Modern English and American literature
ACADEMY OF THE INTERIOR TROOPS OF THEOF INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF UKRAINE
L.V. GorishnaENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
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Горішна Л.В. Сучасна англійська та американська література. -Х.:Акад. ВВ МВС України, 2011. - 185с.
Навчальний посібник "Сучасна англійська та американська література" для курсантів та студентів IV курсу гуманітарного факультету за напрямком підготовки "філологія, переклад". Описання творчого шляху, викладання змісту багатьох творів художньої літератури сприятимуть глибокому розумінню естетичних, моральних і художніх принципів найбільш відомих письменників і поетів XX - початку XXI століття країн, мову яких вивчається.
Автори:Л.В.Горішна, канд. філол. наук, доцент кафедри фонетики та граматики (Академія внутрішніх військ МВС України)Рецензенти:В.В. Місеньова, канд. філол. наук, доцент кафедри міжмовної підготовки (Харківський національний університет ім. В.Н.Каразіна), Т.О.Биценко, канд. філол. наук, доцент кафедри філології, перекладу та мовної комунікації (Академія внутрішніх військ МВС України)
CONTENTS
PREFACE. MAJOR LITERARY GENRES LITERATURE1. THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE (1901-1939). MODERNISMWoolfJoyceHerbert LawrenceQuestions and Tasks2.THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE. NEW PERIOD. PROSE AND DRAMAGalsworthy.S. EliotBernard ShawGeorge WellsSomerset MaughamAldingtonJoseph CroninGreenePercy SnowGoldingMurdochRobert Fowles Questions and Tasks3. ANGRY YOUNG MEN WRITERS. THE GENERATION OF GENERAL DISCONTENTOsborneAmisBraineQuestions and Tasks4. A FEW MORE GLIMPSES OF POST-WAR LITERATUREQuestions and TasksLITERATURE5. AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE FIRST HALF AND THE MIDDLE OF THE XX-TH CENTURY. NEW WAVESDreiserFrostAndersonScott FitzgeraldFaulknerHemingwayPenn WarrenQuestions and Tasks 6. AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX-TH CENTURYSteinbeckAlbert MichenerShawJonesOConnorUpdikeTylerCrichtonQuestions and Tasks
UNIT 7. THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN DRAMAQuestions and TasksOF QUOTED MATERIAL
PREFACE
«Modern English and American Literature» is a course for students and cadets studying English and American literature at intermediate or advanced level of English. It is designed to motivate and involve students in effective studying process. The book can serve as a basis for effective literature lessons at which the students might be expected to understand, learn and appreciate the beauties of great English and American writers, the makers of song and story of their age.book presents a survey of the most significant aspects of the literary process in Great Britain and the United States of America, its historical, social and economic background of the XX-th and the beginning of the XXI century.stress has been laid on the life of the various authors, their relationship and their work to the times in which they lived to stimulate class discussions and involve students in effective work on the literary matters.
«Modern English and American Literature» consists of seven units. Each unit contains a variety of questions focused on assisting comprehension and guiding students towards their own understanding of the authors and their works.book is designed for the students and cadets to get information about English literature, broaden their outlook, develop a high level of target language competence, enjoy the works of English writes and love literature!
INTRODUCTION
literary genrescomes directly from oral traditions found in numerous cultures of the world. Sometimes there were storytellings or storysinging contests, as in the classical age of Greek letters. These early stories were about figures or events familiar to particular groups. New characters with new characteristics appeared. A work of fiction usually possesses characters, plot, setting, point of view, theme, and, sometimes, symbols. Fiction is a shared experience. The writer introduces the readers into his or her created world. William Faulkner, the American writer and a Nobel Laureate, said that the primary job of any writer is to tell you a story, a story out of human experience - I mean by that, universal, mutual experience, the anguishes and troubles and griefs of the human heart, which is universal, without regard to race or time or condition. He wants to tell you something which has seemed to him so true, so moving, either comic or tragic, that its worth repeating. The most held opinion is that fiction is created from a mixture of fact and fancy. Telling a good story is considered to be a primary function of fiction, but telling a truthful story is equally important.is commonly divided into three major genres: poetry, prose, and drama. Each major genre can in turn be divided into lyric, concrete, dramatic, narrative, and epic.can be divided into fiction (novels, novellas and short stories) and nonfiction (biography, autobiography, letters, essays, and reports).is a long fictional story written in prose. It is one of the most popular forms of literature.subject matter of novels covers the whole range of human experience and imagination. Some novels portray true-to-life characters and events. Writers of such realistic novels try to represent life as it is. In contrast to realistic novels, romantic novels portray idealized versions of life. Some novels explore purely imaginary worlds. For example, science-fiction novels may describe events that take place in the future or on other planets. Other popular kinds of novels include detective novels and mysteries, whose suspenseful plots fascinate readers.novels point out evils that exist in society and challenge the reader to seek social or political reforms. Novels may also provide knowledge about unfamiliar subjects or give new insights into familiar ones.novel has four basic features that together distinguish it from other kinds of literature. First, a novel is a narrative - that is, a story presented by a teller. It thus differs from a drama, which presents a story through the speech and actions of characters on a stage., novels are longer than short stories, fairy tales, and most other types of narratives. Novels vary greatly in length, but most exceed 60,000 words. Because of their length, novels can cover a longer period and include more characters than can most other kinds of narratives., a novel is written in prose rather than verse. This feature distinguishes novels from narrative poems. Fourth, novels are works of fiction. They differ from histories, biographies, and other long prose narratives that tell about real events and people. Novelists sometimes base their stories on actual events or the lives of real people. But these authors also make up incidents and characters. Therefore, all novels are partly, if not entirely, imaginary. The basic features of the novel make it a uniquely flexible form of literature. Novelists can arrange incidents, describe places, and represent characters in an almost limitless variety of ways. They also may narrate their stories from different points of view. In some novels, for example, one of the characters may tell the story. In others, the events may be described from the viewpoint of a person outside of the story. Some novelists change the point of view from one section of a story to another. Novelists also vary their treatment of time. They may devote hundreds of pages to the description of the events of a single day, or they may cover many years within a few paragraphs.
Poetrythe oldest kind of literature known to humanity, poetry in its earliest stages was told or sung, but during its long and continuing evolution it has become part of the written tradition and is been use for several purposes. Foremost among the many uses of poetry has been its ability as lyric, narrative, and epic to pay homage to the gods and to recount the history of specific groups of people.European and American poets have been most influenced by Greek culture, in which the writers were known as poets, a title that carried both responsibility and praise. Greek literature consisted in large measure of plays that were written in poetry, a convention of the time. Roman poets adopted most of the rules of the Greeks, later revived during the Renaissance. Beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer, poetry in England flowered and spread throughout the English-speaking world and far beyond. Poetic forms are: verse, poem, song, ode, sonnet, ballad, elegy, parody, epigram, etc.what is poetry? According to William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, the major role of poetry was to stand in opposition to science. Coleridge wrote: poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science. A great and influential man of writing of the Romantic period wrote that Poetry begins where matter of fact or science ceases... . The American poetess of the 19th century Emily Dickinson alludes nearly to the same thing:clothe the fiery thought simple words succeeds,still the craft of genius is mask a king in weeds.is often full of ideas, too, and sometimes poems can be powerful experiences of the mind, but most poems are primarily about how people feel rather than how people think. Poetry can be the voice of our feelings.prose and poetry have much in common and a number of poets also write prose fiction, nevertheless, commonly accepted differences between the two genres are that poetry is generally written in meter, thus creating rhythm, and prose is not; rhyme is a characteristic feature of poetry (though not required) which prose doesnt have. Poetry distills, compresses and refines knowledge through selective use of language, while prose is considered ordinary language. Poets are binding themselves in the chains of traditional poetic forms and then creating interaction between different elements of poetic technique. But nothing about poetry is as important as the way it makes us feel with the help of imagination, symbols, and invention.poetry is freed from the old rules, evolves from the confinement of rigid structure and sometimes content. This is what we now know as free verse - the kind of poetry which was fired by a new kind of poet, epitomized by the great American poet Walt Whitman, poetry which relies heavily on imagery.employ various strategies and elements of poetic technique to frame their vision of human experience in verse: theme, diction, tone, imagery, symbolism, simile and metaphor, personification and apostrophe, mete, rhythm and rhyme, sound, structure, and form.can be divided into serious drama, tragedy, comic drama, melodrama, and farce.differs from other forms of literature in that it demands a stage and performances. It can be enjoyed by both spectators and readers. But the fact is that most plays are written to be produced, and must be performed. The word drama comes from the Greek meaning a thing done. The playwright supplies dialogues for the characters to speak and stage directions that give information about costumes, lighting, scenery, properties, the setting, music, sound effects, and the characters movements and ways of speaking. From its beginnings, drama, like other forms of literature, was meant to tell the story of humankind in conflict with the world. A play is human action or human experience dramatized for stage production. Poetic elements of technique and strategies in a play must be made visible. Through plot, a playwright imitates movements of existence, adjusting the rhythm to fit the mode of presentation, whether that mode is comedy or farce, tragedy or melodrama, tragicomedy or pantomime.
