The Modern Period 英美文学.ppt

The Modern Period,Influences of the two World Wars The catastrophic (disastrous) First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great sufferings to its people. The Second World war marked the last stage of the disintegration (destroy) of the British Empire.,Historical Background,The century had to face two ruinous wars that cost many lives and made destruction of property: thousands of people were killed; the economy was ruined; and almost all its former colonies were lost. The once sun-never-set Empire finally collapsed.,Historical Background,The postwar economic dislocation (disturbance) and spiritual disillusion produced a profound impact upon the British people, who came to see the wretchedness (unpleasant situation) in capitalism.,Historical Background,Since World War , Britain saw momentous changes in its social and political life. Different kinds of philosophical ideas appeared in the Western world. In the middle-19th century, Marxism showed its appearance. Darwins theory of evolution made a strong influence on the peoples mind. Albert Einsteins theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for concepts of time and space.,Modernism,Modernism grew out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared as follows. 1. Expressionism: a practice in art of seeking to depict subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist); 2. Surrealism: the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art, literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural or irrational juxtapositions and combinations;,Modernism,3. Futurism: in the western history of art, especially in the modern painting history of 20th, there were many modern painting trends, such as Fauvism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, etc. Futurism is one of them. 4. Dadaism: a movement in art and literature based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional values; 5. Imagism : a movement in poetry advocating free verse and the expression of ideas and emotions through clear precise images; 6. Stream of consciousness: the continuous unedited chronological flow of conscious experience through the mind.,Modernism,Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent (pour) of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America, the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art, literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural or irrational juxtapositions and combinations,Major Figures of this Movement,Kafka, Franz (1883-1924): Czech (捷克斯洛伐克的)-born author writing in German; Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973): Spanish painter and Virginia Woolf.,Modernism After the Second World War,After the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd (theater that seeks to represent the absurdity of human existence in a meaningless universe by bizarre or fantastic means), new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that “the world was absurd, and the human life was an agony.”,Modernisms Theoretical Base and Themes,Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual.,Features of Modernism,Modernism is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism. It excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literature, it casts away (throw) almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration., which are essential to realism.,English Poetry in the 20th Century,In the early years of this century, Thomas Hardy and the war poets of the younger generation were important realistic poets. Hardy expressed his strong sympathies for the suffering poor and his bitter disgusts at the social evils in his poetry as well as in his novels. The soldiers-poets of World War I revealed the appalling brutality of the war in a more realistic way.,Poetry in the 20th Century,The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeast's matured poetry marked the rise of modern poetry. The modernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry writing such as to use the language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in choosing subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poems. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939): Irish poet & dramatist,Poetry in the 20th Century,In the 1930s, which was known as “the red thirties,“ a group of young poets expressed in their poetry a radical political enthusiasm and a strong protest against fascism. The 1950s witnessed a return of realistic poetry again by advocating reason, moral discipline, and traditional forms. There was no significant poetic movement in 1960s.,Novels in the Early 20th Century,Realistic Novels The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened in width and depth.,Realistic Novelists of the period,The outstanding realistic novelists were John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. The three trilogies (a series of three dramas or literary works) of Galsworthys Forsyte (John Forsyte ,1780-1841, American statesman) novels are master piece of critical realism in the early 20th century, which revealed the corrupted capitalist world. In his novels of social satire, H. G. Wells made realistic studies of the aspirations and frustrations of the “little man;” whereas Bennett presented a vivid picture of English life in the industrial Midlands (the central counties of England) in his best novels.,Realistic Novels in the 1920s,The realistic novels of this period were more or less touched by a pessimistic mood, preoccupied with the theme of mans loneliness, and shaped in different forms: social satires by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949); comic satires by on the English upper class by Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust, 1940).,Realistic Novels in 1920s,Another important aspect of realistic novels in this period is the fact that there rose a few working-class writers, who gave a direct portrayal of the working-peoples poverty and sufferings, by singing highly of the heroic struggles