English literature of the second half

OF THE XX CENTURY

1. Study the following information borrowed from an electronic resource. Prepare to talk about authors and trends.

Increased attachment to religion most immediately characterized literature after World War II. This was particularly perceptible in authors who had already established themselves before the war. W.H. Auden turned from Marxist politics to Christian commitment, expressed in poems that attractively combine classical form with vernacular relaxedness. Christian belief suffused the verse plays of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. While Graham Greene continued the powerful merging of thriller plots with studies of moral and psychological ambiguity that he had developed through the 1930s, his Roman Catholicism loomed especially large in novels such as The Heart of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951). Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his Sword of Honour trilogy (1965) venerate Roman Catholicism as the repository of values seen as under threat from the advance of democracy. Less traditional spiritual solace was found in Eastern mysticism by Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves, who maintained an impressive output of taut, graceful lyric poetry behind which lay the creed he expressed in The White Goddess (1948), a matriarchal mythology revering the female principle.

 

Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904-1991), English novelist, concerned with spiritual struggle in a deteriorating world. Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the son of a headmaster, Greene was educated at the University of Oxford. He worked for the London Times from 1926 to 1929 and then as a free-lance writer. In 1935 he was film critic for the Spectator, a British newspaper, and in 1940 he was named literary editor. From 1942 to 1943 he worked for the British Foreign Office in western Africa and after World War II (1939-1945) he traveled widely.

Greene's popularity came with Stamboul Train (1932), a spy thriller published in the United States as Orient Express. This and subsequent novels such as England Made Me (1935) and The Ministry of Fear (1943), Greene later categorized as “entertainments.” A Gun for Sale (1936), published in the United States as This Gun for Hire, has as a central theme man's conflict between good and evil. It may be considered a precursor to the type of book that Greene specifically labeled as “novels.” These writings are seriously concerned with the moral, social, and religious problems of the time. Greene himself had been converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. The “novels” include Brighton Rock (1938); The Power and the Glory (1940), first published in the United States as The Labyrinthine Ways, his own favorite work; The Heart of the Matter (1948); and The End of the Affair (1951).

Subsequent major works by Greene include The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), A Burnt-out Case (1961), The Comedians (1966), The Honorary Consul (1973), The Human Factor (1978), and The Tenth Man (1985). Many of his novels have been adapted for motion pictures; The Third Man (1950), another spy thriller, was written specifically for filming. As an essayist, he compiled Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1952) and Collected Essays (1969), the latter mostly comprising studies of other writers. He also wrote books for children. Among his plays are The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), and The Complaisant Lover (1959). A Sort of Life (1971) and its sequel Ways of Escape (1980) are his autobiographies.

Greene's works are characterized by vivid detail, a variety of settings (Mexico, Africa, Haiti, Vietnam), and a detached objective portrayal of characters under various forms of social, political, or psychological stress. Evil is omnipresent. In later novels, a dimension of moral doubt and conflict add to the terror and suspense. The 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote, which confronts Marxism with Catholicism, is gentler in tone. A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1994), written by Greene in the final months of his life, is a partly fictitious, partly autobiographical work based on 800 pages of diaries kept over a 24-year span.

 