ENGLISH LITERATURE
UNIT1. THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE (1901-1939). MODERNISM
In Europe, the effect of World War I, and of the ghastly casualties was powerful and lasting. There was a grim contrast between the rousing patriotic speeches of the leaders at home and the slaughter in the trenches of France.devastation of World War I brought about an end to the sense of optimism that had characterized the years immediately preceding the war - nineteenth-century conviction that progress must forever continue, which can be found in the works of G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells. Many people were left with the feeling of uncertainty, disjointedness, and disillusionment. No longer trusting ideas and values of the world out of which the war had developed, people sought to find new ideas that were more applicable to twentieth-century life. The quest for new ideas extended into the world of literature, and a major literary movement known as Modernism was born.writing this was the period called highbrow and precious, the period of new writing meant to be understood only by a very small minority of the people, the cultured few, and that could not be enjoyed by everybody who could read. The works of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), James Joyce (1882-1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) were often difficult and obscure. Young creative writers felt themselves in danger of being overwhelmed by mass media: radio, films, and of course television meant for ordinary people. So they had to keep a long-way-off and do something very different. They decided that real literature, not meant for ordinary reading public, could afford to be difficult, could even glory in its difficulty.effected J.R.R. Tolkien (1893-1973). He personally came under the shadow of war and felt fully its oppression when he was caught in youth by 1914, a hideous experience as he called it himself, and then involved in no less hideous an experience in 1939 and the following years.Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1893 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. After serving in the First World War, he embarked upon a distinguished as one of the finest philologists in the world. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College. He is beloved throughout the world as the creator of Middle-earth and the author of such classic works as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He died on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81.trilogy The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the Ring) appeared between 1936 and 1949. It is a chronicle of the Great War of the Ring which occurred in the Third Age of Middle-earth. It is greatly built on myth and symbols. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth, but not explicit, not in the known form of primary real world, said Tolkien.were, of course, other writers whose work was less affected by the war and the disillusionment that it bred. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), E.M. Forster (1879-1970), and Catherine Mansfield (1888-1923), whose literary careers as writers of fiction began well before the war, exercised much influence on later writers - Conrad by his deep concern with mans inner nature, Forster and Mansfield by their subtle treatment of personal relationships. In the stories collected in The Garden Party (1922) Mansfield uses psychological revelation and skillful description of social gatherings to portray young people trying to break through superficiality upper-middle class life. Some of these stories achieve the level of poetry in their impressionistic recreation of scenes and moments. Mansfield recorded her thoughts during her last years in a writers Journal, which her husband, the English critic edited and issued in 1927, after her death.poets, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) progressed from a dreamy kind of romanticism in the 1890s to highly disciplined, intellectual verse in the 1920s and 1930s, while A.E. Housman (1859-1936) assured his fame with a small number of exquisitely polished lyrics. Poets such as T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and William Butler Yeats (1865) experimented with language and rhythms. Influenced by the innovators of the late Victorian Age, by the poetry of the French Symbolists, by the metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, and by the attempts of the Imagists to capture moments in pure, compressed images, Eliot, Yeats and others wrote an entirely new kind of poetry, intellectually challenging, suggestive, ironic, realistic and often disquieting. Their poems, along with those of Gerald Manley Hopkins, published posthumously in 1918, inspired later poets such as W.H. Auden (1907-1973), C.S. Lewis (1893-1963), and Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) to create technically precise poetry rich in nuance and ideas.important novelist, contemporary with Joyce and Virginia Woolf but markedly different in his approach, was D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930).century writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce have tried not merely to describe how a character might think; they have also attempted to present a record of his consciousness - that is, the stream of the characters thoughts as he is thinking them. They explored the psychic ills of contemporary society through the inner experience of individuals and their relationships. Influenced by developments in modern psychology, writers began using the stream-of-consciousness technique, attempting to recreate the natural flow of a characters thoughts. The stream-of-consciousness technique involves the presentation of a series of thoughts, memories, and insights, connected only by a characters natural associations. In her novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, who is regarded as one of the principal exponents of Modernism, records the consciousness of Clarissa Dalloway as she thinks about a party she is giving: But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and someone else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create, but to whom? Notice that the author does not try to be especially clear. The sentences do not follow one another logically. Instead, she follows the mind wherever it goes, seeking to give an impression of spontaneity rather than order.Modernists experimented with wide variety of new approaches and techniques, producing a remarkably diverse body of literature. During the years between the two world wars, writers in both the United States and Europe explored new literary territories. The landmark stream-of-consciousness novel is Ulysses, published in 1922 by the Irish writer James Joyce. A number of American novelists soon adopted the technique, most notably William Faulkner in the Sound and the Fury, John Passos in U.S.A., Katherine Anne Porter in short stories, Eugene ONeill in Strange Interlude.postwar disenchantment made many writers settle in Paris, where they were influenced by Gertrude Stein. The publicist and the writer who coined the phrase Lost generation to describe those who were disillusioned by the First World War, Stein lived in Paris from 1902 until her death in 1946. Steins home attracted many major authors, including Sherwood Anderson, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. They are the best known of the expatriates. But they are by no means the only ones. Ezra Pound spent most of his adult life in England, France and Italy. T.S.Eliot, born in St.Louis, went to Europe in 1914 and did not return to the United States until 1932.of the lost generation saw very little in their civilization to praise or even to accept. Archibald MacLeish, an expatriate from 1923 to 1928, wrote several volumes of verse expressing the chaos and hopelessness of those years., the Modernists shared a common sense. They sought to capture the essence of modern life in the form and content of their work. To reflect the fragmentation of the modern world, the Modernists constructed their works out of fragments, omitting the expositions, transitions, interrelations, resolutions, summaries, and explanations used in traditional literature. In poetry they abandoned traditional forms in favour of free verse. The themes of their works were usually implied, rather than directly stated, creating a sense of uncertainty and forcing readers to draw their own conclusions. The Modernists generally believed that there is no external order governing human existence and that, as a result, life is often splintered and disjointed.
