Chapter Nine

Literature 1910-1945

Changes in the structure of society at the beginning of the twentieth century resulted in a great
diversity of trends in literature. The writers of the nineteenth century, whether against the
establishment or a part of it, nonetheless had great confidence in the enduring power of the British
Empire. The empire for many was a source of national pride, and the countryside served as the
symbolic custodian of national values. Many writers explored the sociological aspects of British
imperialism, but were powerless to attack the status quo at home. Concurrently, Edwardians were
not interested in contemporary political life. Edwardian poetry is then characterised in part by its
annihilation of the romantic self in poetry, and it expresses a corresponding loss of faith in writing,
and occasionally in the faculty of imagination. Late Victorian and Edwardian writing led to the
eventual triumph of Modernism.

Modernism is a term encompassing several trends in both art and literature that chronologically
belong to the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism reflects the disenchantment with the
Victorian belief in "progress" while at the same time shows the developing impact of psychoanalysis
on literature as writers became increasingly conscious of the influence of the unconscious on literary
works. Much modernist writing is also permeated by cultural relativism and demonstrates an
awareness of the elements of irrationality in the workings of the unconscious mind.

Avant-garde

Artists and writers tended towards the creation of avant-garde art, conveying ideas of experiment
and revolt against tradition. The period is marked by its love of experiment in literary techniques.
Modernism also borrowed techniques from other art forms, e.g., music and the visual arts, hence,
the appearance of trends such as impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism, Dadaism, cubism,
surrealism, imagism, expressionism and others.

Impressionism in literature is a tendency which borrowed heavily from many of the theoretical
foundations which underpinned French painting at the time. Impressionism concentrated on
representing fleeting mental impressions of the character and is manifested in the works of Virginia
Woolf and Joseph Conrad. Impressionistic criticism restricted itself to describing the critic's
subjective response to the work of art as was presented in 1873 by Walter Pater in his Studies in the
History of the Renaissance.

Postimpressionism in art was both the continuation and rejection of the limitations of
impressionism. The use of colour was retained but some artists turned also to primitive art and
adopted simpler forms of representation, a development which can also be observed in literature .

Symbolism was a movement in poetry in the latter part of the nineteenth century. French poets such
as Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarmé wrote against the dominant realistic and
naturalistic trends of the time. They aimed at suggestion rather than direct commentary evoking
subjective moods through the use of symbols. E.M. Forster frequently uses symbolism in his novels
to suggest and render subjective opinions rather than direct statements.

Dadaism was a direct protest against bourgeois society, religion and art, and was founded in 1916 in
Switzerland by Tristan Tzara, a Romanian-born French poet. Dadaist poets experimented with anti-
logical poetry and collage pictures.
Cubism was a style in art that emphasised flat, two-dimensional reality (although composed of
cubes). Artists were not to represent reality but create new realities depicting radically fragmented
objects, whose several dimensions were seen simultaneously.

Surrealism was influenced by Dadaism and symbolism as well as Freud's theories of psychology. It
was launched by André Breton together with the publication of his Manifeste de Surréalisme (1924).
Breton advocated that art and literature should reach beyond the real and obliterate the boundaries
between the real and unreal, rational and irrational, hence many such artists ‘attachment to dreams
and hallucinations.

Expressionism was yet another movement, which sought to break away from realism and naturalism.
Expressionism presented the world distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas
and emotions. Literature was to express feelings and emotions rather than describe reality as one
can see in Franz Kafka’s novels. Expressionism was most popular in the German speaking countries
but its echoes can be found in many dramas of Sean O'Casey, in the "Circe" episode of Joyce's
Ulysses and in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Modernist writers also rejected the traditional Victorian and Edwardian frameworks of narrative,
descriptive and rational exposition in poetry and prose in favour of a stream of consciousness
presentation of personality, a dependence on poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic
communication and upon myth as characteristic structural principle. Literature challenged
conventional ideas about human nature, society, and how to convey reality, or indeed any kind of
experience in words. There is also present the growing force of anthropology as encapsulated in Sir
James Fraser's The Golden Bough (1890 – 1915).

The First World War, also called the Great War, led to the disappearance of the British Empire and, as
it was the first war fought utilising modern technology to the full with all the atrocities this entailed,
it exerted a powerful effect on the writers of the post-war period. Writers had to find new values as
their pre-war outlook had proved to be so tragically inadequate. The crisis was an accelerated
deterioration in the quality of life. It was expressed as the fracturing or dismantling of personal
relations, of social institutions, and even of civilisation itself. While it would seem hard to escape the
effects of the historical events of this period, one can still find the clashing trends of Modernism and
traditionalism, especially in poetry. The Georgians who started writing before the First World War
represented traditional attitudes, whereas Imagists had a much more modern approach.

Futurism

One of the most innovative of the continental schools was Italian Futurism, led by F.T. Martinetti, who
visited London several times to publicise his ideas. Futurism sought an absolute break with the past
in poetry, music and painting and was fascinated by the machinery of modern technology with its
motor cars and aeroplanes. No English writer went as far as to fully embrace Futurism but there is a
good deal of interest in futuristic theory and its practice evident in the works of Ezra Pound,
Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence The seeds of Futurism can also be found in the general attitude
represented by many writers towards both the achievements and drawbacks of the twentieth
century. Nonetheless, many writers did reject the recent past, retaining strong bonds with earlier
periods. Hence, Eliot’s fascination with Dante and the metaphysical poets, Joyce's with the
mythological past, and Pound's with the France of troubadours and the China of Confucius.

The drama of the period is not noted for its outstanding achievements. Eliot's poetic plays deal with
the complex symbolism of history and the contemporary world, whereas the plays of Irish
playwrights touch upon problems vital to Ireland. Neither demonstrated much in the way of
structural or linguistic innovations, but are interesting as documents of the period of time in-
between the modern and the post-modern.

Georgian and War Poetry

Two poets directly preceding the Georgians are Ernest Dowson (1867- 1900) and A.E. Housman
(1859 - 1936). Dowson idealises love but sometimes renders powerful feelings of melancholy. His
collections include Decorations (1899) and The Pierrot of the Minute (1897), the latter are prose
poems. Dowson belonged to the Rhymers' Club, a group of poets who met in the Cheshire Cheese in
Fleet Street and whose member was, among others, William Butler Yeats. Much more "Georgian'" in
his poetic endeavours was Alfred Edward Housman who in 1896 published a collection of poems A
Shropshire Lad, a combination of lyrical pessimism and pastoral idyll, which made him very popular
during the First World War. His Last Poems were published in 1922, and More Poems appeared
posthumously in 1936.

Georgianism was a poetic movement of the early twentieth century in England named by its
founders after the reigning monarch George V (1910- 1936). Georgian poets, to an extent, shared the
perception of reality offered by the Edwardians, yet, their works offer more escapism than the
previous poetry. Georgians suggested that the first and primary defence against the violence and
emotional cruelty of modern times is imagination and reflection, by means of which an individual can
create a better world for himself/herself. Georgian poetry also turned towards the past and the
poetic tradition of Romanticism in search of literary inspiration. Georgians sought to recreate the
Wordsworthian sensibility, the name of the movement signified poetry that was bucolic and idyllic in
style and indeed often Wordsworthian, but lacked the intensity of vision which transmuted
Wordsworth's descriptions of nature into great art. Consequently, such poets were often accused of
sentimental pastoralism or "week-end ruralism." The Georgian maintenance of traditional romantic
realism was hardly touched by the upheavals of the First World War and failed to reflect
contemporary sensibility. The influence of this movement rapidly waned in the Carly 1920s. On an
emotional level, Georgians limited themselves to calmer waters and avoided strong and destructive
passions. Their poetry was to provide verbal magic of musical quality. It promoted melancholic
deliberations on the nature of experience, and offered simple consolation.

The name originated with an anthology of contemporary verse first published in 1912 by a group
consisting of Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro, Wilfred Wilson Gibson and Edward
Marsh. Five volumes appeared between 1912 and 1922 containing the poetry not only of the original
founding poets, but also poems by William H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, D.H. Lawrence, John
Masefield, Robert Graves, James Elroy Flecker and others. A classicist and a patron of modern poetry,
Edward Marsh (1872 - 1953), who prefaced the first anthology, intended no revolutionary manifesto.
Between 1912-1922, five main anthologies appeared. Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound and TS. Eliot criticised
Georgian poetry claiming that such "sweet cheat" does not have anything to offer to the modern
world.

Walter de la Mare (1873 – 1956) is habitually recognised as the embodiment of Georgian poetry
because of his poetic techniques and habits of thought and feeling. Most of his poetry evades the
problems of contemporary reality in various ways. Yet, it is precisely this evasion, so well suited to his
poetic gifts that gave rise to a number of exquisite minor poems. He cultivated fantasy and
continuously sought enchantment, but was not completely aware of the pitfalls of maintaining a
posture somewhere between mundane reality and ethereal fantasy. He created magical dreams in
his remembrance of childhood, displaying that predominant quality of "verbal magic." "The
Listeners" is a good example of such poetics. In all his poetry, de la Mare creates an idyllic
atmosphere such as in “Nod," The Tailor," “At the Keyhole," or in "Never-to-be." He also wrote poetry
presenting various narrative situations like "The Dwelling Place," «"Off the Ground," and "Nicholas
Nye." Often his works are wistful humorous fantasies like "Sam," "The Quartette," and “Where," or
small pieces like "The Silver Penny," "All But Blind," and "Fare Well." One of his most characteristic
poems is "Voices," which introduces all the elements mentioned earlier. The narrator recalls his
happy childhood. It is an idealised picture of happy memories that, in retrospect, looks better than it
must have been in reality. Then the atmosphere changes and becomes even more magical as the
narrator takes a twilight trip to exotic places as the poet searches for stars with his inner eye.
Ultimately, the poem is a prescription for transforming reality through the power of imagination,
escaping through fantasy, or simply dreaming one's life away. In "The Song of the Mad Prince," one
encounters an indulgence in the "sweet cheat" of illusion. The mad prince recalls Hamlet, whose
preoccupation with death and lost love serve as the rationale for his disproportionate forbearance of
grief. The whole of de la Mare's poetry is replete with intense self-pity, highly elaborate idylls and
ponderous moralising about time and eternity. It is also limited by its reliance on cliché-ridden set
themes such as ever-present connection of women and beauty. De la Mare wrote also prose, e.g.,
Henry Brocken (1904), the novel dealing with person who encounters writers from the past, and The
Return (1910), a novel about spirit possession and also some stories for children, including
Broomsticks (1925) and The Lord Fish (1933).

Wilfred Wilson Gibson (1878-1962) contributed to many of the volumes of Georgian Poetry. He
published many volumes of verse most of which deals with Northern rural themes. His experiences
of the First World War are recorded in works like "Breakfast. “His Collected Poems 1905-1925
appeared in 1926.

William Henry Davies' (1871-1940) first volume, The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems (1905), was
well received by the public and also by poets such as Edward Thomas. These poems were his artistic
response to the natural world. His other volumes, Songs of Joy (1911) and Raptures (1918),were also
written in the Georgian tradition. He also published a prose work, The Autobiography of a Super-
Tramp, in which he recounted his experiences from the Klondike, The text was published in 1908
with a preface by G.B. Shaw.

Harold Edward Monro (1879-1932) was chiefly remembered for his Poetry Bookshop, which
promoted the public readings of Georgian poetry. He wrote poetry in the Georgian style, founded
and edited Poetry Review. His Collected Poems (1933) were introduced by T.S. Eliot.

John Drinkwater’s (1882-1937) poems were published in all five volumes of Georgian Poetry and
were collected in 1933 in Summer Harvest. His first volume of poetry, Poems, appeared in 1903. He
also wrote plays, including Abraham Lincoln (1918), Oliver Cromwell (1921), Mary Stuart (1922) and a
successful comedy Bird in Hand (1927).

One of the most colourful figures among the Georgians was John Edward Masefield (1878-1967) who
after a period of idyllic childhood at the age of thirteen began his training for the merchant navy, an
experience which he recounts in his narrative poem, Dauber (1913). His sea experiences reappear
many other times in his writing. At the age of seventeen he went to America, where he undertook
various humble occupations and, on his return to England, became a journalist on the staff of The
Manchester Guardian. He then settled in London and during the first ten years of the twentieth
century wrote a volume of poems, Salt-Water Ballads (1902), which contains the well-known "I Must
Go Down to the Sea Again." His collection of Ballads and Poems was published in 1910.Masefield
also produced collections of short stories, e.g., A Mainsail Haul (1905) and A Tarpaulin Muster
(1907). In 1911 he published a long epic poem The Everlasting Mercy, the realistic story of the
conversion of the ruffian Saul Kane, followed by The Widow in the Bye Street (1912). He continued to
write after the Second World War and an edition of his Collected Poems was published in 1946. His
poetry is not easy to summarise. His life experiences were different than that of the rest of the
Georgians and that certainly affected the themes of his poems. During his first two years in the army,
he started writing poetry about English rural life and tradition and the war never became a
predominant issue in his poetry. Masefield also wrote novels, among others, Sard Harker (1924),
Odtaa (1926), The Bird of Dawning (1933) and So Long to Learn (1952), the latter being part of his
autobiography.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) wrote biographical and topographical works and, when he was over
thirty, began to compose verse at the suggestion of his friend, Robert Frost. He enlisted in the Artists'
Rifles during the First World War, and was killed in Flanders. His verse is a loving and accurate
observation of the English pastoral scene. His Collected Poems appeared in 1920. It is only a
superficial reading of Thomas, based on a broad similarity of subject matter that makes him appear
to be a Georgian poet. Nature and the countryside, though intensely and exquisitely appreciated for
their own sake, are for him, primarily a means of exploring his mood and character and his
perspective on experience, while his best love poems are quite personal. In the poem entitled "A
Tale, “he uses his gift of putting character, mood, and attitude toward life into a seemingly small
situation perceived in a moment. It is the tale of remembrances of a past which gone like the ruins of
a cottage whose story is for ever buried in the past. There is a kind Wordsworthian mood in the
poem. Forest and wood are two symbols that frequently appear in Thomas' works. In "The Gypsy," he
goes home after the Christmas fair and market, carrying with him the images of what he has seen
and heard. His language, unlike that of Walter de la Mare, is free from stale poetical idiom. It is
simple but displays that romantic style of simplicity that never quite goes beyond what it says, but
also never means exactly what it purported to convey.

There were few women poets writing according to Georgian poetics.

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) published a collection of poems, The Farmer's Bride (1916), which was
innovative in its use of verse and admired by Thomas Hardy. Her second collection of poems, The
Rambling Boy, appeared posthumously in 1929.

