The end of the Second World War in 1945 did not make the world a peaceful place. When atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, people understood that the whole world could end at any moment. There was now a Cold War between communist countries and the West which ended only in the late 1980s. The United States of America entered the First World War in 1917 and the Second World War in 1941. Each time it was on the winning side. Victory helped the USA to become the major economic and cultural force in the world.
The Second World War helped to break up the British Empire and made the country think carefully about its place in the world. During this time British influence grew weaker. Nationally, too, the country had begun to break up in many different ways and there have been many contrasts in British life in the years after the war. There have been contrasts between London and the regions, between England and the other countries of Britain (Scotland, Ireland and Wales), between the wealthier south of England and the poorer north of England, between with British and black British people, between employed and unemployed, and between years of optimism (1960s and 1980s) and years of greater pessimism (1970s and 1990s). A war also continued in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, and many British soldiers died there between the 1960s and 1990s.
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But during these years- many people ”have become wealthier and have had a better standard of living’Which has let the_m traVel more in Britain and, oth’e/ countries and let them .own ’their own homes. Free time’ has’ increasedHand more people watch , television as a main – source of information and entertainment. More books are now read by more people than ever before. t
The Novel
f \
Although poetry was the most memorable literary forrn to come out.of the First World War,,the novel-was the form which told the stories of the Second World War. Partly this was because mass rrfedia, newspapers, cinema and” radio had changed the way* Information (and entertainment) were given. ’’ ’ ” > \
Of,course many of the writes who. wrote about the war had already begun trieir careers before the, war. Henry Green, for example,, had,written his first novel, Blindness, at the age of 21 in 1926! Green’s novels, Party Going (1939).^Caught (1943),and Loving (J945) are^ampng the best to be published during the war.’ His style is’simple-and symbolic.!” Party Going describes a group \of-rich people waiting at a statidh^but their train’is delayed by fgg; Loving is a stqry of class difference set in a country house in Ireland during the war. In ”his seemingly simple stories, Greeri manages to contain a lost of observation and meahing. After the war, Green* went on to write several novels-including Nothing (1950), which is almost entirely written in dialogue form. –
Graham Greene wrote some of his most important novels in the 1940s. The Power and the Glory [honour] (1940) has a catholic theme, about a ’whisky priest* in Mexico, and his faults as a man and a-priest. The Heart of the Matter (1948) is set in West Africa/and gain the hero has problems of faith and honour: his name is Scobie, and he represents the typical Greene herp and the problems of the ordinary man. Of another character in the novel, Greene’s third-person narrator says:
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He felt the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness-the sense that is where we really belong . „•*”
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This sense -of unhappiness and uncertainty is typical not only of Gr^en but of many other novelists of the second half of the twentieth century.’Green’s later’noyels, from The End’ of the-Affair; (1951), about love.in wartime, to A Burnt-out Case (1961), ^which many people consider his best novel, all’ explore ^regions of human i/nhappiness in
many dffferent areas of the world.
s – .
For many readers the Irishman Samuel Beckett is the writer who .best shows this human sadness. He is best known for this plays, but his novels are also Very important. Beclcett was a close friend and helper of Jarnes ’Joyce, but his novels are quite’different from Joyce’s. From Murphy (1938) thrbug^ to How It Is (1961) Beckett,uses first-person narrators to’describe the interior feelings of,lonely souls. His tone is comic and his, language very exact: he lived for many years in iFpance, and very often- translated his own works from the French in which he first wrote them, in order, he said, to help, make-the language clearer. Despite the atmosphere of loneliness and futility in all’his writings, there is always a positive aspect, and survival is always important in Beckett’s work. One of his late pieces, a very .short novel, is called ^Imagination Dead Imagine (1966) -it shows that’a’s,long’as there is imagination there is life. One of the most famous Ifnes in-Beckett is the last words of The Umambale (I960) when the’main character says:
.Where I am, I ’don’t I’JI never known, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on. I can’t go no, I’ll go no.
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Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize fro Literature in
1969. ’
Evelyn Waugh, like Graham Greene, became a Catholic. In his’ wartime trilogy Sword of Honour, written well after t|ie end of the war, between 1952 and 1961’, he gives a ^satirical, well-observed picture of the British upper classes at war: Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, published in” 1945,was one of the most successful novels of its time. It
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describes an upper-class family, its Catholic religion, and its decline in modern society. As always with Waugh, there is humour, as well as a tone of regret in the description of the (decline and fall of the old values and codes.)
