20th century British lit:
20th Century British (13)
1) Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad .
2) Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw .
3) Selected Poems, Auden .
4) Selected Poems, Yeats .
5) Selected Poems, Thomas .
6) Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf .
7) Rosencrantz and…, Tom Stoppard .
8) Beowulf, Seamus Heaney .
9) Kim, Rudyard Kipling .
10) Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett .
11) The Quiet American, Graham Greene .
12) The Prime of Miss Jean… , Spark .
13) The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro .

It is difficult to say that the 20th century only began at the turn of the century for there was a marked change in the literature starting as much as 13 years before the change. This was manifested as there were many ways that traditional stability was weakening. The aesthetic movement of “art for art’s sake” assaulted the assumptions about the nature of function of art. The idea of bohemia was rising in France as far more than England struggled with a lower class of people moving into the artistic sphere. There was an ever increasing difference between high and low class in terms of appreciation of art as more and more people were receiving a basic education. There was the attitude that people were “literate but not educated” which highlighted the snobbery around high-brow literature and out of this divide grew a market for low-brow literature. Another significant manifestation of the end of the Victorian age was the rise of various kinds of pessimism and stoicism.

Women were slowly gaining more rights and therefore more of a voice starting with The Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882 (suffrage first started in 1918 and was not universal until 1928). The Boer War (1899-1902) fought by Britain to establish political and economic control over the Boer republics of South Africa marked both the high point of and the reaction against British imperialism. This was right around the time that the Irish Question was being difficult to ignore. Ireland was seeking help from Germany to overthrow British rule around WWI.

Edwardian England 1901-1910 was most embodied in the idea of excess. The Georgian period 1910-1914 was especially golden in retrospect as the last phase of assurance and stability before the old order throughout Europe broke up in violence.

The postwar period of the 1920’s was about spiritual disillusionment. Depression and unemployment in the early 1930’s along with the rise of Hitler and the cruel shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat of another war, represented another sort of wasteland that produced another sort of effect on poets and novelists. The ‘30’s lead to a strong movement towards the political Left as the only solution to the ills of the world. This period was full of radical political belief and voices but there was almost no interesting development of technique.

After WWII the British had to face the dissolving of the empire starting in the ‘40’s and continuing into the ‘60’s. The 1960’s also lead to huge changes in cultural attitudes. Before that period London was considered to have the most appropriate manner of speech whereas after that different dialects began to be heard on the radio and television. This accompanied the dispersal of art funding to regions outside of London for the first time so the overall culture of the country became much more diverse in a short period.

The years leading up to WWI saw the start of a poetic revolution. The imagist movement fought against romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry. The movement developed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Imagism went in for the short, sharply etched, descriptive lyric, but it had no technique for the production of longer and more complex poems. Poetic language began a decisive move towards more casual language with the inclusion of slang, irony, and puns. Eliot was of course the standard bearer for this movement as he pioneered the obsession with French symbolism and English Metaphysicalism. Yeats is considered by far the best poet of his era (1890-1939).

Between WWI and WWII the dominant tone was very neutral and coolly clinical. After the beginning of WWII a neutral tone gave way to the vehemence of what came to be known as the New Apocalypse. Most notable of this period was Dylan Thomas. The period owed something of it’s audacity and violence to the example of the French surrealist poets and painter who sought to express, often by free association, the operation of the subconscious mind.

1912-1930 was the Heroic Age of the modern novel. Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forester. There were three major influences on the changes in attitude and technique in fiction of this period: novelists’ realization that the general background of belief that united them with their public in a common sense of what was significant in experience had disappeared; a new view of time—time was not a series of chronological moments to be presented by the novelist in sequence with an occasional deliberate retrospect but a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual with the ‘already’ continuously merging with the ‘not yet’ and retrospect merging into anticipation (influenced by Frued); and stress on the essential loneliness of the individual.

Short stories especially benefited from the increased focus on symbolism and realism. Modern drama begins with Oscar Wilde but contains few super distinctive traits after him.