· Prose: Golding, Spark, Murdoch

The two most innovatory novelists to begin their careers soon after World War II were also religious believers— William Golding and Muriel Spark. In novels of poetic compactness they frequently return to the notion of original sin – the idea that, in Golding's words, "man produces evil as a bee produces honey." Concentrating on small communities, Spark and Golding transfigure them into microcosms. Allegory and symbol set wide resonances quivering, so that short books make large statements. In Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), schoolboys cast away on a Pacific island during a nuclear war reenact humanity's fall from grace as their relationships degenerate from innocent camaraderie to totalitarian butchery. In Spark's satiric comedy similar assumptions and techniques are discernible. Her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), for example, makes events in a 1930s Edinburgh classroom replicate, in miniature, the rise of fascism in Europe. In form and atmosphere Lord of the Flies has affinities with George Orwel l's examinations of totalitarian nightmare, the fable Animal Farm (1945) and the novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). This kind of fiction, it was argued by Iris Murdoch, a philosopher as well as a novelist, ran anti-liberal risks in its preference for allegory, pattern, and symbol over the social capaciousness and realistic rendition of character at which the great 19th-century novels excelled. Murdoch 's own fiction, typically engaged with themes of goodness, authenticity, selfishness, and altruism, oscillates between these two modes of writing. A Severed Head (1961) is the most incisive and entertaining of her elaborately artificial works; The Bell (1958) best achieves the psychological and emotional complexity she finds so valuable in classic 19th-century fiction. Another notable author is John Fowles.

 

Golding, Sir William (Gerald) (1911-1993), British novelist, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. He was born at Saint Columb Minor in Cornwall and educated at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford, where he studied English literature. Golding spent a short time working in the theater as a writer and actor. He then trained to be a teacher, a profession he left during World War II (1939-1945), when he served in the Royal Navy. After the war Golding returned to writing. His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; motion picture by English director Peter Brook, 1963), was extremely successful and is considered one of the great works of 20th-century literature. Based on Golding's own wartime experiences, it is the story of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island after a plane crash. An allegory of the intrinsic corruption of human nature, it chronicles the boys' descent from a state of relative innocence to one of revengeful barbarism. After Lord of the Flies he wrote several novels with similar themes of good and evil in human nature, including The Inheritors (1955) and Pincher Martin (1956). Much of Golding's writing explores moral dilemmas and human reactions in extreme situations. His trilogy—consisting of Rites of Passage (1980), winner of the Booker Prize, an annual award for outstanding literary achievement in the Commonwealth of Nations; Close Quarters (1987); and Fire Down Below (1989)—reflects Golding's interest in the sea and sailing. His other works include two collections of essays and one play. Golding was knighted in 1988. His last novel, The Double Tongue, was published posthumously in 1995.

 

Spark, Muriel (1918-2005), Scottish-born writer, of Jewish-Italian descent, longtime resident in Rome, Italy. Her novels are wryly satiric commentaries on modern life observed in various locales, colored by her Roman Catholic faith (she converted to Catholicism in 1954). Spark traveled to South Africa and spent several years in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and married S. O. Spark in 1938. The marriage was dissolved and Muriel Spark returned to England in 1944 to work in the Foreign Office on anti-Nazi propaganda. Spark's works include The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), a more serious story of tensions in the Holy Land. Her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), about an eccentric Edinburgh schoolteacher who is seen through the eyes of an admiring (but later disenchanted) pupil, was successfully adapted for stage and film. Her later publications include The Hothouse by the East River (1973), Territorial Rights (1979), Loitering with Intent (1981), a discussion of good, evil, and the writer's mind, and The Only Problem (1984), a witty meditation on the Old Testament Book of Job. Spark's shorter fiction has been collected in The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985), Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories (1997), and she has also written poetry and literary criticism.

 

Murdoch, (Jean) Iris (1919-1999), British writer and philosopher, born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at the University of Oxford. In 1948 she was appointed a fellow and tutor in philosophy at Oxford. Murdoch’s first published book, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), is a study of French existentialism. Her other nonfiction works include Metaphysics As a Guide to Morals: Philosophical Reflections (1992). Murdoch began a career as a successful writer of fiction with Under the Net (1954). A decade later, with Murdoch’s adaptation of her own novel A Severed Head (1961; play, written with British writer J. B. Priestley, 1963), she also became a dramatist. Her style is complex, combining naturalism and the macabre, the familiar and the magical. Regarded as a master stylist, she presents in her fiction a cast of characters who struggle with the discovery that they are not truly free but are fettered by themselves, society, and natural forces. Murdoch’s many novels include The Italian Girl (1964; play, written with James Saunders, 1967); A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); An Accidental Man (1972); The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974); The Sea, the Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize; The Good Apprentice (1986); The Green Knight (1994), a story incorporating many elements of and references to the 14th-century anonymous romance poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Jackson’s Dilemma (1996), a story set in 20th-century Britain but loosely based on the play Much Ado about Nothing by English playwright William Shakespeare.