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941Woolf was a major British novelist, critic, and essayist. She was a leading figure in the literary movement called Modernism.Woolf was born in London in 1882. Her father was Leslie Stephen, one of the most important Victorian philosophers, critics, and men of letters, and the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her father had a large library and Virginia availed herself of these resources throughout the childhood and adolescence, and her fathers friends helped her receive the equivalent of university training. Her fathers first wife was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. her fathers death in 1904, Virginia moved to Bloomsbury, the London district that houses the British Museum. She and her sister Vanessa gathered around them the circle of artists and intellectuals which has become known as the Bloomsbury Group, a remarkable intellectual circle which included economists, historians, critics, and novelists. In 1912 she married the journalist and editor Leonard Woolf. Together they founded one of the most distinguished publishing houses the Hogarth Press, which published works of noted modern writers. Her early novels were The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). The works which made her one of the founders of literary modernism are Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in which she studies the world of characters tragically affected by World War I, To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), which is a poetic statement rather than a novel. Plot and action in her novels become secondary matters and are replaced at the forefront by a lyrical treatment of human consciousness.novels by Virginia Woolf are Jacobs Room (1922), The Years (1937), Between the Acts (1941), collections of stories Kew Gardens (1919), The Mark on the Wall (1919), Monday or Tuesday (1922).has been a critic and an essayist too. The better essays in the two volumes of The Common Reader, and A Room of Ones Own, a short defense of womens rights, have lost none of their freshness.central theme is the intangible shading of feeling and thought that momentarily divides or unites our souls. Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel... life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit...?Woolf stated that the fiction writers central concern is with character, the mysteries of the human personality.Woolf denied the necessity of the plastic development of plots and characters. To approach the experience of life, to reveal the inner lives of her characters and to criticize the social system of the day she often employed the stream-of-consciousness technique in her novels. Although she did not invent this technique, she refined and brightened by her own wit and observation the procedure by which the characters of a novel reveal themselves through their unspoken thoughts. Her method was to assemble in language of great poetic force tiny fragments of perception. She tried, as far as possible, to catch each moment as it passed rather than to thrust her characters into the contrivances of a plot.Woolf had been subject to nervous breakdowns and depression since childhood. When World War II came, she became terrified of relapsing into madness, and at the age of fifty-nine in March of 1941, during a depression following the publication of her last novel The Years, she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Ouse River. After her death, it became fashionable to emphasize her faults as a writer - her inability to create exciting plots or to draw strong, distinctive characters - at the expense of her virtues. Today she is again discovered as a rare spirit who, in her own delicate fashion has enlarged our knowledge of the human heart.
James Joyce
1882-1941Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, the eldest of the ten surviving children. His family was relatively well-to-do. His father sent Joyce at the early age of six to the finest preparatory school in Ireland, the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College. Soon his father John Joyce lost his previous job and was unable to keep the boy at Clongowes Wood. The boy was removed from that school and sent for two years to a mediocre Christian Brothers school in Dublin. Later he was admitted without fees to Belvedere College where he showed himself as a successful schoolboy. Years of unholy mysteries of sex which he experienced at Dublins red-light district and the sacred mysteries of his training at Belvedere were followed by some months of piety, fasting, and prayer. Joyce seriously contemplated entering the priesthood.1898 Joyce graduated from Belvedere and entered University College, Dublin, the Catholic university which competed with the more prestigious Protestant institution, Trinity College. His former life satisfaction was replaced now by academic success and recognition. His literary idol was Henrik Ibsen whose Work was thought to be scandalous at the turn of the century. Joyce attacked the narrowness and provincialism of the Irish intellectuals and nationalists and looked toward Europe as a scene of greater vision and freedom. In 1902 Joyce took his degree and was ready for search for his own vision and freedom abroad. He travelled to Paris to begin studying medicine but quickly dropped out for want of money. He lingered in Paris for a while writing reviews for the Dublin Daily Express and teaching English to private pupils. His mother was seriously ill and Joyce came back home. In 1904, after his mothers death, he took a post teaching at a school in a Dublin suburb.June of 1904, Joyce met and fell in love with a young woman, Nora Barnacle, tall, pretty, but nearly uneducated and having no interest in literature. She was not the girl one would have expected to become the consort of a great master of modern letters, but her understanding and uncritical acceptance of him was perhaps just what Joyce needed. In September 1904 the couple set out for the Continent. Since then Joyce had Joyce had made only two brief trips to Ireland. After brief stays in Poland and in Rome, Joyce took up language teaching at the Berlitz School in Trieste, where he and Nora lived until 1915, and where their two children were born. Not until 1931 were Joyce and Nora legally married. Joyce was a brilliant linguist who for many years earned his living by teaching English to foreigners. He knew Latin, Italian, French, German, and numerous other tongues.first recorded poem was written in 1891. The collection of poetry entitled Chamber Music was published in London in 1907. His second work was an autobiographical brief sketch called A Portrait of the Artist, written in 1904. He also began the collection of short stories. The original manuscript contained twelve stories. They were mostly written in late 1904 through 1905. By 1907 the manuscript was completed by the addition of three more stories and the novella The Dead. But it was not until 1914 that a collection of stories Dubliners was offered to the public. 1914 marked a watershed in Joyce career. He got recognition of poet Ezra Pound too. Joyce had begun refining A Portrait of the Artist into the evocative and dramatic form of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He showed the first chapter to the editor Harriet Shaw Weaver who arranged for it serial publication in his literary magazine The Egoist during 1914-1915 before its book publication in 1916. The book is a remarkable technical achievement, nearly perfect in the economy of its form and the objectivity of its treatment of the most personal of subjects. Portrait principally recounts Joyces homesick misery at Clongowes. Using symbolism, epiphanies, and distinct style, Joyce conveyed the inner life of his protagonist in his progress from early childhood to the assumption of his mature destiny.1920 Joyce settled in Paris. He spent his first two years completing and revising Ulysses, the greatest work of Joyce which he began writing still in 1914. The book was published by the Shakespeare Press in 1922. Despite its obvious seriousness, the uncompromising language and vision of Ulysses made it impossible to publish in Britain and in America. The first American publication appeared only in 1933.is a book that is impossible to describe adequately in brief. It covers one day (June 16, 1904) in the life of three Dubliners, a day in which nothing very much happens, which ends as inconclusively as it began - and yet it is a novel of amazing breadth and scope, an encyclopedia portrait of modern life. On one level, it conveys the flickering, fugitive thoughts of its characters, the hideous domestic details of their lives, dissecting them with a surgical precision hitherto unknown in fiction. On another level it presents Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as the modern symbolic equivalents of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus in Homers epic. The book does not only give the details of the life of the city of Dublin - it is the whole journey of man from birth to grave. In his novel Joyce attempts to embody the whole significance of all human history, the meaning of the family, of manhood and womanhood, war, politics, and human achievement of every sort. Words are Joyces obsession, his delight, the source of his power. So wonderfully are words used by the author that the whole world of Dublin springs up out of their sounds, colours, reverberations, and linkage with each other. A complex network of parallels constantly relates and contrasts the characters to their Homeric counterparts. Joyce uses the story of the wanderings of the classical hero Ulysses as a kind of mythical shorthand to underscore the eternal significance of the contemporary episodes in his work. The ultimate triumph of Ulysses goes beyond its psychological naturalism, its mystic and symbolic structure, and its stylistic experimentation. It deals with the elemental drama of Blooms search for a son and Stephens search for a father, and it reflects the spiritual profundity that underlies all of Joyces artistry. Ulysses is James Joyces masterpiece.spent the next seventeen years, from 1922 to 1939, writing his last novel, Finnegans Wake - Joyce called it his monster - a book that cannot be read, but can only be studied. If in Ulysses he tried to universalize his three Dubliners through their symbolic relations with Greek characters, in Finnegans Wake he attempted a universal history. The title refers to an Irish tavern song about Tim Finnegan, who breaks his skull in a drunken fall and is miraculously resurrected at his own wake. The novel deals with the theme of death and resurrection and with the broader theme of the cyclical character of human history, in which civilizations evolve, collapse, and are reborn. These themes govern the structure of the novel, which in itself is cyclical. It begins in mid-sentence and ends in the middle of the same sentence - as though the novel, like life itself, were continuous with no beginning and no end. The language is English, but with misspellings that call up puns in a dozen other tongues. Word-play, puns, the use of sounds to enforce meaning (onomatopoeia) - these are just a suggestion of the allusive and musical uses of language achieved in this book. It is a book in which Joyce strove to give voice to the eternal dream of humanity, taking place on a single never-ending night of dreams. Within its own terms, the book is great, but it was destined never to be popular with the readers, and the one which can be fully understood only by the handful of specialists willing to devote their lives and energy to mastering its complexities.again to Switzerland by the Nazi occupation of France, Joyce died on January 13, 1941 at the age of fifty-eight, nearly blind and almost worn out by a combination of hard work and hard living. By the time of his death, Joyce had become a legend and remains today the archetypal modern writer, against whom all others are measured.
