Literature of England XIX-XX centuries

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Course work

on discipline "History and culture of the countries of the language being studied"

on the theme “Literature of England XIX - XX centuries.”

Introduction

Literature plays an integral part in culture of any country. It reflects people's feelings, some historical events and most of the problems of the society. Sometimes literature can even provide ways how to solve those problems.

Britain had a lot of talented writers in the 19th and the 20th centuries, who are now well-known all around the world. They had a great influence on the development of the British literature and on the British culture itself. Many of their works became classic not only for Britain, but for the whole world.

At that time life became much more different than it used to be. Scientific and technological progress and economical and political changes were the reason for new realities to appear. And those were reflected and analysed in literature. It was the period when some new trends turned up. They were very different from the classic era, which had been the most common for many years before.

The objective of this work is to characterize the most important periods and figures in the development of British literature of that period. The research subject is cultural development of Britain in the 19th and the 20th centuries and the object of study is British literature of that period itself.

In order to reach the objective there are such tasks as:

to consider the development of British literature in the 19th and the 20th centuries;

to examine literary trends, which appeared at that period;

to review the most important works and authors of that period.

As it was said above, many of those works became classic and had a great influence on society. In fact they still do, as they are read now all around the world, because the issues risen there are quite topical at any time.

Chapter 1. Romanticism

1.1 The History of Romanticism

In the beginning of the 19th century the main trend in British literature was Romanticism. It was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Various dates are given for the Romantic period in British literature, but sometimes the publishing of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. The writers of this period, however, did not think of themselves as 'Romantics' , and the term was first used by the critics of the Victorian period [7].

The Romantic period was a major social change in England, because of the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, that took place in the period roughly between 1785 and 1830. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: the Agricultural Revolution, that involved the enclosure of the land and drove workers off the land, and the Industrial Revolution which provided them employment in the factories and mills, operated by machines driven by steam-power [14]. Indeed, Romanticism could be a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, though it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment (intellectual and philosophical developments of that age (and their impact in moral and social reform), in which Reason was advocated as the primary source and basis of authority), as well a reaction against the scientific rationalisation of nature. The political thinking of many of the Romantic poets was greatly influenced by the French Revolution.

1.2 Romantic Poetry

One of the most prominent things in the poetry of that period is often the landscape, that is why the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, are often described as 'nature poets'. However, the longer Romantic 'nature poems' have a wider concern because they are usually meditations on an emotional problem or personal crisis [7].

Literary historians distinguish two generations of Romantic poets. The key figure of the first one and of the birth of the Romantic poetry itself is William Blake (1757 -- 1827). Largely disconnected from the major streams of the literature of that time, Blake was generally unrecognised during his lifetime, but now his contribution in British literature is highly appreciated. Among his most important works are Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult 'prophecies' such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), and Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804) [15].

Another figures of the early Romanticism were the Lake Poets (they were so designated by the Edinburgh Review), a small group of friends, including William Wordsworth (1770 -- 1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 -- 1834) and Robert Southey (1774 -- 1843) who all lived in the Lake District of England. The characteristic of their poetry may be summed as a feeling of and a sympathy with the pure spirit of nature [13].

The early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic manifesto in English literature, the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1798). In it Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men", and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry, as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" which "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". The poems in Lyrical Ballads were mostly by Wordsworth, though Coleridge contributed one of the great poems of English literature [16], the long Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the South Seas, and which involves the symbolically significant slaying of an albatross. Coleridge is also especially remembered for Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Dejection: an Ode, Christabel, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge and Wordsworth, along with Carlyle, were a major influence on American transcendentalism. Among Wordsworth's most important poems, are Michael, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood and the long, autobiographical, epic The Prelude. It was begun in 1799 but published posthumously in 1850. Wordsworth's poetry is noteworthy for how he inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres, subjects and style by elevating humble and rustic life into the main subject and medium of poetry in general, and how, in Coleridge's words, he awakens in the reader "freshness of sensation" in his depiction of familiar, commonplace objects [3].