Fowles, John (1926-2005), British novelist, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) and other allusive, archetypal stories that address the collision between individual psychology and social convention. Born in Leigh-on-Sea, England, Fowles was educated at Bedford School, University of Edinburgh, and New College, University of Oxford, where he studied French. After serving in the Royal Marines from 1945 to 1946, he taught at schools in France, Greece, and London. Three of his novels became bestsellers and were made into motion pictures: The Collector (1963; film, 1965), about a pathological clerk who kidnaps an attractive girl; The Magus (1965; film, 1968), about a young English teacher lured into a series of sinister magical illusions on a Greek island; and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969; film, 1981), a love story with a fractured narrative structure. A constant theme in Fowles's work is the issue of free choice, which sometimes involves the reader; The French Lieutenant's Woman, for instance, has two endings. Fowles's subsequent novels are Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985). He has also written a volume of short stories— The Ebony Tower (1974), which shows the influence of medieval romance — and a number of nonfiction works, including a history of the seaside resort of Lyme Regis, England.

 

· Prose: The Angry Young Men and other writers

 

In contrast to their wry comedies of sense and sensibility, and to the packed parables of Golding and Spark, was yet another type of fiction, produced by a group of writers who became known as the Angry Young Men. From authors such as John Braine, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, and David Storey (also a significant dramatist) came a spate of novels often ruggedly autobiographical in origin and near documentary in approach. The predominant subject of these books was social mobility, usually from the northern working class to the southern middle class. John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956), about rebellion against traditional mores, is regarded as a landmark in post-World War II British drama and made its author famous as the first of “the angry young men”.

Satiric watchfulness of social change was also the specialty of Kingsley Amis, whose deriding of the reactionary and pompous in his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), led to his being labeled an Angry Young Man. As Amis grew older, though, his irascibility vehemently swiveled toward left-wing and progressive targets, and he established himself as a Tory satirist in the vein of Waugh or Powell.

 

Osborne, John (1929-1994), British playwright and motion picture screenwriter, known for his sharp criticism of modern British life. Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956), about rebellion against traditional mores, is regarded as a landmark in post-World War II British drama and made its author famous as the first of “the angry young men” (see English Literature). The Entertainer (1957), which originally featured the British actor Laurence Olivier, presents the decline of Britain's place in the world through the metaphor of the stage. Luther (1961) is a historical drama in which the title character is seen as a true rebel. Inadmissible Evidence (1964) resumes Osborne's attack on contemporary values, and West of Suez (1971) is a depiction of Britain's past imperial glories in which he shows sympathy for the colonizer. Osborne's screenplay for the 1963 film Tom Jones won an Academy Award. His autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), recalls with bitterness his mother and his lower middle-class origins. Osborne's second volume of autobiography, Almost a Gentleman, was published in 1991.

Amis, Kingsley (1922-1995), British novelist, whose works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially of the period following the end of World War II in 1945. Born in London, he was educated at Saint John's College at the University of Oxford and then served in the British Army Royal Corps of Signals during World War II. After the war he became a college teacher. Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954 ), a bitingly satirical story of an unheroic young college instructor, won the Somerset Maugham Award. The book influenced a number of British playwrights and novelists, including John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, who were known as the angry young men because of their rebellious and critical attitude toward postwar British society. In his later novels That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl Like You (1960) Amis further explored his disillusionment. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories.

