British literature

Contents:

Introduction……………………………………………………………...........3

1. Major trends in British literature since 1900s…………………………….5
1. British literature in XX century……………………………………..5
2. British literature in XI century………………………………………20
2. Main genres of modern literature………………………………………..23
1. Poetry and drama…………………………………………………...23
2. Novels and general prose…………………………………………...26

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….29

Literature……………………………………………………………………...30

Introduction

The object of my term paper is British literature, and the subject is contemporary British literature.

First of all what is literature? The word itself connected to words like “letter”. It means any form of communication which is written down.

But we use the word to describe a certain kind of writing, a certain category of written communication.

Another way of defining literature is to limit it to "great books", books that, whatever their subject is, are outstanding for literary form or expression.

One of the things we think literature is different from other kinds of writing is that it has many meanings close to it, so that we may interpret a piece of literature. There are often some layers of meaning; or, we have to read between the lines to get to the true meaning of a poem or a play. Twentieth century English literature is remarkable for a great diversity of artistic values and artistic methods. The present age being what it is — a welter of contradictions, conflicts and confrontations only too often leading to small and large scale wars, a paradoxical age where the greatest triumphs go along with dire catastrophes — literature naturally responds to its spirit and presents an unprecedented variety of social, ethic and aesthetic attitudes. Following the rapid introduction of new modes of thought in natural science, sociology and psychology, it has naturally reacted to absorb and transform this material into literary communication.

Widely different trends — the philosophy of Henry Bergson, Sigmund Freud's psychology, its development in the works of his disciples, the philosophical implications of Albert Einstein's theories, the great progress in most branches of biology, the later popularity of Existentialist thought and at the same time, the widening recognition of the Marxist interpretation of history and society have all had their impact on British fiction and art. While mirroring the drastic changes in the larger world, contemporary writers have not only revolutionized literary form, but also adhered to a great many traditional modes of expression, thus making it obvious that tradition and innovation are twin substances. The interplay of the traditional and the new goes pretty far to determine the distinctive nature of twentieth century English literature, but its difficulties and complications are the difficulties and complications of the age, and, to be more explicit, of the upheavals of Britain's history and her new position in world affairs.

In my term paper I’ll study English literature of XX and XXI centuries, study main genres of modern literature in Britain.

1.  Major trends in British literature since 1900s

1. British literature in XX century

The XX century had been marked by Great Britain's unparalleled colonial and industrial expansion. Colonial expansion transformed the economic structure of British capitalism. Instead of the old and vanishing industrial monopoly, there was a more complex large-scale colonial and financial monopoly, an extension of British state power over vast distant regions of the earth.

In the last years of the nineteenth century the ideology of this highly industrialized and world-ruling Britain was being inculcated at home and was taking hold of the national consciousness. However, with the advance of the new system came the realization that the working people gained nothing from those much advertised triumphs. The decline of small-scale industry crushed by imperialist monopoly was the cause of mass unemployment. During the last years before World War I the number of unemployed was seldom below a million. Another striking sign of the weakness of the capitalist system and the inconsistency  of bourgeois ideology was the growing frequency of cyclical crises.

The depression of the period brought widespread misery to the attention of the nation. The illusion of permanent progress under capitalism was shaken; there was a new rise of popular interest in the ideas of socialism. Among those who had then contributed to its popularity were the Fabian Socialists. The most prominent of them — Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw and, later, H. G. Wells — formulated the theory of gradual infiltration of socialist ideas into the state machine and the existing bourgeois parties until the system was slowly changed to socialism. The theoretical arguments of the Fabian Society were accepted and used by the leaders of the Independent Labour Party whose influence was steadily growing. In the General Election of 1906 the Tories were swept out by an overwhelming Labour vote.

In the first years of the present century open class conflicts took the form of a large-scale strike struggle led by the miners of South Wales and supported by dockers and seamen, transport and engineering workers all over Britain. Growing mass protest was the spirit of the age.

Fundamental political, social and economic changes on the British scene deeply affected the creative writing of the new century. Men-of-letters of different generations and aesthetic views were critical of the new era; they were spiritual explorers voicing their discontent with life. For a number of these writers an understanding of the artist's duty towards society, an earnest desire to give expression to the feelings and thoughts of the British people was at the basis of their approach to literature; their work therefore became a new investment in the heritage of English realism and stimulated its further development. We find this brilliantly exemplified in the art of H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and others.

