COLEGIUL NATIONAL BILINGV “GEORGE COSBUC”
LITERATURA ENGLEZA IN
SECOLUL AL XX-LEA
Nume elev: Ayoub Selma Coordonator:
Clasa: 12R2 Prof. Milos Doina
2019
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………....….3
CHAPTER 1 – Early 20th Century (1901-1922).…………………………...……………………..4
CHAPTER 2 – The 1920s and the 1930s…………………………………………………………6
CHAPTER 3 – The Rise of Post-Modernism...…………………………………………………...7
CHAPTER 4 – Genre Literature in the 20th Century….……………………………………....…..8
INTRODUCTION
The 20th century was a time of great innovation in English literature. The attitude of
disillusionment with Victorian values (conservatism, objectivity, moral strictness) lead to the
development of modernism – an artistic and literary movement aiming to break away from the
past and encourage self-expression. Besides the alienation from Victorian conventions,
modernist literature was also greatly inspired by developments in the fields of philosophy,
psychology and political theory. The ideas of Charles Darwin, Ernst Mach, Henri Bergson,
Friedrich Nietzsche, James G. Frazer, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, among others, had great
influence on the modernist movement.
Not all acclaimed writers of the 20th century, however, were modernists – Thomas Hardy
(1840–1928) was a prominent English writer whose works represent the transition between the
Victorian era and the 20th century. Another such transitional figure between the Victorians and
the modernists is Henry James (1843-1916). Iconic novelists who are not considered modernists
include H.G. Wells (1866-1946), E.M. Forster (1879-1970) and Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936),
literary figures whose works are still critically acclaimed.
All things considered, the 20th century brought about great changes in the literary field,
fostering self-expression and influencing literature in current times as we know it.
CHAPTER 1 – Early 20th Century (1901-1922)
Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the post-World War I
period. The catastrophic effects of the war sparked a sense of disbelief in the foundations of
Western society, prompting writers to abandon the conventions of the Victorian era and search
for renewal in different ways.
The publication of the Irish author James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 was a milestone event
in the development of modernism as a movement. Parts of the novel were viewed as profane,
leading to Ulysses being banned for many years in English-speaking nations. Other English
modernists whose works rejected literary canon of the time are Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust,
Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner.
Polish-born modernist novelist Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) published his first important
works, Heart of Darkness, in 1899 and Lord Jim in 1900. However, the Victorian Gerard Manley
Hopkins's (1844–1889) highly original poetry was not published until 1918, long after his death,
while the career of another major modernist poet, Irishman W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), began late
in the Victorian era. Yeats was one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century English
literature.
While modernism was emerging, genre fiction was also beginning to become popular.
Emma Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903) started off as a highly successful play, organized
in London in 1905. The novel was published not long after the play opened and received
immediate acclaim. Orczy soon picked up a following of readers in Britain and all around the
world. The fame of the novel, which related the undertakings of an individual from the
English upper class in the French Revolutionary time frame, urged her to write various spin-
offs for her "reckless daredevil" throughout the following 35 years. The play was a great
success in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, and the book was translated into 16 languages.
The Scarlet Pimpernel has been adapted for television, film and other media. Orczy's character
The Old Man in the Corner was one of the first armchair detectives (fictional investigators
who do not personally visit crime scenes or interview witnesses, but inform themselves about
the crimes they solve from newspapers) to be created. Her short stories featuring Lady Molly
of Scotland Yard were an early example of female protagonists in detective fiction.
Agatha Christie (1890– 1976) was a crime writer best known for her 80 detective
novels, in particular those featuring detectives Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Christie has
earned the title "The Queen of Crime” and she still remains one of the best-selling authors in
the world today. Some of Christie’s most well-known novels are Murder on the Orient
Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Other important figures in the
Golden Age of Detective Fiction were Dorothy L. Sayers (1893– 1957), Ruth Rendell, P. D.
James and Scot Ian Rankin.
A noteworthy work of science fiction from the mid 20th century is A Voyage to
Arcturus by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It is a combination of
philosophy, fantasy and science fiction, exploring the concept of existence, as well as the ideas
of good and evil and their ties to existence itself. It was acclaimed by critic and philosopher
Colin Wilson as the "greatest novel of the twentieth century". Not only did A Voyage to
Arcturus have a profound influence on C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, famous fantasy novelist J.
R. R. Tolkien also admitted he read the book "with avidity", and praised it as a work of
philosophy, religion, and morality.
CHAPTER 2 - The 1920s and the 1930s
Important English authors from the interwar period include Scottish poet Hugh
MacDiarmid (1892– 1978), who started publishing during the 1920s, and novelist Virginia
Woolf (1882– 1941), who was not only a significant figure in the feminist movement, but also a
noteworthy stylistic innovator, known for her usage of the stream-of-consciousness technique in
novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). The essay A Room of One's
Own, which Woolf published in 1927, contains the famous statement, "A woman must have
money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".
T.S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama with Sweeney Agonistes in 1932,
and this was followed by others including three further plays after the war. In Parenthesis, a
modernist epic poem based on author David Jones's (1895–1974) experience of World War I,
was published in 1937.