Sillitoe, Alan (1928-), British novelist and poet, best known for his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958; motion picture, 1960), which is the story of a young factory worker in post-World War II Britain. Born in Nottingham, Sillitoe left school to work in a bicycle factory at the age of 14. He served in the British Royal Air Force from 1946 to 1949 as a radio operator. Sillitoe then returned to England and was diagnosed with tuberculosis, spending several months in a hospital. During this time he read and wrote extensively. In 1950 Sillitoe met American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1952 and with whom he traveled and lived for six years in France and Spain. During this time Sillitoe wrote most of the poems later published in The Rats and Other Poems (1960). Sillitoe's poetry is informed by the same angry spirit as his successful first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Its hero, Arthur Seaton, is impatient with society and disaffected with middle-class values. The same feeling motivates the working-class characters who feel outcast from the larger society in Sillitoe's acclaimed volume of stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959; motion picture of title story, 1962). Other novels include Key to the Door (1961 ), in which the characters search for a way out of disaffection, and The Lost Flying Boat (1983) and Last Loves (1990), both of which involve ex-servicemen returning to their theater of operation many years later.

 

· Prose: Trends and names

 

Thoughtfulness about the form of the novel and relationships between past and present fiction showed itself most stimulatingly in the works—generally campus novels—of the academically based novelists. From the late 1960s onward the outstanding trend in fiction was enthrallment with empire. The first phase of this focused on imperial disillusion and dissolution. Then, in the 1980s, postcolonial voices made themselves audible. Salman Rushdie 's crowded comic saga about the generation born as Indian independence dawned, Midnight's Children (1981), boisterously mingles material from Eastern fable, Hindu myth, Islamic lore, Bombay cinema, cartoon strips, advertising billboards, and Latin American magic realism. Such eclecticism, sometimes called " postmodern," also showed itself in other kinds of fiction in the 1980s. Julian Barnes 's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters [1989], for example, inventively mixes fact and fantasy, reportage, art criticism, autobiography, parable, and pastiche in its working of fictional variations on the Noah's ark myth. For Rushdie, as The Satanic Verses (1988) further demonstrate, stylistic miscellaneousness – a way of writing that exhibits the vitalizing effects of cultural cross-fertilization – is especially suited to conveying postcolonial experience. The Satanic Verses was understood differently in the Islamic world, to the extent that the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, in effect a death sentence, on Rushdie.

However, not all postcolonial authors followed his example. Vikram Seth's massive novel about India after independence, A Suitable Boy (1993), is a prodigious feat of realism, resembling 19th-century masterpieces in its combination of social breadth and emotional and psychological depth. Nor was India alone in inspiring vigorous postcolonial writing. Timothy Mo's novels report on colonial predicaments in East Asia with a political acumen reminiscent of Conrad. Particularly notable is An Insular Possession (1986), which vividly harks back to the founding of Hong Kong. Novelists such as Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri wrote of postcolonial Africa, as did V.S. Naipaul in his most ambitious novel, A Bend in the River (1979). Naipaul also chronicled aftermaths of empire around the globe and particularly in his native Caribbean.

Nearer England, the strife in Northern Ireland provoked fictional response, among which the bleak, graceful novels and short stories of William Trevor and Bernard MacLaverty stand out. Widening social divides in 1980s Britain were also registered in fiction, sometimes in works that purposefully imitate the Victorian "Condition of England" novel. The most thoroughgoing of such "Two Nations" panoramas of an England cleft by regional gulfs and gross inequities between rich and poor is Margaret Drabble 's The Radiant Way (1987).

Just as some postcolonial novelists used myth, magic, and fable as a stylistic throwing-off of what they considered the alien supremacy of Anglo-Saxon realistic fiction, so numerous feminist novelists took to Gothic, fairy tale, and fantasy as counter-effects to the "patriarchal discourse" of rationality, logic, and linear narrative. The most gifted exponent of this kind of writing, which sought immediate access to the realm of the subconscious, was Angela Carter, whose exotic and erotic imagination unrolled most eerily and resplendently in her short-story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979).