David Herbert Lawrence
1885-1930Herbert Lawrence explores the world of love between men and women and the cultural, historical and natural forces that bear on the fulfillment of human potential. A brilliant, imaginative, and emotional writer, Lawrence portrays characters sympathetically, as victims of an inhibiting society, and nature as symbolic of what is vital and nurturing in life..H. Lawrence, an English novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright, was born on 11 September in a poor family of a coalminer in the village of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in central England. He was the fourth child of a miner and an ex-schoolteacher. In 1898 at the age of thirteen he entered Nottingham High School winning a scholarship. Leaving school at sixteen he became a clerk for a short time. In 1906 he entered the training department of the Nottingham University College and after graduating from it was appointed as a teacher to an elementary school in Croydon, near London, where he began writing poems and short stories. Like that of many other writers his literary career started with writing highly charged love poetry. In 1913 appeared Lawrences first book of poems Love Poems and Others.conflict between his mother, who had been a schoolteacher and had written poetry, and his father, a crude and uneducated miner, made Lawrence feel keenly the tension between the gentler world of imagination and art and the world of physical labour. The tempestuous relationship with his violent father and passionate bonding with his refined, socially ambitious mother shaped much of his later work. In his writing Lawrence often contrasted the physical side of love with the passionless, intellectualized side. While his mother was clearly an early inspiration, he also wrote about his father with gentles, as in the semiautobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913). His mother kept her delicate son from strenuous stint in the mines. But her close intimacy with her son produced a powerful bond that warped his post adolescent development and delayed his emergence into full personal and artistic freedom.1911 his first novel The White Peacock came out, and Lawrence decided to devote himself to literature.1912 Lawrence met Frieda von Richthofen, the young wife of one of Lawrences Nottingham professors and mother of three children. The two fell in love instantly, left for Germany together and began a nomadic life together. Their relationship was intensely intimate but often troubled, and Lawrence based much of his fiction on this lifelong love. The couple was married in July 1914, when Friedas divorce became final. This was a stormy marriage from the first and inspired Lawrences volume of poems Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). During World War I Lawrence and his wife lived in London and at Greatham. Disillusioned with England and its narrow-minded rejection of his works with the pictures of sexual creativity Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen left the country for good in 1919, thereafter returning to England only for brief periods. Sea and Sardinia (1921) was a quick, joyous, unconventional record of a journey.second novel was the Tresspasser (1912), then the novel Sons and Lovers (1913), his first major work and semi-autobiographical account of his early life and the ambiguous relations he shared with his parents, which established him as a mature writer.the end of 1914 he published a book of short stories called The Prussian Officer, and in 1915 - the novel The Rainbow. Lawrence often suffered from censorship and public condemnation. The Rainbow was banned in England as obscene, and even his literary friends did not appreciate this strikingly original work. In 1916 appeared a travel book Twilight in Italy. The Lost Girl (1920) was an attempt to give the public what he believed it wanted. It won him the James Tait Memorial Prize and was followed by Aarons Rod (1922). Women in Love, which had been completed in 1917 but rejected by the London publishers was issued late in 1920. Women in Love is the deeper and more bitter than The Rainbow. It was a product of World War I, a period that strengthened Lawrences nightmare vision of humanity on the brink of collective suicide. Then followed Cangaroo (1923), a novel written and set in Australia, the result of his extensive travelling. The Plumed Serpent came out in 1926, and Lady Chatterleys Lover, his last novel was written in Italy and published privately in 1928. Lady Chatterleys Lover was not legally published in its entirety until 1959. This booked was banned for its sexual explicitness, strong language, and detailed descriptions of sexual relationship and was not published in its complete form in England and the United States until over thirty years later. In this novel Lawrence tells the story of a love affair between an aristocratic lady and a game keeper in order to show the importance of the physical as well as the emotional side of human relationships. It contains explicit descriptions of the sexual awakening of its heroine. More permissive times have lessened the shock of its erotic realism. This book did much to expand the range of published material, for courts ruled that it is art and therefore justified in depicting love explicitly. Today it is regarded as a frank and vivid portrayal of a relationship based on passion and is respected as one of the twentieth centurys greatest literary works.s nonfiction, fiction, and poetry all are characterized by strong physical descriptions and by sensitivity to the world of nature. One volume of poems is titled Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923); other collections include Tortoises (1921), Pansies (1929), and Nettles (1930).health and disillusionment with England caused Lawrence to travel the world, seeking a hospitable climate. The Lawrences visited and lived in Italy, Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, New Mexico, and the South Pacific. Many of this localities and cultures provided Lawrence with inspiration for books. He had contracted tuberculosis while living in primitive conditions in Mexico.spent the winter 1929-1930 at Bandol and in February went to a sanatorium in France. Death finally claimed him at Vence on the French Riviera. He died at the age of forty-four of tuberculosis on March 1, 1930. His ashes were eventually taken to his ranch above Taos, New Mexico.Lawrence is classed among English modernists, though he did not deny the necessity of the plastic development of characters and the plot. What places him among modernists is Freuds conception of an individuality and the theory of subconsciousness which he supported and propagated in his novels.with social life, Lawrence sought escape in the world of nature. He firmly believed that the evils of an unjust and corrupt society could be mitigated if men and women found warmth and happiness in love. The sufferings brought upon lovers by a cruel social law or, more often, by the clash of their conflicting - wills, by the hatred and revolt that sometimes go hand in hand with love are the main subjects of Lawrences novels.World War I the philosophical outlook of most English writers has been deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis, as developed by Freud, is the apotheosis of the individual, the extreme of intellectual anarchy. It affected the works of D. H. Lawrence very much.was also the first writer who openly wrote about marriage and relationship of sexes. He intruded into the sphere of intimate life, breaking the prejudices of the time. However, realistic picturing of the life is characteristic of Lawrences novels: truthful pictures of the life of miners in Sons and Lovers; the description of St.Philips school in The Rainbow, beautiful and fascinating descriptions of nature in The White Peacock; atmosphere of family life in The Lost Girl.and Lovers. Lawrences novel Sons and Lovers is largely autobiographical. It principally chronicles the war for Lawrence's soul between his mother and Jessie Chambers, Lawrences first love. The main hero Paul Morel, a poet and painter, like the author himself, has been brought up in a working class home. Thus the book, set in a coalmining community similar to D.H.Lawrences birthplace, is based on his own experience and is a semi-autobiographical account of his early home life and the ambiguous relations with his parents - an obsession and the claustrophobic relationship with his mother and hatred he felt for his father. Life at Eastwood offers nothing to a vital, unambitious man like Pauls father, except the pit and the pub. To his wife, with her intelligence and her longing for refinement, it offers only the chapel and the hope of getting up into the middle class - through her children if not through the disappointing husband. This is Paul Morels heritage, and the neurotic refusal of life engendered in him is the direct result of his parents failure. And the parents failure is the direct result of the pressures of an inhuman system.s mother has one passion in her life - a passion for her sons; first for the eldest, then the second. Paul is urged into life by the reciprocal love of his mother. But when he comes to manhood, he fails to fall in love because his mother is the strongest power in his life. Lawrence shows the feelings and passion of Paul's mother. First it was motherly love to her little son. She cared about him, defended him from the cruelty of her husband and from hard work in the mine. She wants him to become a painter, she is so glad when he is successful in study and work. But she is very jealous and she demands the same love to herself from him. Meanwhile Paul comes into contact with a sensitive girl Miriam. She is timid and self-conscious because she loves him, and with a prophetic insight fears that he will go beyond her limitations. Paul is angry with her emotional intensity because it already begins to constitute a claim on him. Strongly drawn to Miriam, he cannot and will not give himself to her; he wants to be safe. Miriam fights with Pauls mother for the possession of his soul. But mother gradually proves to be the stronger of the two, because of the tie of .their blood. Paul realizes that he cannot really love Miriam, but he does not know why. He does not clearly recognize the power of his mother. It is true that he returns to his mother, but he thinks that he is still faithful to Miriam, that she still holds him in the depths of her soul. Miriam wants a completely committed love with faithfulness, tenderness and understanding - qualities that Paul cannot give. Yet her possession of his soul comes to matter less and less. His mother wins the fight for his soul. His mother is the chief thing to him, the only supreme thing. He said about Miriam to his mother, No, Mother - I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you. ...I could let another woman - but not her. Shed leave me no room, not a bit of a room -. And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly. Another woman comes into his life. Clara comes to work at the factory where Paul is employed, and her husband also works there. Clara is different from Miriam. She is independent, emancipated and experienced. The development of their relations is wholly without any tender glow. But his mother is not displeased; she thinks that he is getting away from Miriam, and that he is growing up.Paul is severely hurt by Claras husband and pneumonia follows, his mother nurses him, and he again returns safely to his mothers care. But his safety is clouded by his mothers illness; it is a fatal cancer. Paul is prostrated with grief. Clara leaves Paul because she realizes that her husband has more dignity than Paul.last effort with Miriam fails. They meet again, with all the old tension. She suggests marriage, and in a scene of tortured, enigmatic confusion Paul rejects it. He says: You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there, smothered. Lawrences exposition of the novel closes with these words: He is left in the end naked of everything, with him drift towards death.s work has been the subject of violent argument. On the one hand, it was praised to the skies, on the other, it was reviled as immoral. The truth of the matter is that Lawrence was one of the first among English writers to be absolutely outspoken on questions of love and relations between men and women while the element of social protest in Sons and Lovers is not strong.