The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron (1788 -- 1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 -- 1822) and John Keats (1795 -- 1821). Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three, preferring the brilliant wit of Pope to what he called the 'wrong poetical system' of his Romantic contemporaries [14]. Byron achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings. Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius" of their century [5]. A trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe, but also a sharp satire against London society. The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels between 1809 and 1811. However, despite the success of Childe Harold and other works, Byron was forced to leave England for good in 1816 and seek asylum on the Continent. There he joined Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, with his secretary John William Polidori on the shores of lake Geneva, during the 'year without a summer' [3]. Polidori's The Vampyre was published in 1819, creating the literary vampire genre. This short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour (1813). Between 1819 and 1824 Byron published his unfinished epic satire Don Juan, which, though initially condemned by the critics, was much admired by Goethe who translated part of it.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is perhaps best known for poems such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud, The Masque of Anarchy and Adonaпs, an elegy written on the death of Keats. Shelley's early profession of atheism, in the tract The Necessity of Atheism, led to his expulsion from Oxford and branded him as a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalization and ostracism from the intellectual and political circles of his time. His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day. A work like Queen Mab (1813) reveal Shelley as the direct heir to the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s[3]. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets. His influential poem The Masque of Anarchy (1819) calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.

Though John Keats shared Byron and Shelley's radical politics his best poetry is not political but is especially noted for its sensuous music and imagery, along with a concern with material beauty and the transience of life [17]. Among his most famous works are: The Eve of St Agnes, Ode to Psyche, La Belle Dame sans Merci, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn and the incomplete Hyperion, a 'philosophical' poem in blank verse. Keats's letters are among the finest in English and important for their discussion of his aesthetic ideas, including 'negative capability' [14]. Keats has always been regarded as a major Romantic, and his stature as a poet has grown steadily through all changes of fashion [3].

Another important poet in this period was John Clare (1793 -- 1864) who was the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation for the changes taking place in rural England [10]. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self" [2].

George Crabbe (1754 -- 1832) was an English poet who, during the Romantic period, wrote closely observed, realistic portraits of rural life in the heroic couplets of the Augustan age [3]. Lord Byron who was an admirer of Crabbe's poetry, described him as "nature's sternest painter, yet the best". Modern critics consider that Crabbe's work has been and still is seriously undervalued [12]. His most famous works are The Village (1783), Poems (1807), The Borough (1810), and poetry collections Tales (1812) and Tales of the Hall (1819).

1.3 Novel

An important figure of that period is Mary Shelley (1797 -- 1851) who is remembered as the author of Frankenstein (1818). The plot of this is said to have come from a waking dream she had, in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, following a conversation about galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts to life, and on the experiments of the 18th-century natural philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin, who was said to have animated dead matter. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also amused themselves by reading German ghost stories, prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own supernatural tale.

But perhaps the most important British novelist at the beginning of the 19th century was Sir Walter Scott, who was not only a highly successful novelist, but the greatest single influence on fiction in the 19th century [6]. Scott's novel writing career was launched in 1814 with Waverley, often called the first historical novel, and was followed by Ivanhoe. The Waverley Novels, including The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, and whose subject is Scottish history, are now generally regarded as Scott's masterpieces. He was one of the most popular novelist of the era and his historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. His novels also inspired many operas, of which the most famous are Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) by Donizetti and Bizet's The Fair Maid of Perth (1867). However, today his contemporary, Jane Austen, is widely read and the source for films and television series, while Scott is neglected.

Jane Austen's works are known as the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security [8]. Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She reveals not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a major writer. Her works include Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1817) and Persuasion (1817).

Chapter 2. Victorian literature

2.1 History

Victorian literature is the body of poetry, fiction, essays, and letters produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 --1901) and during the era which bears her name. It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the modernist literature of the twentieth century.

During the nineteenth century the novel became the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely observed social satire and historical fiction. Serialized popular novels won unprecedented readership and led to increasing artistic sophistication.

But there is a problem with the classification of "Victorian literature", because of the great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period (1901 -- 1910) and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.

2.2 Prose Fiction

While in the preceding Romantic period poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period (1837 -- 1901). Another important fact is the number of women novelists who were successful in the 19th century, even though they often had to use a masculine pseudonym. At the beginning of the 19th century most novels were published in three volumes. However, monthly serialization was revived with the publication of Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers in twenty parts between April 1836 and November 1837. Demand was high for each episode to introduce some new element, whether it was a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain the readers' interest. Both Dickens and Thackeray frequently published this way.

The 1830s and 1840s showed the rise of social novel, also known as social problem novel, that arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832 [14]. This was in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. Stories of the working class poor were directed toward middle class to help create sympathy and promote change. An early example is Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837 -- 38).

Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s with the two novels mentioned above. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion, accessible to readers of all classes. One of his most popular works to this day is A Christmas Carol (1843). In more recent years Dickens has been most admired for his later novels, such as Dombey and Son (1846 -- 48), Great Expectations (1860 -- 61), Bleak House (1852 -- 53), Little Dorrit (1855 -- 57) and Our Mutual Friend (1864 -- 65). There is a gradual trend in his fiction towards darker themes which mirrors a tendency in much of the writing of the 19th century.

An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray, who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair (1847). In that novel he satirizes whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp.

The Brontл sisters were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently accepted as classics. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each the following year: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey. Later, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte's Villette (1853) were published. Due to their forced or voluntary isolation, the Brontл sisters constituted a separate literary group which neither had predecessors nor successors. There is not a 'Brontл' line such as exists among authors of realist and naturalist novels, and in poetry, the romantic, and the symbolic.

Elizabeth Gaskell was also a successful writer and her first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. Gaskell's North and South contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial north of England with the wealthier south. Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions, Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes: her early works focused on factory work in the Midlands. She always emphasised the role of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters [NA].

Anthony Trollope (1815 -- 82) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works are set in the imaginary county of Barsetshire, including The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857). He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters, including The Way with Live Now (1875). Trollope's novels portrayed the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian England.

Another remarkable author of this period was Mary Ann Evans (1819 -- 80), who had a pseudonym George Elliot. Her first novel Adam Bede was published in 1859. Her works, especially Middlemarch (1871 -- 72), are important examples of literary realism, and are admired for their combination of high Victorian literary detail combined with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict.

An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy (1840 -- 1928). A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William Wordsworth [15]. Like Charles Dickens he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898, so that initially he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). He ceased writing novels following adverse criticism of this last novel. In novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy attempts to create modern works in the genre of tragedy, that are modeled on the Greek drama, though in prose, not poetry, a novel not drama, and with characters of low social standing, not nobility.

Another significant late 19th-century novelist is George Gissing (1857 -- 1903) who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best known novel is New Grub Street (1891).

Important developments occurred in a fiction genre in this era. Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River in 1841, the history of the modern fantasy genre is generally said to begin with George MacDonald, the influential author of The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858). Wilkie Collins's epistolary novel The Moonstone (1868), is generally considered the first detective novel in the English language, while The Woman in White is regarded as one of the finest sensation novels.

H. G. Wells (1866 -- 1946) is seen, along with Frenchman Jules Verne (1828 -- 1905), as a major figure in the development of the science fiction genre. His writing career began in the 1890s with science fiction novels like The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898) which describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians. He also wrote realistic fiction about the lower middle class in novels like Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910).

2.3 Poetry

The Victorian era was a period of great political change, social and economic change. The Empire recovered from the loss of the American colonies and entered a period of rapid expansion. This expansion, combined with increasing industrialisation and mechanisation, led to a prolonged period of economic growth. The Reform Act 1832 was the beginning of a process that would eventually lead to universal suffrage.

The major Victorian poets were Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though Hopkins was not published until 1918.

Tennyson was, to some degree, the Spenser of the new age and his Idylls of the Kings can be read as a Victorian version of The Faerie Queen, that is as a poem that sets out to provide a mythic foundation to the idea of empire.

The Brownings spent much of their time out of England and explored European models and matter in much of their poetry. Robert Browning's great innovation was the dramatic monologue, which he used to its full extent in his long novel in verse The Ring and the Book. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is perhaps best remembered for Sonnets from the Portuguese but her long poem Aurora Leigh is one of the classics of 19th century feminist literature.

Matthew Arnold was much influenced by Wordsworth, though his poem Dover Beach is often considered a precursor of the modernist revolution. Hopkins wrote in relative obscurity and his work was not published until after his death. His unusual style (involving what he called "sprung rhythm" and heavy reliance on rhyme and alliteration) had a considerable influence on many of the poets of the 1940s.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a mid-19th century arts movement dedicated to the reform of what they considered the sloppy Mannerist painting of the day. Although primarily concerned with the visual arts, two members, the brother and sister Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, were also poets of some ability. Their poetry shares many of the concerns of the painters; an interest in Medieval models, an almost obsessive attention to visual detail and an occasional tendency to lapse into whimsy.

Dante Rossetti worked with, and had some influence on, the leading arts and crafts painter and poet William Morris. Morris shared the Pre-Raphaelite interest in the poetry of the European Middle Ages, to the point of producing some illuminated manuscript volumes of his work.

Towards the end of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent fin-de-siиcle phase. Two groups of poets emerged, the Yellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymers' Club group that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and William Butler Yeats.

