and its distribution was severed. Lawrence unhappily waited out the end of the war and published “Women in Love” in 1920. He continued writing novels, poems, and even books on psychoanalysis, though only “Lady Chatterley's Lover” (1928), another heavily censored book, approached the fame and reputation of “Sons and Lovers”, “The Rainbow”, and “Women in Love”. Lawrence is one of the few writers whose reputation is equally staked on novels, short stories, and poetry, and though his initially censored work now seems tame, he opened up the door to sensuality for countless writers after him. D. H. Lawrence wrote with understanding about the social life of the lower and middle classes, and the personal life of those who could not adapt to the social norms of his time. Lawrence attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the acceptable treatment of sexual issues.   VIRGINIA WOOLF Virginia published an extraordinary amount of groundbreaking material. She was a renowned member of the Bloomsbury Group and a leading writer of the modernist movement with her use of innovative literary techniques. In contrast to the majority of literature written before the early 1900s, which emphasized plot and detailed descriptions of characters and settings, Woolf's writing thoroughly explores the concepts of time, memory, and consciousness. The plot is generated by the characters' inner lives, not by the external world. In March 1941, Woolf left suicide notes for her husband and sister and drowned herself in a nearby river. She feared her madness was returning and that she would not be able to continue writing, and she wished to spare her loved ones. Over the course of her many illnesses, however, Woolf had remained productive. Her intense powers of concentration had allowed her to work ten to twelve hours writing. Her most notable publications include “Night and Day”, “The Mark on the Wall”, “Jacob's Room”, “Monday or Tuesday”, “Mrs. Dalloway”, “To The Lighthouse”, “Orlando”, “A Room of One's Own”, “The Waves”, “The Years”, and “Between the Acts”. In total, her work comprises five volumes of collected essays and reviews, two biographies (“Flush” and “Roger Fry”), two libertarian books, a volume of selections from her diary, nine novels, and a volume of short stories. Virginia Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique.   EDWARD MORGAN FOSTER Forster became a writer shortly after graduating from King's College. His first novels were products of that particular time -- stories about the changing social conditions during the decline of Victorianism. However, these earlier works differed from Forster's contemporaries in their more colloquial style and established the author's early conviction that men and women should keep in touch with the land to cultivate their imaginations. He developed this theme in his first novels “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (1905) and “The Longest Journey” (1907), followed by the comic novel “A Room With a View” (1908), which concerns the experience of a young British woman, Lucy Honeychurch, in Italy. However, Forster's first major success was “Howards End” (1910), a novel centered on the alliance between the liberal Schlegel sisters and Ruth Wilcox, the proprietor of the titular house, against her husband, Henry Wilcox, an enterprising businessman. The novel ends with the marriage of Henry Wilcox to Margaret Schlegel, who brings him back to Howards End, reestablishing the Wilcox land link. “A Room with a View” and “Howards End” examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society in England. Forster spent three wartime years in Alexandria doing civilian work and visited India twice. After he returned to England, inspired by his experience in India, he wrote “A Passage to India” (1924), which reflected challenges to imperialism. The novel examines the British colonial occupation of India, but rather than developing a political focus, explores the friendship between an Indian doctor and British schoolmaster during a trial against the doctor, based on a false charge. “A Passage to India” is the last novel Forster published during his lifetime, but two other works remained, the incomplete “Arctic Summer”, and the unpublished complete novel “Maurice”, which was written circa 1914, but published in 1971 after Forster's death. Forster specifically requested the novel be published only after his death due to its overt homosexual theme. Although Forster published no novels after “A Passage to India”, he continued to write short stories and essays until his death in 1970. He published several anthologies, including “The Celestial Omnibus” (1914) and “The Eternal Moment” (1928), two collections of short stories, “Abinger Harvest” (1936), a collection of poetry, essays and fiction, and several non-fiction works. The essays by Forster as well as his frequent lectures on political topics established his reputation as a liberal thinker and strong advocate of democracy. Today, many people know of E.M. Forster due to the many film adaptations of his work. Titles by Forster that are immortalized not only on the page but also on film include “A Passage to India” (1984), “A Room with a View” (1986), “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (1991), and “Howards End” (1991). It is ironic that so many of his titles were made into movies, many with great success, as throughout his life he remained adamant about the difficulty of adapting books to stage or film. In 1919, he contributed regularly to the London literary magazine "The Athenaeum", often criticizing various attempts to convert written work to the stage. For him, the individual experience of reading a book was something that could not be captured in another form of media. Despite his beliefs, many of the film adaptations of Forster's work were met with widespread enthusiasm and praise, including multiple Academy Award nominations.   