20th Century English Novel

20th Century English Novel

*there was a growing pessimism among 20th century writers and people.The main themes of the modern period are composed of fear of loneliness, loss of identity,anxities, fears, inner conflicts of individuals.

*Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways.

*the English novels of the nineteenth century were written at a time of great confidence in British society, culture and political organization, and although different novelists present groups of characters from different levels of society and explore different themes, there is a sense of confidence in the basic structure of society and the place of people in it, that underlines their works.

*the writers of the twentieth century could not share this confidence, the changes in beliefs and political ideas were influenced strongly by the events of the First World War and by the events across the world that led to the disapperance of the British Empire and began even earlier.

*Rudyard Kipling= the poems and short stories for which he is best known deal with India itself, its wild animals and the British army and navy. His best known books are

"The Jungle Book" describing how the boy Maugli is brought up in the jungle by wild animals who have human personalities.

*Kipling writes with certainty that the beliefs an values of his stories are accepted and shared completely by his readers.

*Forster had called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses and for a satisfaction of the needs of one's physical being. His most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), combines these themes with an examination of the social distance separating the English ruling classes from the native inhabitants of India and shows the impossibility of continued British rule there.

*E.M. Forster= he takes a completely different view of the values which formed and governed British society at that time and on which the British Empire was based. "Howard's End" shows the completely different beliefs of two families."A Passage to India

*Forster's theme is the importance of bringing together opposites to make completely and healthy whole. Forster also points out that people who are failures in terms of money and worldly importance may in fact be succesful.

*Although Forster was presenting new ideas about people and society, the form of the novel that he used followed the traditioal pattern.

*Arnold Benneth=The traditional form was also used by Arnold Benneth, but with greater realism in the presentation of the details of the character's lives. "The old wives tale" contrasts the lives of the sisters from the parts of England.

*his novels give a picture of life that is harder and fuller than that given by most earlier writers.

*H.G.Wells= he also often took characters from a lower social level, but many of his characters are given a chance of happiness. "Kipps" and "the history of mr.Polly" both deal with men working in shops who find that the things they thought would change their lives.

*wells also used modern scientific advances in his novels."the time machine" is about a machine that can travel through time."the war of the worlds"describes an attack on this world by men from Mars."the first man on the moon" shows men flying to the moon about seventy years before this actually happened.

*Somerset Maugham=his first novel, lisa of Cambeth, gave a realistic picture of a city life with poor and dirty living conditions, and the novel based on his own life, Of human Bandage showed the hardship and difficulties of his own early life.

*D. H. Lawrence similarly related his sense of the need for a return from the complexities, overintellectualism, and cold materialism of modern life to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the race. His numerous novels and short stories, among which some of the best known are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), are for the most part more clearly experimental than Forster's.

*Lawrance=his view of the writers purpose was very different, he felt it was the novelists job to show how an individuals view of his own personality was often affected by conventions of language, family and religion, and to show how people and their relationships with each other were always changing and moving. He took the form of the traditional novel and made it wider and deeper.Sons and lovers is in a sense about his own early life.Rainbow tells the story of a family through three couples of different ages.

*James Joyce= In his novel Ulysses (1922) he focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce went beyond this to create a whole new vocabulary of puns

his first short stories, published as Dubliners,are realistic on the surface but also carry a deeper meaning. "a portrait of the artist as a young man"presents Joyce himself as a young man and shows how he gradually frees himself from the influence of powerful forces to follow his own nature and his own fate.

*Ulysses is regarded as one of the most important novels of English of the century.

*in Ulysses Joyce created a completely new styles of writing which allows the reader note inside the minds of the character, and presents their thoughts and feelings in a continuous stream, breaking all the usual rules of description, speech and punctuation. This style is known as interior monologue or stream of consciousness and it has had a powerful influence on the work of many other writers.

*In Ulysses the characters and parts of the novel are connected with and reflect characters and events from Greek stories. The novel is funny, touching and often satirical.

*Joyce Cary=His best known novel remains The Horses Mouth, which shows great cleverness in his use of language to give this picture of an artist who lives for his art, but in its beliefs that art can conquer the rest of the world, it has a hope for the future that is very different from most of the other novels being written at this time.

*Virginia Wolf=she was also attempting to explore the consciousness of her characters, but she was not attempting to deal with so many types of people and situations as Joyce was.Mrs. Dalloway gives a description of one day in June as it was experienced by Mrs.Dalloway and other characters. "orlando" presents a main character who begins as a man in the sixteenth century and as a woman in 1928, still only thirty six years old.

*"the waves" takes six characters at different points of their lives and shows how each is affected by the death of a person they all knew well

*she also wrote many critical studies on literature and other subjects.

*Graham Greene=he divides his many books into two groups:serious novels and entertainments. In his serious novels the characters who are failures-in comparison with what they wanted and hoped to do-are seen as being nearer Good than those who are more successful in worldly ways."Brighton Rock", "The Power and The Glory".

*Irish Murdoch=she thinks that life is a mixture of the serious and fanciful events."under the net", "the black prince".

*the detective novel is a form that became very popular towards the end of the nineteenth century, particularly through "the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle".

*In the twentieth century, the most famous writer of detective stories is Agathe Christie, whose long line of books began with "the mysterious affair at styles"

*George Orwell=he wrote several novels but his fame rests mainly on his later books and his political and critical writing.The heroes of his early novels share with Orwell himself the desire and ability to cut through lies and pretence to find out truth about a situation or a person.

*Orwell was very conscious of the ways in which language could be used to hide the truth and he shows how governments can use language to deceive the people in "1984"

*the quality of a language suggests the quality of the society that uses it, so that a government controls a language in order to control completely the people who use it

*Much of Orwell's best writing is political and he is certainly the most important political writer. Perhaps his most famous work is a political allegory "animal farm" which tells the story of a political revolution that went wrong.