Comic verse abounded in the Victorian era. Magazines such as Punch and Fun magazine teemed with humorous invention and were aimed at a well-educated readership [11]. The most famous collection of Victorian comic verse is the Bab Ballads.

2.4 Victorian Drama

For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was restricted by a licensing system to the Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could perform only musical entertainments (although magistrates had powers to license occasional dramatic performances). The passing of the Theatres Act 1843 removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres.

Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (1820 -- 90) was an extremely popular writer of comedies who achieved success on the London stage with works like London Assurance, (1841), in the middle of the 19th century. However, drama did not achieve importance as a genre in the 19th century until the end of the century, and then the main figures were also Irish-born. In the last decade of the century major playwrights emerged, including George Bernard Shaw (1856 -- 1950), the author of Arms and the Man (1894), and Oscar Wilde (1854 -- 1900), who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Both of these Irish writers lived mainly in England and wrote in English, with the exception of some works in French by Wilde.

2.5 Children's Literature

The Victorians are credited with 'inventing childhood', partly via their efforts to stop child labour and the introduction of compulsory education. As children began to be able to read, literature for young people became a growing industry, with not only established writers producing works for children (such as Dickens's A Child's History of England) but also a new group of dedicated children's authors. Writers like Lewis Carroll, R. M. Ballantyne and Anna Sewell wrote mainly for children, although they had an adult following. Other authors such as Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson wrote mainly for adults, but their adventure novels are now generally classified as for children. Other genres include nonsense verse, poetry which required a childlike interest (e.g. Lewis Carroll). School stories flourished: Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays and Kipling's Stalky & Co. are classics.

Rarely were these publications designed to capture a child's pleasure; however, with the increase in use of illustrations, children began to enjoy literature, and were able to learn morals in a more entertaining way. With the newfound acceptance of reading for pleasure, fairy tales and folk tales became popular. Compiling folk tales by many authors with different topics made it possible for children to read literature about lots of different things that interested them. There were different types of books and magazines written for boys and girls. Girls' stories tended to be domestic and to focus on family life, whereas boys' stories were more about adventures.

2.6 Science, Philosophy and Supernatural Literature

The Victorian era was an important time for the development of science and the Victorians had a mission to describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing does not rise to the level of being regarded as literature but one book in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, remains famous. The theory of evolution contained within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves and their place in the world. Although it took a long time to be widely accepted, it would dramatically change subsequent thought and literature. Much of the work of popularizing Darwin's theories was done by his younger contemporary Thomas Henry Huxley, who wrote widely on the subject.

A number of other non-fiction works of the era made their mark on the literature of the period. The philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill covered logic, economics, liberty and utilitarianism. The large and influential histories of Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution, A History, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and The Heroic in History permeated political thought at the time. The writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay on English history helped codify the Whig narrative (Whig history is an approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy) that dominated the historiography for many years. John Ruskin wrote a number of highly influential works on art and the history of art and championed such contemporary figures as J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. The religious writer John Henry Newman's Oxford Movement aroused intense debate within the Church of England, exacerbated by Newman's own conversion to Catholicism, which he wrote about in his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

A number of monumental reference works were published in this era, most notably the Oxford English Dictionary which would eventually become the most important historical dictionary of the English language. Also published during the later Victorian era were the Dictionary of National Biography and the ninth edition of the Encyclopжdia Britannica.

The old Gothic tales that came out of the late 19th century are the first examples of the genre of fantastic fiction. These tales often centred on larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes, famous detective of the times, Sexton Blake, Phileas Fogg, and other fictional characters of the era, such as Dracula, Edward Hyde, the Invisible Man, and many other fictional characters who often had exotic enemies to foil. Spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a particular type of story-writing known as gothic. Gothic literature combines romance and horror in attempt to thrill and terrify the reader. Possible features in a gothic novel are foreign monsters, ghosts, curses, hidden rooms and witchcraft. Gothic tales usually take place in locations such as castles, monasteries, and cemeteries, although the gothic monsters sometimes cross over into the real world, making appearances in cities such as London.

Chapter 3. The 20th Century Literature

3.1 Fiction

In the early 20th-century literary modernism developed in the English-speaking world due to a general sense of disillusionment with the Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the idea of objective truth [1]. The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809 -- 82), Ernst Mach (1838 -- 1916), Henri Bergson (1859 -- 1941), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 -- 1900), James G. Frazer (1854 -- 1941), Karl Marx (1818 -- 83), and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856 -- 1939), among others. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.