H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw held the public attention for more than half a century. While Shaw essentially expounded the intellectual, social and moral problems of his time, Wells laid heavier stress on the consciousness of his changing compatriots and analysed the feelings and ambitions of the present in the light of the nation's future. Wells believed that the very existence of civilization was in jeopardy unless men of the highest intelligence seized the initiative, or communicated their wisdom to the masses until they reached the point where they would be capable of governing themselves. Being a scientist he turned his knowledge into science fiction in which he emphasized the social implications of the problems of space, time and technical revolution. When presenting his imaginary picture of the future he is really concerned with the present. Wells depicts the old order seeking in vain to perpetuate itself in a changing world and the new one rising assertively, chaotically in cities which grow and throw out their suburban tentacles far into the country-side.

The beginning of the century was an epoch of incessant debates, of criticizing, evaluating and rejecting old conceptions of life. Bernard Shaw was increasingly involved in these activities, castigating social defects in his plays, essays, lectures and letters to the papers. His surgical frankness in uttering plain truths to the nation was all , the more impressive as they reached the public through the medium of the theatre. In Mrs. Warren's Profession he demonstrated that it was society which was to blame for the evils of prostitution rather than the procuress; in Widower's Houses again it was society rather than the individual landlord, who created abuses of the right to property that proved disastrous to the lower classes. Shaw's contemporaries never failed to take in his message because apart from being an expert in stagecraft, he was a master of forceful simple English and an irresistible wit. His plays may be said to have won the day for realism in the theatre.

John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett worked in the best novel-istic traditions of English literature. Both were exact contemporaries, born in the same year (1867) and destined to react to the same ferment of ideas about society. In their books both wrote about the particular spheres of life known to them, observing the passage of time and contrasting the successive generations. In his Forsyte chronicles Galsworthy depicts the life of the people of property and inherited wealth against the background of England's pre-war depression and post-war decay, while Bennett described the humbler middle class in the sprawling industrial region of the Potteries, the Five Towns which were the scene of his boyhood and early manhood, of the years of dullness and frustration when he saw the town grow bigger, blacker and more drab and squalid. Both Galsworthy and Bennett were concerned with the persistence of change which was altering not only the outward shape of England but also having its devastating effect on character, moral values and individual destinies. Both novelists were devoted to the concept of literature as an art which has a social and moral function to fulfill.

In the short-story genre the art of Katherine Mansfield is a significant contribution to the enduring tradition of English realism. Her stories, largely inspired by Chekhov involve a narrow social setting and limited area of human experience, yet, they are expressive of a vast range of moral and social problems treated with great subtlety and penetrating insight. Katherine Mansfield unfolds her themes in the sphere of the everyday and the trivial which is least expected to suggest a subject for poetic presentation. However, her material yields a most impressive comment on life's bitter reality, on the thwarting of hopes and ideals, the betrayal of trust, the difficulty of communication between human beings, the tragedy of loneliness, the ironic discrepancy between the charmed world of youthful illusion and the adult world of insincerity and corruption. Katherine Mansfield achieved a high degree of excellence in the story of ' atmosphere, emotional experience and subterranean probing, which is still, almost sixty years after her death, dominant in the work of English and American short-story writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, H. E. Bates, Susan Hill and a great many other gifted contemporary authors.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century English literature was also greatly influenced by writers and poets who made persistent attempts to break away from established literary conventions. The new century heralding changes in every sphere of life and human knowledge and foreshadowing the inevitability of more profound upheavals — all this, the writers felt, called for a different, a new approach to literary representation. These trends gained an especially strong impetus after the holocaust of World War I. And many of those who wanted to express their disillusionment and hopelessness, their loathing of the revolting realities of bourgeois society, felt it their duty to reject traditional literary forms. Unable to form a clear conception of how to change things, they limited their protest to extravagance of form, relegating the rational meaning to the background.

The writers experimenting with poetic form have received the much debated and still not clearly defined title of "modernists", as distinct from traditionalists. This term cannot be accepted without certain reservations. To begin with, we must distinguish between the earlier modernists (those belonging to the first decades of the present century), who were certainly critics both of social and literary conventions, and the later ones in whose art experimentation with form became a convenient device to impart an aura of novelty to unclear or even reactionary ideas. It should also be emphasized that modernism cannot be used as a universally disparaging designation of all that was negative in literature. Some of the innovations introduced by modernists exercised a certain influence upon the realistic trends of twentieth-century art and were accepted by progressively minded artists.

