Post War and Modern literature

After World War II appeared many young writers like such as James Aldridge, who were ready to keep up the standard of wholesome optimism, and mature writers, who have passed through a certain creative crisis, but who were now working to discover humanism with a positive set of values. Such a writer is Graham Greene.

In the fifties there appears a very interesting trend in literature, the followers of which were called 'The Angry Young Men'. The post-war changes had given a chance to a large number of young people from the more democratic layers of society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life. Unemployment had increased after the war and besides that, English society continued to follow the old conservative rules of life and apparently did not need them. No one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. They felt deceived and became angry.

There appeared works dealing with such characters, angry young men who were angry with everything and everybody. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain, Kingsley Amis and the dramatist John Osborne.

Modern literature that began in the sixties saw a new type of criticism in the cultural life of Britain. This criticism was revealed in the 'working-class novel', as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class, but they have a petty-bourgeois psychology. The best known writer of this trend is Alan Sillitoe.

So, in this period one can differ the Post War Literature itself and the Modern Literature that began in the sixties with the new type of cultural life of Britain.

Since sixties the literary life in Great Britain has developed greatly. The new time brings new heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works. The specific feature of nowadays literature is the variety of genres and styles, which enrich the world's literature. Alongside with the realistic method the symbolic one takes place and develops further. On the one hand, the themes in the modem literary works concern more global problems: the Peace and War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and the Universe.

Literature in the UK after WWII is also difficult to generalize.The field of popular literature has been extremely fruitful in England during the twentieth century:

- Agatha Christie (1890-1976): detective novels

- Ian Fleming (1908-1964): James Bond novels

- J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973): Lord of the Rings

- C.S. Lewis(1898-1963): The Chronicles of Narnia

- Sea Adventure: Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander

- Historical novels. Robert Graves (1895-1985), I, Claudius novels. Ken Follet (1949-) The Pillars of the Earth (1989)

- Confessional writing: Helen Fielding’s Bridget’s Jones’s Diary, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), Fever Pitch (1992)

In the field of Children’s literature, English literature has provided the world with the most famous books and characters: Enid Blyton (1897-1968), the fifth most translated author worldwide (The Famous Five series, Malory Towers; J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter); Roald Dahl (1916-1990), born in Wales to Norwegian parents. James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Revolting Rhymes.

The prominent place in modern English literature is taken by William Golding (1911-1993) due to his philosophic and allegoric novels. He was educated at Grammar School and at Oxford. He was in the Navy during the 2-nd World War. Golding is the author of a number of essays, radio plays, short stories, a good deal of poetry, but his name first became known to the general public when his novel Lord of Flies was published in 1954. The cruelty of fascism and the war horrors made the writer think over the fate of mankind and nature of man. His novel Lord of Flies is written as a warning about the subsequences of fascism, he said that the tasks of evil must be found inside the country and its people. This novel has been called a modern classic and has had great popularity. The story tells of how nice people can, under certain circumstances, become savages very quickly. It is a story about a group of boys who found themselves on a desert island when their plane was shot down, and all the grown-ups perished. The island is not a real island, it symbolizes everyone who tries to act with common sense: to keep order, to built huts on the beach, to keep a fire on the mountain top as a signal. Simon and Piggy are the only boys whom Ralph really trust. Jack is only interested in hunting and power. The boys regress to savagery. In reversing the pattern of children's adventure stories and locating evil in the boys themselves, Golding reenergized the notion of original sin. Facile fashionable doctrines of progress and evolution are up-ended in The Inheritors (1935) where we see a crucial stage in the rise of our species through the eyes of Neanderthal man (and hear a good deal of his utterance too). Neanderthal man is innocent, pious and amiable, while our own progenitor. Homo sapiens, who comes to displace him in the process of evolutionary development, is double-minted and capable of self-deception. The theme of the human Tall¹ is present again. Golding makes no concessions to the novelist's natural desire to work to a promising briefer to repeat experiments that have proved successful. In Pincher Martin (1956) a shipwrecked sailor imagines that he is clinging to a bare rock desperate to survive. His past is recalled; but at the end we learn that he died in the wreck and that the whole recollection has taken place at the point of drowning. Free Fall (1959) is the study of Sammy Mountjoy, a successful artist, how he loses his soul and is brought up against the consequences when the girl he has seduced goes insane. If Martin is a mock-up Prometheus, Sammy is a parodic Dante who destroys his Beatrice. In The Spire (1965) Golding studies the moral and spiritual condition of Jocelin, dean of a cathedral, whose obsessive resolve to build a spire has a dual motivation in faith and in sheer self-assertion, through which the powers of heaven and hell collide. Golding has continued to produce novels (Darkness Visible, 1979; Rites of Passage, 1980) in which he experiments boldly with substance and style, in each case sustaining his vision on a symbolic framework which gives moral thrust and coherence to the whole.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), on the other hand, is a professional philosopher who has used the novel as a vehicle for studying the problem of freedom and responsibility. Under the Net (1954) is heavily overplotted but often very amusing, while The Bell (1958) is somewhat over-organized in terms of symbol and characterization.

Muriel Spark (1918-2006) first made an impact with a novel, Robinson (1958), which, curiously enough, like Golding's Lord of the Flies, owes something to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. January Marlow and two other survivors of a plane crash spend three months on a manshaped island inhabited only by Robinson and his servant. Robinson, a semi-mythical figure - benefactor, host and provider, yet also governor and director -withdraws for a space to contrive temporary freedom' for the survivors, and their relationships reenact passages from January's past. In Memento Mori (1959) aged characters have the tenor of their ways shaken by intermittent telephone calls reminding them that they must die. Thus Muriel Spark subjects her characters to specialized laboratory conditions that intensify aspects of the inescapable human condition - they are marooned in exile or under threat of mortality. Her little words become microcosms of the larger reality. Dimensions of awareness are lightly opened up. The Devil turns up at a London factory in the shape of a lively Scotsman in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). The Bachelors (1960) is a quieter study of what the title suggests: the intrusion of the unknown. Other is in this case represented by spiritualism.

'Angry Young Men'

Angry Young Men, various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.

The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. The trend that was evident in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the play’s 26-year-old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all his contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their lower-class mannerisms. When Sir Laurence Olivier played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade.

Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but who is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.

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