Comprehension Questions and Tasks
1. Comment on Modernism as a major literary movement. Name the main representatives of Modernism. Explain modernists ideas and slogans.
. Briefly tell Virginia Woolfs biography. What well-known novels did she write? Comment on Virginia Woolfs central themes in her writings. Can we call her a fighter of womens rights? Why?
. What writings is James Joyce famous for? Speak on the subject of Ulysses. Name all the main characters of the book. Explain: Why nowadays James Joyce remains the archetypal modern writer.
. Tell about D.H. Lawrences lifetime and literary work. Comment on the critics words: Novels which explore the interrelation between the individual self, the social self and nature. Name and classify the relations between the members of the family according to their quality and intensity (Sons and Lovers).
UNIT 2. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE. NEW PERIOD. PROSE AND DRAMA
Galsworthy
1867-1933Galsworthy is one of the outstanding representatives among the English authors of the close of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. He was an extremely intellectual man, trained for the Bar.Galsworthy was born in a well-to-do family in Surrey. He got his first education at home. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Harrow School, a very old and famous public school for boys. At Harrow Galsworthy distinguished himself as an excellent pupil. After Harrow he studied law at Oxford; but he did not find his studies in law exciting though he received an honours degree in law in 1889 and was admitted to the Bar. But very soon he gave up law entirely for literature. His decision was influenced greatly by Ada Galsworthy, his wife.1899 Galsworthy published his first novel Jocelyn. Afterwards, at frequent intervals he wrote plays, novels and essays.first notable work was The Island of Pharisees (1904) where he attacked the stagnation of thought in the English privileged classes, with their reject of any emotion and their preference for a dull, settled way of life. Five following works entitled The Country House (1907), Fraternity (1909), The Patrician (1911), The Dark Flower (1913) and The Freelands (1915) show a similar attitude. Here the author criticizes country squires, the aristocracy and artists, and professes his deep sympathy towards strong passions, sincerity and true love.he gained popularity only after the publication of The Man of Property (1906) - the first part of The Forsyte Saga. Galsworthy had not intended to write a sequel to The Man of Property. But speaking about the Forsyte family he said: I never meant to go on with them, but after 1918 they began to liven up again, and the whole thing then came on with a rush - six books and four interludes full of them.first three books of The Forsyte Saga for which John Galsworthy was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 - The Man of Property, In Chancery and To Let show us Soames Forsyte in his dealings with his elders and his contemporaries. The dominant theme of this trilogy is the struggle between the possession instinct which would reduce even human beings to the level of property, and the instinct for beauty and freedom which eternally eludes possession.three novels - The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon and Swan Song were united under the general title A Modern Comedy (1928) - in which the younger generation of the Forsytes are depicted against the background of the post-war England. The action is centered round Soames daughter Fleur. The third trilogy is called End of the Chapter (1931-1933) and includes Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness and Over the River.took Galsworthy 22 years to accomplish this monumental work. It is both a family chronicle and the history of the English bourgeois society during fifty years of gradual decay. We see World War I altering the aspect of many things, the workers movement threatening to overthrow the old economic system, uncertainty growing in morals as well as economics.was also a great playwright of his time. In his plays he is a social reformer, but too often he is only an observer, trying to mete out equal justice for both sides. His best plays such as Strife (1909), The Silver Box (1909), Justice (1910), which is concerned with the evils of the prison system, and The Loyalties (1922), by many regarded as Galsworthys best play, attack the most pressing social issues of the day. His Strife treats of industrial warfare in tin-plate works on the borders of England and Wales. The central theme is that of class distinction. In the play The Silver Box he shows the difference between the rich and the poor in the interpretation of the law. In the tragedy Justice the barbarity of the English Penal Code is revealed; we see that justice is kinder to the rich man than to his poorer brother. His plays, like his novels, are often didactic; that is to say, they are directed not towards entertainment but towards enlightening the minds of their audiences, towards guiding them to the solution of social problems and to the clearing up of social abuses. They are full of ideas and thoughts, they are intellectually stimulating.is not only a novelist and a dramatist, but also a short story writer and an essayist. His short stories give a most complete, and critical picture of English bourgeois society in the first part of the XX century. It is in his short stories that Galsworthy deals with the most vital problems of the day - he condemns the imperialist war, exposes capitalism that brings suffering and unemployment to the people, showing his sympathy for the so-called little men and reflecting their hard life and tragic fate, though his characters are mostly members of the upper middle-class, with which he was wholly familiar.is a great master of exciting plots, realistic depiction of life and characters, of critical attitude towards national prejudices. He tried to revive the realistic traditions of his predecessors - the writers belonging to the brilliant school of English novelists. Though Galsworthys criticism is not as sharp and acute as that of Dickens and Thackeray, he is justly considered to be one of the greatest realists of his time. The novels and plays of Galsworthy give a most complete picture of English bourgeois society in the XX century. A bourgeois himself Galsworthy nevertheless clearly sees the decline of his class and truthfully portrays this in his works. To him it is not man who is wicked-but society that is wrong. He believes in man as all humanists do. Yet one cannot help seeing the limitations of Galsworthys realism. His criticism of the bourgeoisie is ethical and esthetic only. He aims to improve his class, but in no case does he want it to lose its ruling position. The descriptive talent of the author, the richness of his style, sincerity and keen sense of beauty put Galsworthy on the level with the most prominent writers of world literature.Forsyte SagaMan of Property. At the beginning of the novel we see the Forsyte family in full plumage. All the Forsytes gather at the house of old Jolyon to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyons granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. Old Jolyon is the head of the family, eighty years of age with his white hair, his domelike forehead and an immense white moustache, he holds himself extremely upright and seems master of perennial youth. He and his five brothers and four sisters (James, Timothy, Nickolas, Rodger and others) represent the first generation of the Forsytes. All of them are rich businessmen, heads of various firms and companies - big landowners, salesmen, lawyers, publishers. With distrust and uneasiness they watch Junes fiancé - a young architect without any fortune. In their opinion Jolyon ought never to have allowed the engagement. Bosinney seems to be an impractical fellow with no sense of property, while the Forsytes consider property to be a sacred thing, the object of worship and respect. Their aim of life is to enlarge their wealth by all means. They are clinging to any kind of property - money, wives, reputation.most typical man of property is Soames Forsyte, a representative of the second generation of the Forsytes. Soames sacred sense of property even extends to works of art, human feelings and family relations.married Irene, 20-year old daughter of a poor professor, a woman who has never loved him, Soames treats her as though she were his property. Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none. In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body - if he indeed could do that, which he was beginning to doubt.to get his beautiful wife out of London, away from opportunities of meeting people, Soames decides to build a house in the country. He asks Bosinney to design the house, because he thinks that Bosinney will be easy to deal with in money matters. Irene falls in love with the young architect, and Soames, driven by jealousy, brings a suit against Bosinney for having exceeded the sum of money which had been fixed for the construction of the house. On the day of the trial Bosinney meets with a tragic death. Being passionately in love with Irene and depressed by the hopeless state of affairs he wanders aimlessly in the foggy streets of London and is run over by an omnibus. Irene leaves Soames. But she is forced to return to him though not for a long time. The new house remains empty and deserted.