against capitalism waged by the working class. Among this group, the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the most outstanding. His trio log: Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934) present the social changes and the working-peoples life on farms, in towns, and cities through the personal experience of Chris Guthrie.,Novels in the 1950s and 60s,In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class backgrounds, who ere known as “the Angry Young Men.” They demonstrated a particular disillusion (醒悟） over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded social and political values in their society. They portrayed unadorned (not decorated) working-class life in their novels with great freshness and vigor of the working-class language.,Modernist Novels in the First Three Decades,The first three decades of this century were golden years of modernist novel. Psycho-analysis played a particularly important role in stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation. Psycho-analysis basically holds the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that ones present was the sum of his past, present, and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual.,Writers of Modernist Novels,Writers who digged into human consciousness 1. Dorothy Richardsons Pilgrimage (-1915- 1938); 2. James Joyces Ulysses (1922); 3. Virginia Woolfes Mrs. Dalloway The above-mentioned novels they created are preoccupied with stream-of-consciousness.,Another Group of Modernist novelists,In this group of modernist writers, we still see the old traditions, but their subject matter about human relationships and their symbolic or psychological presentations of the novels are entirely modern. E. M. Foster and D. H. Lawrence are the representatives in this group.,E. M. Foster,His master piece is A passage to India (1924). It is a novel of decidedly symbolist aspirations, in which the author set up a fable of moral significance that implies a highly mystical, symbolic view of life, death, human relationship, and the relationship of man with the infinite universe.,D. H. Lawrence,Unlike James Joyce, Lawrence was not concerned with technical innovations very much: his interest lay in the tracing of psychological development of his characters and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing (depriving of human qualities) effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. He believed that life impulse was the primacy of mans instinct, and that any conscious repression of such an impulse would cause distortion or perversion of the individuals personality.,D. H. Lawrence,In his best novels The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), Lawrence made a bold (fearless) psychological exploration of various human relationships, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness. Lawrence claimed that the alienation of the human relationships and the perversion (unhealthiness) of human nature in the modern society were caused by the desires for power and money, by the whole capitalist mechanical civilization, which turned men into inhuman machines. Modernist novels came to a decline in the 1930s.,Dramatists in the Last Decade of the 19th Century,Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, in a sense , pioneered the modern drama though they did not make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist poets or novelists. Wilde expressed a satirical and bitter attitude towards the upper-class people by revealing their corruption, their snobbery, and their hypocrisy in his plays, especially in his mater piece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).,George Bernard Shaw,Shaw is a more important figure in drama than Wlide. He is considered to be the best-known English dramatists since Shakespeare. His works are examples of the plays inspired by social criticism. John Galsworhty carried on this tradition of social criticism in his plays. The Silver Box (1906) and Strife (1910) are such examples, in which Galsworthy presents not only realistic pictures of social injustice, but also the workers heroic struggles against their employers.,A Revival of Poetic Drama in 1930s,One of the early experimenters of poetic drama was T. S. Eliot who regarded drama as the best medium of poetry. Eliot wrote several verse plays and made a considerable success. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) with its purely dramatic power, remains the most popular of his verse plays. After Eliot, Christopher Fry gained considerable success in poetic drama. His exuberant (joyous) commonplace verse drama, The Ladys Not for Burning (1948), attracted delighted audience.,Dramatic Revolution in 1950s,Influenced by dramas in Europe and America, English dramatic revolution came in the 1950s and developed in two directions: the working-class drama and the Theater of the Absurd. The working-class drama was started by a group of young writers from the lower-middle class, or working class, who presented a new type of plays which expressed a mood of restlessness, anger, and frustration, a spirit of rebelliousness, and a strong emotional protest against the existing social institutions.,John Osborne,He was the man who started the first change in drama by presenting his play, Look Back in Anger, in 1956. In a fresh, unadorned（朴素的） working-class language, the play angrily, violently and unrelentingly (not letting up or weakening in vigor or pace) condemned the contemporary social evils. With an entirely new sense of reality, Osborne brought vitality to the English theater and became the first “Angry Young Man.”,The Theater of Absurd,The most original playwright of the Theater of Absurd (theater that seeks to represent the absurdity of human existence in a meaningless universe by bizarre or fantastic means) is Samuel Beckett, who wrote about human beings living a meaningless life in an alien, decaying world. His first play, Waiting for Godot (1955) is regarded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd.,