The first modernists to put forward a program of some consistency were the "imagists" — a group formed shortly before World War I and listing among its members E. Pound, T. E. Hulme, R. Aldington, and others. The theoretical concepts of the group were put forth in the writings of Т. Е. Hulme. The imagists scornfully rejected melodious, rhythmically flowing verse abounding in poetic imagery or a logical, straightforward prose style, in short, all that is commonly denoted by poetic and prose diction.

A modernist writer or poet feeling isolated in the reality of bourgeois society, where faith in progress seems meaningless and naive, is inclined to identify this society with humanity as a whole. The outcome of his precarious attitude, of his inner uncertainty, and a kind of protest against a hostile world is the obscurity of his art. He does, indeed, "learn a style from a despair".

For the purpose of enhancing obscurity, intricacy of utterance, the modernists favored a number of stylistic devices, the most typical being unmotivated allusions to mythological and literary personages, to quotation, sometimes altered out of recognition, as well as omission of connecting links between successive ideas, use of words of specific terminological character, foreign place names, words or entire lines in a foreign language. Preference is given to metaphors devoid of any poetical connotations or emotional undertones, thus producing an image of deliberate prosaic implications.

The two most prominent figures in modernist literature were Thomas S. Eliot in poetry and James Joyce in prose. Eliot's major poetic creation The Waste Land was a model for poets, for it became a symbol of the world's sickness, of a civilization gone to seed. The waste land is a world of spiritually displaced people of every nationality and creed, of people emotionally and intellectually starved and hopelessly alienated from decency and dignity in a barren land of rock and stone with dry bones strewn everywhere. Eliot's influence was strongly exerted on several generations of poets, among whom were such diverse talents as Robert Graves, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.

In prose fiction James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are especially representative of a writer's reaction to man's alienation from life and society. Joyce depicts the psychic movement of his characters by creating a chaotic play of sensations and emotions in arbitrary succession without seeming relevance to a unifying idea. To present the workings of the human mind he evolved a special technique defined by literary criticism as the "stream-of-consciousness" technique disregarding linguistic norms in an attempt to approximate mental processes below the level of consciousness. Deliberate obscurity has rendered Joyce's books practically unintelligible to all but the most zealous and scholarly students. And while Joyce's influence on later writers has been considerable, they have refrained from competing with his inaccessibility. Even Virginia Woolf, one of the leaders of the modernists and an experimentalist herself admitted how difficult she found it to read Joyce. Though she evolved methods and techniques distinctly different from those of conventional fiction, her works never went far beyond the cultivated readers' comprehension.

Virginia Woolf sees the duty of the new generation of writers (formulated metaphorically in her short essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown) in "breaking the windows" of stifling and stuffy over-furnished rooms of contemporary middle-class fiction and letting in the fresh air of experiment. The products of this approach are her novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, etc., all of them demonstrating that the events and happenings of practical living are for Virginia Woolf the least part of life. Her problem is the projection of mental processes, the subordination of observable actions to private thoughts and feelings, which, in her understanding, form the real flux of living.

Criticism of modern civilization also finds a very strong and peculiar expression in the work of D. H. Lawrence. Often accused of obscenity and immoral treatment of sex, Lawrence devoted his great literary talent to the pursuit of a life more full, free and intense than the contemporary world could grant to men and women. The underlying purpose of his art was to restore the natural balance in living destroyed by the evils of industrialism. His novels and short stories, his verse, essays and travel books reveal that to him sex was the creative affirmation of life as opposed to a deadening, sordid and mechanical age.

There were some writers of the twenties who reflected the prevailing disillusionment by giving a satirical picture of their time. Thus, Aldous Huxley used the powerful weapon of satire to castigate his contemporaries, to depict the follies and hypocrisy of a reckless corrupt society, of a world grown increasingly callous and meaningless. The satirist's bitterness was partly inspired ^by disgust for the hopeless futility of human effort. If his disgust was only implicit in Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Point Counter Point, it became quite explicit in Brave New World. It was succeeded by more altruistic motives in his later works, but these were sacrificed to his unacceptable abstract creeds and obscured by his lack of interest in man as he really is.

The ironic sharpness of Huxley's earlier works was to find a counterpart in the novels of the brilliantly witty Evelyn Waugh, who satirized the post-war young people of Britain in a series of comical novels such as Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall- He also made a laughing-stock of the inanities of the British press and politics in Scoop, and of Britain's war effort in his trilogy known under the general title of Sword of Honor. On one occasion Waugh followed Huxley's lead and developed a few passages of his novel After Many a Summer into the devastating satire of The Loved One.