The Man of Property represents a typical bourgeois who is a slave of property, which is to him not only money, houses and land, but also his wife, the works of art and the talent of artists whose works he buys. Soames believes that the souls and thoughts, ideas and love, the inspiration of a genius, the kindness and sympathy of a warm heart are all to be bought for their value in money. In his conversation with Philip Bosinney young Jolyon, a painter, the son of old Jolyon says: We are, of course, all of us the slaves of property, and I admit that it's a question of degree; but what I call a Forsyte is a man who is decidedly more or less a slave of property. He knows a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property - it doesnt matter whether it be wives, houses, money, reputation - is his hallmark.Galsworthy depicts a concrete family of men of property - the Forsytes - he shows us at the same time the life of the class which rules the country, the upper-middle class. Every Forsyte feels great pleasure speaking about money matters. If he sees anything, he immediately states the value of it.individualism, egoism, snobbery, an ability never to give oneself away, contempt for everything foreign, a sense of property and money-worship - these are the most characteristic features of the Forsytes. The collision between the sense of property and money-worship, on the one hand, and true love and a keen sense of beauty, on the other, is the main theme of the novel. Irene symbolizes beauty, Bossiney - art. But the above mentioned characters are not as vivid and full-blooded as those of the Forsytes. They are created to contrast the Forsyte clan and its evil qualities.second and the third novels of the trilogy - In Chancery and To Let tell about the marriage of Soames with a French girl Annet who is 20 years his junior. She doesn't love him, but she is practical. This marriage produces an heir - the daughter Fleur. Irene marries young Jolyon and they have a son - John. They represent the third generation of the Forsytes. The young people fall in love with each other, but Irene can not bear the idea of her son being in love with the daughter of the man whom she hates. They send John off to America to separate two young loving souls. Robin Hill house is sold. Hence, the title To Let. This is the end of the Forsytes efflorescence.Modern Comedy.second trilogy opens with The White Monkey. Galsworthy shows habits, customs, views and psychology of the so-called lost generation. The typical figure of this generation is Wilfred Desert, a poet, who falls in love with Fleur, but she refuses him and he leaves England and spends many years in the East. Fleur still longs for John. But she is hot a girl to waste time and she decided that it was better to have whatever life held for her and she soon marries Michael Mont. Fleur is the very image of colour and vitality. She is sly and cunning, acute and clever, she is self-possessed and self-restrained, she has a ready answer for everything and everybody. She could keep on the tracks she was on. She is overflowing with health and life. She is a marvel of energy. The title of the novel is allegorical. Once Soames bought a picture with a monkey eating an orange. Her eyes express the tragedy of a human soul - it seems to the monkey that there is something hidden in the orange she is trying to peel off, she tries to find it but in vain, and she is unhappy and angry. When Michael Mont saw the picture he said that it should be placed in the British Museum under the title Civilization as it is.meaning of the second novel The Silver Spoon is disclosed in the phrase concerning Fleur, Wilfred Desert, Fleurs son Kit and others. All of them were born with the silver spoon in the mouth. Since their birthday they had everything they needed. There was only one thing for them to do - to puzzle over something, to seek what else they could have. Again the author pictures the aristocratic society allegorically, in the image of an old toothless woman sucking a silver spoon. She fears to let the spoon out of her mouth and at the same time she is no longer able to keep it in her mouth.of the Chapterthird trilogy End of the Chapter shows the decay of an aristocratic family. We meet many young people of the new generation, among them Dinny Cherrel, who is opposed to empty society. She has the aim in her life - to save the family from ruin. Dinny is a remarkable young woman with lots of qualities (plenty of pluck, singular power of acumen, natural spring of wit not devoid of humour). But the greatest testimony to her character lies in her transparent honesty. It is out of her character to tell lies; she likes a straight deal in everything. She is as straight as a die. Dinny is a marvel of energy. Being in the know that her brothers reputation is aspersed she sets her mind on pulling useful strings to vindicate Huberts honour without thinking of herself.of relations between men and women Dinny is of the opinion that affection should come first. The giving of her heart would be no rushing affair. As her old Scotch nurse used to say Dinny knows on how many toes a pussy-cat goes. No wonder she receives her due of respect and admiration on the part of everybody. No wonder that Hallorsen took a toss over her and Alan Fasburgh fell for her charms on sight.again meet Wilfred Desert who returned from the East. Wilfred Desert is brightly portrayed by the author. He is a tall young man of about thirty four, with a disdainful look about his mouth, with daring and compelling face, whose eyes were his best point. He comes from an old family and has a streak of the wanderer in him. His face gave the impression of spiritual struggle and disharmony, of dreaming, suffering and discovery. Though on his own admission he got over the war there were in him nerves not yet mended up. Wilfred is acutely unhappy from deep inward disharmony, as though a good angel and a bad one were for ever seeking to fire each other out. Wilfred is suffering from a deep spiritual discontent. He is at odds with himself according to Dinny. He has sort of enmity against people and life and his not shared love for Fleur started him as a rolling stone. He went to seek sanctuary in the East. The greatest testimony to his character is that he could see through any falsity, for it was alien to his nature.his return to England Wilfred Desert finds himself in complete isolation because being in the East he recanted at the pistol point and took mohammedism under the threat of life. He felt sorry that he stifled his first instinct which was to say: shoot and be damned. It was not cowardice. It was just better scorn that men can waste each others life for beliefs that seemed to him equally futile. Dinny and Wilfred love each other. But although Dinny is ready to fight for him and help him he again leaves England and parishes in the East.