Anna Wickham (1884-- 1947), b. Edith Mary Alice Harper, spent most of her childhood in Australia,
where her family emigrated in 1890. Her first volume of verse, Songs of John Oland, appeared in
1911. Later volumes included The Contemplative Quarry (1915), Man with a Hammer (1916), The
Little Old House (1921) and Thirty-Six New Poems (1936).

Frances Cornford (1886-1960), b. Crofts Darwin, came from a family of scholars. Her mother was a
lecturer in English at Newham, and Wordsworth's great-niece, her father was the son of Charles
Darwin. In 1910 she published her first book, Poems. Her later collections included A Spring Morning
(1915), Different Days (1928) and Mountains and Molehills (1934).

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (1887-1964) despised much of the work of the Georgian poets, and from
1916-1921 edited Wheels, an anti-Georgian anthology. Her first volume of verse, The Mother and
Other Poems, published in 1915, was followed by many others and she soon acquired a reputation as
a rather eccentric figure. Her only novel, I Live Under a Black Sun (1937), was not well received. As to
her war poetry, her collections included Street Songs (1942), Green Song (1944) and The Song of the
Cold (1945) for which she received much acclaim. She also wrote some critical works such as The
Study of Pope (1930). Her brother, Sir Francis Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969), himself a writer, was also
an enemy of the Georgians, considering them formally unimaginative and philistine.
War poetry maintained the formal patterns of the Georgians but replaces the idyllic with the
horrible, first hand experiences of the soldiers.

One of the major war poets is Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), the son of a Rugby teacher, he was
educated there and also at King's College, Cambridge. He began to write poetry while still at Rugby,
and during 1913-1914 he travelled in America and the South Seas. When the war broke out he took
part in the unsuccessful defence of Antwerp, and early in 1915 was sent to the Mediterranean where
he died in April of the same year. His Collected Poems (1918), including a group of 1914 Sonnets,
appeared in 1915 and caught the mood of the romantic patriotism of the early war years before
disillusionment set in. These verses became very popular in England after the First World War,
especially "The Soldier," written in 1914, beginning: “If I should die think only this of me" in which
Brooke captured the popular images of the victim and the hero, glorifying the sacrifice of the hero. In
this poem, Brooke juxtaposes happy home-England with the misery of overseas. The repetition of
the word "English “seems to strengthen his need to remember his home. He also elevates the
concept of being English to an organic level so that he is a part of England, and when he dies, his
grave will also be English. The poem expresses the patriotic spirit of the English soldier at the
beginning of the war. Brooke's "The Hill" demonstrates similar patriotic spirit and is more dynamic
and less meditative than "The Soldier" being a manifesto of hope and glory. His Letters from America
appeared in 1916 with an introduction by Henry James.

Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915) died six months after Brooke, spending those six months on the
Western Front. He criticised Brooke for adopting so sentimental an attitude to the war, which was so
full of death, cold and dirt in the trenches. He left only thirty seven complete poems, which appeared
in a posthumous collection Marlborough and Other Poems (1916). His best known poems are "The
Song of the Ungirt Runners, “Barbury Camp" and "When you see millions of the mouthless dead.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was the most significant of the war poets to sur-vive the war.
Educated at Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, he enlisted at the outbreak of the war. His
war poetry is vivid and often satirical, expressing his bitterness to-wards hypocrisy and romanticism.
His published works include The Old Huntsman(1917), Counter-Attack (1918), Satirical Poems (1926),
The Heart's Journey (1928),Vigils (1935) and Collected Poems (1947). He also produced semi-
autobiographical fiction Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)
and Sherston's Progress (1936). In the collection Counter-Attack, the poem "General" is a sort of
narrative in which the narrator is plural-either "we," the soldiers, or "Harry and Jack. “The difference
is that Harry and Jack are dead while the narrator is alive. There is tension between the soldiers and
the officers, but the soldiers never dare to cross the line separating them from the officers. The
officers are unable to support their men as they know the men are simply instruments of war who
need to be tricked into battle and are ultimately doomed. Since the British officer corps were mostly
of upper class origin, there is also a strong element of social unrest in the work. The General of the
poem remains a nameless part of the machine-Sassoon's reversal of the normal tendency to name
the leader and depersonalise the rest of the army. His poem "They" de-romanticises the war. It is a
mini dialogue between a Bishop who sees the "boys" as war heroes washed with honour and grace
and the soldiers, who reply that indeed they came back changed; some shot through lungs, some
without legs and some contracting syphilis. Sassoon's ironic remark put in the mouth of the Bishop
"The ways of God are strange!" highlights the senselessness of sacrifice and heroism.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who wrote poetry before the First World War, was killed just before the
Armistice and before he was able to complete a planned book of poetry, of which he said in the
preface "the subject of it is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity." The war was crucial
from a literary point of view, as some experiences were so shattering that the poets were not
equipped to write about them. In the face of such tragedy, nobody paid much attention to poetry,
yet it was important to exorcise such terrible experiences. In one of his poems, Owen asks the
fundamental question: "What passing-bells for these who die like cattle?" His poems, like "Anthem
for Doomed Youth"(1917), are preoccupied with the premature deaths of young people who are, in a
way, forced to take responsibility for the future of the world. One of his most characteristic works is
"Strange Meeting" (1918), a dialogue, which takes place in hell, but the surroundings of the
underworld strangely resemble a bunker. Two enemies meet here and trade opinions about the war,
the pointlessness of combat and their sense of being cheated. For each, patriotism is equated with
killing enemies. After death, such inflated words seem to be useless. The poem ends with the
observation, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend “which reverses the meanings of the words,
friend and enemy. "Futility" (1918) combines the simple with the elaborate and can be compared to
In Memoriam. But Tennyson suggested that life is not futile and finally made his peace with God,
while Owen presents a cry of despair that if the memories of the Great War ever fade, much of the
verse we associate with it will also be forgotten. Owen asserts that war is man made and not God's
creation. Hence, hostility is the only response to war. Owen's poems are consistent with the Roman-
tic tradition, yet can be read as the ironic denial of it. His poems combine beauty with terror; we feel
pity and we see the unnecessary waste. He saw that pity was the one thing that the war distilled, and
this it was the most important feeling for it showed that love was stronger that hate. Owen's
Collected Poems were published in 1920 by his friend, Siegfried Sassoon.

Like Owen, Isaak Rosenberg (1890-1918) was a poet of promise who was killed in the First World
War. His work was experimental in character, strongly influenced by his Jewish background. His best-
known poems deal with his experiences in the trenches. His poetry was rather remote from the
English rural traditionalism of the Georgians' by contrast with its symbolic and descriptive manner it
approached the works of European Expressionist paintings. In 1912 he published, at his own
expense, his first book of verse, Night and Day, which was followed by Youth (1915) and Moses: A
Play (1916). His best-known poems recount his war experiences. "Louse Hunting" presents a vivid
scene of killing lice in ones clothing; a common scene in trenches in the poem is transformed into
fascinating spectacle of dirt and misery, repulsive though it may be. His "Break of Day in the
Trenches" is one of his finest poems, again concerned with the life in the "Under-world." His
Collected Works appeared in 1937.

Some of Julian Grenfell's (1888-1915) poems are very painful, in that they permit no escape into self-
righteousness or other satisfactions afforded by the squib or lampoon. He joined the regular army in
1910, and in 1914 was sent to France. Grenfell died at Ypres. His most famous poem is "Into Battle"
(1915).

Edmund Charles Blunden (1896- 1974) wrote poetry in the style of the Georgians. His war
remembrances are conveyed in poems like Third Ypres" and “Report on Experience." These
memories and the guilt of survival become the recurring themes of his later poetry. His best known
work is Undertones of War (1928) in which he describes the destruction of both man and nature in
Flanders. His Collected Poems appeared in 1930.

David Michael Jones (1895 - 1974) was a Welsh poet and artist. He served in the First World War, an
experience which gave rise to one of his major works. Like all the above mentioned poets, his life had
been changed by the trenches. His observations were captured in the collection of poems, In
Parenthesis (1937). Jones is the most difficult to classify as a war poet, as most of his older colleagues
felt more akin to the Georgian rather than to the modernist poetry, while Jones clearly shows
sympathies with the Anglo-American modernism. In poems like "Mr. Jenkins Half Inclined his Head to
Them" and "All Curbs for Fog-Walkers" he writes an epic of war based on the soldiers' words.
Providing explicatory footnotes to his allusions to King Arthur, Jones situates his poems in the
chivalric tradition of the Middle Ages, yet he poignantly comments that the deaths of Arthurian
knights as well as those of the soldiers in the First World War were equally pointless.

Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) published his first poems in the Georgian Poetry an-theologies. He also
published poetry while he was serving in the First World War. Over the Brazier (1916) and Fairies and
Fusiliers (1917) began a career that continued over the years, steadily increasing his popularity. In his
poems he opposed British policy and its leadership thereby condemning the war, yet in this process
these same poems celebrate them use. Poems such as "The Beach," The Shot," "Recalling War" and
"Warning to Children'' recall the terrifying experience of the trenches. In the latter, the repetitions
serve to show the mental wounds inflicted by the war, as its victims are shell-shocked. Although
Graves wrote many poems recalling his war experiences which also reappear in his autobiography
Goodbye to All That (1829), the work which combines autobiography and a re-flection on the post
war disillusionment of his generation, he is also remembered as a prose writer. He shows energy and
versatility and he is well known for his historical novels,1, Claudius (1934), Claudius the God (1934)
and Count Belisarius (1938). One of the most interesting of his non-fiction works is The White
Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948). Here, Graves argues that true poets do not
derive their inspiration from the male God but go further in time, reclaiming the territory of
matriarchal Moon Goddess, the female principle, once dominant, in Christianity suppressed by a
patriarchal God.

The Imagists

Imagism is another important movement in the war and post war British and American literary
scenes. Imagism refers to a concept of poetry associated with an aesthetic school or movement that
flourished between 1910 and 1917.

It derived from the aesthetic philosophy of Thomas Ernst Hulme(I883- 1917) who in his essay
"Romanticism and Classicism" defines Romanticism as a 'spilt religion" and predicts a new "dry and
sophisticated" poetry of images. Imagism is thus a doctrine based on the anti-romantic opposition of
the "dry image" and influenced both poetry and the visual arts. Hulme published also a series of
articles on Bergson in 191l in the New Age and five short poems called The Complete Poetical Works
of T.E. Hulme. Much of his work survived in notebooks. Ezra Pound first refers to it in 1912 in the
appendix to Ripostes.

The next year, he and Frank Stewart Flint (1885– 1960) further publicised the school through articles
in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Flint, himself poet, published his first collection of poems In the Net
of the Stars in 1909 and a collection of conventional love poems entitled Cadences in 1915, He
subsequently renounced his romantic interests in favour of the Imagist poems. By the time Pound
had brought out Des Imagists: An Anthology (1914), Amy Lowell had displaced him as leader of the
group. Under her leadership, anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets were published in 1915, 1916
and 1917. By 1917 the movement had run its effective course. The first two anthologies contain
prefaces, which constitute the most deliberate statements of Imagist theory and stand as its
manifestos. The features outlined in these manifestos are brevity, economy of language, use of
everyday speech, and a preoccupation with the objective world. Imagists expressed themselves with
clarity, exactness and a correctness of detail, all structured around a single metaphor or rhythm of
cadences. The intention was to provide the reader with a direct experience of reality by eliminating
the abstract potential of poetic language. The poems depict urban life as dark, obscure, unpleasant
and dirty, utilising the form of free verse.

One of the chief exponents of Imagism was Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972), an American poet who
became familiar with ancient Chinese poetry through an essay by Ernest Fenellosa entitled The
Chinese Character. A Medium for Poetry. Pound combined this influence with the Japanese haiku
tradition to help him introduce his own conception ac-cording to Imagist principles. Haiku is a form
of Japanese verse that encapsulates a single impression of a natural object or scene. Feelings are
suggested by natural images rather than directly stated. Original haiku had seventeen syllables
arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. Pound's poem "In a Station of the
Metro" epitomises the Imagist formula for poetry writing. It consists of two lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet, black bough.

The petals on a wet black bough are the white faces put against dimness. For Pound the subway
tunnel looks like a bough, while the people hurrying down resemble a stream of water. He plays with
colours and contrasts. His comparisons embody a leap of imagination giving the reader a shock of
surprise. Pound also wrote a monumental polyglot work, Cantos, which took him several years to
complete. In Cantos, Pound embarked on the quest for the essence of contemporary times, which he
saw as spiritually empty. He shows the quest through various allusions, like the mythical figure of
Odysseus or Dante's journey through hell. The mixture of styles, sources and even language
employed was intended to demonstrate the complexity of culture." In 1915, he published a group of
poems called Cathay, which are loosely based on ancient Chinese poetry and seem to exemplify
Pound’s conviction that adaptation and translation are necessary parts of the poet's craft., These
poems touch remotely upon wartime London, but their general motifs are people exiled from home
during all wars. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), Pound uses a series of shorter poems to recount
the war in detail through the persona of another poet. The voice of Mauberly expresses Pound's
disgust and contempt for the war and the spiritual wasteland let in its wake, Pound left many
volumes of criticism Pavannes and Division (1918), How to Read (193 1) and ABC of Reading (1934)
to name but a few.

Amy Lowell (1874- 1925) was an American poet who belonged to the group. Which Ezra Pound
described as Amy-gists after she became the leader. Among her collections of verse are Men,
Women, and Ghosts (1916) and Can Grande Castle (1918). In most of her poems Lowell aimed for
Imagist precision, which sometimes affected the literary contents of the poems. Some of her best
poetry however is quite removed from the works which most deliberately try to encompass the
imagist ideals. In the poem Patterns, “Lowell ponders upon the conflict between an individual's
internal life and the conventions set by society. The poem is a dramatic monologue with a persona of
a speaker sharing history and revealing his character. In "Sisters," Lowell takes up the issue of
women's position in restrictive post-Victorian society. The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell
were published in 1955.

Richard Aldington (1892– 1962) began his literary career as the editor of The Egoist, an Imagist
periodical. He published several volumes of poetry, such as Images 1910– 1915 (1915). His collected
poems appeared in 1928. He also did some critical and biographical work, but was best known for his
novels: The Death of a Hero (1919), The Colonel 's Daughter (1931) and AIl Men are Enemies (1933),
the first recounting his experiences of the First World War. Portrait of a Genius, But... (1950) is a
biography of D.H. Lawrence which was friendly to Lawrence's writing but sometimes seems to be less
than fair to the man. Lawrence of Arabia. A Biographical Enquiry (1955) is a satirical portrait of
Thomas Edward Lawrence, the archaeologist and RAF pilot. Aldington married an American poet
Hilda Doolittle in 1913 (divorced in 1937).