An important development, beginning in the 1930s and 1940s was a tradition of working
class novels actually written by working-class background writers. Among these were coal
miner Jack Jones, James Hanley, whose father was a stoker and who also went to sea as a young
man, and coal miners Lewis Jones from South Wales and Harold Heslop from County Durham.
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) published his famous dystopia Brave New World in 1932,
the same year as John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance. Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
published his first major work, the novel Murphy in 1938. This same year Graham Greene's
(1904–1991) first major novel Brighton Rock was published. Then in 1939 James Joyce's
published Finnegans Wake, in which he creates a special language to express the consciousness
of a dreaming character. It was also in 1939 that another Irish modernist poet, W.B. Yeats, died.
British poet W.H. Auden (1907–1973) was another significant modernist in the 1930s.
From the early 1930s to the late 1940s, an informal literary discussion group associated
with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the "Inklings". Its leading members
were the significant figures in fantasy literature, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is best
known for The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) and The Space
Trilogy (1938–1945), while Tolkien is widely acclaimed as the author of The Hobbit (1937), The
Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), and The Silmarillion (1977).
CHAPTER 3 – The Rise of Post-Modernism
Initially, postmodernism was a mode of discourse on literature and literary criticism,
commenting on the nature of literary text, meaning, author and reader, writing and reading.
Postmodernism developed in the mid- to late 20th century not only in literature, but also in
philosophy, the arts, and architecture, as a form of rejection of modernism.
Postmodernism relies on critical theory, an approach that confronts the ideological,
social, and historical structures that shape and constrain cultural production. Common targets of
postmodernism and critical theory include universalist notions of objective
reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress. Postmodernist
approaches have been adopted in a variety of academic and theoretical disciplines,
including political science, organization theory, cultural studies, philosophy of
science, economics, linguistics, architecture, feminist theory, and literary criticism, as well as art
movements in fields such as literature and music.
Postmodern literature is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by
writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox,
questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist
literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is
little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.
Among British writers in the 1940s and 1950s were poet Dylan Thomas and
novelist Graham Greene whose works span the 1930s to the 1980s, while Evelyn Waugh, W.H.
Audencontinued publishing into the 1960s.
CHAPTER 4 – Genre Literature of the Late 20th Century
In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952,
while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in
twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr.
No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), and other
short stories.
In contrast to the larger-than-life spy capers of Bond, John le Carré was an author of spy
novels who depicted a shadowy world of espionage and counter-espionage, and his best known
novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), is often regarded as one of the greatest in the
genre. Frederick Forsyth writes thriller novels, including The Day of the Jackal (1971), The
Odessa File (1972), The Dogs of War (1974) and The Fourth Protocol (1984). Ken Follett writes
spy thrillers, his first success being Eye of the Needle (1978), followed by The Key to
Rebecca (1980), as well as historical novels, notably The Pillars of the Earth (1989), and its
sequel World Without End (2007). Elleston Trevor is remembered for his 1964 adventure
story The Flight of the Phoenix, while the thriller novelist Philip Nicholson is best known
for Man on Fire. Peter George's Red Alert (1958), is a Cold War thriller.
War novels include Alistair MacLean thriller's The Guns of Navarone (1957), Where
Eagles Dare (1968), and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed (1975). Patrick O'Brian's nautical
historical novels feature the Aubrey–Maturin series set in the Royal Navy, the first being Master
and Commander (1969).
Nigel Tranter wrote historical novels of celebrated Scottish warriors; Robert the
Bruce in The Bruce Trilogy, and William Wallace in The Wallace (1975), works noted by
academics for their accuracy.
John Wyndham wrote post-apocalyptic science fiction, his most notable works being The
Day of the Triffids (1951), and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). George Langelaan's The
Fly (1957), is a science fiction short story. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A
Space Odyssey (1968), is based on his various short stories, particularly The Sentinel (1951). His
other major novels include Rendezvous with Rama (1972), and The Fountains of
Paradise (1979). Brian Aldiss is Clarke's contemporary.
Michael Moorcock (born 1939) is a writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who
has also published a number of literary novels. He was involved with the 'New Wave' of science
fiction writers "part of whose aim was to invest the genre with literary merit”. Similarly J. G.
Ballard (born 1930) "became known in the 1960s as the most prominent of the 'New Wave'
science fiction writers". A later major figure in science fiction was Iain M. Banks who created a
fictional anarchist, socialist, and utopian society named "The Culture". The novels that feature in
it include Excession (1996), and Inversions (1998). He also published mainstream novels,
including the highly controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984. Nobel prize winner Doris
Lessingalso published a sequence of five science fiction novels the Canopus in Argos:
Archives between 1979 and 1983.
Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series of comic fantasy novels, that
begins with The Colour of Magic (1983), and includes Mort (1987), Hogfather (1996), and Night
Watch (2002). Pratchett's other most notable work is the 1990 novel Good Omens.
Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials comprises Northern Lights (1995), The
Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming-of-age of two
children as they wander through a series of parallel universes against a backdrop of epic events.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sanders, Andrew (1994), The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon
Press
Alexander, Michael (2000), A History of English Literature, Macmillan Press
https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-20th-century
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature
https://www.britannica.com/art/Modernism-art
