General characteristic of the early twentieth century English literature

Lecture course on the XXth century English literature

Lecture 1. The Early Twentieth Century Literature (1901-1939). New Directions. Modernism

Plan of the lecture

General characteristic of the early twentieth century English literature

A major British novelist, critic, and essay­ist Virginia Woolf

The life and literary activity of James Joyce

David Herbert Lawrence – the explorer of the world of love between men and women

A) Sons and Lovers.

General characteristic of the early twentieth century English literature

In Europe, the effect of World War I, and of the ghastly casual­ties was powerful and lasting. There was a grim contrast between the rousing patriotic speeches of the leaders at home and the slaughter in the trenches of France.

The devastation of World War I brought about an end to the sense of optimism that had characterized the years immediately pre­ceding the war - nineteenth-century conviction that progress must forever continue, which can be found in the works of G.B.Shaw and H.G.Wells. Many people were left with the feeling of uncertainty, disjointedness, and disillusionment. No longer trusting ideas and values of the world out of which the war had developed, people sought to find new ideas that were more applicable to twentieth-century life. The quest for new ideas extended into the world of literature, and a major literary movement known as Modernism was born.

In writing this was the period called "highbrow" and "precious", the period of new writing meant to be understood only by a very small minority of the people, the cultured few, and that could not be enjoyed-by everybody who could read. The works of T.S.Eliot (1888-1965), James Joyce (1882-1941), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) were often difficult and obscure. Young creative writers felt them­selves in danger of being overwhelmed by mass media: radio, films, and of course television meant for ordinary people. So they had to keep a long-way-off and do something very different. They decided that real literature, not meant for ordinary reading public, could afford to be difficult, could even glory in its difficulty.

War effected J. R.R. Tolkien (1893-1973). He personally came under the shadow of war and felt fully its oppression when he was caught in youth by 1914, a "hideous experience" as he called it himself, and then involved in no less hideous an experience in 1939 and the following years.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1893 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. After serving in the First World War, he embarked upon a distinguished as one of the finest philologists in the world. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College. He is beloved throughout the world as the creator of Middle-earth and the author of such classic works as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He died on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81.

His trilogy The Lord of the Ring (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the Ring) appeared between 1936 and 1949. It is a chronicle of the Great War of the Ring which occurred in the Third Age of Middle-earth. It is greatly built on myth and symbols. "Myth and faery-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth, but not explicit, not in the known form of primary 'real' world," said Tolkien.

There were, of course, other writers whose work was less affect­ed by the war and the disillusionment that it bred. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), E.M.Forster (1879-1970), and Catherine Mansfield (1888-1923), whose literary careers as writers of fiction began well before the war, exercised much influence on later writers - Conrad by his deep concern with man's inner nature, Forster and Mansfield by their subtle treatment of personal relationships. In the stories collected in The Garden Party (1922) Mansfield uses psychological revelation and skillful description of social gatherings to portray young people trying to break through superficiality upper-middle class life. Some of these stories achieve the level of poetry in their impressionistic recreation of scenes and moments. Mansfield re­corded her thoughts during her last years in a writer's Journal, which her husband, the English critic edited and issued in 1927, after her death.

Among poets, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) progressed from a dreamy kind of romanticism in the 1890's to highly disciplined, intellectual verse in the 1920's and 1930's, while A.E.Housman (1859-1936) assured his fame with a small number of exquisitely polished lyrics. Poets such as T.S.Eliot (1888-1965) and William Butler Yeats (1865) experimented with language and rhythms. In­fluenced by the innovators of the late Victorian Age, by the poetry of the French Symbolists, by the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, and by the attempts of the Imagists to capture mo­ments in pure, compressed images, Eliot, Yeats and others wrote an entirely new kind of poetry, intellectually challenging, suggestive, ironic, realistic and often disquieting. Their poems, along with those of Gerald Manley Hopkins, published posthumously in 1918, in­spired later poets such as W.H.Auden (1907-1973), C.S.Lewis (1893-1963), and Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) to create technically precise poetry rich, in nuance and ideas.

An important novelist, contemporary with Joyce and Virginia Woolf but markedly different in his approach, was D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930).

Twentieth-century writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have tried not merely to describe how a character might think; they have also attempted to present a record of his consciousness -that is, the stream of the character's thoughts as he is thinking them. They explored the psychic ills of contemporary society through the inner experience of individuals and their relationships. Influ­enced by developments in modern psychology, writers began using the stream-of-consciousness technique, attempting to recreate the natural flow of a character's thoughts. The stream-of-consciousness ' technique involves the presentation of a series of thoughts, memo­ries, and insights, connected only by a character's natural associa­tions. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, who is regarded as one of the principal exponents of Modernism, records the con­sciousness of Clarissa Dalloway as she thinks about a party she is giving: "But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judge­ments, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and someone else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt contin­uously a sense of their existence; and she felt a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create, but to whom?" Notice that the author does not try to be especially clear. The sentences do not follow one another logically. Instead, she fol­lows the mind wherever it goes, seeking to give an impression of spontaneity rather than order.

The Modernists experimented with wide variety of new approaches and techniques, producing a remarkably diverse body of literature. During the years between the two world wars, writers in both the United States and Europe explored new literary territories. The landmark stream-of -consciousness novel is Ulysses, published in 1922 by the Irish writer James Joyce. A number of American novelists soon adopted the technique, most notably William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, John Passes in U.SA, Katherine Anne Porter in short stories, Eugene O'Neill in Strange Interlude.

The postwar disenchantment made many writers settle in Paris, where they were influenced by Gertrude Stein. The publicist and the writer who coined the phrase "Lost generation" to describe those who were disillusioned by the First World War, Stein lived in Paris from 1902 until her death in 1946. Stein's home attracted many major authors, including Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. They are the best known of the expatriates. But they are by no means the only ones. Ezra Pound spent most of his adult life in England, France and Italy. T.S.Eliot, born in St.Louis, went to Europe in 1914 and did not return to the United States until 1932.

Most of the lost generation saw very little in their civilization to praise or even to accept. Archibald Macleish, an expatriate from 1923 to 1928, wrote several volumes of verse expressing the chaos and hopelessness of those years.

Yet, the Modernists shared a common sense. They sought to capture the essence of modern life in the form and content of their work. To reflect the fragmentation of the modern world, the Mod­ernists constructed their works out of fragments, omitting the ex­positions, transitions, interrelations, resolutions, summaries, and explanations used in traditional literature. In poetry they aban­doned traditional forms in favour of free verse. The themes of their works were usually implied, rather than directly stated, creating a sense of uncertainty and forcing readers to draw their own conclu­sions. The Modernists generally believed that there is no external order governing human existence and that, as a result, life is often splintered and disjointed.

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