Twentieth century literature in Britain

• Profile of a century

In Britain the beginning of the 20th century coincided with the death of Queen Victoria who had reigned for 83 years (1819-1901). She indeed gave her name to a whole period, not only in literature but in furniture, house decoration, behaviour – a whole cultural climate – though in fact what people understand as ‘Victorianism’ varies greatly. However it is true that until the nineties of her reign the majority of the British people lived in an ordered society which seemed to be stable and to be becoming more and more prosperous.
Change had really begun in the nineties, at least ten years before Queen Victoria died, and although in the social sense Victorianism lingered on in Edwardianism (the reign of Edward VII, 1901-1910) both were swept away together by the First World War (1914-1918).
Of the years 1900-1914 the novelist H.G. Wells wrote:
‘Queen Victoria sat on the throne of England like a great paper-weight, and after she died things blew about all over the place’
In all areas of life change, become apparent and in literature and art the change was particularly seen in the literary Movement that we associate with the first part of the century – Modernism.
Modernism is an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts, both in Britain and in other parts of Europe, which influenced the writing of the early part of the 20th century and in different ways and later combinations have gone on influencing it ever since.
It was deeply affected by a new understanding of psychology (the human personality) and mythology (aspects of human history) as presented in the works of such seminal writers as:

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) who, driven from Nazi Germany, lived the latter part of his life in London where he died at the outset of the Second World War. His many contributions to knowledge and to the production and understanding of literature include his examination of the working of the unconscious, those hidden layers of the mind which exercise such an enormous effect on human conduct. Many of his concepts have become universally familiar (sometimes in a simplistic or vulgarized form) such as ‘the Id, the Ego and the Superego’, a death wish, repression, phallic symbolism, the Oedipus complex, the formative experience of childhood. Ever since Freud a psychoanalytic understanding of literature has become inevitable.
Students more seriously interested in the background of modernism as seen in Freud’s work may consult: Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Civilisation and its Discontents; Totem and Taboo. They should also be aware of the impact of Henri Bergson’s work on the relationship of time to consciousness.

Also

Sir James George Fraser (1854-1941) The Golden Bough (abridged edition) especially: ‘The Killing of the Divine King’, ‘The Myth of Adonis’, ‘Dionysus’, ‘The Myth and Ritual of Attis’, ‘The Myth of Osiris’, ‘Dionysis’ and ‘Public Scapegoats’. Fraser was one of the founders of modern anthropology. He made a comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind and held the thesis that men progress from the magical through religion to scientific thought. His discussion of fertility rites, the sacrificial killing of kings, the dying and resurrected god, the scapegoat etc. caught the literary imagination. After Fraser an anthropological approach to literature became possible and among other things showed that many aspects of different religions and different times and civilizations bore similarities often expressed in rituals, which seem to meet the needs of men in ordering their own ethnical life.

The writers that we have come to call modernist were very different from each other but they all shared a rejection of traditional Victorian and Edwardian values and of the 19th century approach with its predictable framework of narrative description and rational exposition in both poetry and prose. Their rejection of the values and approach of the period immediately preceding was allied with a desire to experiment in the technique of writing. They advocated a more fluid and internal approach to characterization and the presentation of personality which included the notion of the existence of chronological and psychological time. From these strands evolved what came to be known as the stream of consciousness, later to be absorbed into the mainstream of literature:
…the myriad flow of impressions, half-thoughts, associations, lapses, hesitations, incidental worries and sudden impulses that form part of the individual’s consciousness along with his rational thoughts. It is a technique that has proved widely influential in much twentieth century fiction. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

In poetry the importance of the poetic image was increasingly felt to be the essential vehicle of esthetic communication, rather than context or narrative content.

The central modernist writers are:
The later Henry James, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad.

W.B. Yeats was writing at the same time, but he was not consciously modernist and was differently affected by his position as an Irish poet.

George Bernard Shaw was the central playwright of the period. He was not a typical modernist writer, but a typical and witty socialist one.

Also living in this period, and also unaffected by modernism, was H. G. Wells, the first writer of science fiction.
Modernism began before the First Word War. But it came to its greatest fruition after it, especially in the twenties.