Typically, though, fiction in the 1980s and '90s was not futuristic but retrospective. As the end of the century approached, an urge to look back – at starting points, previous eras, fictional prototypes – was widely evident. Many novels juxtaposed a present-day narrative with one set in the past. In addition to the interest in remote and recent history, a concern with tracing aftereffects became dominatingly present in fiction.

 

Dahl, Roald (1916-1990), British writer, a popular author of ingenious, irreverent children's books and of adult horror stories. Following his graduation from Repton, a renowned British public school, in 1932, Dahl avoided a university education and joined an expedition to Newfoundland, Can. He worked from 1937 to 1939 in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now in Tanzania), but he enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) when World War II broke out. Flying as a fighter pilot, he was seriously injured in a crash landing in Libya. He served with his squadron in Greece and then in Syria before doing a stint (1942-43) as assistant air attache in Washington, D.C. There the novelist C.S. Forester encouraged him to write about his most exciting RAF adventures, which were published by the Saturday Evening Post. Dahl's first book, The Gremlins (1943), was written for Walt Disney and later became a popular movie. He achieved best-seller status with Someone like You (1953; rev. ed. 1961), a collection of stories for adults, which was followed by Kiss, Kiss (1959). His children's book James and the Giant Peach (1961), written for his own children, was a popular success, as was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ( 1964).

· Poetry: Heaney

 

From the late 1960s onward Northern Ireland, convulsed by sectarian violence, was particularly prolific in poetry. From a cluster of considerable talents Seamus Heaney soon stood out. Born into a Roman Catholic farming family in County Derry, he began by publishing verse – in his collections Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) – that combines a tangible, tough, sensuous response to rural and agricultural life, with meditation about the relationship between the taciturn world of his parents and his own communicative calling as a poet. Since then, in increasingly magisterial books of poetry Heaney became arguably the greatest poet Ireland has produced, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature (1995). Having spent his formative years amid the murderous divisiveness of Ulster, he wrote poetry particularly distinguished by its fruitful bringing together of opposites. Sturdy familiarity with country life goes along with delicate stylistic accomplishment and sophisticated literary allusiveness. Present and past coalesce in Heaney's verses: Iron Age sacrificial victims exhumed from peat bogs resemble tarred-and-feathered victims of the atrocities in contemporary Belfast; elegies for friends and relatives slaughtered during the outrages of the 1970s and '80s are embedded in verses whose imagery and metrical forms derive from Dante. Surveying carnage, vengeance, bigotry, and gentler disjunctions such as that between the unschooled and the cultivated, Heaney made himself the master of a poetry of reconciliations.

 

· Drama: Stoppard

Stoppard, Tom (1937 –), English playwright, noted for his ingenious use of language and ironic political metaphors. Stoppard was associated with the continental European theater of the absurd, a movement that lamented the senselessness of the human condition. He fused the English tradition of the “comedy of manners” (a play that satirizes the customs of the upper classes) with contemporary social concerns by concentrating on the intricate and comical duplicities of everyday conversation within a wider, and often menacing, historical perspective. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlen, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic), the son of a physician who was later killed by the Nazis, Stoppard was educated in India and England. He worked as a journalist and as a writer for radio and television before coming into prominence with the production of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966. Conceived as a satirical meditation on Hamlet, by English playwright William Shakespeare, Stoppard's play focuses on the sadly existential but frivolous meanderings of two of Hamlet's marginal characters, a pair of quarrelsome courtiers. Although sometimes criticized for the limited character development in his work, Stoppard used inventive linguistic displays and plot inversions to fuel the texts for his plays. In addition, Stoppard adapted several foreign-language plays, and he wrote many radio scripts and motion-picture and television screenplays, including the motion-picture adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), which he also directed. Stoppard’s interest in language and use of intellectual concepts remained apparent in his later plays.

 

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