Hilda Doolittle (1886--1961) who used the nom de plume, H.D., was not only associated with the
Imagists movement, but was also fascinated by classical literature, its love for nature and the
aesthetics of ancient culture. In her poems she tried to isolate a significant moment, in the Paterian
sense, from the flow of life, to immortalise the fleeting experience for its own sake without any
moral reflections, Her early poems were collected in Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems
(1920) and Red Roses rom Bronze (1929). Doolittle was very much the influenced by Freud's theories,
which, combined with her war experiences in London resulted in the long poem Trilogy comprising
The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946).

The icon of modern poetry is Thomas Stearns Eliot(1888- 1965), an American who settled in England
in 1915. He began publishing his own verse with the help and encouragement of Ezra Pound. His first
volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock shows the influence of Robert Browning's dramatic monologue . The name Alfred, a serious
stately name is immediately juxtaposed with a slightly funny surname. Such juxtaposition is keeping
with the mode of irony prevalent throughout the poem. creates the mode of iron prevalent in the
entire poem. The reader finds himself/herself in medias res, in the middle-of a given situation in
which two people are talking “let us go then, you and I," arguably the honorific "you" is the invitation
to the reader. The ensuing image is that of an evening compared to a patient etherised, spread out
on a table rendering a feeling of immobility an insipidness. No action, no motion is there, but the
suggestion of passivity and death. Although Eliot plays with symbolism (French symbolists believed
that poetry should not be linguistically logical but should be musically and symbolically tuned), the
poem employ metaphysical conceits, bringing together disparate images. After which follows a short
two-line couplet, which brings to mind the image of high society and women moving swiftly from
room to room talking about Michelangelo. This image is contrasted with that of cheap hotels, oyster
shells (aphrodisiac), sawdust and dirt. All throughout the poem the city is described by differentiating
between concrete, grim and unpleasant images. Recurring subjects and auditory elements unify the
work allowing the identity of the narrator to constantly shift. There is a sense of the emptiness,
futility and boredom, of spiritually sterile people, who unable to love. Hence, the impossibility for a
man and a woman to communicate. The love song becomes a tragic cry of frustration. This modern
urban hell(akin to Dante's hell from The Divine Comedy featuring in the epigraph, which is not
translated) would appear later in The Waste Land as Eliot developed his portrait of a decadent
modern civilisation unable to discern the difference between good and evil.

Eliot's poetry respects tradition, but re-defines it as well. References to mythological, biblical or
indeed literary antecedents are never made directly. Instead, he uses conceits to recreate tradition
with his uniquely dry, neoclassical intellectual tone, which also encompasses an emotional dimension
by means of what he called objective correlative.T.S. Eliot introduced the term objective correlative
in the essay “Hamlet and his Problems" (1919), reprinted in The Sacred Wood (1920). He claimed
that Hamlet was an artistic failure because the central character is dominated by inexpressible
emotions. Objective correlative is the external equivalent for an internal state of mind. The only way
to convey the inexpressible was to find a set of objects, a situation and a set of events which would
evoke equivalent emotions in the recipient, the same feelings that inspired the lines that flow from
the poet's pen. In other words, the poem should have the power to express feelings and evoke the
same emotions in the reader. Poetry was to intensify emotions by assembling scattered images and
stimulate their contemplation. Objective correlative is the way of overcoming the dissociation of
thoughts and feelings in English poetry.
When Prufrock came out, Eliot was assistant editor of The Egoist, a journal to which he contributed
some of his early criticism. In 1919, he produced Poems, which contained "Gerontion," and were
published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press. “Gerontion" links Prufrock with The Waste
Land. It is the tale of an old man who is deaf and blind, he cannot smell or taste but observes the
world, which for him becomes a symbol of barrenness. In 1922, Eliot founded The Criterion where he
published The Wasteland, dedicated to Ezra Pound. Eliot's cryptic and allusive masterpiece
powerfully ex-pressed man's need for salvation through the use of ancient myths translated into
contemporary literature. Utilising the motif of the Arthurian Grail myth, and the symbolic quest,
which is an archetypal journey according to James Fraser's The Golden Baugh, the poem weaves
together the themes of bareness, decay and death with the aspirations for life and resurrection in
the disillusioned post-war world. The Fisher King who rules the Wasteland is physically and sexually
impotent, thus another knight, Parsifal, has to set out on a journey in search for the signs of
resurrection. Both Christian and Buddhist sources serve to provide symbols of both the endeavours
and failures of modern civilisation to cope with its desolation and moral squalor. The poem consists
of five parts: "The Burial of the Dead “with the famous line: “April is the cruellest month'" because it
wakes nature and people up from their winter lethargy, but the nascent spring does not gives them
hopes for spiritual renewal. "The Game of Chess" offers images from the lives of two very different
women, who share a lack of love and spirituality. “The Fire Sermon" is a vision of fishermen from the
Thames connected with water (the symbol of life) and fish (the symbol of fertility)."Death by Water"
reiterates the symbol of water through the death of a Phoenician sailor signifying metaphysical
return to the beginning of life. The last part, "What the Thunder Said," leads the reader through the
Waste Land, and images of death as the Fisher King ponders how to save his land and turn the
"sterile thunder" into life giving rain. The Wasteland highlights the materialism of contemporary
culture and civilisation which slowly dies as it looses its spiritual element.

In 1925 Eliot published The Hollow Men, which reproduced the same mood of the inertia and
resignation of people who exist in modern spiritual emptiness.

After becoming a British citizen in 1927, he published Ash Wednesday (1930) which employs a less
taut, more lyrical style reflecting Eliot's discovery of faith. The master-piece of this new style was
Four Quartets, first issued as a whole in New York in 1943 after having been published in parts since
1936. These highly original poems were meditations on time and eternity, the personal and the
general, and on man's place in nature and in history. They were his first success at reaching a wide
audience and communicating in a modern idiom the fundamentals of Christian faith and experience.

With Sweeney Agonistes: An Aristophanic Fragment in 1932, Eliot began an attempt to revive poetic
drama, which continued with Murder in the Cathedral (1935), and The Family Reunion (1939), and
three comedies: The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman
(1958). These last were unsuccessful efforts to clothe profound ideas in the garb of a conventional
West-End play and as a vehicle to present poetic drama as a means to convey the meaning of
objective correlative. Drama, more than poetry, exemplifies the distance between the persona of the
author and the internal and external world of his experience. Since the author can, in this case, only
speak through his characters, his objectivity is assured. Eliot looks at British history through the eyes
of a stranger in his work about the murder of Thomas à Becket, Murder in the Cathedral. He
compares the mythic rituals of Becket's time with the contemporary devaluation of their meanings in
Murder in the Cathedral. The purifying force of confession degenerates into psychoanalytic sessions,
while the symbolic rite of the consumption of the body and blood of Christ becomes the cocktail
party. Eliot also produced a minor masterpiece in Old Possum 's Book of Practical Cats (1930), a
classic among books of poetry for children.
Apart from his literary career, Eliot was an influential critic who wrote several works of criticism, such
as The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933), Elizabethan Essays (1934), The ldea of a Christian Society (1938), Notes Toward the
Definition of Culture (1948), Poetry and Drama (1951) and essays On Poetry and Poets (1957).

Wyndham Percy Lewis (1882- 1957), an American leader of the vorticist movement, collaborated
with Ezra Pound to edit Blast, the Review of the Great English Vortex (1914– 1915). Pound claimed
that vorticism was a further step from imagism. Vorticism was an avant-garde movement, realised
primarily in the visual arts. It embraced Bergsonian vitalistic philosophy merging it with Italian
futurism, whose focus was the "vortex “of a present shorn of all illusions and ideals. Its manifestos
appeared in the two issues of Lewis's magazine Blast and called for the end of all sentimentality and
melancholy, in place of new abstraction celebrating the dynamic energies of the machine age. Yet, at
the same time, Vorticism accusing Futurism of having romanticised the machine. Lewis was both a
painter and a writer who carried the spirit of his abstract paintings into his satirical novels, Tarr
(1918) and The Childermass Book I (1928). He also wrote a trilogy The Human Age, of which Books II
and III, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, were published in 1955. The Apes of God and Self
Condemned appeared in 1930 and 1954, respectively. He also wrote short stories and essays on
criticism. Even more than Huxley, he was repulsed by the physical side of human existence, claiming
that this renders us no more than mere animals. On the other hand, he hated the reduction of
behaviour to typically mechanistic responses with people behaving like machines. In Time and West-
ern Man (1927) Lewis attacked Joyce as representative of the time-obsession of the modern Western
World.

The Novel

In the 1920s, writers started to examine the influence of the Great War on human beings. The war
changed and undermined many values and the novel, not poetry proved to be a more adequate
means to describe post-war reality. Yet, the old established forms did not suit the writers of the post-
war era. Contemporary writers reformulated the assumptions of novelistic discourse and recognised
that each individual was isolated in his/her perception of reality, and such perception moreover was
always unique. Objectivity was substituted with subjectivity and the representation of the world
filtered through individual conscious-ness. The transformation from the traditional to the modern
can be readily seen in the development of the experimental novel. For this genre, in particular, the
traditional means of character construction was inadequate. Consequently, there is a growing
interest in stream of consciousness techniques. The theoretical basis was formulated by the
American psychologist William James (1842-1910). In his Principles of Psychology (1890), James
claimed that human consciousness is characterised by a continuous stream of thoughts. An-other
important voice belonged to Henri Bergson who published his Matter and Memory in1896 and
Creative Evolution in 1907.

Influenced by the work of William James and Henri Bergson, novelists developed stream of
consciousness technique. Imitating one's internal thoughts such a technique was intended to give
the reader a direct insight into a character's mind. Stream of consciousness is usually presented
through the device of an interior monologue, the stream of consciousness being the subject matter
and interior monologue being the technique of presenting it. Rejecting the traditional convention of
presenting a character's thoughts in a rational and orderly manner, writers began to use
disorganised, unfinished sentences to reflect the chaotic state of the human psyche. Although it is
not always the case, linguistic disorder or the lack of punctuation (Joyce) often makes the reading of
such works difficult. The writers' search for a new set of values needed a new literary format to
convey the complexity of their experience. The flow of thoughts, illogical and based on free
associations mirrored the chaotic nature of the existence of a modern man. Prose based on
associations had already been practised by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, but writers like
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf perfected the stream of thought technique. Other writers still pre-
served the traditional realistic novel structure. E.M. Forster examines English traditionalism as if
through the critical eye of a stranger, comparing its stale values to the fresh ideas from the continent.
D.H. Lawrence uncovers meaning in physical functions such as sex and the importance of sexual
drives in the development of a human being. He constructs an alternative system of values that make
public the forbidden and concealed. The Victorian tradition and its repercussions in the post-
Victorian era were constantly re-evaluated in the novels, poetry and drama of the period.

The technique of the stream of consciousness was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) in
Pointed Roofs (1915). Pointed Roofs is the best of her twelve novel sunder the general title
Pilgrimage. Others in the series are Backwater (1916), Honeycomb(1917), Interim (1919), The Tunnel
(1919), Deadlock (1921), Revolving Lights (1923),The Trap (1925), Oberland (1927), Dawn's Left Hand
(1931), Clear Horizon (1935) and Dimple Hill (1938). The series deals with the life of Miriam
Henderson, but the outside world is reduced to a reflection in the consciousness of the heroine.
Miriam Henderson is Dorothy Richardson’s fictional "alter ego". It is through her eyes that the
narration is filtered. Concurrent with William James' precepts, the books deal with private
phenomena, which in turn construct personal realities. Still, Richardson not only records subjective
states of mind but primarily reveals its subjective singularity. While the reader witnesses the inner
voyage, s/he is confronted with a realistic as well as an allegorical journey. The collective title of the
novels-chapters suggest the metaphor of a journey of self-development, a quest for identity, a
pilgrimage through life towards Miriam’s true self."

The master of stream of consciousness was James Joyce (1882- 1941). Joyce was born in Dublin,
educated at Jesuit schools and then at University College Dublin. Dissatisfied with the narrowness
and bigotry of Irish Catholicism, as he saw it, he went to Paris for a year in 1902, before returning to
Dublin in 1903. A short time later he left Ireland for good to spend the rest of his life abroad, in
Trieste, Zurich and Paris. At the time, Joyce started working on an autobiographical novel Stephen
Hero which he later reworked as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and published in 1916.
Stephen Hero was published posthumously in 1944. While abroad, he supported himself by teaching
English, contending for many years with poverty, and suffering late in life from severe eye trouble.
Joyce was a European but at the same time a typically Irish writer. Joyce living in self-imposed exile
writes about Ireland, thinks about Ireland as if he had never left the country, “Have I ever left it?"
was his answer to the question whether he would ever go back. One of his most apparent influences
was James Clarence Mangan (1803– 1849), an Irish poet, whose life was ruined by alcohol and
poverty. Joyce thought of Mangan as a truly nationalist poet, the author of such poems as "Dark
Rosaleen" and "The Nameless One," whose greatness would never be discovered as long as the two
"imperialisms," British and Roman Catholic, prevail. Joyce, more than any other writer, acutely felt
the loneliness of the artist, a condition stressed also by yet another Irish writer, Oscar Wilde.
Sometimes ironically, sometimes sentimentally Joyce comments on the Celtic Revival and the writers
and politicians connected with it, as for example we observe on account of the fall of Parnell in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Time and time again in his writing Joyce characteristically salutes and bids farewell to the Ireland he
had left and to the Ireland he created in his absence from it and its absence from him.
Joyce the European draws extensively from the vast heritage of European literary, just as Joyce the
Parisian reads contemporary French authors, especially poets. One of the writers, whose influence
pervades Joyce's writing is Dante (1265- 1321), the pillar of Catholic poets, whose writings were
rediscovered by Romantic writers such as Byron and Shelley and the Victorian critic Thomas Carlyle.
Joyce also drew from the anti-Catholic tradition of Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600). Homer, Freud,
Gustave Flaubert (1821- 1880), Leo Tolstoy (1828 -1910), Henrik Ibsen (1828- 1906) are among his
many other influences.

His first published work was a volume of verse, Chamber Music (1907), which was followed by the
collection of short stories entitled Dubliners (1914). Chamber Music is a collection of musical verse
full of magical imagery. It was later also published together with other poems in Collected Poems
(1936). These poems included "The Holy Office"(1904), a personal commentary on an ambiguous
Aristotelian metaphor, and "Gas from a Burner," a satirical monologue of a publisher commenting on
some authors of the Celtic Revival.

In Dubliners through a series of sketches, Joyce wanted to portray the city of Dublin and its citizens.