T.S. Eliot
1888-1965the time when he was regarded as Americas most eminent living poet, T.S. Eliot announced that he was an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a royalist in politics, and a classicist in literature. T.S. Eliots family was rooted in New England, yet he was born into a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was the chancellor of Washington University. Eliots childhood awareness of his native city would show itself in his poetry, but only after he had moved far away from St. Louis. During his years as an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot published a number of poems in The Harvard Advocate, the school literary magazine. In 1910 he earned his masters degree in philosophy. In the same year he completed his first important poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This poem was published in the magazine Poetry. He graduated from Harvard and went on to postgraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris.before the outbreak of World War I, Eliot took up residence in London, the city that would become his home for the rest of his life. There he worked for a time in a bank, suffered a nervous breakdown, married an emotionally troubled Englishwoman, and finally took up the business of literature. He became active as a publisher in the outstanding firm of Faber & Faber, and, on his own, edited The Criterion, a literary magazine. As a critic, he was responsible for reviving interest in many neglected poets, notably the seventeenth-century poet John Donne. 1927, Eliot gave up his American citizenship and became a subject of the King of England. But residence in an adopted country does not necessarily change the philosophy or the style of a poet.before he decided to live abroad permanently, Eliot had developed a taste for classical literature. He was as familiar with European and Eastern writings as he was with the masterpieces of English. But the most crucial influence upon his early work came from the late-nineteenth-century French poets who, as a group, came to be known as the Symbolists. They saw poetry as an art of recreating states of mind and feeling, as opposed to reporting or confessing them. These beliefs became the basis of Eliots own poetic methods. When people complained that this poetic method of suggestion was complex and difficult to understand, Eliot retorted that poetry had to be complex to express the complexities of modern life. Eliot and other American poets also believed that, divorced from British antecedents, they would once and for all bring the peculiar rhythms of their native speech into the mainstream of world literature. Eliot and these other poets are often referred to as Modernists.had an austere view of poetic creativity; he disagreed with those who regarded a poem as a means of self-expression, as a source of comfort, or as a kind of spiritual pep talk. Practicing what he preached, Eliot startled his contemporaries in 1917 with the poems Portrait of a Lady, Prufrock and Other Observations. These early poems were dramatic studies of man's spiritual and emotional poverty in a barren world. Then, in 1922, with the editorial advice and encouragement of Ezra Pound, Eliot published The Waste Land, a long work which would become the most significant poem of the early twentieth century. The poem was so influential that the word wasteland entered common usage from Eliots work. The word suggests a civilization that is spiritually empty and paralyzed by indecision and anxiety. The Waste Land proved that it was possible to write an epic poem of classical scope in the space of 434 lines. The poem contrasts the spiritual bankruptcy that Eliot saw as the dominant force in modern Europe with the values and unity that governed the past. Critics pored over the poems complex structure and its dense network of allusions to world literature, Oriental religion, and anthropology. The impact of The Waste Land on other writers, critics, and the public was enormous, and it is regarded as one of the finest literary works ever written.few years after The Waste Land appeared Eliot published a series of notes identifying many of his key references. In 1925, Eliot published a kind of lyrical post-script to The Waste Land called The Hollow Men, which predicted in its somber conclusion that the world would not end with a bang but with a whimper. In The Hollow Men, Eliot repeats and expands some of the themes of his longer poem and arrives at that point of despair beyond which lie but two alternatives: renewal or annihilation. Critics, surveying Eliot's career, said that, after the spiritual dead-end of The Hollow Men, Eliot chose hope over despair and faith over the world-weary cynicism that marked his early years. But there is much evidence in his later poems to indicate that, for Eliot, hope and faith were not conscious choices. Instead, they were the consequences of a submission. After he became a British citizen and the member of the Church of England, radical changes in the focus of Eliots writing, the exploration of religious themes became evident in his later poems Ash Wednesday (1930), with its deeply religious spiritual explorations, and Four Quartets, which contains the philosophical conclusions of a lifetime (though always tentative). These poems suggest that Eliot felt that religious belief could be a means of healing the wounds inflicted on a person by spiritually bankrupt society he depicted in The Waste Land. In such poetic dramas as Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Cocktail Party (1950), and The Confidential Clerk (1954), Pound affirmed a positive religious conviction that is sustaining.spent the remainder of his poetic career in an extended meditation upon the limits of individual will and the limitless power of faith in the presence of grace.winter evening settles down The morning comes to consciousnesssmell of steaks in passageways. Of faint stale smells of beero'clock From the sawdust-trampled streetburnt-out ends of smoky days With all its muddy feet that pressnow a gusty shower wraps To early coffee-stands.grimy scrapswithered leaves about your feet With the other masqueradesnewspapers from vacant lots; That time resumes,showers beat One thinks of all the handsbroken blinds and chimney-pots, That are raising dingy shadesat the corner of the street In a thousand furnished rooms.lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.then the lighting of the lamps.tossed a blanket from the bed, His soul stretched tight across the skies lay upon your back, and waited; That fade behind a city block,dozed, and watched the night revealing Or trampled by insistent feetthousand sordid images At four and five and six o'clock;which your soul was constituted; And short square fingers stuffing pipes,flickered against the ceiling. And evening newspapers, and eyeswhen all the world came back Assured of certain certainties,the light crept up between the shutters, The conscience of a blackened streetyou heard the sparrows in the gutters, Impatient to assume the world.had such a vision of the street I am moved by fancies that are curledthe street hardly understands; Around these images, and cling:along the bed's edge, where The notion of some infinitely gentle curled the papers from your hair, Infinitely suffering things.clasped the yellow soles of feet Wipe your hands across your mouth, and laugh;the palms of both soiled hands. The worlds revolve like ancient womenfuel in vacant lots.for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In the decades that followed, he came frequently to the United States to lecture and to read his poems, sometimes to very large audiences.Stearns Eliots poetry received more critical acclaim than that of any other American poet of his time. Several of T.S. Eliots plays had a successful run in London and New York.Pound wrote a few final words on the death of his old friend, ending with this passage: Am I to write about the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? Or my friend the Possum? Let him rest in peace, I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago: READ HIM.