A significant transitional figure between Victorians and modernists was the late-19th-century novelist, Henry James (1843 -- 1916), who continued to publish major works into the 20th century. Another remarkable figure was an immigrant, Polish-born modernist novelist Joseph Conrad (1857 -- 1924), who published his first important work Heart of Darkness in 1899 and Lord Jim in 1900. Amongst the novelists, after Joseph Conrad, other important early modernists include Dorothy Richardson (1873 -- 1957), whose novel Pointed Roof (1915), is one of the earliest example of the stream of consciousness technique, and D. H. Lawrence (1885 -- 1930), who published The Rainbow in 1915, though it was immediately seized by the police [3]. Then in 1922 Irishman James Joyce's important novel Ulysses appeared. It has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement". Set during one day in Dublin, in it Joyce creates parallels with Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) is another significant modernist novel, that uses the stream of consciousness technique.

Another significant modernist in the 1920s was Virginia Woolf (1882 -- 1941), who was an influential feminist and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Her essay collection A Room of One's Own (1929) contains her famous dictum: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" [9].

Anyway modernism was not the only trend in British literature in the beginning of the 20th century. Novelists who are not considered modernists include: Rudyard Kipling (1865 -- 1936) who was also a successful poet; H. G. Wells (1866 -- 1946); John Galsworthy (1867 -- 1933), who got the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932 and whose works include a sequence of novels, collectively called The Forsyte Saga (1906 -- 21); Arnold Bennett (1867 -- 1931) author of The Old Wives' Tale (1908); G. K. Chesterton (1874 -- 1936); and E.M. Forster (1879 -- 1970), though his work is "frequently regarded as containing both modernist and Victorian elements" [14].

A major work of science fiction, from the early 20th century, is A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish writer David Lindsay who first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been described by writer Colin Wilson as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century", and was a central influence on C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.

The most popular British writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907). Kipling's works include The Jungle Books (1894 -- 95), The Man Who Would Be King and Kim (1901), while his inspirational poem If -- (1895) is a national favourite and a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism. Kipling's reputation declined during his lifetime, but more recently postcolonial studies has rekindled an intense interest in his work, viewing it as both symptomatic and critical of imperialist attitudes [03].

Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday published in 1908 is arguably his best-known novel. Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has received some of the broadest-based praise.

A significant English writer in the 1930s and 1940s was George Orwell (1903 -- 50), who is especially remembered for his satires of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945). Another remarkable author was Evelyn Waugh (1903 -- 66), who satirised the "bright young things" of the 1920s and 1930s, notably in A Handful of Dust (1934), and Decline and Fall (1928), while Brideshead Revisited (1945) has a theological basis, setting out to examine the effect of divine grace on its main characters. Aldous Huxley (1894 -- 1963) published his famous dystopia Brave New World in 1932, the same year as John Cowper Powys's (1872 -- 1963) A Glastonbury Romance. Samuel Beckett (1906 -- 89) published his first major work, the novel Murphy in 1938. This same year Graham Greene's (1904 -- 91) first major novel Brighton Rock was published. Then in 1939 James Joyce's published Finnegans Wake. In this work Joyce creates a special language to express the consciousness of a character who is dreaming [14].

Among popular novelists were Daphne Du Maurier who wrote Rebecca, a mystery novel, in 1938 and W. Somerset Maugham (1874 -- 1965), an author of a novel Of Human Bondage (1915), a strongly autobiographical novel, is generally agreed to be his masterpiece. In genre fiction Agatha Christie was an important writer of crime novels, short stories and plays, best remembered for her 80 detective novels. Christie's novels include Murder on the Orient Express (1934), And Then There Were None (1939) and Death on the Nile (1937). Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers.

World War II had an enormous influence on the literature. One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war period was William Cooper's (1910 -- 2002) naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), which was a conscious rejection of the modernist tradition [4].

Graham Greene was an important novelist whose works span the 1930s to the 1980s. Greene was a convert to Catholicism and his novels explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Notable for an ability to combine serious literary acclaim with broad popularity, his novels include The Heart of the Matter (1948), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), and The Human Factor (1978).