Possibly the best single novel about the Second World War is The River Line (1949) by Charles Morgan. A novel of action and personal relationships, it uses the present in contrast with the past, which is the war, to give a psychological and moral insight into its characters’ behaviours. Where the poetry of the First World War was very personal and emotional in its descriptions of the war, most of the novels about the Second World War have a certain ironic distance, which gives them a quite different feel and quality.
The novels of George Orwell always have a political intention. As a socialist Orwell believed in equality. In the thirties he had written several works including the novels: Keep the Aspidistra Flying [aspidistra = common English house-plant] (1936), with themes of culture and money, and Homage to Catalonia [homage = act of respect] (1938), about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s best-known works are Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The first is a fable where the animals free themselves from their masters and take over Manor Farm. But gradually they become more and more like their masters had been. It is a satire against the political systems which Orwell had seen develop in the 1930s and 1940s. In Animal Farm, after the rebellion the animals says that all animals are equal. Here he describes some of the animals who have become powerful:
And a moment later, out from the door of the farmhouse come a long file1 of pigs, all walking on their hind2 legs…. And finally there was a tremendous baying3 of dogs and a shrill crowing4 from the black cockerel5 and out came Napoleon himself…with his dogs gambolling6 around him.
He carried a whip in his trotter.
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I
(Mine 2back 3loud barking 4loud noise made by a bird
5male chicken 6running and jumping 7pig’s foot)
Later the animals create another saying. It is: ’All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.’ Orwell believed that socialist and communist societies could become dictatorships in which ordinary people were not free.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is similar to Huxley’s Brave New World in some ways. It describes a future world (in
1984) when the political system has total control over people. The slogan ’Big Brother is Watching You’ gives an idea of the power of this system. Orwell also wrote many essays, and gave many radio broadcasts, usually giving a political insight into English society and culture.
The Novel In The 1950s And 60s
Each decade introduces different ways of writing. In the 1950s a new generation of writers began to appear, with new subjects and concerns. Angus Wilson is in some ways the most traditional of the new writers, but his way of looking at society is unusual for he gives space to middleaged characters, and to outsiders (he is particularly good on homosexual characters). His novels are full of ironic observation, and follow Dickens and Thackeray rather than any modernist trend. Hemlock and After [hemlock = poisonous plant] (1952) was his first novel; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) and No Laughing Matter (1967) are his best-known works.
The voice of the lower classes is heard in novels by Colin Wilson, John Wain and Alan Sillitoe. The young men are now Angry Young Men, perhaps with a university education, as in Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), perhaps frustrated in their working-class environment, as in Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). They are all outsiders-and this is the title of Colin Wilson’s most famous book, The Outsider (1956). Wilson’s outsider hero is a man of genius who is not understood, and his struggle is typical of the ’existential’ crisis of the 1950s generation. The fifties brought many outsiders into literature. It is not an age of success, but a time of struggle towards success.
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The most successful comic novel of the fifties was Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). It was one of the ffrst novels to have” a university setting-this later became very popular in the novels of Malcolm Bardbury and David Lodge. Amis’s -hero Jim Dixon shows the comedy of being an outsider trying to fit into the new world he has struggled to reach. As the title suggests, this outsider has better luck in his fights with authority than most outsider heroes. Amis’s later -novels continue to have a comic style, but his main characters grow older as the author does-and The Old Devils (1986), for example, is a study of old age.
Among the women writers who became famous in the fifties, Murie! Spark and Doris Lessing show different ways of writing about society. Spark’s style is witty and subtle. Her novel about old people Memento Mori (1959) shows more comedy than Amis on the same theme. Her story of a school teacher The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is her bestknown work, also known as a play,- as a film, and as a .television series. The novel describes the life of Jean Brodie, a school teacher in Edinburgh, Scotland, who is in her prime, the best years of her life. She^ is an excellent and inspirational teacher but she chooses pupils for special attention and favours them, calling such pupils her’creme de la creme’ [the very best, trie cream of the cream]. The novel explores her influence on these girls. The influence is both good and bad, and Spark comments wittily on,the dangers of obsessive behaviour. The novel is ^traditional in form and structure, but The Driver’s Seat (1970) is much more experimental. It describes a’woman who has death-wish, and is written throughout’in the simple present tense. Here later work, such as A Far Cry From Kensington [a far cry = a long way] (1988), brings ’a new theme of memory and loss, and shows .Spark’s development as a writer of social comedy, again with a focus on female characters.
