(modern period)20th Century_English_Literature 20世纪英国文学讲义

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social, ideological background

(2) Ideologically, the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships. (a) Darwin's theory of evolution exerted a strong influence upon the people, causing many to lose their religious faith. The social Darwinism, under the cover of "survival of the fittest," vehemently advocated colonialism or jingoism. (b) Einstein's theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space. (c) Freud's analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature.
Modern English novels
Lawrence claimed that the alienation of the
human relationships and the perversion of human nature in the modern society were caused by the desires for power and money, by the shams and frauds of middle-class life, and, above all, by the whole capitalist mechanical civilization, which turned men into inhuman machines.

Modern English novels
He believed that life impulse was the
primacy of man's instinct, and that any conscious repression of such an impulse would cause distortion or perversion of the individual's personality. In his best novels like The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), Lawrence made a bold psychological exploration of various human relationships, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness
Modern English novels
They had created unprecedented stream-
of-consciousness novels such as Ulysses (1922) by Joyce, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Woolf. One of the remarkable features of their writings was their continuous experimentation on new and sophisticated techniques in novel writing, which made tremendous impacts on the creation of both realistic and modernist novels in this century.
Realism in the 20th century English literature
The realistic novels in the early 20th century
were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened both in width and depth. The outstanding realistic novelists of this period were John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Eennett. The three trilogies of Galsworthy's Forsyte novels are masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century, which revealed the corrupted capitalist world.
Modern English poetry
The 20th century has witnessed a great achievement in
English poetry. 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 in his novels. The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeats's matured poetry marked the rise of "modern poetry," which was, in some sense, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian 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.
Modern English novels
The first three decades of 20th century were golden
years of the modernist novel. In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. With the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one's 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 like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness.
Modern English novels
James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-ofconsciousness novelist; in Ulysses, his encyclopedialike masterpiece, Joyce presents a fantastic picture of the disjointed, illogical, illusory, and mental- emotional life of Leopold Bloom, who becomes the symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-ⅠEurope. D. H. Lawrence is regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing; but unlike Joyce, he was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lay in the tracing of the psychological development of his characters and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature.
20th Century English Literature
The Modern Period
social, ideological background
(1) The influences of the First World War on English
literature: Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. The First World War had greatly influenced the English literature. The catastrophic First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great sufferings to its people as well. Its appalling shock severely destroyed people's faith in the Victorian values; The postwar economic dislocation and spiritual disillusion produced a profound impact upon the British people, who came to see the prevalent wretchedness in capitalism.
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