British Literature (Realism – 20th century)
- realism, modernism, postmodernism
Realism – 1820 – 20th century
- from Latin – means real
- changes in society, social problems
- mainly in prose – novel
- effort to show society as a whole
- actions chronologically + take place mainly in present time
- surrounding (environment) – a big city
- characters – escape from a village to a big city, in other direction only for money
- language – not literary, dialects
– descriptions of surrounding and characters
- in not so developed states – historical themes
- influenced by philosophy – positivism, materialism
- naturalism – about bad phenomena in society (alcoholism, prostitution), show human’s passion and behavior
- take inspiration in previous authors + respond to problems of present
- Charles Dickens – childhood in poverty – his characters are children (autobiographical features)
– David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations
- William Makepeace Thackeray – satire against higher classes, popular at youth
– Vanity Fair – “a novel without hero”
- Brontë sisters – books influenced by romanticism – unhappy love
– Charlotte – Jane Eyre; Emily – Wuthering heights
- Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange case of dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde
- Conan Doyle – detective stories – Sherlock Holmes
- Thomas Hardy – Under the Greenwood tree
Modernism – 1st half of the 20th century
- symbiosis of tradition and experiment
- diversity – detective stories, sci-fi, nonsense literature, novel, literature for children
- Irish literature – tradition, country, nationalism, B.Yeats
- types:
- critical to British imperialism – Rudyard Kipling – The Jungle book
- experimenters – hard for readers – breaking rules (grammatical, time)
– try to show the reality newly
– sometimes banned
– stream of consciousness – floating thoughts,
– hard to find logic
– Virginia Woolf – member of Bloomsbury
– against realists
– lyrical novel, tabooed themes (lesbian love – Orlando)
– To the Lighthouse
– James Joyce – Irish, stream of consciousness
– Ulysses – inspirations in Odysseus, banned for obscenity
- outstanding authors – show social evil, anti-hero (divorced, alcoholism)
– George Orwell – Animal farm, Nineteen Eighty-four
- other authors: G.Wells, L.Caroll, J.R.R.Tolkien, Agatha Christie
Postmodernism – 2nd half of the 20th century
– many interpretations, sometimes author plays a game with reader, penetrations of genres, intertextuality (links to other books)
- 50’s and 60’s – Angry young men – against values of society, criticize, not so vulgar and extreme
– campus novel – young graduated man doesn’t want to take place in society (careerism) but then marry rich woman and settle down
– Amis Kingsley – Lucky Jim
– John Osborne – Look back in anger
– John Braine, John Wain, Doris Lessing
- Graham Green – The Quiet American
- William Gerald Golding, Patrick Ryan (parody to WWII – How I won the war)