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Doris Lessing is more politically and socially concerned than Spark. She was brought up in Africa, and her early stories and novels are set there.’The series Children of Violence (1952-69), moves from Africa to England, and moves forward in time to the year 2000. In the five novels the story of Martha Quest is told, and the sequence is one of the best growing-up novels about a young woman in modern
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literature. Lessing also wrote The Golden Notebook (1962) which brings together politics and psychology. The Golden Notebook presents the four experimental notebooks of the writer Anna Wulf who is in crisis in her domestic life, is unable to write as she wants and whose political beliefs are uncertain. In each notebook she explores here experiences in different styles and from different points of view, but they are fragments which she finds difficult to bring together into a whole. Anna suffers a breakdown but recovers, finding new freedom with an American lover, becoming more independent in her politics (she joins the socialist British Labour party) and producing new creative work. The novel, especially its section ’Free Women’, is seen as an important feature in the description of women’s independence in the twentieth century. Doris Lessing also wrote a science fiction series Canopus in Argos: Archives [archives = records] (also five novels, between 1979 and 1983). After the 1960s, she wrote about the ways in which society and the individual personality are falling to pieces.
Barbara Pym seems at first sight more traditional than Lessing or Spark, but her simple love stories of lonely women are full of humour and sadness. She has been compared to Jane Austen in her awareness of the sexual. pressures of society and the comic observation of male and female behaviour. Her first novel was Excellent Women (1952). Quartet in Autumn (1977) is sometimes considered her best work. Her work was mostly forgotten between 1963 and 1977, but Pym became famous and very popular in the three years before her death in 1980. Readers now found her stories of loneliness and lost love realistic, rather than romantic, and Pym’s reputation is assured. Barbara Comyns wrote several novels about her own poor background, such as Our Spoons Came from Woolworth’s (1950), but her fable of the plague in a vallage, Who was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) is One of the strangest novels of its time.
Only the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, also published in 1954, touches similarly unusual themes. In this novel a group of boys on a desert island return to the savage state. It shows the animal in all of us, and caused great shock when it was first published.
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In this scene from Lord of the Files Golding describes the boys as they begin to behave and act. like wild men in a savage tribe:
Ralph hit out; then he and what seemed like a dozen others were rolling over and over, hitting, biting, scratching. He was torn and jolted, found fingers in his mouth arid bit them. Golding was one of the great story-tellers of his time, always exploring in his novels the things which form human behaviour. In The Inheritors (1955) he went back to prehistory to do this. In his final great trilogy of sea novels, starting with Rites of Passage [events marking important points in life] in 1980, he went back to a sea voyage in the early nineteenth century-again using a society in a small group like the boys on the island and told the story of how the whole society coped with all the pressures of a long voyage. William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in ’ 1983.
Iris Murdoch also published her first novel in 1954. This was Under the Net, a comedy. Most of her novels, however, are more philosophical than comic. They have a wide range of themes, and show that serious novels can stiil become best-sellers. Among her best-known works are The Bell (1958), and a novel about the Irish rebellion in 1916, The Red and the Green (1965). Perhaps her best work is from the 1970s, when she wrote The Black Prince (1973), A word Child (1975) and The Sea, The Sea (1978), which many people consider her best novel. Murdoch is always concerned with philosophical and moral problems of good and bad, right and wrong, art and life, and the nature of truth.
The colonial setting for the novel appears again in the
1950s in The Malayan Trilogy (1956-9) by Anthony Burgess. Burgess went on to write such novels as A Clockwrok Orange (1962), a novel of violence which became better known as film. This novel and Earthly Powers (1980) show Burgess’s fascination with language, with music, and his very large themes. His range of themes,
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r ideas, and subjects is greater than that of almost any other Iwriter of his time.
In the 1960s more women writers became famous. Margaret ©rabble has written many novels, usually with female leading characters. She follows her characters though their education and on to their careers and family ^^ relationships. Her early novels include A Summer BirdCage (1963) and The Garrick Year (1964). Her trilogy about the 1980s,The Radiant Way [radiant = bright], A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory [ivory =
5 smooth white bone from an elephant] (1987-91), is one of the clearest descriptions of that decade, and the political
• attitudes shown at that time.
Edna O’Brien is perhaps the best-known woman writer from Ireland. Her early stories of poor girls, The Country ”,” Girls trilogy (1960-63), show the contrast between sensual desires and a Catholic background. Ireland has always produced important writers. In the 1960s, William Trevor became known both for his short stories and for novels such as The Old Boys (1964). His later Irish novel Fools of Fortune [fortune = destiny] (1983) shows the effects of the continuing problems of the people of that country.