Other novelists writing in the 1950s and later were: Anthony Powell (1905 -- 2000) whose twelve-volume cycle of novels A Dance to the Music of Time (1951 -- 75), is a comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century; comic novelist Kingsley Amis, best known for his academic satire Lucky Jim (1954); Nobel Prize laureate William Golding with his allegorical novel Lord of the Flies (1954), which explores how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys marooned on a deserted island; philosopher Iris Murdoch, who was a prolific writer of novels that deal with such things as morality and the power of the unconscious. Her works include Under the Net (1954), The Black Prince (1973) and The Green Knight (1993). Scottish writer Muriel Spark also began publishing in the 1950s. She pushed the boundaries of realism in her novels. Her first, The Comforters (1957), concerns a woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) at times takes the reader briefly into the distant future to see the various fates that befall its characters. Another author of that period, Anthony Burgess, is especially remembered for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), set in the not-too-distant future, which was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. In the entirely different genre of Gothic fantasy Mervyn Peake (1911 -- 68) published his highly successful Gormenghast trilogy between 1946 and 1959.

Angela Carter (1940 -- 1992) was a novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. Writing from the 1960s until the 1980s, her novels include The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and Nights at the Circus (1984). Margaret Drabble (born 1939) is a novelist, biographer and critic, who has published from the 1960s until this century. Her older sister, A. S. Byatt (born 1936) is best known for Possession published in 1990.

Martin Amis (born 1949) is one of the most prominent of contemporary British novelists. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). Novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan (born 1948) is another of contemporary Britain's most highly regarded writers. His works include The Cement Garden (1978) and Enduring Love (1997), which was made into a film. In 1998 McEwan won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam.

In the late 20th-century Scotland has produced several important novelists, including James Kelman (born 1946), who can create humour out of the most grim situations. His How Late it Was, How Late (1994), won the Booker Prize that year. Another contemporary Scot is Irvine Welsh, whose novel Trainspotting (1993) gives a brutal depiction of the lives of working class Edinburgh drug users.

3.2 Modernist poetry

literature british modernist poetry

Modernist poetry in England started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then pervaded, and seeking to bring poetry to the layman.

Modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets (such as Guido Cavalcanti), and the English Metaphysical poets.

Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short, compact lyrics. As it developed, however, longer poems came to the foreground. These represent the modernist movement to the 20th-century English poetic canon.

As for the poets, there were some remarkable ones. For example, Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 -- 89), whose highly original poetry was not published until 1918, long after his death. In contrast to him, the career of another major modernist poet, Irishman W. B. Yeats (1865 -- 1939), began late in the Victorian era. Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Irishman so honoured. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize: these works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

But while modernism was to become an important literary movement in the early decades of the new century, there were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists. During the early decades of the 20th century the Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke (1887 -- 1915), Walter de la Mare (1873 -- 1956), and John Masefield (1878 -- 1967, Poet Laureate from 1930) maintained a conservative approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism, sandwiched as they were between the Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and Modernism, with its strident rejection of pure aestheticism. Edward Thomas (1878 -- 1917) is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet. He enlisted in 1915 and is one of the First World War poets along with Wilfred Owen (1893 -- 1918), Rupert Brooke (1887 -- 1915), Isaac Rosenberg (1890 -- 1917), Edmund Blunden (1896 -- 1974) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886 -- 1967).

Conclusion

Summing it all up we see that the period of the 19th and the 20th century is very important in British literature. First of all, romanticism imported aesthetics, emotionality, heroism, pathos, idealization and humanism into the works of that time. Although that trend did not last for a very long time, those works are still worshipped nowadays. Then the Victorian period brought the realistic ways of narration and the philosophical positivism. At that time a new genre appeared: a social novel with a moral, supernatural prose and children's literature as well. Some substantial scientific books were published in that period, too. Another important fact is that women were much more involved in literary arts by writing significant books, which influenced many people.

As for the modern literature, it is represented by various genres, which arouse many current problems of the society in a plenty of different ways, for example, famous dystopias make us think about our future, that can be horrible unless the world stops making mistakes. Some of those issues were risen under the impact of wars.

So we see that British literature developed a lot during that period and of course it had its own influence on cultures of many other countries all around the world.

Sources

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of literary Terms (7th edition). Boston: Heinle & Heinle, Thomson Learning, Inc., 1999. -- xvii, 366 p. -- ISBN 9780155054523;

Bate, Jonathan. John Clare: A biography. London: Picador, 2003. -- 672 p.;

Birch, Dinah. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2009. -- 1164 р.;

Bradbury, Malcolm. "Introduction" to William Cooper, Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Macmillan, 1969. -- 379 p.;

Christiansen, Rupert. Romantic Affinities: Portraits From an Age, 1780 -- 1830. London: Bodley Head, 1988. -- 262 p.;

Cuddon, J. A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984. -- 808 p.;

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