Almost all the characters want to escape from Dublin but are hindered by various circumstances or
their own inability to change the status quo. The realistic narration of Dubliners does not reflect life,
but creates reality. The stories are arranged so as to show four different aspects of life, childhood,
adolescence, maturity and public life. He considered the stories a moral history of Ireland, and a
portrait of the city as the centre of its paralysis. The stories are short descriptions directed towards
an epiphany, each revealing a truth about the reality of each situation. First, an environmental trap
takes form and then the possibility of escape unfolds before a final moment of frustration seals the
trap. These three elements are present in "A Little Cloud," the story which begins the "adult life"
stories. The narrative describes a meeting of two friends; the less intelligent but successful one and
the more gifted but unhappy one. The former finds success in leaving Dublin while the other one
stays. The latter thinks that there might be some hope for him outside Dublin, but the hope
dissipates upon his return home to a wailing baby. He (a weak father) shouts at his small son. He
knows that he is a prisoner for life. The titles of many of the stories are evocative of the fugitive
fragmentary moods and impressions of modern life . "Eveline" ends with the heroine's indecision
whether to board the ship and search for her new life with Frank or stay and lead a secure existence
with her family in Dublin. In “Ivy Day in the Committee Room," naturalistic details manifest their
symbolic significance. Set in the committee room of an Irish Party (nationalists), the local election is
still dominated by the absence of Charles Parnell. The party deteriorates into a group of self-centred
politicians. Joyce claimed that Parnell was betrayed by his own people and by placing the story on
October 6, the anniversary of Parnell's death, he commemorates a great politician and a great man.
In "Two Gallants" we meet two men, Corley and Lenehan, whose only purpose in life is to find
someone to live off. Like para-sites they sponge on unsuspecting human beings. In "The Dead" Joyce
brings together the public life and private portraits of several characters. Gabriel is a man whose
intellect and apparent sensitivity are stifled by his environment. At the party, a sudden surge of
emotion toward his wife takes him into a new area of experience, yet at the crucial moment he
realises the emptiness of their relationship, its vacuity. His wife's romantic involvement shows
Ireland's taste for sentimentality, and as Gabriel looks out of the window the story extends beyond
the particulars of his own experience, and the final passages concerns himself with Ireland. "The
Dead" culminates the collection with the immanence of death and the symbolic appropriation of the
past. "His own [Gabriel's] identity was fading out into grey impalpable world: the solid world itself,
which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling".
In Exiles (1918), Joyce's only play, an Irish writer is paying a visit home after nine years of self-
imposed exile in Italy. There is something ostensibly egoistic about the writer. He preaches ideas of
freedom and enlightenment, but in fact makes everyone around him frustrated and unhappy. To an
extent, he is close to Joyce himself who, at the time, was also fighting to find a moral justification for
his self-imposed exile.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, first published serially in The Egoist (1914-1915), is a semi-
autobiographical novel, a Künstlerroman, yet another form of Bildungsroman, a developmental
history in which we see how the artist grows up. Five chapters illustrate his growth, each proceeding
in increasingly more complex language filtering the world through Stephen's eyes. When Stephen is
five, his perception of reality is that of a five years old, and he longs for his family's warmth. Yet,
some of his observations betray the author, as Stephen could not remember all that is recorded in
the book. The narration is kept in the third person to keep some distance between Joyce and
Stephen, but its lack of continuity precludes its realistic progress. Thus the story depends on those
situations which had immense influence on Stephen's development. His experience and thoughts
about art are bound with the portrayal of his childhood and adolescence, and of his emerging
sexuality in the context of ideological and national issues related to the emerging ideas of Irish
freedom. Terms like "sin," "soul," "transgression" frequently occur in the text but Stephen’s sexual
initiation (with Dublin prostitute) is presented as an indispensable transgression. Yet, an act of
confession represents a linguistic as well as a spiritual problem. Stephen Dedalus' name has mythical
connotations with Dedalus, the artist and scientist, who built the labyrinth for the man-eating
Minotaur, but was subsequently imprisoned, and constructed wings, which enabled him to escape.
Dedalus is less known than his son, Icarus, who flew too high and the sun melted the wax on his
wings and as a result he drowned. The contrasts between flying high, artistic raptures and fall and
corruption are constantly present in the book, as Stephen is systematically exposed to the right and
attitudes in life. Still, he is meant to follow the middle attitude of Dedalus. The absurdities of life are
slowly revealed to him but he has to learn for himself how to discern life's little ironies from its
serious moments. Here, as in Dubliners, epiphanies play an important role in tying together this
openly constructed work.

Epiphany is a term used in Christian theology denoting God's presence on Earth. Joyce used
epiphany to show spiritual manifestation happening in everyday life. In Joyce an epiphanies, a
common object or gesture can appear radiant to the observer and provide a sudden revelation.

Ulysses, Joyce's most famous book, was published in Paris in 1922. This novel is a re-flection of
Joyce's fascination with mythology as it is constructed around the mythic journey of the ancient hero
Ulysses. The Odyssey, as T.S. Eliot claimed, is both subtext and pretext, which made the modern
world possible for art. Joyce, as much as his hero, becomes the epic hero of his own literary Odyssey.
Here again, Joyce exiles himself within his consciousness into his memory of Dublin, his imaginary
homeland. Revolving around the events of one day in Dublin in June 1904, the novel presents a
young artist, Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish
advertisement canvasser, and Bloom's wife, Molly. The newspaper is one of the symbols in Ulysses.
Associated with waste and disposability, the newspaper provides a model for the collective archive of
memories, ideas, and idioms. It is connected to public knowledge and communication shared by
individuals. The plot follows the wanderings of Stephen and Bloom through Dublin, describes their
eventual meeting and ends with a monologue by Molly Bloom. Various chapters roughly correspond
to episodes in Homer's Odyssey and Stephen represents Telemachus, while Bloom is Odysseus, and
Molly resembles Penelope. The novel parallels the wanderings of Ulysses/Odysseus. “In a different
reading, Stephen can be a Sancho Pansa and Bloom a Don Quixote. The Odyssey and Don Kichote are
but the most obvious literary references. The intertextual web of Ulysses is much more complex and
to draw on all of the allusions would require another book. In the course of the story, a public bath, a
funeral, a newspaper office, a library, public houses, a maternity hospital and a brothel are visited. A
number of other Dublin scenes and characters are also introduced. Stream of consciousness and
parody are among the techniques used in this highly allusive work that moves from extreme realism
to fantasy.

Ulysses was Joyce's grand undertaking and it is not possible to outline all of its narrative techniques.
The major ones, however, are, according to Gross, the following:

1. Thematic - patterns of imagery, internal allusions, external parallels, the reintroduction or

2. Mimetic - onomatopoeia, imitative rhythms, violations of normal word order and other devices
designed to make the language enact what it describes.

3. Cinematic - the literary equivalents of close-ups, flashbacks, slow motion sequences, tracking
shots, jump cuts, and so forth; not that cinema was in any way a direct source of inspiration, but it
does provide the analogy for Joyce's dynamic handling of space and a constantly shifting angle of
vision.

4. Poetic - imaginative word play, condensed syntax, startling metaphors, abrupt juxtapositions:
poetic effects, that is to say, in the spirit of symbolist or post-symbolist poetry.

5. Centrifugal-jokes, interruptions, false clues, marginal erudition, Rabelaisian catalogues, tricks after
the fashion of Tristram Shandy intended to overflow the framework of the story and draw attention
to the artificial nature of the fictional medium itself.

Samuel Beckett claimed that Joyce had an absolute mastery over words, that he could make them
express anything. Joyce was constantly trying to improve his art and make language express the
inexpressible. Finnegans Wake, extracts of which appeared as Work in Progress, is an example of
Joyce's wrestling with language. The book was published in its entirety in 1939. Along with Ulysses, it
revolutionised the form and structure of the novel by its development of the stream of
consciousness technique, and its pushing language to the extreme limits of communication. Joyce's
excessive use of puns, allusions and strange combinations of words make Finnegans Wake a difficult
read. Its central theme is the cyclical pattern of fall and resurrection. Here, Joyce consciously refers to
the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), who resurrected the classical view of history
as that of a cyclical process. Vico claimed that human history returns to the beginning after going
through four successive periods: the mythological, the heroic, the human, and the chaotic. Joyce
presents the story of H.C. Earwicker, a Dublin tavern keeper, whose dreamy unconscious ramblings
through the course of one night establish him as a modern-clay Everyman. Other characters are his
wife, Anna Livia, their sons Shem, the artist and Shaun, the man of deed, and their daughter, Isabel,
Iseut, Isolde or Issy. Their relationships take on the mythical and historical dimensions Joyce seeks to
illustrate as their transformations and changes take place in a dimension where time is a relative
category. Anna becomes Napoleon's first wife, Josephine, mother Eve, the river Liffey. The
transformations of the female characters stress the eternally cyclical nature of human life.
Linguistically, the text is an amalgamation of several languages and proves to be largely
untranslatable symbolising the tower of Babel. It suggests the irreducible multiplicity of idioms, the
incomplete that works against the totalising forces of culture. In spite of its obscurity, Finnegans
Wake contains great beauty and humour. If in Ulysses the newspaper features as one of the symbols
of communication, in Finnegans Wake it is the radio. The radio recurs several times transforming the
techniques of vocal operations. What is more, the radiophonic permeability of voices in Finnegans
Wake suggests the capacity of the text to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside and
thereby strengthen the multitude of voices already present in the text.

Joyce claimed that the human experience of life has its own aesthetic value. It is nothing and
everything at the same time. It can be trivial, heroic or indeed both, it all depends on the point of
view. Recreating a small fragment from somebody's life in full detail intensifies the subjectivity of this
experience, and at the same time communicates the impossibility of its objective presentation
through language.

One can see Flann O'Brien, whose real name was Brian O Nuallain (O'Nolan) (1911- 1966) as Joyce's
disciple as well as Joyce's critic. After graduating from University College Dublin, he did linguistic
research in Germany and then joined the Irish Civil Service, The influence of Joyce's parody, satire
and literary fantasy is evident in At-Swim-Two-Birds, published in 1939. The book explores the
possibilities of creation within the absurd world created by an author writing a book about another
writer. The construction is based on the Chinese box principle in which the characters change places
with, and sometimes take control over, the main narrator who, in turn, is the creation of Flann
O'Brien. The book opens with four beginnings, the narrator, chewing bread and giving us examples of
three separate openings for the novel he is about to write. The writer is an undergraduate of
University College Dublin, and lives with his uncle. His life at home and at college as a scholar
drunkard forms one narrative. Another beginning is the burlesque account of the legendary Gaelic
heroes Finn McCool and Mad Sweeney. The third beginning is the story of Dermont Trellis, who is
writing a novel, the characters of which lead an independent life while Trellis is asleep and revenge
themselves on him by writing a novel in which he is a character. The layers of functionality is
summarised by the narrator who tells us that "The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer,
could be despotic." Such a despotic author could be only Joyce. O'Brien also wrote a novel in Gaelic,
An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941). He also authored Faustus Kelly (1943), a play The Hard Life
(1961) and The Third Policeman (1940, finally published in 1967). The Third Police-man links the
world of realism with the world of fantasy. The novel begins with the murder of an old man called
Mathers by the hero and his companion John Divney, and ends sixteen years later when the hero
reappears on the threshold of Divney's house. The reality of the book consists of the theories of de
Selby (Das Selbe, the Self), who seeks omniscience and is irretrievably reduced to fantasy. The fact
that de Selby's world is controlled by police-men brings to mind the connection between fantasy and
social reality. Such contrast is also presented in The Hard Life, in which the schoolboy Finbarr
observes the fantasies of his older brother Manus while he himself remains in the real world.
O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive (1964) was turned into a play and produced on the Dublin stage in 1965.
As Myles na Gopaleen, he was a well-known satirical columnist for The Irish Times. A legendary figure
among Irish writers, he lived with his wife in Dublin until his death in 1966.

Two other Irish writers worth mentioning here are Eimar O'Duffy (1893-1935) and Mervyn W a 11
(1908-1997). O'Duffy's first novel, The Wasted Island (1919), is a bitter record of the ferment that
preceded the 1916 rising and the bitterness originated after-wards. His King Goshawk and the Birds
(1926) is the first work in the Cuandine trilogy relating the adventures of the mythical Irish hero
Cuandine in contemporary Ireland and England. O'Duffy uses fantasy and allegorical journeys to
satirise contemporary Ireland. Other novels in the Cuandine trilogy are The Spacious Adventures of
the Man in the Street (1928) and Assess in Clover (1933). In contrast to O'Duffy, Wall used medieval
themes to satirise contemporary Ireland and primarily the Irish Catholic Church's influence on public
life. His most famous are two novels about a medieval monk, The Unfortunate Fursey (1946) and The
Return of Fursey (1948). In Leaves for Burning (1952), Wall presents the journey of a group of friends
who want to re-inter the body of W.B. Yeats as an image of the misery of Irish post-war society and
culture. Both O'Duffy and Wall used satire and fantasy to oppose the restrictive Censorship Acts (in
1923 censorship of cinema was introduced, and in 1929 of printed matter).

For Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and for Joyce "the art of fiction" (the phrase taken from a famous
article published in 1894 by the American writer Henry James (1843-1916) was unquestionable. She
is the other most famous exponent of the stream of consciousness in fiction. The daughter of Sir
Leslie Stephen, well-known editor of the Cornhill Magazine, she lived in Bloomsbury after the death
of her mother. This place gave name to the Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals and writers
who shared similar views on art and literature, asserting that the most important things in life were
love, enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Although the members of the
group denied any sort of formal ties, according to McNeille, the group consisted of Virginia Woolf,
E.M. Forster, the literary journalist Desmond Mac Carthy (1877--1952), the critics Roger Fry (1866-
1934, also a painter) and Clive Bell (1881-1964), the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, the
painters Duncan Grant (1885- 1978)and Vanessa Bell (1979- 1961, Virginia Woolf's sister), the
political writer and worker, publisher and auto biographer Leonard Woolf and the economist John
Maynard Keynes(1883- 1946).

Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a socialist and an author of historical literature, and in 1917 they
founded together the avant-garde publishing house, Hogarth Press. Beginning with essays and critical
works, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in1915. Written under the influence of E.M.
Forster, it already had certain traits very characteristic of her future writing with its limited number
of characters and narration from a female perspective. The text is a hazy, fluid and metaphoric
interplay between the public his-tory and personal experience. Virginia Woolf contributed
significantly to the development and status of the art of fiction. From Jacob's Room (1922) to
Between the Acts (published posthumously in 1941) her experiments with the novelistic form
minimalised the importance of facts, events and character analysis in order to concentrate on the
moment by moment experience of living itself. She did this by eliminating the author as narrator and
commentator. While Joyce was still interested in the transfiguration of the object under the eyes of
the spectator, Woolf was interested in the transfiguration of the mind of the spectator looking at the
object. Woolf saw that truth is suddenly revealed in connection with some trivial perception. Her
idea of the art of the novel was to show life as it is, but to achieve this the artist has to enter into the
mental reality of the characters. Yet, still, in or-der to achieve a true reflection of life, one has to
transform it. Reality exists through moments of revelation and recollection. She was also a
distinguished critic who excelled at conveying the impression made by an author or a work upon a
receptive and cultivated mind. The Common Reader, first issued in 1925, The Second Common
Reader (1932) and Modern Fiction are the crucial works for understanding the atmosphere of these
years and grasping the themes and motifs of the literature of the period. In A Writer 's Diary, her re-
flections on each of her works from conception to completion convey a vivid impression of the joys
and the agonies of the creative act. Her diary provides an extremely interesting self-conscious
analysis of the writing of each novel; never before has the material and style of the diary been so
markedly analogous to the Work in Progress. Her other prose works are Orlando (1928) and The
Years (1937).

The Voyage Out (written 1912 - 1913, published 1915) concerns a young woman of twenty four,
Rachel Vinrace who travels to South America on board of her father's ship with her uncle and aunt.
The necessary enclosure enables Woolf to observe social interaction between the passengers of the
ship. In South America, Rachel meets a young Englishman, who attempts to write a novel. Being
interested in women's experience he in strengthening her femininity but also her dislike towards late
Victorian patriarchal society In an attempt to broaden her learning Rachel begins to read the classics
but finds then alienating in their lack of representation female experience. Such views were later to
be developed in Woolf’s Room of One 's Own (1929). The love-friendship idyll between Rachel and
Terence is destroyed by Rachel's illness and death. The novel ends with an English party at the hotel
after the funeral resuming their ordinary lives and taking leave to their bedrooms. The Voyage Out
reverses the traditional order of Bildungsroman as the heroine becomes increasingly confused and
disorientated.

Jacob’s Room, her third novel after the transitional Night and Day (1919), was an attempt to capture,
through the impressions and remembrances of others, the personality of a young man who died
during the war. Although there are components of a traditional biography, the attention is not on
facts, but rather on the creative process itself. The novel follows the progress of Jacob as he passes
from adolescence into adulthood wandering through Cornwall and Greece. There is no voice of the
protagonist. Instead we have the multiplicity of voices of those who remember him, and he is
remembered through related incidents, thoughts and impressions. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is the story
of one June day in the lives of London residents, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren, and the
ways in which their characters become complimentary. Clarissa, a neither especially intelligent nor
beautiful society matron, carries the action with the errands and chance meetings that punctuate
her preparations for a party that evening. Woolf shows us a deeper level of Clarissa's character
through her personal remembrances of her whole life. For Septimus Warren that June day is the last
day of his life. Psychologically wounded during the war, this young man is revealed through bits and
pieces of his thoughts and the associations his wife makes. He meets Clarissa in the park and then
other links emerge. This novel is very carefully constructed. It has two separate narrations, which
have their own temporal frames. From the fragments of the narrations of other people, we are
presented with an all-encompassing picture of London society. Woolf recognised the need for the
creation of a new reality in novels through photographic representation. Woolf de-scribes reality
from a character's point of view rather than from an omniscient narrator’s standpoint. The
personalised account consists of descriptions of colours and the effect these colours have on the
character. There seems to be more vagueness in such descriptions than in the case of Joyce. Instead
of facts, we are dealing with impressions and what “seems to be" rather than "what is"; yet, the
setting, the description of characters and the time frame are realistic.

Similar to Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse (1927) is also concerned with the passing of time. The
novel is based on the frame of a planned excursion by the Ramsay family and a few of their friends to
the lighthouse. Woolf gives family life a symbolic outline, recognising the disappearance of the
Victorian system of family life and the decline of family happiness. The novel has an extremely
complex realistic surface, in the first part entitled "The window" the sixteen characters are shown
doing ordinary things, walking, reading, knitting, painting, etc. before the central event, the dinner,
takes place in chapter seven-teen. The youngest child, James Ramsey, wants to visit the local
lighthouse but due to the rough weather his parents refuse to go and the trip is postponed. "Time
passes" covers the period of the First World War and the death of Mrs. Ramsey alongside Lily's
attempts to escape her influence. One of the Ramseys' sons dies in the war, and the house as well as
the family structure deteriorates. In the final section, "The Lighthouse," the celebrated excursion
takes place, and James and his father are finally symbolically reconciled and come to terms with the
changes that affected them. The sea remains timeless and unchanging. although life everywhere is
irrevocably altered. The lighthouse symbolises Mrs. Ramsey, capable and inspiring, whose role is
taken on and adopted by Lily Briscoe as she seeks to capture the changing nature of people and
events in a single composition. To the Lighthouse contrasts English middle-class society before and
after the war, seeing them through the affectionate yet modern woman, Lily Briscoe, who is painting
the portrait of Mrs. Ramsey. Narrated through her sensitivity, the novel demonstrates the power of
her personality. Lily is given a certain historical consciousness which is representative not only of the
Ramseys but also of the entire society, while at the same time providing a commentary on the
system of values Woolf's parents represented in their time.

Orlando: A Biography (1928) possesses quite a different quality from all the other Woolf’s books. The
elusiveness of the central character is not the central theme. Orlando is far closer than Jacob; his/her
thoughts frequently overlap with the biographers. The novel was dedicated to Woolf's close friend
(and lover), Vita Sackville-West. The novel narrates the career of the androgynous Orlando from the
late sixteenth century, a handsome boy of sixteen, to the present day Lady Orlando. For Woolf the
concept of androgyny was more than simply Orlando’s cross dressing and sex changing. In A Room of
One's Own, Woolf develops her concept of an artist's androgynous mind, illustrating it with the
image of two people getting into a taxi at the same time from two different sides. The text contains
many literary and historical insights into the ages through which it sweeps. The reader meets many
eminent literary and political figures of the times. At the beginning of the twentieth century Orlando
is a female and a poet, and the novel ends with Orlando driving to his/her ancestral home in Kent.
The Waves (1931) has a construction similar to a poetic drama and consists of a series of the interior
monologues of three men and three women pertaining to different periods of their lives; their
monologues are also commentaries on other people The book uses human beings as histories to
illustrate the nature of life. The image of waves is used to show different measures of chronological
and psychic time.

Another "biography" is Flush (1933), which revolves around the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
pet spaniel. In 1923 Woolf composed the play Freshwater satirising Victorian ideals on romance, love
and marriage. She returned to the same topics in The Years (1937), a conventional family saga
chronicling the lives of the Pargiters family from1880s to the 1930s. Subsequent chapters trace the
lives of the seven children after the death of their mother. Such ideas required a framework other
than factual and conventional. The book is an extended intellectual metaphor written in a very
difficult time; a politically and socially complex situation is anchored in the novel's method and
intent. The rejection of the "masculine world of aggression and propaganda" results in a powerful
striving towards a peace-engendering personal freedom. Woolf presents a middle class English family
who have to adapt their worldview to contemporary times marked by the occasion of a great family
reunion in 1936. Three Guineas (1938), the book that followed The Years, conserve as a valuable non-
fictional appendix to it. In this book, Virginia Woolf makes the analogy between paternalism and
fascism as being similarly oppressive totalitarian systems. Between the Acts, Woolf's last novel,
returned to the experimental form. The novel is set in a country house and centres upon the
performance of a village pageant during a June afternoon. It features a number of characters whose
thoughts are presented as stream of consciousness. The shadow of the war hangs over the June sky
but the novel celebrates the values of life, which will be irrevocably changed by the war.

To an extent, Woolf's characters function as archetypes. Mrs. Ramsay is the archetype of a woman
who filters her experience through the internal world of the household. She is perceived entirely in
relation to the family and the house, and when she dies, the house loses its soul. As one of the first
writers to give women the primary voice, Virginia Woolf manages to happily marry timeless general
archetypes with particular human beings and their unique lives filled with problems and joys. She
was also one of the first writers to voice the opinion that a woman's mind and perception differs
radically from that of a man's and it should be kept so, rather than women's attempting to live up to
masculine standards.
Woolf is widely recognised as a precursor of modern feminist criticism, with her Room of One's Own
as well as Three Guineas she voiced her opinion on the customary subjugation of women, their non-
existence in a literary canon and expressed criticism of the (male) classics. In A Room of One's Own
she battles for women's right to be their own persons in-stead of living through their families. The
title "room" signifies privacy and "a view of the open sky," but it also means freedom and liberty of
artistic expression. Answering the question why there were no famous Elizabethan women writers,
Woolf conjured the figure of Shakespeare's sister, Judith, who was driven to suicide by artistic
frustration. Woolf pays tribute to women writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Austen and the Brontë
sisters. Following her great predecessor, Mary Wollstonecraft, she then examines the disadvantages
of a woman's position in society, their educational obstacles she herself encountered when she tried
to enter the British Library reading room, a preserve reserved exclusively for men.

Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), although largely overshadowed by his wife's
achievements was also an author and a social reformer. He was an active member of the Fabian
Society and published many works on politics and international affairs. Among others, he published
Economic Imperialism (1920), Imperialism and Civilisation (1928). He also published novels, The
Village in the Jungle (1913), The Wise Virgins (1914) and Stories of the East (1916); all of them were
set in Ceylon.

Another member of the Bloomsbury Group was Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), a biographer and an
essayist. Himself a homosexual, Strachey spent the last sixteen years of his life in the household of
Dora Carrington (1893-1932), a painter, and her husband Ralph Partridge. Although he started his
career with critical works such as Landmarks in French Literature (1912), his most outstanding
achievement is in biography. In 1918 he published Eminent Victorians. His far from adulatory mode
of writing exposed Victorianism as hypocritical and oppressive. The essays on Dr. Thomas Arnold and
General Charles George Gordon expose public school system attacking the Victorian ideals of
Evangelicalism, liberalism and imperialism. His next work, Queen Victoria (1921), is a humorous
portrait of a young Queen, and warm portraits of the Queen as a wife, mother and then widow.
Strachey does not hide his admiration for the Queen's love for Albert but does not conceal her
legendary devotion to her servant John Brown, either. All in all, the picture of the stoutly Queen
Victoria is more human and sympathetic than many other of his portraits. Strachey's last work,
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928), presents an odd love affair between the Queen, already
very much past her prime, and a very young courtier, Essex, presented through the context of
Elizabethan times. Strachey uses theatrical devices to vividly present court intrigues and their dire
consequences (like the famous scene of execution of a supposed traitor, a Spanish Jew, Elizabeth's
court doctor, Dr. Lopez). Endowing his characters with psychological traits, Strachey conforms to the
narrative demands of his times. Apart from his biographies, Strachey left various collections of essays
and critical works on literature.

Another member of the Bloomsbury Group, Edgar Morgan Forster (1879-1970), is more traditional in
his approach to the novel writing. He was an intellectual aristocrat whose attachment to the old
values made him a typical Edwardian humanist-radical attached to romance and the realistic novel.
He started his career with the so-called Italian novels and short stories. His first novel, Where Angels
Fear to Tread (1905), is the tragi-comic story of a group of Englishmen who go to Italy in order to
retrieve the child of the late Lilia Herriton who married Gino, an Italian twelve years her junior and a
dentist's son. Themis-marriage is looked down upon by both families, but the Herritons are
particularly appalled. The book is split between two towns: Sawston, a small town close to London,
and Monteriano, in Tuscany. This division means that travel is important. The novel is also structured
around letters, and itself is a letter. The English are represented in contrast to the generous and
hospitable Italians. Not wanting to accept that the Italians might simply have a different lifestyle, the
Herritons want to take Lilia's child from his father and to rise him in England. Phillip, Lilia's brother-in-
law, manages to bond with Gino and finds Gino's spontaneity appealing. Although the child
eventually dies during the attempted kidnapping, the ending suggests reconciliation as the English,
previously deprived of spontaneity, ultimately find psychological rejuvenation.

Forster's next two novels, The Longest Journey (1907) and A Room with a View (1908), are largely
autobiographical. Far from being free from inconsistencies and structural weakness, The Longest
Journey has a brisk narrative pace, a poetic but precise style and humour, as well as sensitivity to the
tragic nuances of human experience, and a sense of psychological motivation. The book explores
different types of life and human relation-ships while satirising the narrow, unimaginative conformity
of the English public school. The story of Frederick (or Rickie) Elliot, a young man orphaned at fifteen,
is one of the most autobiographical of Forster's novels. The title of the novel is a quotation from
Percy Shelley’s love poem Epipsychidion (On the Subject of the Soul) in which he called marriage the
longest journey. Indeed, Forster's novel exposes the deadliness of loving one per-son. It also
discusses the situation of illegitimate children as the well guarded family secret. The apparent
misogyny of the novel should not be equated as an expression of Forster's homosexuality. Although
the implication that the subject of the novel is Forster's homosexuality, among other things because
of Rickie's final decision to leave his wife and help his half brother, such a view, however, is
problematic when we consider Forster's engagement with social issues. What is more, the tragic
death of Rickie on the train tracks, self-destructive and annihilating, recapitulates the issue of sexual
identity, of those who marry as well as the nature of marriage itself. A Room with a View is
structured around dark and light symbolism, the view and the absence of view. The novel explores
the opposition of lying and telling narrating the story of a girl who marries a man without the
approval of her family and escapes from the conventional snobbery represented by them. The book
criticises the English abroad with their aloofness and emotional sterility, contrasting it with the
spontaneous and passionate Italians. Italy here functions symbolically as the liberating agent.

Howards End (1910) is the first of Forster's two greatest achievements and rates highly for its
incisively drawn situations and its skill in bringing all segments of the middle class to bear upon catch
other. It is a novel which shows Forster's attachment to Edwardian England and the values soon to be
irretrievably lost with the upheaval of the First World War. The book explores the relation between
inward feeling and outward behaviour, and the story concerns the personal relationships and
conflicting values of the Schlegel and the Wilcox families, It weaves social comedy with serious and
often tragic situations and creates an interplay of the realistic and the archetypal modes of
representation. Again the novel is built on contrasts, this time there are contrasts between social
classes: the wealthy Wilcoxes and the poor Basts, and within the family between Margaret Schlegel
and her sister. Central to all these contrasts is the property, Howards End belonging to Ruth Wilcox
and bequeathed unofficially to Margaret Schlegel. As it turns out, Margaret gets Howards End as she
reconciles her husband Henry Wilcox with her sister, then an unmarried mother Helen Schlegel, after
what has become a family tragedy (Charles Wilcox, Henry's son, is accused of manslaughter following
the death of Leonard Bast). The ending of the story, owing to the common sense and moral strength
of Margaret, brings a vision of peace and affection.