Jean Rhys wrote her novels in the 1920s and 1930s, but she was rediscovered in the 1960s when she published •• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It is set in the 1830s, and gives the story of one of the characters of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre -the first wife of Mr Rochester. With this novel Jeans Rhys became an important figure in women’s writing.
The genre of the detective novel has produced many women writers in the twentieth century. The best known is Agatha Christie, with her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Others include Dorothy L. Sayers, and her detective Lord Peter Wimsy. More recently P. D. James, whose detetvie is called Adman Dalgliesh, has taken the genre into more serious areas. Ruth Rendell has written many novels featuring Inspector Wexford, and many other psychological thrillers. Margaret Yorke and Joan Smith are also among the best known of today’s women detective story writers. Among men writers, Julian Symons, Edmund Crispin, H. R. F. Keating (whose detective is Indian) and Reginald Hill are
Or. B. R. Mullik
perhaps the best known. Television versions of the novels have brought success to many writers, including Colin Dexter, with his detective Inspector Morse.
The short story has continued to be popular, and many of the best-known writers of the century, from Samuel Beckett to Doris Lesing, have written in the form. The writers who are better known for their short stores rather than any other kind of writing include the Irishman Sean * O’Faolain. His first volume of stories was published in 1932, and his Collected Stories almost fifty years later, in 1981, V. S. Pritchett had been writing for even longer: his first stories were punished in the 1920s. He wrote many kinds of books, including novels and travel books, but it is his short stories which are best remembered. They are collected in two volumes of Collected Stories published in 1982 and
1983.
The Novel from 1970
The novel in the 1970s took several directions. The four marin directions were: the focus on foreign and local, regional voices; more female voices; the academic or campus novel and the coming of the kind of fantasy known as magic realism.
Novelists born outside Britain, or of foreign origins, have brought a new range of experience into the modern novel. Kazuo Ishiguro’s background is Japanese and his first novel A Pale View of Hills (1982) uses this setting. His best-known work is The Remains of the Day (1989) which, like the earlier novel, uses the past and an examination of guilt and responsibility to examine the present. The main character is a butler, Stevens, who has been present at some historic occasions, but his master was a traitor. By the end of the novel, Stevens finds he has lost more than he has gained through his faithful service. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize, and was later successfully filmed.
Timothy Mo also mixes cultures in his novels: Sour Sweet (1982) uses Chinese immigrants in England to show the conflicts of modern Britain; An Insular Possession
[insular = island] (1986) and The Redundancy of Courage
alb
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[redundancy = uselessness] (1991) show some of the historical conflicts behind today’s situation.
Hanif Kureishi in The Buddah of Suburbia (1990) looks at immigration from India and the difficulties of living in a new culture. He also wrote the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) which successfully illustrated similar problems among young people. Ben Okri, form Nigeria, set his prize-winning novel The Famished Road [famished = hungry] (1991) in that country. Caryl Phillips has written many novels set in the West Indies. These include A State of Independence [state = position] (1986) and Crossing the River (1993), an ambitious work on historical themes.
Of the younger generation of British writers, Martin Amis (son of Kingsley Amis) started his career with shocking novels on sexual themes (The Rachel Papers, 1973 and Dead Babeis, 1975). But in the 1970s and 1980s Amis showed that he is one of the best social observers of his generation. Success (1978) and Money (1984) show the emptiness of modern values and London Fields (1989) is a comic view of morals and murder in the television age. Time’s Arrow (1991) moves backward in its narration of the Second World War and its effects on the present.
Julian Barnes in A History of the World in 10’/a Chapters (1989) gives an unusual view of history; Falubert’s Parrot (1984) looks at the great French nineteenth-century novelist from a new point of view. This change of point of view is typical of many new writers. Ian McEwan, for example, in The Child In Time (1987) uses the loos of a child to look at the values of a modern couple. Graham Swift in Waterland (1983) uses an area of eastern England, known as the Fens, to examine past and present in a complex and rich family story. Both writers use new and unusual situations to present very modern questions.
Anita Brookner’s novels usually present a single woman, living unhappily. Hotel du Lac (1984) became very successful and won the Booker Prize. It goes against the line of more feminist writing, for her characters do not rebel against society, but often simply accept their lonely situation. In Hotel du Lac the heroine does, however make a major decision: not to get married on her wedding day.