George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950Shaw was born in Dublin in a family of a civil servant. He was fifteen when he left school to become an office boy at a firm of land agents in Dublin. Being fond of the theatre he visited it from his earliest years and acquired so profound a knowledge of Shakespeare that he knew many of the plays by heart.the age of nineteen Shaw moved to England to spend his remaining 75 years there. In London B. Shaw had no intention of continuing office work and he spent a lot of time educating himself. He used to say: Though almost penniless I had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture gallery in Trafalgar Square and another at Hampton Court without any servants to look after or rent to pay. I had the brains to use them. 1879 and 1883 he wrote five long novels, such as Immaturity, Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in which he tackled the problems of marriage and showed himself as the fighter for family relations built on spiritual understanding free from social and class prejudices. Other works are An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byrons Profession.the early eighties Shaw was deeply impressed by the increasing unemployment in London, being not far from poverty himself. At the British Museum reading room he read Karl Marx in a French version and From that hour I became a man with some business in the world. In 1884 B. Shaw joined the Fabian Society which based their activity on believing in slow development of different social reforms instead of revolutionary measures. He became one of the most famous public speakers, who was feared by every opponent for his sharp tongue and clear argument.this time Shaw was offered a job in the Pall Mall Gazette and in a short time he became one of the most popular critics of music, art and drama in London. He published several books of criticism on music and theatre, among them London Music, Music in London, Our Theatres in the Nineties. Nevertheless Shaws attention was turned to the drama as a means of expressing the ideas crowding his mind. The long list of his plays opens with the cycle of Plays Unpleasant which marked the beginning of a new period in the history of English drama. This cycle includes Widowers Houses (1892), Philanderer (1893) and Mrs.Warrens Profession (1894). He protests against the evils of the society and the low position of a woman. He exposes such seamy sides of bourgeois society as poverty, sexual exploitation, marriage as a business deal, prostitution.s Houses. The first performance of B. Shaws play Widowers Houses in 1892 was quite a sensation. Shaw was attacked both by the public and the critics who called him a cynic.theme was declared by Shaw to be middleclass respectability fattening on the poverty of the slums as flies fatten on filth. The play was a ruthless exposure of the darker sides of English life.respectable English gentleman Sartorius has made his fortune by renting tenement houses in the slum area. The houses are in a terrible state, but he refuses to spend any money on repairs. During the rest on the Rein he acquaints his daughter Blanche with a young doctor Harry Trench. They fall in love with each other and decide to marry. They return to England where Harry Trench pays a visit to Mr. Sartorius house and is shocked at finding out that Sartoriuss wealth has come from slum property. Trench offers Blanche to live on his income which he believes is derived in an honest way. However, Sartorius proves to Trench that the wealth of the latter comes from the same source, because the slums are located on the land that belongs to Trench and his aunt. The play reveals that the respectability of the rich rests on the money squeezed out of suffering and starving people.the start was made. He started by criticizing bourgeois morals and corruption. A year later he wrote the Philanderer and a few months later another satire Mrs. Warrens Profession, all the three being plays unpleasant, because he was telling the truth to the bourgeois readers and spectators.. Warrens Profession. Mrs. Warren is a proprietress of several brothels in Belgium, Vienne, Budapest and she profits greatly from them. She considers her business quite honest and noble. She is able to give her daughter Vivie a decent education at private school and then at the university. Her daughter does not suspect what the source of her mothers income is. When she becomes aware of this her first impulse was to protest against it. It seemed that Bernard Shaws intention was to portray a new character who due to her energy would try to change things in the bourgeois society. But it didnt happen. Her mother told the story of life of three sisters: one of them, got poisoned by lead at the factory and died, another married a worker and kept the house and three children for 16 shillings a week till her husband deteriorated through heavy drinking. Was it worthy to keep straight for the sake of it? she asks her daughter. Then she told her daughter about her work as a scullery maid until she and her sister Lizz opened a brothel. It was a first-rate brothel and the girls were treated miles better than she was treated working as a scullery maid. Little by little her daughter begins to take mothers side. You were right if taken from practical point of view, she said. And from all others, was Mrs. Warrens answer. She said that marriage did not settle the question, so the best way was to chase a bachelor, marry him and live on his money. Prostitution is tackled by Shaw as the social evil and he severely criticizes it. No wonder that the play did not see the stage until 1902.first cycle was followed by another one which he called now Plays Pleasant. There appeared Arms and the Man (The Chocolate Soldier), The Man of Destiny, and Candida.title of the cycle is rather ironical: through the amusing situations and witty scenes with sparkling dialogues B. Shaw continues his criticism of bourgeois morals and ideals. He attacks militarism and war, their senselessness and cruelty, ridicules war and the so-called glories of war (Arms and the Man, 1894). This is a story of a man who gives up military service, the war and the arms entirely for a womans society. Edward VII, then a would-be king, Prince of Wales said that the author of the play must be a fool. Shaw dethroned Napoleon in The Man of Destiny. The main attention of the author is paid to the problem of morality. He calls upon the people to unmask, to free themselves from prejudices and illusions. Then followed Candida, the comic play You Never Can Tell, and the equally comic Androcles and the Lion. The third cycle of plays of B. Shaw Three Plays for the Puritans includes: The Devils Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Captain Brassbounds Conversion (1899). The title of the third cycle has a double meaning: on the one hand the plays turn against English Puritanism, bigotry and hypocrisy, on the other hand they are directed against the decadent drama. He contrasts his plays for puritans to those where the main themes tackled are love and marriage. Shaw explains that the greatest evil is to replace intellectual life by love intrigues.1900 Shaw had established his reputation as a playwright. He wrote one play after another as well as books of criticism and pamphlets on socialism. B. Shaws plays were not merely plays of dramatic action. Their tension was created by the struggle of ideas; they always set out to solve some social, moral or philosophical problems. In his more than fifty plays, in their numerous prefaces, Shaw has treated almost every public and social theme of the century.made a revolution in the theatre of his time. Shaws plays deal with various problems: politics, science, religion, education and economics. And in solving them he criticizes the vices of capitalist society laying bare its gross injustice and showing its inhumanity.. Shaw also revived the practice of including a long preface and sometimes a sequel in the published version, explaining what the play was about and what he actually meant. He gained a reputation as a man of brilliant wit, making frequent and effective use of the paradox, which can be found in dramatic structure, characters and style. Shaw uses them not merely for the sake of witty play of words, but to turn inside out the moral and social truths of the bourgeois world.World War I Shaw wrote long and daring articles, protesting against the imperialist governments and their war policy. In his article Common Sense about the War he said: No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather the harvest in the villages and make a revolution in the towns.was greatly interested in Russian culture. He highly appreciated and admired L. Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded, and also Chekhov and Gorky.. Shaw was at was at the peak of his fame (1925) when he received the International Nobel Prize for Literature.spite of the fact that he called himself a socialist, Shaw was at times incredibly contemptuous of the working class and thought it incapable of ever playing a significant role in winning socialism. He never fully understood Marxism. Shaw saw and felt the class contradictions of the new imperialist era very sharp and intense and in his analysis of the political and economic basis of imperialism he went much farther than his predecessors, the mid-nineteenth century writers. Shaw's aim was to show real life, not to write plays for entertainment with a happy end. He opposed the so called well-made play trend - which was very popular among the playwrights of his time.list of Shaws plays is very vast; to his most popular plays also belong Pygmalion (1912), The Apple Cart, Heartbreak House (1917), Major Barbara, Saint Joan.House was written during World War I. Shaw himself highly appreciated the play and in the preface to it he disclosed the symbolic meaning of the title. In the subtitle he called the play fantasia in the Russian manner on the English theme. The dramatic pattern of the play is Chekhovian; a group of people in a country house, the collision of their conflicting ideas and their impact on each other.sympathized with these people for their culture, sincerity, disgust for business, and at the same time accused them of idleness, of hatred for politics, of being helpless wasters of their inheritance. The author indicated the futility of the life of bourgeois intelligentsia.. The main hero of this play, Professor Henry Higgins, is presented rather ironically, as a kind of modern Pygmalion. (Pygmalion, a celebrated sculptor of mythological antiquity and King of Cyprus, fell in love with a statue of Galatea which he had made of ivory, and at his prayer Aphrodite had given life to it. Pygmalion is often accepted as a symbol of the power to breathe life and soul into inanimate things).actual fact the satire implied in the play is directed against Professor Henry Sweet, a well-known English philologist and phonetician. There are touches of Sweets character in the play, but Henry Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.Higgins meets Eliza one stormy night selling flowers to a crowd under the portico of St. Pauls Cathedral. The professor, struck by her remarkably pure Cockney pronunciation is making notes of her words with a view of studying them at home. A gentleman seems particularly interested in Higgins, and the conversation, which springs up between them reveals that he is Colonel Pickering, a student of Indian dialects. He and Higgins, it appears, have been interested in each other's work for years. Higgins points out that he can perfect the girl's shocking pronunciation which keeps her selling flowers in the street and prevents her from getting a respectable position as a saleslady in a flower shop.remark has made a deep impression on Eliza and the very next day she visits the professor to take lessons in pronunciation, at a price she considers fully sufficient of one shilling an hour. Finding Eliza's offer very interesting professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering make a bet, that in six months Higgins will teach Eliza the language of Shakespeare and Milton and pass her off as a duchess at an ambassadors party. If Higgins succeeded Pickering would pay the expenses of the experiment.is taken into Higgins house where during several months she is being taught to speak correct English. While staying at Higgins home Eliza gets accustomed to Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering. Higgins is not married and lives alone with his servants and his elderly housekeeper. He often finds Eliza amusing and Eliza, grateful for the education he is giving her, makes herself useful to him wherever she can. In order to prove his experiment Higgins dresses Eliza in beautiful clothes and takes her to the Ambassadors Garden Party where she meets the cream of society. Everybody takes her for a grand lady.wins his bet. But he has forgotten that a flower-girl is a human being with mind and heart. He looks upon her only as a thing. He does not care what is to become of her when he has finished his instruction. He says, When Ive done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter, and then it will be her own business again.