Similar to The Longest Journey, A Passage to India (1924) requires the queer reading. Queerness in its
official sense highlights the uncanny and peculiar aspects of experience that often leave one with a
feeling of bewilderment. The novel is a study of cultural contrasts based on triangular structure of
Anglo-Indians, Indians-Hindu and Indians-Moslems. The novel presents the contrast of two worlds
whose differences are never overcome. Dr. Aziz is an intelligent young Indian Muslim who resents the
injustice of the English domination of his nation, but responds favourably to a friendship (with
homosexual innuendo) with Henry Fielding. Aziz's acquaintance with two English ladies, Adela
Quested and Mrs. Moore, proves to be a rather unhappy event for him. “Their trip to the Marabar
caves ends in Adela's hallucinations about an attempted rape by Aziz. Later she withdraws the
charges against him, but it is never clearly stated what had really happened in the caves. For Aziz,
however, the friendship with Fielding is over. The Marabar caves signify Forster's symbolic vision of
the impossibility of co-existence for those who subdue and those who are subjugated. They also
symbolise an inexplicable moral nihilism, senselessness and emptiness as well as an
incomprehensible female hollowness, the hole being the symbol of suckling, cruel and essentially
destructive femininity which is revealed in an almost Joyce-like epiphany moment.

Forster's last novel, completed in 1914 and published posthumously in 1971, is Maurice, a semi-
autobiographical work written according to the precepts of Bildungsroman, only this time it signifies
the growing and maturing of Maurice's sexual awareness. Born into a privileged family, young
Maurice grows up without a father and is spoiled by his mother and sisters. Although mindful of his
social status, Maurice finds himself more and more at-attracted to his own sex. An encounter in
Cambridge proves fatal as his friend Clive decides to conform to society's norms and marry, but the
gamekeeper Alec, met on Clive's estate, is the promise of happiness for Maurice. The novel unfolds
in such a way as to provide the context for exploring the sexual awakening of a young man and affirm
that homosexual love is ennobling and not degrading.

The Celestial Omnibus, Forster's short stories, appeared in 1911 followed by yet an-other collection
in 1928, The Eternal Moment. He called his stories "fantasies" and indeed fantasies they are. Some of
them have futuristic settings ("The Machine Stops"), whereas others ("The Story of a Panic," "The
Road to Colonus") are set in foreign countries, like Italy and Greece he visited. The stories repeat the
motifs Forster was most interested in, namely the contrast of paganism with the restraints of the
English culture, society's restrictions on personal freedom and life's little ironies, events which
shatter personal beliefs and systems of values.

In 1927 Forster published a theoretical work, Aspects of the Novel, which contains his views on novel
writing and concentrates on the presentation of story, characters and plots, citing examples from
various novels. In 1951 Forster published a collection of essays, re-views and broadcasts, Two Cheers
for Democracy, and in 1953 appeared his Hills of Devi (1953), a record of his visit to India. Foster’s
novels frequently contrast the English with foreigners. For him, the English represent a stern and
emotionally sterile nation while the Italians, with their passionate and open nature, stand for a
liberating force. Another theme is the clash between distant cultures like the European and the
Hindu ones. Here different systems of values and beliefs impede the resolution of the conflict.

Among the most interesting women writers loosely connected with the Bloomsbury group is
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-1923), who used the pen-name of Katherine Mansfield. She
was born in New Zealand and educated both there and in London. She spent most of her life in
England trying to improve the quality of her work and persistently battling with her ill health. She
wrote no full-length novel. In a German Pension (1911), Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The
Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) contain short stories in the impressionistic manner of
Chekhov. Plot counts for very little. Delicate observation is recorded with an exquisite precision of
phrase and the subtlest choice of detail. The represented world of the story is usually presented
through the perspective of her female characters. Mansfield searches for the expression of an
ephemeral experience in somebody's life. It is through details and associations that we perceive the
characters and the narrative background. Moments of joy are usually intertwined with sad innuendo.
In Her First Ball, she contrasts the attitude towards life as represented by the young protagonist, her
fascination with city life and the lights in the ballroom with the opinions of an old man who claims
that the first ball foretells the beginning of the last. Her Collected Stories were published
posthumously in 1945. Her Journal and Letters were edited by her husband John Middleton Murry,
and published in 1927 and 1928, respectively.

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was the son of a Nottingham miner. Educated at University
College Nottingham, for a time he was a schoolmaster there before he turned to writing as a
profession. Apart from his years in England during the First World War, he and his wife Frieda Weekly
b. von Richthofen, the daughter of a German baron and a wife of a Nottingham professor, spent most
of their time abroad. Lawrence and Frieda went to Germany together and married after her divorce
in 1914. From 1919 they lived mostly abroad, in Italy, Austria and New Mexico. Lawrence died of
tuberculosis in Vence, near Nice. While he was working at a school, he published some short stories,
poetry, and two novels, The White Peacock (1911) and The Trespasser (1912), the latter based on the
experiences of his friend Helen Cork.

In 1913 he published the autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913). In the novel the characters
of Mr. and Mrs. Morel are based on Lawrence's own parents. The marriage of the Morels is that of
the opposites. Mrs. Morel is the weak side, Mr. Morel, the strong, a bit primitive, but a hard working
man whom Mrs. Morel emotionally rejects. She constantly demonstrates her pretended elegance
and throughout the book makes him look brutal clumsy and worthy of contempt. The book
concentrates on the character of Mrs. Morel whose love for her sons proves to be fatal. William, the
eldest, dies nominally from a dis-case, but actually from his unsuccessful flight to London as a means
of breaking the bond with his mother. After that tragedy, Mrs. Morel turns her love towards her
younger son, Paul. This love is psychological incest, as she refuses to allow any other woman to take
her place, defeating all of Miriam's efforts to fight for Paul's love. Miriam is Paul's friend who fights
for Paul, but he eventually turns away from Miriam in a symbolic liberation from the bonds with the
mother. Leaving Miriam, Paul begins to recognise that people are trapped not by what they hate but
by what they love. All women in the story are manipulated by Paul (including Clara Dawes with
whom he achieves physical satisfaction and who is strongly disapproved of by Mrs. Morel) in his
painful effort at self-identity emphasising sexual survival. Lawrence claimed that sexual instincts are
crucial for the development of human beings and through these instincts each human being
becomes a separate entity. He was greatly skilled at the realistic portrayal of family life, which was
based on his own childhood experiences. Sons and Lovers, not unlike Joyce’s novels, has an open
ending. Yet, Lawrence employs traditional methods of writing, combining dramatic scenes with an
authorial commentary. Scenes often culminate in very vivid and sharply observed descriptions of
natural objects, which seem to sum up the emotional states of the characters.

In both The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), Lawrence presents his views that a mutual
and satisfactory relationship between two lovers is the key to self-identification. The Rainbow is the
story of three generations of Brangwens, from about the mid-nineteenth century up till the author's
time, as human life develops against the backdrop of the early twentieth century flowering of
industry, science and technology. For Lawrence, the ideal marriage is based on sexual attraction and
contrasting personalities. His work frequently attests to the belief that people's differing intellectual
capacities can find satisfaction in such relationships. Lawrence claimed that the lack of intellectual
bonds guarantees the solidity of the relationship as no party tries to dominate one another.
Throughout the novel the rainbow symbolises each character's struggle to achieve self-fulfilment.
The elder generation of Brangwens, Tom and his wife Lydia Lensky, the widow of a Polish refugee,
represents the values of the Victorian world, while the younger generation of Brangwens, especially
their daughter Ursula, in many ways resembles the New Woman. The New Woman was the new
model of femininity advocated by various writers in the late Victorian period. She goes to university
and works as a teacher. Women in Love takes up the story of Ursula, a product of contemporary
civilisation, who in order to define herself must reject the falsity and conventions of civilisation.
Ursula falls in love with Birkin, a disguised portrait of Lawrence himself. Her life and love is contrasted
with her sister Gudrun, a woman of intellect who, in the end, destroys, symbolically and literally,
Gerald, the son of a local colliery owner, the man she supposedly loves. Their respective love stories
present two distinctive attitudes towards love and contemporary society and civilisation. The four
characters are based on Lawrence and his wife Frieda (Birkin and Ursula) and John Middleton Murry
and Katherine Mansfield (Gerald and Gudrun).

Such resentment towards the falsity of contemporary civilisation led Lawrence to write other novels:
The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod (1922) were written in Italy, while Kangaroo (1923) is a product
of his four-month stay in Australia. He also wrote a novelette, St. Mawr, published together with The
Princess (1925), in both reality is mixed with mysticism; Sun (1926); The Escaped Cock (known as The
Man who Died); and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930). In 1922 Lawrence began his unfinished novel
Mr Noon, which de-scribed further events in the life of the Morel family. The Plumed Serpent (1926)
is the best example of his use of mysticism, as it attempts to recreate an ancient Mexican ritual in
what he considers to be contemporary Mexico. By bringing back to life the cruel rituals of ancient
Mexico Lawrence, already very ill and dependant on his wife, tried to recreate the primeval virility,
which was dominant over the female element. Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of forty, meets in Mexico
two men. Symbolically, one of them represents Quetzalcoatl, The Plumed Serpent, and the other
Huitzilpochtli, the god of war. Each of them wants to rid Mexico of Christianity.

Lady Chatterley's Lover reworks the same myth of male domination and female sub-mission in a
different way. It is his last fully expressionistic novel and adequately exemplifies Lawrence's views.
For Connie Chatterley, the meeting of Oliver Mellors is a sort of a school of love. Her marriage to an
aristocrat paralysed from his waist down symbolises the paralysis of the entire class's inability to
conceive. Her affair with young Mellor teaches her how to love and how to be loved. Along with its
challenge to puritan morality, the book gives Lawrence's views on a woman's role in a relationship.
As in his other books, a woman should acknowledge phallic power and should not seek sexual
satisfaction as an end in itself, and rather find contentment in a reverent submission to the male. The
book was published in an expurgate edition in 1928, an unabridged edition in 1929 in Paris, and in
full edition in England in 1960.

Lawrence also wrote poetry. His collections include Love Poems (1913), Amores (1916), Look! We
Have Come Through! (1917), New Poems (1918), Bay (1919), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923),
Pansies (1929), Nettles (1930) and Last Poems (1932). His non-fiction works include Psychoanalysis
and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). He also produced Studies in
Classic American Literature (1923),which analysed nineteenth century American literature.

For Lawrence, the novel was not art, still it could provide a substitute for what was lost in
contemporary times, namely a fresh vision. Lawrence's writing is sensuous and, at times, erotic. In
his novels he illustrates his views on human sexuality as an important element of growing up and
developing a mature personality. His involvement with expressionism influenced him to create
dynamic narratives. Anaïs Nin sees Lawrence's phallic obsession as not only invigorating for men but
also non-threatening, even liberating, to women. He attempted to harmonise the intellectual and
emotional forces in human nature, yet at the same time, he revolted against intellectualism,
frequently presenting the superiority of the primitive and the instinctive while exposing the violent
erotic psychology of his characters.

John Cowper-Powys (1872-1963) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) both spent much of their
lives in the United States. Cowper-Powys' novels show a powerful attachment to the Dorset area
where he grew up. A Glastonbury Romance (1932, New York; 1933, London) is probably his most well
known piece which deals with the complex love stories of the town's inhabitants. The novel probes
spiritual and mystical ethos of the small English village of Glastonbury weaving together the mythical
past, the legend of the Grail and Arthurian legends to recreate the "romance" in the lives of common
people. Glastonbury in Somerset has the abbey, which is said to have been founded by Joseph of
Arimathea (connected with the Grail legends). Some legends identify Glastonbury with Avalon.
Cowper-Powys' Maiden Castle (1936, New York; 1937, London) takes up a similar topic, but here the
lives of the protagonists move towards disillusionment and endurance. In 1940 (1941, London) he
published his most successful historical novel, Owen Glendower, set in the dark ages of Wales. His
other works are Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages (1951) and The Brazen Head (1956). Cowper-
Powys wrote his autobiography (London 1934, USA 1968) and also published some critical works,
such as Visions and Revisions. A Book of Literary Devotions (1915, London 1955), in which he
discusses number of writers and painters, including Shakespeare, Dante, and El Greco.

Isherwood approaches pre-war reality from a different angle. His reputation as a writer was
established by two political novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939).
Like many writers of his time, he was a leftist, but his socialist sympathies are what might be called
living-room socialism. In the semi-autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin he recreates the Berlin of the
pre-war years with its panorama of characters. Featuring as the narrator's voice, Christopher, a young
writer, "Herr Issyvoo" maintains himself by teaching English. He lives with various families, the
Nowaks, a struggling working-class family, and the Landauers, a wealthy Jewish family whose life is
about to be ruined. The book presents an interesting portrait of an English cabaret dancer, Sally
Bowles, who epitomises the sexual freedom of the swinging thirties. In his early years he wrote two
novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932), a depiction of impoverished land
owners, set in the times of growing disorientation and pre-war chaos. All the Conspirators is, as he
himself claimed, a book that can be regarded as a very late Victorian novel, a book presenting the
struggle between the old and the young. Phillip Lindsey leaves work and goes back home, where he
lives with his mother and sister. His sister is engaged to Victor Page, a man Phillip truly detests. As he
attempts to break free from his home entanglements, his unspecified illness and his lack of
professional prospects ensure to deepen his entrapment. Isherwood also collaborated with W.H.
Auden to write The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and On the Frontier (1938). Prater Violet, which he
wrote in 1946, describes an aristocrat who flirts with communism after losing his estate and finds
himself unable to accept the loss of his position. He became an American citizen in 1946. His post-
war writing, e.g., A Meeting by the River (1967), displays his interest in Hindu philosophy.

One can find another portrait of an actress and chorus-line singer in Sir Edward Montague (or
Morgan) Compton Mackenzie's (1883-1972) novel Carnival (1912),Mackenzie left quite a
considerable output. He wrote books of travel, a biography, as well as essays, poems and novels for
which he is probably best remembered. In 1913 and 1914,he published two volumes of Sinister
Street in which he created the semi-autobiographical figure of Michael Fane, educated in Oxford and
learning to live among London's low-life characters. His novel Vestal Fire, published in 1927, is based
on a true story of two cousins who take up residence on a Mediterranean island and abandon the
stiff English rules of behaviour and are later involved in some social scandals. In the following year he
produced Extraordinary Women, a novel set again on the same Mediterranean island, but this time
the story concerns lesbian relationships. His most ambitious work was The Four Winds of Love (1937-
1945), a biography of Scottish hero, John Ogilvie, which spans from the time of the Boer War to the
emergence of Scottish nationalism in 1945. His Thin Ice (1956) reflects upon the problems of "wild
risks" in the life of Henry Fortescue, a homosexual member of Parliament.