The First World War (1914 - 1918)
The First World War, at the time known as the Great War, or ‘the war to end wars’, broke into the development of Modernism.
The most widely enduring literature actually to come out of the war itself was poetry, especially that of: Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.
They all took an active part in the war and Owen and Rosenberg were killed in action.
Novels dealing with the First World War, were: the Tietjens Sequence by Ford Madox Ford (Some Do Not 1924, No More Parades 1925, A Man Could Stand Up 1926, The Last Post 1928).
There are, however, two important autobiographical memoirs concerning that war. Robert Graves’ fine Good-bye to All That, 1929, which reflects the post-war disillusionment of his generation by a writer who has later to be for six years (1961-66) professor of poetry in Oxford, and Testament of Youth, 1933 by Vera Brittain who nursed in the front line throughout the war and was an early active member of the women’s movement.
In the last two decades of the 20th century there was a reawakening of interest among novelists in the First World War a number were written on the human aspects of that war, including one that won the Booker Prize . Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, 1991; The Eye in the Door, 1993; The Ghose Road, 1885) and Birdsong by Simon Ffaulkes.

Between two wars – the Twenties and the Thirties

Only twenty years elapsed between the first and second world wars. Those born at the end of the first just finished school in time to go and fight in the second. But these two decades had a character of their own.
On the European scene they were shaped by the upsurge and superficial attraction of Communism, also of the Nazi movement in Germany and Fascism in Italy and Spain. The two decades were also deeply influenced in Britain, as in the whole of Europe and the United States, by the unemployment arising from the Great Depression . One of the ways in which these things affected society, at any rate in Britain, was an important rise in feelings of social responsibility. There was also a strengthening of workers’ movements, both the militant (Communist) movement and Fabianism . The Communist Party was never strong in the UK. But from the 19th century onwards there has been a strong strain of socialism in England and Wales (indeed radical and Christian social reform movements existed even earlier).
It was in this period that modernism, born earlier, took roots as many of the best known works of the writers mentioned above were written or became known:
Yeats later poems, T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, The Four Quartets, plays and most of his criticism, D.H. Lawrence: The Rainbow, Women in Love, Virginia Woolf: Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, James Joyce: Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake. 
There were some novelists and a group of poets whose work belongs entirely to this interwar period of social unrest and ideological commitment. A period moreover punctuated by the Spanish Civil War in which ideological convictions and emotions came to a head and were even acted upon. So that British poets, novelists and artists could be found on both sides of the struggle in Spain.   
Writers whose main earlier works reflected the inter-war period are the poets: W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis Macniece, and the novelist Aldous Huxley. These were all socially engaged writers.
Among them a special place here is taken by George Orwell who, with the exception of Shaw is the most overtly political writer in 20th c literature in Britain. He was a democratic socialist and his novel Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was an impassioned document of unemployment and proletarian life. His most famous novels Animal farm (1945) and NinetyEightyFour (1949) were not published until after the Second World War.

The Second World War 1939-1945

The Second World War broke out in western Europe in autumn 1939 and its record has been more frequently captured in the many films that have come out since than in literature. But the experience of the rescue of the British army from the shores of Dunkirk, (a rescue in which anyone who had even a small boat to ferry the armies to the waiting naval ships tool part) the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, D-day, the Normandy landings, (see fn 5) evacuation of children and women from major cities, are still at the century’s end part of the common stock of knowledge. Moreover, the end of the war was the beginning of the Atomic age:

There is no doubt that the Second World War was as terrible a fracture of the twentieth-century experience as the First had been. In fact its impact on world history, human consciousness and artistic expression was ultimately far greater… After the war’s outbreak in 1939, nightmarish fantasies far greater than any writers of the Thirties had dared imagine soon began to unfold. On the biggest battlefields in the history of the world tanks rolled, jackboots marched, over-flying bombers and unmanned rockets smashed great cities.
Vast regions of Europe saw occupation by foreign troops; the knout and the lash took over, and the intentions and deeds of totalitarian regimes proved far more terrible than the grimmest prophets had foreseen.
By the war’s end in 1945 many of the great European cities were gutted by bombing of land offensives, large regions of the continent lay in ruins… many of Europe’s people were displaced… The unbelievable facts about the deportations, massacre and genocide that had occurred in Nazi concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz only gradually began to emerge. Nor was the conscience of the Allies clear. As a result of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the war ended with another no less terrible holocaust which led to the Japanese surrender, and the beginning of the Atomic age (Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, 1993, p.263-264).

