Literature of the early 20th century realism

1.

LITERATURE OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
REALISM
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) – a novelist and
playwright, a Nobel Prize winner
Plays Unpleasant:
Widower’s Houses
The Philanderer
Mrs.Warren’s Profession
Plays Pleasant
Arms and the Man
Candida
The Man of Destiny
Other Plays
John Bull’s Other Island
Pygmalion

2.

The great advantage of a hotel is that
it is a refuge from home life.
The trouble with her is that she
lacks the conversation but not the
power of speech.
He who can, does. He who
cannot, teaches.
Hegel was right when he said that we
learn from history that man can never
learn anything from history.

3.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) – a playwright,
a novelist, a Nobel prize winner
Trilogies:
The Forsyte Saga
(The Man of Property, In Chancery,
To Let)
A Modern Comedy
End of the Chapter
In his works he criticized the upper
middle class

4.

George Herbert Wells (18661946) a science fiction writer
concerned about the
consequences of progress
The Time Machine
The Island of Dr.Moreau
The Invisible Man
The War of the Worlds
The First Men on the Moon
The Shape of Things to Come,
etc.
Russia in the Shadows

5.

6.

MODERNISM
(literature between the two World Wars)
•Various trends within modernism: impressionism,
symbolism, futurism, the psychological school, etc.
•Zigmund Freud (a psychoanalyst, a writer).
His ideas:
-the three-component concept of human nature (the id/ the
subconscious sphere, the ego, the superego); the Oedipus
complex; the childhood traumas, etc.

7.

Characteristics of modernist literature
• Rejection of the link between character and
environment,
• Instead - emphasis on the role of the unconscious,
•Rejection of history, of the social or moral function of
art,
•Abundance of historical, mythological, biblical,
literary allusions,
• non-egalitarian character of their works, high brow
intellectuals as their target audience,
•Disruption of the linear form of narration,
•The
stream-of-consciousness
technique,
i.e,
registration of the character’s flow of thoughts,
feelings, impressions.

8.

James Joyce (1882-1941)
Born in Dublin, studied
at two Jesuit colleges
and Dublin University
described later in his novel
A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man.
In 1904 left Ireland forever,
lived in Switzerland and
France.

9.

Novels:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
Ulysses
(a sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
based on Homer’s poem Odyssey). Characters –
Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Molly)
Finnegan’s Wake
Collection of stories The Dubliners
Poems

10.

It is an autobiographical novel, a
coming-of-age novel (a Bildungsroman),
a Kunstlerroman.
The four main themes that run through
the whole novel are: family, religion,
fatherland, art.
At the end of the novel Stephen Dedalus
says:
“I will not serve that which I no longer
believe, whether it call itself my home,
my fatherland, or my church, and I will
try to express myself in some mode of
life or art as freely as I can and as wholly
as I can using for my defence the only
arms I allow myself to use – silence,
exile and cunning.

11.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Essay “Modern Fiction”
Novels:
The Voyage Out
Mrs. Dalloway
(Characters – Mrs. Clarissa
Dalloway,
a war veteran Septimus Small)
To the Lighthouse
Orlando: A Biography
(dedicated to Vita
Sackville-West)
The Waves
The Years

12.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Novels:
The White Peacock
Sons and Lovers
The Rainbow
Women in Love
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(Characters – Constance, Lord Clifford
Chatterley, a game keeper Oliver
Mellors),
Collections of stories
Poems
His link with modernism lies in stressing the
significance of the id, in conveying a person’s
subconscious instincts, passions, desires
unrestricted by intellect.

13.

Test on the English literature
of the 18-20th centuries
1.Who was the author of the trilogy “The Forsyte
Saga”: Joseph Conrad, William Thackeray, John
Galsworthy, George Eliot
2. Pygmalion was a man who a) made himself wings
out of wax, b) was a singer and a musician, c) created a
statue of a beautiful woman, d) made a pact with the
devil.
3.Which of the following writers was a romanticist:
Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard
Kipling