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Brookner’s ’spinster’ novels have continued with A Friend from England (1987) and Fraud [cheating] (1992). Fay Weldon is sometimes seen as a feminist, but sees herself as a female novelist rather than as a feminist writer. Her books usually have a female main character, and are realistic, often comic examinations of modern life. Praxis (1978) and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) are among her best-known books. Letters to Alice an First Reading Jane Austen (1984) is a book which makes the case for reading -« and for literature in a most attractive way. Jeanette Winterson is openly gay, and her novels are, strongly positive on female themes. Oranges Are Note The Only Fruit (1985) is her best-known work. This was followed by Written On The Body (1992) and Art and Lies (1994) among others. The novels and short stories of Susan Hill are ore traditional in form. She is a story teller, and her books range from sympathetic observations of old age, to the First ^ World War Strange Meeting (1971), and the delicate love * story Air and Angejs (1991).
The academic novel, or campus novel, became popular among readers who had been to university, and could recognize many of the issues discussed. The History Man (1975) by Malcolm Bradbury was a great success. Its hero, Dr Howard Kirk, is a university teacher at the new plateglass University of Watermouth. Hs is an ambitious academic who used his wife, his academic colleagues and his students so that we question who he is and what he really believes in. • Bradbury has also written Stepping Westward (1965) about an English professor in America and Rates of Exchange (1983). David Lodge, in Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), makes comedy out of academic work exchanges and, in his Catholic novels, such as How Far Can You Go? (1980), raises religious and moral issues which are not often found in the modern novel.
John Fowles wrote several very successful novel in the ’
1960s and 1970s. The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966, reworked in 1977) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman [lieutenant’s = army officer’s] (1969) made him world famous. Fowles examines how the story is told, how the reader reacts, and plays with the forms of the novel: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for example seems to
be a Victorian novel, and offers two possible endings. This was seen as very new at the time, although it had been done a century before, by Thackeray in The Newcomes, for example.
Another kind of magic is found in the novels of Angela Carter. Nights at the Cirus (1984) and Wise Children
(1991) are called magic realism novels as they move beyond the usual limits of the novel and the story, bringing in a new range of experiences. Magic realist novels have a strong plot, but day-to-day realistic events mix with unexpected events which cannot be explained and which appear to belong to a dream, fairy-story, or myth. Angela Carter died in 1992 soon after the publication of Wise Children.
Alasdair Gray’s very Scottish novel Lanark (1981) also has many features of magic realism, Gray is one of the most adventurous of Scottish writers, and such books as The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) and Poor Things (1992) examine the differences between being Scottish and being English, often with a historical but comic tone. James Kelman, in such very realistic novels as A Disaffection (1989) and How Late It Was, How Late (1994), gives a new view of Scottish language and society.
Poetry
Poetry after the war included many works by W. H. Auden, who by then lived in America. His long poem The Age of Anxiety (1984) in many ways gave its name to the period. The war had not been heroic, and the mood afterwards was not victory, but of change: the old class system in Britain was ending, the younger generation made themselves heard, and new scene of realism came into literature.
The poets of the 1920s and 1930s continued to write during and after the Second World War. T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets were completed with ’East Coker’, The Dry Salvages’ and ’Little Gidding’ between 1940 and 1942. In many ways these were the most important poems of the Second World War. The poets who died during the war did not produce work of such greatness as the soldiers of the First World War. But the poetry of Keith Douglas and Sidney
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Keyes is the poetry of war. Douglas’s Selected Poems came out in 1943, before his death in 1944; his best poetry is in Alamein to Zem Zem (1946). Keys too had published a couple of volumes before his death; his Collected Poems was published in 1945.
In this poem by Keith Douglas called ’Vergissmeinnicht’ (the German word for a flower called forget-me-not) the poet finds on the body of a bead German soldier the picture of a girl with the message ’forget-me-not’:
For here the lover and the killer are mingled
Who had one body and one heart, And death,
who had the solder singled
Has done the lover mortal hurt.
Dylan Thomas, who had started publishing poetry in the 1930s, was in many ways the most important new voice of the 1940s. His language is rich and colourful, his images complex, and his view of nature bright. He goes beyond the fear of death:
After the first death there is no other.
(’A Refusal to Mourn’ in Deaths and Entrances 1946)
Do not go gentle into that good night.
(in Collected Poems 1952)
His play for voices, Under Milk wood, was broadcast on radio in 1954, and remains a classic work, bringing sound and sense together in a new way.
R. S. Thomas is a different kind of Welsh poet. He is a priest, and closer to the poetry of George Herbert than to any twentieth-century poet.