Since World War Two – The Fifties and the Sixties

            Postwar rehabilitation on the personal and the national level was only achieved gradually. The position of Britain in the world had changed. The meltdown of the British Empire began and the feeling of change in particular permeated the old upper class, as Britain began to move nearer to a classless society (or at any rate one in which class and class/regional accent matters far less than before the war). But a hard core of national pride remained not only because of being on the winning side but also for a time to have stood alone against the Nazis and having come through the Battle of Britain, the bombing and the war in Africa. Moreover these were things that had united the country, unlike the fate of occupied countries where wartime experience had been a disuniting experience. Although the post-war period begun as a grey time, in which rationing continued, and bomb damage had to be made good, the country as a whole felt certain social issues (health, education, equality of opportunity) had taken a step forward with the creation of what came to be called the Welfare State.
After the First World War had come the explosion of Modernism, no such explosion in either novel or poetry happened after the Second. However the modernist techniques, especially in the novel, had entered the mainstream of writing even though the novel of the fifties and sixties marked a partial return to realism and linearity which the Modernists had rejected. There was also a rediscovered provincial scene, tending to “hug the shore of the real” as Henry James had put it.

The Late Twentieth Century

            There is no ‘movement’ into which one can try to fit writers of the latter part of the century (at least not yet – but in any case labeling is usually done by later generations) but one freah and original current was provided by the fact some notable new British writers came from families whose parents or grandparents had emigrated to the UK from the West Indies, India, Pakistan, or China and brought a new stream into writing in Britain.
New bodies of literature in English have also developed in Canada, and Australia to take their place alongside literature written in Britain. In India and Africa there has also emerged literature written in English, offering a specific post-colonial point of view.
Although there is no easily defined movement, many art forms and life-forms are today talked of as post-modern and in them the feminist and post-colonial movements play a great part.
The only simple definition that can be given of post-modernism is that it is ‘after modernism’, which does not help much. The inclusion of post in the name does, however, suggest that is not only after-modernism but is in some way different from it. It sees the complexities of life in different from it. It sees the complexities of life in different ways from earlier writers. It is less narrowly ego-centred than much of the literature of modernism was. Indeed it seems to demand a number of different centres of interest, often in different historical periods, countries or existences. It also likes playing intellectual games with inter-textuality, or patterns of different kinds of writing or texts woven together, providing different, sometimes contrary information. Novels often sometimes have more than one ending, and almost never present one single truth because of the different truths that different people see. In poetry there is less concentration on personal images and more on those of common human experience.
Post-modernist British novels which students will enjoy are John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus; Antonia Byatt’s Possession; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, The Satanic Verses; Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot.
Outstanding, late 20th century poets which they will enjoy are
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and
Seamus Heaney (1939 - ) who at the beginning of the new millennium published his gripping modern translation of the 9th century poem Beowulf (soon available on tape read by Heaney).

B/ Writers and Books: the Reading List
What to Study – How to Present it

            Apart from individual literary texts (novels, poetry, drama, etc.) students ought to have some understanding of the social context of the works they have read, as well as the predominating ideas and artistic techniques characteristic of the 20th century.
They should, therefore make use of relevant literary criticism. Some helpful books are indicated on the existing list but others may also be chosen.
Critical works can be surveys of literature of any period – like ‘The 20th Century’ – or of the whole history of literature in Britain, and it is the later chapters of such books that should be read for this exam. Others may be accounts of a selected number of writers or group of writers. These analyses often explain difficult novels etc.
Works like Ulysses or The Waste Land are not expected to have been read in their entirety but students must have some knowledge of the ways in which these, and other essential texts, function.
They are also expected to know some biographical data and the main titles of important writers in addition to the works they have put on their reading list.
When they come to take the exam students should bring their own typewritten list of the works they have read, and underline the periods and the names and works of writers to which they have given special study. Lists should contain at least 20 items, an item being a writer and one or more of his/her works. At least 10 items should come from writers marked with an asterisk *. If they have read them in 3rd or 4th year seminar their list may contain other novels than those listed.
Students may also underline books or articles of criticism which they feel has helped them in understanding some work or period.
The reading list is important. It is a summary of a student’s work. It shows how they have prepared the exam and provides examiners with their first reaction to a candidate as he/she comes to the exam.