With Waugh literature enters the period with a completely different political and ideological climate. The world economic crisis, the rapid fascination of Germany and Hitler's coming to power in 1933, the launching of his offensives against peaceful neighbors, and, on the other hand, the victories of socialism in the USSR made men-of-letters develop a sense of social responsibility. The feeling that the artist must be as active as his fellow-citizens in doing what could be done to stop fascism and to support the anti-fascist United front actuated the greater part of the literary work of the period.

It was in the thirties that the Communist party of Great Britain came to the fore and exercised a marked influence on British intellectuals. This resulted in an upsurge of Marxist criticism as introduced by Ralph Fox, Christopher Caudwell, Alec West, Thomas A. Jackson and Jack Lindsay, an expounder of Marxian theory and a popular poet and novelist.

Prominent among them was John Cornford, a gifted poet, historian and essayist. Like Fox and Caudwell, he joined the International Brigade fighting fascism in Spain where he was killed when he was barely 21. The heroism of those days is described in John Somerfield’s book Volunteer in Spain (1937).

The chivalrous struggle of Spain for her freedom inspired three gifted young poets to go to the peninsula as reporters and devote some of their best poetry to her and to their indignation at the lack of support she got from capitalist countries calling themselves democratic. These were the so-called Oxford poets W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. Their poetry lost much of its fire when they later left England for the USA and turned from left to right wing.

The cause of democracy, peace and welfare was staunchly upheld by Sean O'Casey, whose international reputation as a playwright had been established in the twenties. A member of the Communist party, he wrote a number of plays of primary political importance bearing upon the crucial problems of our times. Some of these problems found their way into the work of the leading prose writers of the day. Richard Aldington won the world for an audience with his Death of a Hero, and a more limited, but appreciative attention with the acid criticism of English middle-class ways in Very Heaven and other novels of the period. The widespread success of Dr. Archibald Joseph Cronin's novels (Hatter's Castle, The Stars Look Down, The Citadel) revealed a general interest for books that are plain and straight stories dealing with the uphill struggle of common men and women, with the joys and sorrows of ordinary life, with characters who have it in them to fight adverse fate.

Among the writers of the thirties John Boynton Priestley ranks highest. His novels include comically optimistic scenes obviously determined by wishful thinking and the desire to lift the low spirits of British people oppressed by post-war hardships (The Good Companions), but also sad and true pictures of life as it is actually lived by hundreds of Smiths and Browns all over England.

It is as a playwright, however, that Priestley took the popular fancy most. His numerous plays can roughly be divided into five groups: 1) detective plays (The Dangerous Corner, An Inspector Calls and many others) where, however, the technique of detection is used for the sake of a serious social message; 2) realistic psychological plays (Eden End, The Linden Tree); 3) experimental plays based on idealistic theories of time and on highly subjective treatment of consciousness (Music at Night, Time and the Conways, Johnson over Jordan); 4) political pamphlets (Home Is Tomorrow, Treasure on Pelican); 5> light comedies (Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon, etc.). During the war Priestley was staunch in his anti-fascist and pro-Soviet attitude. He had the whole nation for an audience as a radio commentator and wrote a series of novels and plays to stimulate England's power of resistance and her effort as part of the Second front against Hitler's Germany. On the whole English writers devoted comparatively few books to World War II, at least comparatively few books of importance.

Britain emerged from World War II in a weakened position both economically and politically. British industry had been reorganized to satisfy the needs of war and now produced only the bare essentials. In addition the government had sold half of the country's foreign capital investments and borrowed money widely to cover the war expenditures. A further strain on the country was the cost of military bases. In that situation Britain tried to maintain its imperialist position by accepting the role of a junior partner of American imperialism. Popular opinion held that a great part of the trouble was caused by the reactionary Conservative government and, accordingly, in 1945 the majority turned down the Tories and elected a Labour government.

True to its pre-election promises, the Labour Government introduced a system of social security and created the so-called "welfare state" with security allegedly guaranteed to the workers in nationalized industries. However, the "welfare state" proved to be a deception. The social benefits granted by the new administration were largely nullified by a steady increase of indirect taxation. The hopes of the people were also gradually killed as the government gave priority to the payment of lavish compensations to ex-factory owners, leaving the workers' demands for higher wages unnoticed. The prices went on rising, unemployment reemerged, all this breeding countrywide discontent and the realization that capitalism continued to exploit the working man just as much as ever. Disappointment with the Labour government was prevalent.

The deep questioning of social changes and ideas, the prevailing concern with new dilemmas was best expressed in post-war literature. The novel continued to be the dominant genre and many writers were engaged in an attempt to depict the post-war world in realistic colors. Among those attempts Jack Lindsay's series of Novels of the British Way, starting with Betrayed Spring in 1953, deserves notice.

