Overview from the Norton
Anthology of English Literature
Historical Background of 1537's-1940's
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Increase in literacy revealed high
and low brow literature
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"Anti-Victorianism" (against domesticity,
status quo, etc.) led to fight for women's rights
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World Wars I and II led to disillusionment
and alienation
Poetry
New creative movement in poetry,
focusing on imagery--influenced by reintroduction metaphysics and french
symbolist poetry
influence of great composers and
artists encourage the new poetic language, rhythm and tone
Fiction
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Novels, especially those of the 1920's
and 1930's, focused on intense reflection and debate.
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Reality existed only as it is perceived
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Major authors include Joyce, Woolf,
and Conrad
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Christian faith, knowledge, materialism,
and history were questioned
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Use of stream of consciousness (access
to character's thoughts without saying "he/she thought ") along with free
and indirect style (authors enter their characters' minds and "speak as
if it were on their behalf" 1906)
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Identifiable group of English Catholic
writers emerge in the 1930's and on (Waugh, Eliot, Greene)
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Greatness of Graham Greene--interested
in the conditions and trials of humanity.
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Out with the grand narratives and England's
stories of Empire and in with the ordinary, the provincial, and the "real"
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1980's--writers obsessed with Germany
(England's old enemy), horror of war, and earlier English narratives.
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Emergence of feminist writers (Jeannette
Winterson, Sexing the Cherry), gay writers, and science fiction authors
as well as commonwealth writers. These combined to enliven the sterile
course British literature had taken
Drama 1890's-1950
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Emergence of Irish nationalist theater
(Yeats)
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T.S. Eliot combined religious symbolism
with "entertaining society comedy" in The Cocktail Party (1950).
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Unevenness of tone and disturbing shifts
in representing realism
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In 1968, playwrights freed from censorship;
could include more controversial issues in their work
T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
1888 (Missouri) - 1965
Studied at Harvard and later at
Oxford
Poet, playwright, essayist, editor.
Married Vivienne Haigh Wood in
1915 (she helped him with his poetry--see Tom and Viv)
In 1927, he became a British Subject
and joined the Church of England
Considered himself "Anglo-Catholic
in religion, royalist in politics, and classicist in literature." In 1915
He taught at a boy's school in London; he left in 1917 to work at Lloyd's
Bank.. He had his wife committed to a mental asylum, leaving her in 1933;
she died in 1947. Won the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1948
In 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher.
His writing, particularly poetry,
reflects:
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Jacobean interest in terror
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Metaphysical poets like Donne (Use
of wit and recognition of death in life: "For whom does the Bell toll,
it tolls for thee")
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Insistence on order, discipline.
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Allusions, literary references (brings
us back to a "simpler" or more pastoral moment)
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Decay of culture
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fragmentation of ideas and structure
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disillusionment
-
decay
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realitic images, harsher reality
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Dramatic Monologue--one speaker; Dialogue--two
speakers
Note on about Pound:
Ezra Pound born in 1885 in Hailey,
Idaho, U.S.-died in 1972 in Venice, Italy
"American poet and critic, a supremely
discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any
other single figure to advance a "modern" movement in English and American
literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally helped to shape, the
work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats,
James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot.
His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar
arrest and confinement until 1958. Belonged to "school of images."