Two more authors are worth mentioning here:

Neil M. Gunn (1891-1973) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901-1935). Gunn chose a Highland setting for
some of his best-known novels, such as Morning Tide (1930), Highland River (1937) and The Silver
Darlings (1941). Morning Tide is a symbolic account of a boy's growing up in the High-lands. Finn,
who has a name of the legendary Celtic hero Finn MacCoul, strives to attain self-knowledge and
witnesses the struggles of the community through economic hard-ships. His historical novel Sun
Circle (1933) deals with the Viking invasion of Scotland. In1942 he published a pastoral idyll, Young
Art and Old Hector, and in 1944, a dystopic continuation of the Art and Hector story, The Green Isle
of the Great Deep (1944). Gunn was a socialist and a nationalist, very much concerned with the
Gaelic language and the preservation of Scottish identity. He was very much aware of the changes,
enforced migrations and relocations of the Highland Clearances that began with the destruction of
the clan system of land ownership after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. He depicts the post-
communal Highland life in The Silver Darlings. His later fiction includes The Well at the World's End
(1951), and he also published an autobiography, The Atom of Delight (1956).

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell who is best known for his trilogy
of novels entitled collectively Scots Quair (1946), comprising Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933)
and Grey Granite (1934). The trilogy moves from legend to history, emerging from the days of
William the Lyon and Cospatric de Gondeshil, Knight of Kinraddie, into a chronicle of the Scots nation
from 1911 to the general strike of 1926 and the bunger marches of 1932. Public history is shown
through the life of Christ Guthrie, through her son Ewan's political career. Together with Hugh
MacDiarmid, Gibbon published Scottish Scene, or, The Intelligent Man 's Guide to Albyn (1934), which
was an important contribution to the Scottish renaissance.

The Scottish Renaissance was a movement in Scottish literature between the 1920s and 1940s.
Originally this term was applied to a group of poets including Hugh MacDiarmid, but soon the
movement was joined by such writers as Lewis Grassic Gibbon who were deeply concerned with the
revival of Gaelic and the re-establishment of Scottish political and social institutions.

A writer encapsulating the social scene of the pre-war England is Aldous Huxley (I894- 1963). He was
the brother of a famous biologist, Julian Sorell (1887– 1975), and the son of the editor and
recognised writer, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895). He started off writing poetry but soon took
to prose. In 1921, he made his debut with the novel Crome Yellow, which established him as one of
the most significant writers of the twentieth century. His works are cynical and often satirical pictures
of post-war Britain that create a panorama of intellectual and moral unrest, often left unresolved in
senselessness and disappointment. In Crome Yellow, he originated what can be labelled as the novel
of ideas. Such novels concentrate on conversations, discussions and debates. Plot as well as narrative
conflict are thus limited. Crome Yellow tells the story of a gathering of friends hosted by one of them
in his house over several days. In a typical "situation of the conversation, “one learns about the
characters through their talks with each other. We also encounter some personality types
characteristic of Huxley's later works: there is an intellectual who speaks in stereotypical phrases, a
scientist running away from reality, an innocent young girl and an independent, sexually liberated
young woman. All of them are characterised by the sterility of their feelings and their intellectual
poverty.
 Antic Hay (1923) is another of Huxley's novels which explores the lack of values in contemporary
society of bohemian London. This novel was, however, pronounced obscene because of its explicit
description of sexual desires. His greatest success was definitely Point Counter Point (1928), an
experiment in composition with a sort of musical construction. It is said that Mark Rampion, the
writer, is modelled on D.H. Lawrence whom Huxley met in Italy. This panoramic view of the ideas and
mores of London sophisticates in the years following World War I, portrays them as rootless and over
civilised, leading lives that consist of a series of sordid and ludicrous erotic adventures which
generally end unhappily. All of the characters meet at parties organised by Lady Edward Tantamount.
Huxley realised that the music, the stream of pure and clear tones transfers the short, deadly passing
of time into a symbol, turning human existence into something greater than man's life. Phillip
Quarles, a young and ambitious writer, embodies Huxley’s drive to reach the depths of reality and
know it in all its aspects. Mark Rampion, a good writer of low background, is the one who sees
beyond people and through them, noticing the variety of human types. He is the one who notices
that industrial civilisation brings nothing but odour and that the only way to know true life is to
escape from civilisation. For all its nihilistic wit, erudition and satiric puncturing of society's
hypocrisies and superficialities, Point Counter Point attains a genuine emotional power rare in satire
embodying Huxley’s conviction that a novel should be bursting with opinions and ideas.

Huxley’s interest in social and psychological problems is evident in the series of essays, Proper
Studies (1927). These interests are also displayed in his next novel, Brave New World (1932), a typical
modern dystopia. "O brave New World that has such people in it!" exclaims Miranda on the
enchanted island that is the world of Shakespeare's Tempest. With typical cynicism, Huxley takes
these words for the title of his novel in which he describes a future, which is anything but brave. The
residents of Huxley's Brave New World immerse themselves in Community Sings which have
replaced masses to satisfy their religious needs, hyper sensual movies called fee lies, and heavy
doses of a drug called soma. They take two-week sleep holidays, look forever young, and, at sixty, all
have to re-port to the hospital to die. Unable to face the realities of life, humanity is drowned in the
everlasting soma, and living for the sensation of the moment. Huxley satirises the idea of progress
advocated by many philosophers and scientists presenting the danger of stagnation and lack of
spontaneity once the future progress reached its highest stage. The characters of Huxley's Brave
New World live in the grotesque projection of a "civilised world" where everything is machine made,
mass-produced and sterile.

Huxley also wrote the short stories collected in Limbo, published in 1920, and Mortal Coil, published
in 1922. The latter, written when he was living in France and Italy, contains the famous story, "The
Gioconda Smile." The search for a new morality finally led Huxley to a mysticism based on the
religions of the Far East. These beliefs were presented in books such as Perennial Philosophy (1946),
and its fictional counterpart, Eyeless in Gaza (1936). As in his earlier novel, Those Barren Leaves
(1925), these works deal with the problem besetting a man searching for values in mysticism. His last
utopian novel was Island (1962), in which he sets forth the possibility of creating a perfect state in
which mysticism and rationalism were combined.

Another famous social satirist was Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (1902– 1966), son of the editor-in-
chief of the publishing house, Chapman and Hall. Waugh studied and worked at Oxford. Decline and
Fall (1928) takes its title from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and is a
humorous rendition of the decline of the aristocracy. Paul Penny feather, who resembles Fielding’s
Tom Jones or even Voltaire's Candide, is essentially good at heart but slightly naive, and becomes the
prey of well-born society, After his expulsion from Oxford, he embarks on a series of absurd
adventures. He nearly married an aristocratic lady, unconsciously aids with white slave trading, goes
to prison and escapes with the help of his friends who simulate his death. While in prison, he meets
many of his fellow teachers from the elite school, in which he worked for some time after he left
Oxford, and discovers that they are not normal, but a parade of common, madmen sadists. He
returns to Oxford as his own distant cousin. Waugh's satire is less contemptuous than Huxley's as he
gives a satirical picture of the demoralisation of the English upper class in the context of a witty social
comedy. In 1928, Waugh married Evelyn Gardner, they were known as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn, the
perfect couple, until she fell in love with somebody else and Waugh filed for divorce in 1929.

Vile Bodies (1930) is a murky picture of the jazz era. It shows the degeneration and irresponsibility of
privileged and cynical young aristocrats, who are sure that the world belongs to them and they are
without respect for anyone else. The Bright Young Things (the merry generation of young people
born at the beginning of the century), as Waugh calls them, think about fancy dress parties and
money (party treasure hunts). Absurd and never serious, the post-war generation embarked on a
quest for fun. For them everything is temporary although they desperately strive to attain some form
of permanence, like the marriage between Adam and Nina, which they both want but somehow it
never happens and is finally disrupted by the third party called Ginger, whom Nina eventually
marries. The longing for permanence is also expressed in Adam's pursuit of the father-figure called
the Drunk Major. Adam is first recognised as a "son" by the sinister priest Father Rotschild. The title
refers to a line from Hamlet: "O thou vile king, give me my father" is Leartes' utterance upon his
return to Elsinore. There is yet another instance of the use of the word “vile" in King Lear when
Gloucester wants to share Lear's predicament he says:

Our flesh and blood, my Lord, is grown so vile That it doth hate what gets it.

In the novel the vileness" expresses the paradoxical longing for presexual innocence alongside sexual
fulfilment. The book ends with a surrealistic picture of a great war that destroys the whole world.

Waugh’s novels Black Mischief (1932), set in Africa, and Scoop (1938) contain characters that are
mere stereotypes or even grotesque puppets, giving the impression of an in-creasing distance
between the author and his creations that is perhaps a result of Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in
1930. In 1934 he wrote A Handful of Dust. The novel demonstrates that everything can be shown at
the level of absurdity. Its hero, Tony with the telling surname Last, is something of a tragic character
in a comic universe. The deception of his wife, and the death of his son in a hunting accident compel
him to leave Hetton, the Gothic Victorian mansion he loves. He ends up in the South American jungle
reading Dickens to a mad settler ominously named Mr. Todd.

Waugh also wrote travel books such as Ninety Two Days (1934), a book about Guiana and Brazil. A
later novel, Work Suspended (1942), features John Plant as the first person narrator and a writer of
detective stories. The action of the book, encapsulated in its two sections entitled "A Death" and "A
Birth", takes place in the final months of peace, mainly in London. Plant is run down by a car driven
by Atwater, a self-dramatizing commercial traveller, who provides a comic dimension by claiming a
relationship with Plant as a result of the accident. One of the better characterised protagonists in
this book is Basil Seal, Put More Flags (1942) is set in the period of the Phoney War and Basil Seal
reappears as the anti-hero.

Brideshead Revisited (1945) is considered to be Waugh's best novel, in which satire is mixed with
pure admiration for aristocracy. Subtitled as The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles
Ryder, the book presents the remembrances of Captain Charles Ryder, who recalls the good old days
of friendship with the March main family. Ina world where aristocratic values are dying, the
underlying message is that the decline and fall of English society began with the reformation and the
only way it can regain power is to return to Catholicism. Charles is infatuated with the whole family
but in particular wit) Sebastian's sister Julia. In the course of the book, he comes to realise that there
is no link between him and them not only because of the social distance, and in order to achieve
spiritual peace he has ultimately to distance himself from his friend's aristocratic family. The book
also portrays the instability of the world, the failure of human aspirations, the impermanence of any
edifice, and the omnipresence of suffering. It gives an intensely detailed description of social history
at the end of the First World War.

The Loved One (1948) is Waugh's last satire in the style of Decline and Fall, and depicts the
commercialisation of American Morticians in the same dark and absurd manner. Waugh's last major
work was the trilogy, Men at Arms (1952), Of jeers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional
Surrender (1961), modelled on Ford Maddox Ford's trilogy of the Tietjens. It appeared under the
general title The Sword of Honour. Guy Crouchback is another Don Quixote who lives in the glorious
past of his ancestors. His ideals are out-dated and his fights are a series of mistakes and
disappointments. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is a confessional and conversation piece" and a
study in hallucination of a Roman Catholic novelist who escapes to Ceylon to heal his psyche, but in
the course of the trip falls prey to even harsher illusions.

Waugh's complete short stories appeared in 1999, they also include his juvenilia. The stories display
Waugh's particular sense of humour as he observes human vices and fault In "Bella Fleace Gave a
Party" (1932), an ageing Irish hostess expires a day after her unattended ball, the invitations to which
she forgot to put in the mail. The heroine of "On Guard" has her nose bitten off by her jealous poodle
so as to repel all suitors. "The Man Who Liked Dickens" (1933) was later used in A Handful of Dust.
His diaries were published in 1976.

His diaries were published in 1976. Waugh's witty and sophisticated satires of contemporary society
are often compared with Swift's. Waugh, however, is less misanthropic and more humorous.
Frequent elements of the absurd and the grotesque expose the pre-war atmosphere of chaos, while
in his later novels the Catholic overtones are the reflection of his search for new values in the
emotionally sterile post-war reality.

Traces of Waugh's satirical wit are found in the writings of Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), another writer
whose career began before the war and extended into the post-war period. During the war, he was
literary editor of The Observer and founded the literary review Horizon with Stephen Spender in
1939. In 1938, he published a collection of essays with an autobiographical section Enemies of
Promise, followed by The Unquiet Grave and The Condemned Playground in 1944, and ldeas and
Places in 1953. His only novel, The Rock Pool, set in the south of France, appeared in 1936. He was a
very good essayist, who, in the widely praised Enemies of Promise, was constantly preoccupied with
the idea of literary immortality, and searched for a better existence in the created worlds of literature
against the grim atmosphere of the coming war.

Unlike Waugh, Henry Green (1905– 1973), the pseudonym of Henry Vincent Yorke, was a novelist
who portrayed the working class. He was the son of a wealthy industrialist whose portrait we find in
Living (1929). He began his literary career with Blindness (1926). His second novel, Living, is set in an
iron foundry in Birmingham. The book is concerned with class distinction and juxtaposes the lives of
the workers in Birmingham the factory owner's family in London. Both groups are individualised by
their use of colloquial and dialectal vs. standard language. Green portrayed himself as young Dick
Dupret, the son of the mortally ill Mr. Dupret. Although Vincent Yorke, Henry's father, did not support
the career choice made by his younger son, he must have been puzzled to find himself killed off in his
son's novel. In 1939, Green published Party Going, a book which concentrates on a group of rich
young people caught trapped at a train station be-cause of a fog. As they have to delay their
departure for a winter holiday, they talk, get angry, sentimental or amused. This image becomes a
symbolic picture of the society about to be destroyed by the coming of the Second World War.
Caught (1943) is a quasi-documentary of London under German bombardment and a Kafkaesque
description of the atmosphere of menace and unreality portraying the upper and lower quarters of
an Irish country house during the war. Green also published Loving (1945), Back (1946), Doting
(1952),and an autobiography Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (1940).

Similarly to Green, Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896 – 1981) produced a large number of popular
novels which drew on his Scottish childhood and his experiences in the Welsh coal-mining valleys.
Cronin held a medical degree and was appointed Medical Inspector of Mines in 1921 -1924. He gave
up medicine after the success of his first novel, Hatter’s Castle (1931). His other novels are The Stars
Look Down (1935), The Keys to Kingdom (1942), The Green Years (1944), The Judas Tree (1961) and A
Pocketful of Rye (1969). He also published a play, Jupiter Laughs (1940), and an autobiography,
Adventures in Two Worlds (1952).