The works of his younger fellow-writer James Aldridge are wider in scope and design. In his novels and short stories problems of war and peace, of national movements and international relationships are treated with remarkable honesty and courage.

After the war there was a significant movement away from the avant-garde, from the technical experimentation favored by earlier generations of writers. The writers' interest in man's external relationships led to a less associative style, to a style closer to the straightforward narrative of the greater part of nineteenth-century fiction. They often deliberately tried to reestablish conventional prose techniques, old novelistic traditions. Several major writers like С. Р. Snow and Graham Greene came to the fore in the inter-war period, but their specific manner outlined itself most markedly in their post-war work.

C. P. Snow viewed all social problems in large political terms. He invariably expressed his social convictions and attitudes in reference to political power. Throughout his sequence Strangers and Brothers (which forms an impressive study of both great public issues and man's peisonal problems), Snow continually illustrated some form of conflict between individual conscience and the pressure of the political situation. His books provide a valuable commentary on the life of contemporary British society.

Like C. P. Snow, G. Greene never confines himself to a narrow world. His concern is the world at large, the international scene, and his attitude is one of compassionate interest in man's predicaments, in the individual's responsibility for the suffering of mankind. This induced him to traverse the European, African and American continents, and as his vision widened his mind reverted again and again to the unjustifiable suffering of man and to its social and political causes. He is a writer with a sense of history, a moral message and uncompromising critical attitude to the sordid cruelty of imperialism. Accordingly, The Heart of the Matter is set in West Africa and The Quiet American is played out against the background of war in Vietnam; it is likewise in character that the action of A Burnt-Out Case takes place in the Congo, and The Comedians disclose the truth about the tyranny in Haiti.

Humanistic traditions of English literature have also been taken up by Angus Wilson who appeared on the literary scene immediately after the war. With mingled irony and compassion he gives, both in his short stories and novels, a skilful dissection of post-war England exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of the middle-class milieu, its self-righteous and hollow conventions, the mean devices with which people seek to mask their deep-rooted brutal egotism. In his major novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes he uses the large framework of the traditional nineteenth-century novel, the saga that portrays a society by cutting across numerous class and occupational lines, by raising profound questions of moral honesty.

In the mid-fifties, post-war disillusionment, divergence between hopes and reality determined the character of fiction created by a group of writers who came collectively to be known as the "Angry Young Men". Among them were Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, John Osborne and Colin Wilson. It is important to note that they did not belong to a clearly defined movement. Far from it: they attacked one another in the press and some were even reluctant to appear between the same covers with others whose views they violently opposed. But they had one thing in common — an attitude of nonconformity to the established social order. Through their characters these writers were eager to express their anger with society, an anger modified by the fact that it was expressed from the point of view of men who were themselves products of the "welfare state".

The protagonists of Amis's Lucky Jim, Wain's Hurry On Down, Braine's Room at the Top, Colin Wilson's The Outsiders and of Os borne's play Look Back in Anger,-no matter how different they are, represent the frustrated young generation who defy everybody in authority. They do not seem to fit in; they refuse to put up with society's conventions', their statements express both political scepticism "and disgust with personal insecurity. Their anger originates in their inability to communicate with others as fully and meaningfully as they would like to; all of them are intelligent young men from the lower or lower-middle classes educated at provincial universities but let loose in a society dominated more than ever by ruthless class distinctions.

An important development of the fifties and early sixties, having a direct connection with the outburst of the "angries", was the emergence of a working-class novel. In their vigorous fiction Allan Silli-toe, Sid Chaplin, Stan Barstow and David Storey provide the lower-class perspective of the post-war situation. The defiance of authority, the attitude of resentment, a working man's constant struggle in a hostile world — all this gives their characters a certain unity of fellow feeling directed against the forces exploiting their physical and spiritual powers. Allan Sillitoe, who sets his novels against the lowest depths of England's grimy industrial cities, makes his reader realize that his young heroes are unable to fulfil themselves within the prison of a class-bound system.

Among the English writers who are intensely committed to a sense of social responsibility and to a warm sympathy with those oppressed by society is Doris Lessing. Her interest in political battles permeates most of her novels and short stories. The series of novels that deal with colonial Africa and a girl's growing-up (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple in the Storm, Landlocked, The Four-Gated City) demonstrates a heroine who is anxious to change society, to work actively for a more humane and just world- When Doris Lessing moved to England in 1979 her sense of responsibility and compassion for those who are socially rejected led her to search for her values and for her literary material among the working class in London (The Other Woman, In Persuit of the English). In a series of essays entitled Going Home she frequently advocates direct participation in political action.