JOHN GALSWORTHY (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his distinguished art of narration which takes its highest form in “The Forsyte Saga” published between 1906 and 1921 and as a collection in 1922. The second series of novels in the Forsyte roman fleuve would be “The White Monkey” (1924), “The Silver Spoon” (1926), and “Swan Song” (1928). “Maid in Waiting” (1931), “Flowering Wilderness” (1932), and “Over the River” (1933) comprised the third. “The Man of Property” (1906) would be the first of the “The Forsyte Saga”. Chronicling three generations of the Victorian upper-class Forsyte family, it was followed by “Indian Summer of a Forsyte”, “In Chancery”, and “Awakening” in 1920 and “To Let” in 1921. The Forsyte obsession with wealth, status, and acquisition is apparent. Galsworthy satirically though not unsympathetically criticizes the hollow insularity of everything from matters of property and marriage to the ideologies of the very class he was born into. Writing merely for his own amusement around the age of twenty-eight, Galsworthy first published a collection of his short stories, “From the Four Winds” (1897) and the novel “Jocelyn” (1898) at his own expense and under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. After realising that the practice of law was not for him, he published his first novel “The Island Pharisees” (1904) under his own name, and which in his opinion remained his most important work. “The Silver Box” first opened at the Court Theatre in 1906 and was the first of many noteworthy plays of the politically aware and liberal Galsworthy, many of them with social implications such as “Justice” (1910) which raised awareness of the then prison system and caused reform in the use of solitary confinement. Other novels published around this time were “The Country House” (1907), “The Patrician” (1911), “The Freelands” (1915), and his collection of short stories “Five Tales” (1918). “Escape” (1926) was another prison-based play, highly acclaimed.   ARNOLD BENNET Novelist, playwright, essayist, critic and journalist. Arnold Bennett had shown early promise as a writer and had won a writing competition in a local newspaper as a boy. In London he began to see his writing published in popular magazines and he joined the staff of Woman magazine in 1893, later becoming its editor. His first novel to be published “A man from the north”, appeared in 1898 and its success allowed him to give up other work to concentrate on writing. A prolific, yet uneven, author, the reputation of Arnold Bennett rests on his thirty novels. His best work can be found in the novels “Anna of the Five Towns” (1902), “The Old Wives' Tale” (1908), “Clayhanger” (1910) and “Riceyman Steps” (1923). In his earlier career, Arnold Bennett was also a respected playwright, his interest in the theatre following on from his work as a critic. His most successful play was “Milestones”.

  HERBERT WELLS He first became very popular for his humorous essays and short stories, and only later he began writing the science fiction that would later become his trademark. Wells's first novel, “The Time Machine” (1895), was written to relieve his poverty. It serves as a harsh critique of capitalism. In the novel, a man travels to the future and finds a nightmarish dystopia in which two distinct species have evolved from the ruling and working classes. The novel struck a chord with Victorian England, a heavily industrialized country of Haves and Have-Nots, and it became a success. Wells followed with “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1896), “The Invisible Man” (1897), and “The War Between the Worlds” (1898). All were hits that solidified Wells's place in the science-fiction canon. In “The War Between the Worlds”, the description of a Martian invasion of Earth was so terrifying that when it was adapted as a radio play in 1938 by Orson Welles as a "real" emergency broadcast, it sent thousands of listeners into a panic. Wells soon turned his attention to inflammatory and often contradictory politics. He preached socialism whenever he could, though he later rejected it; he stood for women's rights while he cheated on his wives; he was a staunch supporter of World War I, calling it "The War That Will End War," but after World War II found the war-ravaged world he departed in 1946 more horrifying than any of his fictions. Wells became as major a player in the political landscape as a writer could become. A personal acquaintance of world leaders including Winston Churchill, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and others, he was unabashed in their presence, earning their respect or enmity as circumstances warranted. Wells also found his share of admirers and detractors in the literary world. He had something of a love-hate relationship with the American writer Henry James. Each recognized great potential in the other, but they wrote cutting letters back and forth for twenty years criticizing each other's technique and ideas. By most accounts, Wells's career sank after 1920. Critics accused him of metamorphosing into a full-fledged propagandist, the "novel of ideas" ran out of steam, and his belligerence surely did not win him many friends. Nevertheless, Wells remains a titan in the world of science fiction.   WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM (1874-1965) English playwright and author.Like his protagonist, Maugham himself would live for many years in search of his calling and a place where he belonged. He courted much controversy through his works including accusations of a thinly-veiled satirical attack on Thomas Hardy in “Cakes and Ale” (1930). Although he was homosexual, he married once and had numerous affairs with women, many of his female characters mirroring real life lovers. Maugham travelled far and wide during his life to Europe, North America, the Far East, the South and beyond; he also explored many professions including doctor, spy, and playwright, but it is for his short stories and novels that he is best remembered today. There are many biographical details in his stories and characters; he avoids verbose sentimentality, favouring spare yet vivid, often cynical prose. His first novel is “Liza of Lambeth”. As a medical student Maugham had seen first-hand the poor and suffering of the shabby working classes in London's Lambeth slum area while apprenticing as midwife. The experience would serve him well in writing vivid physical descriptions of his fictional characters, and in realistic portrayals of the seedier aspects of life and its consequences on the human psyche. Liza Kemp belongs to that genre of fiction examining the less-than pristine Victorian slum-life of adultery, sickness, and desperate searches for meaningful love. Although Liza achieved mild success at the time, especially because of the controversy its subject matter stirred, Maugham decided to turn full-time to writing. “The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia” was published in 1905. Other works published around this time include “The Hero” (1901), “Mrs. Craddock” (1902), “The Merry-Go-Round” (1904), “The Explorer” (1907), “Moon and Sixpence” (1919), “The Trembling of a Leaf” (1921), and “The Painted Veil” (1925). Back in London, Maugham continued to write, immersing himself in the theatre and literary world, working on novels and plays, some inspired by the style of Oscar Wilde whose sensational trial and ensuing criminal charges surrounding his homosexuality surely left an impact on Maugham, who never publicly wrote of his own orientation. His first drama, “A Man of Honour” (1903) earned him notice with London's intelligentsia. Among his almost two-dozen plays are “Lady Frederick” (1907), “Jack Straw” (1912), “The Unknown” (1920), “The Circle” (1921), “Our Betters” (1923), “The Constant Wife” (1927) and “Sheppey” (1933). In his later years he wrote numerous essays and short stories, further publications including “Cakes and Ale” (1930), “The Narrow Corner” (1932), “Don Fernando” (1935), “The Summing Up” (1938), “Up At The Villa” (1941), “The Razor's Edge” (1944), “Then And Now” (1946), “Creatures of Circumstance” (1947), “Catalina” (1948), and “The Art of Fiction: An Introduction to Ten Novels and Their Authors” (1955). Somerset Maugham was a cynical observer of human nature.

Early 20th-century drama BERNARD SHAW Shaw began writing rather late in life. He wrote five novels, but he earned a living as a music and theater critic, advocating strongly for the music of Richard Wagner. Shaw originally tried his hand at writing plays to flesh out his criticisms of the existing British stage. Compared to the light Victorian comedies which were the fashion, Shaw's plays were revolutionary in their seriousness and socialist themes. His earliest plays were published in a set titled “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant” (1898). The “Pleasant” volume includes “Arms and the Man” (1894), “Candida” (1893), and “You Never Can Tell” (1895). The “Unpleasant” volume includes “Widower's Houses” (1892), “The Philanderer” (1893), and “Mrs. Warren's Profession” (1893). The latter play describes the mother/daughter relationship between a prostitute and her exacting daughter, and it was banned in London for its "immorality." “Widower's Houses” and “Mrs. Warren's Profession” savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as “Arms and the Man” and “The Man of Destiny” the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas. In 1901 he published “Three Plays for Puritans”, a set which included “The Devil's Disciple”, a play about the American Revolution. Of his later plays, Shaw is best remembered for his “Saint Joan” (1923) and “John Bull's Other Island” (1904). “Saint Joan” portrays the Frenchwoman as a stubborn piece of work who was ahead of her time. It is his masterpiece, in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present. “John Bull's Other Island” is a comedy about Ireland. Other important plays by Shaw are “Caesar and Cleopatra” (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and “Androcles and the Lion” (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In “Major Barbara” (1905), one of Shaw's most successful «discussion» plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. “The Doctor's Dilemma” (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. “Candida” (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and “Pygmalion” (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour. Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.

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