NOVELS

First half of the century
*Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes
*E. M. Forster: Howards End, Passage to India
*D. H: Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love
*James Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses (extracts and importance)
Katherine Mansfield – selected short stories
*Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves
Aldous Huxley: Point Counterpoint, Eyeless in Gaza, Time Must Have a Stop
Mid-century
*George Orwell: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-four, Essays
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory, The Burnt-out Case
Joyce Cary: Mister Johnson to be a Pilgrim, The Horse’s Mouth
William Golding: Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall
Iris Murdoch: The Nice and the Good, The Sea The Sea, Bruno’s Dream, The Black Prince
Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Sword of Honour Trilogy (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender)
*Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea)
L. P: Hartley: The Go Between
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim
Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (12 novels)
Peter Scott: The Raj Quartet
J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings

Latter part of the century
*Julian Barnes: Flaubert’s Parrot
Malcolm Bradbury: The History Man
*Antonia Byatt: Possession
Anita Brookner: A Start in Life, A Family Romance
Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber
J. M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace
Ian McEwan: The Cement Garden, A Kind of Loving
Helen Fielding: Bridget Jones’s Diary
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
Doris Lessing: The Grass is Singing, The Man and Two Women (short stories)
David Lodge: Changing Places, Nice Work, Small World
Edna O’Brian: The Country Girls, The Love Object
*Salmon Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
William Trevor: The Ballroom Romance (or some other collection of short stories)
Fay Weldon: Down Among the Women, The Love and Life of a She-Devil, Affliction

POETRY

Early part of century
*Gerard Manley Hopkins (own selection)
*William Butler Yeats: The Rose Upon the Rood of Time, A Coat, Easter 1916, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, The Wild Swans at Coole, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, Among School Children, Dialogue of Self and Soul
*T. S: Eliot: own selection (including The Waste Land and Prufrock)
*own selection of poets/poems or of first world war: Owen, Sassoon, Rosenburg, Graves
*own selection from interwar poets: Robert Graves, *W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis Macneice (based on Norton or some similar standard anthology)

Poets of the latter part of the century
Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, *Ted Hughes, *Seamus Heaney

DRAMA

Earlier writers
*G. B. Shaw: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, St. Joan, Candida, Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion
*T. S: Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party, The Family Reunion
M. J. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World

Later writers
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
Harold Pinter: The Caretaker, The Birthday Party
John Arden, Arnold Wesker, John Mortimer

PROSE

T. S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent

C/ TEXTBOOKS AND STUDY MATERIALS

As noted above students should select from the list below those books which

• Help them to understand the period as a whole
• “place” the writers that they have selected to read and
• give them a better insight into the works they have read

Every student’s list for this exam is different in details, and no single list of books can be recommended as the books to read. In most cases their titles show what the books are about. We have, however, placed anthologies, histories and general surveys first and more specialized books later.

Vol. 6 Oxford Anthology of English Literature (also contains notes on periods and authors)
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (with notes)
Macmillan Anthologies of English Literature vol. 5
Longman’s English Series – Poetry 1900-1975, ed. MacBeth (with informative and critical notes)

Henry Blamires: Twentieth Century English Literature
D: Daiches: A Critical History of English Literature, vol. 4
Andrew Sanders: A Short Oxford History of English Literature
M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (eds.): The Short Oxford History of English Literature,
                                                             Modernism: 1890-1930
M. Bradbury: The Modern British Novel (usually available from Algoritam)
This has a comprehensive reading list of important critical studies.
M. Bradbury and James McFarlane eds.: Modernism (Pelican guides to European Modern
Literature)
Povijest svjetske književnosti, sv 6, Liber
Randell Stevenson: The British Novel since the Thirties
Chritopher Innes: Modern British Drama 1890-1990
Frederick R. Karl: A Readers Guide to the Contemporary English Novel
John Russell Brown, ed.: Modern British Dramatists
John Russell Brown: A Short Guide to Modern British Drama
Charles Shapiro, ed.: Contemporary British Novelists
Arnold Kettle: An Introduction to the English Novel
David Lodge, ed.: 20th Century English Criticism

M. Bowra: The Heritage of Symbolism
L. Edel: The Psychological Novel
G.S.Fraser: The Writer and the Modern World
Dorothy van Ghent: The English Novel- Form and Function
David Lodge: Modes of Modern Writing
Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd

S. Bašić: Klasici Modernizma
Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan: Kamov i rani Joyce, Mit, nacija, književnost ‘kraja stoljeća’, pjesništvo
                                   V. Nazora I W. B. Yeats
V. Sepčić: Klasici modernizma
I. Vidan: Joyce i Faulkner, Ključ za književno djelo, Nepouzdani pripovjedač, Tekstovi u
               Kontekstu
Viktor Žmegač: Povijesna poetika romana

A useful list of titles (some of them already included above) of sources for Modernism are available from the Seminar library on the list: Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan  Third Year as well as excerps of relevant critical assessments of Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Yeats and Beckett is to be found in LJ. I. Gjurgjan’s Reader for the 3rd year seminar on British modernism. The reader is available from the seminar library.

The Internet can also be highly useful and highly informative source for students but it needs to be used with imagination and selectivity.