A great deal of contemporary English fiction and drama is dedicated to the subject of man's search for identity, and the stress is not so much on political or social issues as on moral problems, which adds another dimension to the portrayal of modern English society. The problem of identity closely linked with one of the most influential philosophical trends of twentieth century thought, often evokes an existential attitude. It implies a certain scepticism about ever knowing the essential nature of any of man's various experiences, particularly when that experience is received only through individual consciousness. At the same time, man must live and make his choice, must come to some terms with his own existence and the true meaning of everything around him. Existentialist philosophy places limitations on man's knowledge and power and even on his search for identity and on the necessity for serious action or engagement.

The influence of existentialist ideas left a profound impression on the work of Iris Murdoch. She has created a series of intricate novels that essentially deal with the nature of man and his delusions. Her characters search for an understanding of the meaning of life; they try to reduce experience to the manageable and comprehensible, but none of the identities or definitions provide any satisfactory solution. Though Iris Murdoch always attempts to shape her characters perception of the world's chaotic nature into significant form, her rich and highly artistic prose mocks man's efforts to formulate precise codes and laws about life.

With Iris Murdoch the trend in creative writing moved to philosophical fiction. William Golding's novels and especially his most assured success Lord of the Flies are notable for their symbolic treatment of human nature. In part they constitute a pessimistic commentary on the corrupt world, based on the author's belief in the falsity of the existing morals. Golding has covered several vastly different themes, not always consonant with each other, but all expressive of his concern about the influence of modern civilization. In The Inheritors he makes the whole civilized enterprise look like a betrayal of man's chance to exist; in The Spire he suggests that any great task imposed upon a community makes such heavy demands on men that they break under the strain; The Pyramid is a forcible appeal to kindness, mutual understanding and humanity as the only way to save the world from heartless selfishness and calculated greed.

Preoccupation with a philosophical explanation of the nature of things is manifest in the work of John Fowles, a highly imaginative and innovative modern writer. Fowles probes deep intoTniman relations, especially those between the opposite sexes, by manipulating numerous literary, historical and artistic allusions and devices to demonstrate which part of the life of his characters belongs to the past, the present and to all times. His point of departure is invariably man's lack of knowledge about human nature; his male is always limited by his partial understanding of woman; and in his frustration, his necessity to operate in a world where his knowledge is only partial, he acts so as to capture (The Collector), desert (The Magus) or betray (The French Lieutenant's Woman) the female he can only dimly comprehend. Fowles treats his constant theme with deep insight as well as with great intensity of sociological and psychological observation.

The complex relations between modern men and women find their way also into Margaret Drabble's fiction, who writes from a feminine viewpoint. She deliberately presents her themes within the framework of a conventional novel; she likes what she calls "a good traditional tale". Margaret Drabble writes about young women who are not merely attractive, intelligent and educated, but also sharply observant. Her heroines are all mothers, and their involvement with their children cuts sharply across their concern with a career and their desire for emotional freedom. During their painful searchings and struggle they reveal the contradictory psychological make-up that Margaret Drabble thinks is characteristic of modern British women.

On one occasion, however, Margaret Drabble went beyond the description of woman's intimate emotions and her troubles in a hostile male world. In The Ice Age she gives a convincing description of Britain in the throes of an economic and cultural crisis, in the grip of the ice age. This links her work with a series of books, all written in the 1970s, whose obvious purpose is not merely to go in for minute psychological analysis of personal emotions, but to comprehend the nature of the world at large. These books comprise John Fowles's Daniel Martin with its earnest craving for an overall view of contemporary reality on a fairly international scale, Paul Scott's Staying On with its perceptive probing into Britain's political problems as they affect the lives of individuals, Melvin Bragg's The Autumn Manoeuvres with its satirical delineation of present-day English political life, David Storey's study of the life of Colin Saville (Saville) against a vast social background, Malcolm Bradbury's Man of History, dealing with English university life and the problem of new intellectuals springing up from the working class.

