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trilogies of Galsworthy's Forsyte novels are masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century, which revealed the corrupted capitalist world. In his novels of social satire, H. G. Wells made realistic studies of the aspirations and frustrations of the \whereas Bennett presented a vivid picture of the English life in the industrial Midlands in his best novels.
Realism was, to a certain extent, eclipsed by the rapid rise of modernism in the 1920s. But with the strong swing of leftism in the 1930s, novelists began to turn their attention to the urgent social problems. They also enriched the traditional ways of creation by adopting some of the modernist techniques. However, the realistic novels of this period were more or less touched by a pessimistic mood, preoccupied with the theme of man's loneliness, and shaped in different forms: social satires by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell comic satires on the English upper class by Evelyn Waugh; and Catholic novels by Graham Greene. Another important group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background in the mid-1950s and early 1960s known as \Young Man.\particular disillusion over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded social and political values in their society. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe were the major novelists in this group. They portrayed unadorned working-class life in their novels with great freshness and vigor of the working-class language. Amis was the first to start the attack on middle-class privileges and power in his novel Lucky Jim (1954). The term \Angry Young Man\
Having been merged and interpenetrated with modernism in the past several decades, the realistic novel of the 1960s and 1970s appeared in a new face with a richer, more vigorous and more diversified style.
1.Modern English poetry:
It is, in some sense, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The modernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry writing such as to use the
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language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in choosing subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poems.
2. Modern English novels:
The first three decades of 20th century were golden years of the modernist novel. In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. With the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one's present was the sum of his past, present and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual, writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created unprecedented stream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses (1922) by Joyce, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Woolf. One of the remarkable features of their writings was their continuous experimentation on new and sophisticated techniques in novel writing, which made tremendous impacts on the creation of both realistic and modernist novels in this century.
James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist; in Ulysses, his encyclopedia-like masterpiece, Joyce presents a fantastic picture of the disjointed, illogical, illusory, and mental- emotional life of Leopold Bloom, who becomes the symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-ⅠEurope.
In the works of E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, old traditions are still there, but their subject matter about human relationships and their symbolic or psychological presentations of the novel are entirely modern. Forster's masterpiece, A Passage to India (1924), is a novel of decidedly symbolist aspirations, in which the author set up, within a realistic story, a fable of moral significance that implies a highly mystical, symbolic view of life, death, human relationship, and the relationship of man with the infinite universe. D. H. Lawrence is regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing; but unlike Joyce, he was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lay in the tracing of the psychological development of his characters and in
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his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. He believed that life impulse was the primacy of man's instinct, and that any conscious repression of such an impulse would cause distortion or perversion of the individual's personality. In his best novels like The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), Lawrence made a bold psychological exploration of various human relationships, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness Lawrence claimed that the alienation of the human relationships and the perversion of human nature in the modern society were caused by the desires for power and money, by the shams and frauds of middle-class life, and, above all, by the whole capitalist mechanical civilization, which turned men into inhuman machines.
After the Second World War, modernism had another upsurge with the rise of existentialism which was reflected mainly in drama. 3. The development of 20th century English drama:
The most celebrated dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who, in a sense, pioneered the modern drama, though they did not make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist poets or novelists. Wilde expressed a satirical and bitter attitude towards the upper-class people by revealing their corruption, their snobbery, and their hypocrisy in his plays, especially in his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Shaw is is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare whose works are examples of the plays inspired by social criticism. John Galsworthy carried on this tradition of social criticism in his plays. By dramatizing social and ethical problems, Galsworthy made considerable achievements in his plays such as The Silver Box (1906) and Strife (1910), in which Galsworthy presents not only realistic pictures of social injustice, but also the workers' heroic struggles against their employers.
W. B. Yeats, a prominent poet of the 20th century, was the leader of the Irish National Theater Movement. He was a verse playwright who desired to restore lyrical drama to popularity. With the heroic portrayal of spiritual truth as his main concern, Yeats wrote a number of verse plays, introducing Irish myths and folk legends; but the
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plot in his plays was seldom very dramatic.
The 1930s witnessed a revival of poetic drama in England. One of the early experimenters was T. S. Eliot who regarded drama as the best medium of poetry. Eliot wrote several verse plays and made a considerable success. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), with its purely dramatic power, remains the most popular of his verse plays, in spite of its primarily religious purpose. After Eliot, Christopher Fry gained considerable successes in poetic drama. His exuberant though poetically commonplace verse drama. The Lady's Not For Burning (1948), attracted delighted audience.
The English dramatic revolution, which came in the 1950s under various European and American influences, developed in two directions: the working-class drama and the Theater of Absurd.
The working-class drama was started by a group of young writers from the lower-middle class, or working class, who presented a new type of plays which expressed a mood of restlessness, anger and frustration, a spirit of rebelliousness, and a strong emotional protest against the existing social institutions. John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger (1956), in a fresh, unadorned working-class language, angrily, violently and unrelentingly condemned the contemporary social evils. With an entirely new sense of reality, Osborne brought vitality to the English theater and became known as the first \oung Man.\
The most original playwright of the Theater of Absurd is Samuel Beckett, who wrote about human beings living a meaningless life in an alien, decaying world. His first play Waiting for Godot (1955) is regarded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd.
1. What is Modernism?
Modernism was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts, originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism,
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imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America. It has also been called \tradition of the new\conscious rejection of established rules, traditions and conventions, and \into the background traditional notions of the individual and society. The major figures that were associated with Modernism were Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that \was absurd, and the human life was an agony.\
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, Modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama. 2. The basic philosophy or characteristics of Modernism in literature:
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. One characteristic of English Modernism is \art\The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. Therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are
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