However deeply Britain is affected by the present crisis, English literature, though influenced by some of its aspects, remains an active and living force. There is some reason to think that it is now in the process of assimilating a vaster body of social experience than it did in the previous decades. This is not to say that novels involving highly individual psychological subtleties are passing out of fashion. They are no less numerous than before. Nor does it mean that British literature is chiefly orientated to serious social studies. The role of light fiction, and particularly detective fiction, still remains prevalent. The scope of the latter varies very widely ranging from stories where the technique of detection becomes the vehicle of social and moral criticism (as in C. P. Snow's A Coat of Varnish) to absolutely unartistic and shoddy creations imitating the notorious James Bond series by the late Ian Fleming.

The middle level of detective stories has been reached by successful and gifted novelists like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Cyril Hare, John Le Carre and others. These authors are masters of a craft not devoid of psychological and artistic interest. Within the limits of the genre their fiction, apart from entertainment value, offers a commentary upon human nature and insight into the century's social changes.

English literature is passing through a period of transition and any forecasts concerning its further development would be arbitrary. One thing seems certain, however — the best works of contemporary prose and poetry are being put at the service of the momentous issues of today and bear relevance to the needs and aspirations of humanity.

In the work which has appeared since the end of the Second "World War, it is just possible to identify two main attitudes. The first is the preoccupation of many writers with themselves and their private experiences. The second is the concern of some writers with society, its influences, its faults and (sometimes) its reform. In the work of a number of writers, traces of both attitudes are present. The tendency of the age is to cater for the masses. Writers are as much members of the mass as anyone else, but they are more worried than many other people by tlieir lack of active participation. Their private sensations therefore become more important to them, and it is these which they try to pin down and shape in their writings. Many try to see themselves in relation to the society in which they live. Often the more sensitive of these try to make an objective record of their situation, while definite social criticism comes from those who would press more actively for reform. Yet, in the ninetccn-fifties at least, these active elements lacked a positive direction; they were eager and biting in their criticism, but silent when it came to the question of what they really wanted. Utopian plans for the reform of society seemed little more than empty talk and self-delusion.

In literature today, man is written with a small 'm'. He is no longer seen as a great abstraction for whom plans may be made, but as a person capable of suffering. In the products of both attitudes, the awareness of suffering is notable.

2. British literature in XI century

Philip Pullman is best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, that comprises of Northern Lights 1995, The Subtle Knife 1997, and The Amber Spyglass 2000. It is a coming-of-age story with many epic events. Neil Gaiman is an esteemed writer of science fiction, fantasy short stories and novels, whose notable works include Stardust 1998, Coraline 2002, The Graveyard Book 2009, and The Sandman series. Alan Moore's works include Watchmen, V for Vendetta set in a dystopian future UK, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and From Hell, speculating on the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper.

Ian McEwan's Atonement 2001, refers to the process of forgiving or pardoning a transgression, and alludes to the main characters' search for atonement in interwar England. His 2005 novel Saturday, follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon.

Zadie Smith's Whitbread Book Award winning novel White Teeth 2000, mixes pathos and humour, and focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends in London. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 2003 by Mark Haddon, is written in the first-person perspective of a 15-year-old boy with autism living in Wiltshire. The first novel from Susanna Clarke is the historical fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 2004. Works of the 2007 Nobel Prize recipient Doris Lessing include, The Grass is Singing, and The Golden Notebook. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series, is a collection of seven fantasy novels that chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter, the idea for which Rowling conceived whilst she was on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The series begins with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 1997, and ends with the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2007.

In the 1950s, the bleak absurdist play Waiting for Godot, by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. The Theatre of the Absurd influenced playwrights of the later decades of the 20th century, including Harold Pinter, whose works are often characterized by menace or claustrophobia, and Tom Stoppard. Stoppard's works are however also notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays. Michael Frayn is among other playwrights noted for their use of language and ideas.

Formerly an appointment for life, the appointment of the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom is now made for a fixed term of 10 years, starting with Andrew Motion in 1999 as successor to Ted Hughes. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded Motion in the post in May 2009. A position of national laureate, entitled The Scots Makar, was established in 2004 by the Scottish Parliament. The first appointment was made directly by the Parliament in that year when Edwin Morgan received the honor The post of National Poet of Wales (Welsh: Bardd Cenedlaethol Cymru) was established in May 2005. The post is an annual appointment with the language of the poet alternating between English and Welsh.

2. Main genres of modern literature

1. Poetry and Drama

Poetry has remained principally a private thing. The poems of George Barker (1913- ) illustrate this exactly. Society does not concern him. His impressions of the outside world have no coherence outside his own awareness. 'I looked into my heart to write,' he begins one of his poems, and the line offers us a key to his work as a whole. Essentially personal, his whole thought comes from his heart; there is nothing intellectual about either his meaning or the images he chooses for its expression. His best poems are emotions, not recollected in tranquility, but urgently present. He can create a moment of sudden anguish, as in his sonnets on the two young men drowned in the Pacific, in which the seagulls and the sea are not merely pictorial setting but essential parts of his tragic awareness. There is an atmosphere of tragedy in his work which in many of his longer poems declines into a tendency to make big abstract statements. Where he compresses himself into a tighter form, the sudden throb of life is present.

Poets searching into human awareness have tried to link up with the origins of the race and its primal urges; so there has been much probing into the meaning of the major human experiences of birth, death, love, and the working of the soil. Robert Graves (1895- ) explores in mythology the oldest expression of the facts of the human situation. Jack R. Clemo (1916- ) shows us man as a creature in nature and under God. Drawing much of his imagery from the claypits, he offers a vision of man working the earth and receiving his strength from it while aware of his small-ncss in the face of the majesty and terror of God. The earth is physically present in Clemo's poems, and men are shown with 'the wind on their faces', 'the cold rain stings them', they 'creep down in rain-grooves' to wait 'till lightnings, thunder-rasps have died'.

With Dylan Thomas (1914-53) nature is more of a symbol, for he often relates its various aspects to facets of human existence and uses them as images to make his meaning clearer. There is joy, fear and wonderment in his view of life as a continuous process of which birth and death are but two incidents in nature's cycle. To die is but to 'enter again the round'. Youth is when 'Time held me green and dying', not a fixed point but part of the cycle. In his earlier poems the metaphors follow so closely one after the other that they often tend to obscure rather than enlighten. As he grew older, this fault disappeared, and he became more sparing of bis imagery. Moreover his readers were now accustomed to his way of thought and to his consciousness of the embryo in the fully-grown being, a complex relationship expressed in the poem which begins 'This bread I break was once the oat'. He explored afresh the image of the human condition as it is found in the Christian ritual; for his poetry is essentially religious as it searches for meaning and shape in the fact of existence.

Dylan Thomas's verse has a concentrated power which distinguishes it from the quieter output of other contemporary poets. Many, such as Robert Conquest (1917- ), are descriptive rather than intensive. Others work a harder road and find their expression through an intellectual imagery, yet their communication lacks urgency. One turns with relief to the translations from Chinese poetry made by Arthur Waley (1889- ), whose versions are so sensitive that he achieves his own recognition as a poet through them.

Only a scattering of poems contain direct social criticism, and those of Christopher Logue (1926- ) have the most impact. Although such poems arc for political reasons in a clear style so that their meaning can be grasped immediately, this characteristic is not confined to them. Many poets are turning away from metrical freedom in favor of a stricter technique, and the ballad form is becoming popular for both social and personal poetry

The theatre, as the most social of the arts, might have been expected to lead the way in taking a critical view of society. This has not proved to be the case, however, for our theatres have preferred to follow rather than mould public opinion. Few dramatists have attempted anything more than light entertainment.

Immediately after the war there was an attempt to revive the use of verse in play writing, for it was claimed that only in this way could language be sufficiently heightened to suit the great dramatic moments of the theatre. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888- ) had already made a reputation before the war with his Murder in the. Cathedral (1935) and had attempted to meet the theatre in its own style in the unsuccessful The Family Reunion (1939). In 1950 he produced The Cocktail Party. This is a drawing-room comedy whose characters are subjected in the second act to attentions of a psychiatrist who helps them by means of some mystical hocus-pocus to accept the pettiness of their lives as an inevitable fact with which they must come to terms. He followed this with The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959). He has tried to suit his verse to the rhythms of ordinary speech, aiming to make the audience 'forget that they are listening to a poetic play'. The result sounds in the theatre like rather verbose prose.

The opposite technique is used by Christopher Fry (1907- ) whose verse overflows with poeticisms. In a rush of words and images, Fry explores the language in search of a valid rhetoric. This exuberance of language has been particularly well-received in his comedies A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), The Lady's Not For Burning (1949) and Venus Observed (1950), where it enables him to achieve a greater profundity of vision. Often he seeks to convey his meaning through a series of images, as though rejecting each one in turn as unsatisfactory; so that one is left in the end aware of the meaning itself more than of the often rather worn images through which it has been expressed. Moreover he has a considerably stronger sense of the stage than T. S. Eliot. He is not primarily a poet, but a dramatist who has chosen to cast his language in verse. For all its exuberant and rather florid style, his verse has proved the most acceptable in the theatre in this century, because it has the immediacy which is a mark of the beet dramatic dialogue.