Richard Hughes' (1900 – 1976) works are underlined by the elements of irrationality and coincidence
governing human fate. A writer of Welsh origin, he published a volume of poems, Gipsy Night (1922),
while at Oxford. Confessio Juvenis, his collected poems, appeared in 1926. He spent some time in the
USA, Canada and the West Indies, eventually publishing A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). The novel
tells the story of a group of children who are sent to England because of the strong winds in Jamaica,
have their ship captured by pirates and finally overcome the pirates. The book opens with the ruined
houses of the West Indies, slave quarters and mansions levelled by natural causes and deadly
vegetation. The lush nature, which grows wild all around has similar effect on the children, in that
they too grow wild. Precisely because of this, the Thornton children are sent to England. Hughes
describes the cruelty of children who, without the guidance of grown-ups, interpret the world in
their own imaginative and irrational way. It is a satirical-working of the romantic myth of child
innocence, as Hughes suggests that children are closer than adults to nature but in their own way,
they replicate the wild, uncontrolled and murderous aspects of it. When they find themselves in
England, the children are told by the adults of their ordeal, in an attempt to conform with the adults
stories, they do not shudder from lying in court and sending the ship's captain to the gallows. Hughes
resists any at-tempt to extract from his novel a moral or sociological lesson. In the end, everything is
not what we expect it to be. In Hazard: A Sea Story (1938) Hughes shows the peril of a life in which
everything is subject to coincidence. A Moment of Time (1926), The Spider 's Palace and Other
Stories (1931) and Don't Blame Me (1940) are books of short stories, the as two being for children.
The Fox in the Attic (1961) is the first volume of a long historical novel of Hughes' time, culminating in
the Second World War. It is the story of a young Welshman who, while visiting his family in Munich,
witnesses all the most important events before the war. Certain scenes are presented with such
historical precision that it is difficult to believe that the author was not an eyewitness.

Jean Rhys (1890 - 1979) was born in Dominica as the daughter of a doctor of Welsh descent. She
briefly studied at the Perse School, Cambridge and the Academy of Dramatic Art, then worked as a
chorus girl and during the First World War as a volunteer cook. In 1919, she married the first of her
three husbands and set off to live in Paris where she began to write. In 1927 appeared her first
collection of stories, The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of Present Day Bohemian Paris, followed by
Postures (1928, re-printed in 1929 as Ouartet). Fourteen stories are set in Montparnasse but there
are stories also from Santé prison, a hospital and retrospective views of Dominica. Ouartet, set out
against winter-wet streets and cafés of Montparnasse, presents the story of a woman who needs a
man to survive. Afraid of growing old without supports, Marya clings to the first opportunity that
arises in the figure of Mr Stephen Zelli and that is when her problems begin. Rhys' heroine is an
anachronism in Paris with her unquestioning assumption of traditional gender roles and her
commitment to the most dangerous female romantic fantasies. This novel introduces a number of
typically Rhys' motifs, including the most important one of women's essential loneliness and
helplessness in the world related to the never fulfilled romance. Between 1927 and 1939 she
published four novels and a collection of short stories. There followed a silence until Wide Sargasso
Sea appeared in 1966. Voyage in the Dark (1934) is a story of a nineteen years old chorus girl Anna
Morgan, a West Indian whose experiences have a lot to do with Rhys' own life as a chorus girl.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) repeat the motifs found in
Quartet. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie presents its heroine, Julia Martin, who is tragically alienated
and separated from other people and watches her life dissolve in front of her eyes. The story
discusses failed mother-daughter relationships as much as failed male-female relationships. With its
complex system of shifting focalisations and its emphasis on indeterminacy, After Leaving Mr
Mackenzie is a modernist fiction which repeats Julia's slippage away from the world of conventional
discourse through its own strategies of detachment. Rhys is distancing herself from the conventions
of romance plot and melodrama through which women's stories have traditionally been told, and
which she had used in Quartet.

Good Morning, Midnight, told in the first person, is the narrative of Sasha Jensen who leaves behind
a dead marriage and a dead baby. She goes to Paris to celebrate the new beginning but the past is
inescapable and even a handsome lover cannot save her from loneliness and despair.

Wide Sargasso Sea was Rhys' great success. It is an unusual story about Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Bertha Mason, Rochester's first wife who having set Thorn field Hall on fire supposedly dies in it. In
Rhys' book, the fire that blinded Rochester does not kill Bertha because she gives an account of her
life, unless her narrative is a kind of ghostly narrative. Bertha's real name is Antoinette. She is a white
West Indian woman, a victim of cultural determinism. Rochester cannot love her (even for her
money) because for him she symbolises an excess of passion similar to the wild and uncontrollable
nature that over-whelms him and makes him sick. In Victorian culture female passion was equated
with madness. Here Antoinette-Bertha is imprisoned in the attic rooms in which she behaves like a
wild animal. The withdrawn and stern young man, who names his wife anew, perceives her totally
through the perspective of British culture. He rejects her love and passion because it is something he
cannot understand, and for Antoinette, such rejection is a double loss of identity. She loses her
stance in the world for the first time when he renames her. In Jane Eyre imperialism is England's
mission, while in Wide Sargasso Sea it is the violation of natural order leading to misunderstanding
and tragedy. Her confinement in Thorn field extends to her historical imprisonment within the
English language. The narrative is as much an unhappy love story as it is a political pronouncement.
The book is an important milestone in the development of post-colonial literature, as a symbol of the
search for identity of the people born in the colonies.

Rhys' Creole background reappears in some of her short stories, such as "Let Them Call It Jazz," from
Tigers are Better Looking (1968), in which Selina Davis' story is presented as quintessential of the
immigrant woman's position in urban culture where she is marginalised and silenced. Rhys was
always concerned with non-England born Creole identity and its repercussions in England. In 1976
she published Sleep It Of, Lady. She also published an unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979).

Another writer concerned with the relations between the colonisers and the colonised is Joyce
Arthur Cary (1888- 1957) who was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Oxford.
Cary took part in the Balkan War, and in 1913 joined the Nigerian political service. In the 1930s he
returned to England. His life and experiences in Africa emerged in his writing as source material for
his first books, the African novels Aissa Saved (1932), An American Visitor (1933), The African Witch
(1936) and Mister Johnson (1939). Mister Johnson is concerned with a Black who is fascinated by
white civilisation and then brutally betrayed by it. Mr. Johnson, far from his family and friends, is prey
to white British officials whose rules he does not understand. He means to help and to do things well
but his views on "borrowing" money are not exactly the same as his superiors. He kills one of them in
a fight and is executed. The novel stresses the differences between two cultures and the
unbridgeable gap between the White and the Black worlds. Charley is my Darling (1940) is the story
of a boy from the slums who, although seemingly evil, as judged by all the tricks he plays, is in fact an
innocent kid using up too much energy.

Cary is a moralist and that in itself hinders many people from reading his books. His characters are as
realistic as they are magnified and thus become almost epic figures. This is clearly shown in the
trilogy: Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942) and The Horse’s Mouth (1944). The major
motif of these books is the need for individual freedom and choice. The heroine of the first is an old
woman, Sarah, who is a thief and a cook, and who represents the essence of a womanhood for Cary.
She is the mythological figure of many male fantasies. The novel is her memoir written in prison
where she is kept for theft. To Be a Pilgrim is the memoir of an old man who cannot keep his
narration within any chronological order. Instead, he gives a kind of interrupted narration of the
history of English society. The characters themselves are pilgrims, symbolically and sometimes
literally coming back to the place where they belong, their home.

The Horse 's Mouth presents the world as seen through the eyes of a painter who wants to finish his
opus vitae. The novel is a somewhat picaresque story. The last apocalyptic scene presents the painter
trying to finish his painting while workmen are trying to takedown the building before it falls. The
artist lives for his art, believing that art can save the world. In this belief is his hope for the future of
humanity. Cary's last trilogy is well fitted to the trends of the times and concerns power politics and a
fictional politician who is the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party. The trilogy comprises
Prisoner of Grace (1952), Except the Lord (1953) and Not Honour More (1955). In 1941 Cary
published a semi-autobiographical novel A House of Children. Cary also wrote political studies such
as Power in Men (1939) and The Case for African Freedom (1941).

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884- 1969) was a novelist whose stories are told within the strict
conventions of her own style. The plots, often concerned with crime and violence in Edwardian
upper middle class society, emerge mainly through the prolonged conversations of her characters.
Her first novel, Dolores (1911), was followed by Pastors and Masters in 1925. Subsequent novels
included Brother and Sister (1929), Men and Wives (1931), More Women Than Men (1933), A House
and its Head (1935), A Family and a Fortune (1939), Parents and Children (1941), Man and
Maidservant (1947), Mother and Son (1955), The Mighty and Their Fall (1961) and others. Compton-
Burnett is a creator of what is commonly known as the play-novel, a novel which employs many of
the conventions of Greek tragedy, and also Shakespearian drama, which emphasise dialogue. She
herself called them "something between a novel and a play". Her subjects are frequently power, its
abuse within the family structure, which does not seem to aspire to have any relation with the
outside world. Plots and sub-plots as well as dramatic change of fate play an important role in all her
works. She deals with the Victorian period from the point of view of an outsider, offering a powerful
criticism of a male dominated society of domestic tyrants, whose upbringing necessarily results in
the repressive treatment of their families.
 Elizabeth Bowen(1899 - 1973), born in Dublin of an Anglo-Irish family, was a novelist and short story
writer. Among her novels are The Last September (1929), To the North (1932), and The House in Paris
(1935). The Death of the Heart (1938) is considered her best novel and is about a lonely girl, who
lives without her parents in her brother's house-hold, rejected and deprived of feelings. The novel is
structured around a series of journeys, which contrasts with the stagnation of the house. To the
North culminates in the final tragic scene of a journey "to the north" undertaken by unhappy
Emmeline as she is supposed to drive her unfaithful lover, Mark (called Markie), to where he is
staying. To the North is structured around journeys. Emmeline works in a travel agency and both she
and her recently widowed sister-in-law often talk about leaving London, and about travelling in
general. In this novel, perhaps more so than in any of Bowen's other works, journey implies change
in the most profound sense. The Heat of the Day (1949) is a love story about two people in London
during the war. Stella, living in strange rooms, holds on to the past and attaches herself to Robert
who is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Slowly Stella's life is torn to pieces. The Heat of
the Day also uses metaphors of instability and displacement as "the known and the familiar is made
uncanny”. On a larger scale, Bowen characterises a society in which the sterility of feelings kills those
who are not strong enough to fight for themselves. She is a writer of moral-social conflicts through
which her characters are presented. Her other novels are A World of Love (1955) and Eva Trout
(1969). A World of Love is an exploration of a young girl's search into her mother's past and her own
awakening into the world of love. Bowen also published volumes of short stories, including
Encounters (1923), The Cat Jumps (1934), and The Demon Lover (1945). Her short stories The Cat
Jumps and Look at All Those Roses (1941) foreground her fascination with crime at home. The
Mulberry Tree, her collection of essays, reviews and autobiography, in which she recalls her Irish
childhood, appeared in 1986.

Dame Emile Rose Macaulay (1881 – 1958) was an essayist, a novelist and a travel writer. She began
writing with Abbots Verney (1906), but her first commercial success was Potterism (1920), a satirical
view on the world of journalism and literature. She published a number of novels before the war,
including Told by an ldiot (1923), Orphan Island (1924), Crewe Train (1926) and They were Defeated
(1932), a historical novel about Robert Herrick, the cavalier poet. Her two post-war novels were The
World, My Wilderness (1950) and The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

Many women writers in the nineteenth century were involved in the struggle connected with The
Married Women Property Acts, which became legal acts in 1870 and 1882, The Divorce Law Reform
Act from 1923 placed women in equality with man in property division after divorce. The first half of
the twentieth century witnessed yet another campaign, that of women's suffrage; the movement
itself was the aftermath of the political and social changes after the First World War. The need for the
enfranchisement of women was finally recognised by Members of Parliament and in 1918 women
over thirty were allowed to vote. In 1928, the age level was lowered to twenty one. The suffrage
movement was connected with the general concern for women's education and social needs as
women provided the surplus of most European societies. In 1908 the Women Writers Suffrage
League was founded by Cicely Hamilton and a journalist Bessie Hatton. Its president was Elizabeth
Robins (1862- 1952), an American who spent most of her life in England. Robins was an actress,
playwright, and novelist. Her writings tackled many social problems such as prostitution, e.g. Where
Are you Going To? (1913), which was published in America under the title My Little Sister.

One of the earliest supporters of the suffrage movement together with Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner,
and May Sinclair was Violet Hunt (1862 - 1942).She began her literary career in 1894 with The
Maiden 's Progress: A Novel in Dialogue. In 1904 she published an autobiographical novel Sooner or
Later, which explores two celebrated literary female types, the whore and the virgin. Her White Rose
of Weary Leaf (1908) discusses the problem of sexual double-standard in Edwardian society. In 1926
she published The Flurried Years, which concerns her relationship with Ford Madox Ford.

Cicely Hamilton (1872 - 1952) contributed to the cause with Marriage as a Trade (1909), in which she
wanted to demystify marriage and the private sphere (the division of private and public sphere was a
Victorian idiom to define the complementarity of sexes).Hamilton fought to free women from the
"destiny" of marriage and motherhood, which should be of her own volition and not a social
necessity. Hamilton was a playwright, novelist, journalist, actress and a travel writer. Her other plays
include Diana of the Dobsons (1908), a comedy portraying the experiences of women from the upper
and lower classes, as well as How the Vote was Won (1909) and A Pageant of Great Women (1910),
both of which are her suffrage plays. In 1919, Hamilton published a war novel, William, an
Englishman. Her other successful novel was Theodore Savage (1922). Hamilton never married but
devoted her life to women with whom and for whom she worked and whose company she enjoyed.

A writer who openly admitted her lesbianism was Radclyffe Hall (1886 – 1943).b. Marguerite
Radclyffe-Hall. In 1906, she published a collection of poems, Twixt Faith and Stars. Her novels include
The Unlit Lamp (1924), Adam 's Breed (1926) and The Well of Loneliness (1928), which explored the
world of sexual deviance. The novel was found by the courts to be an obscene libel and was
withdrawn from circulation.

Rebecca West (1892- 1983), whose real name was Cecily Isobel Fairfield, was a supporter of women's
rights movement. She had a long and troubled relationship with H.G. Wells with whom she had a
child, Anthony West (b. 1914). West's novels explore the relationship between the sexes. Her first
novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), depicts a man shattered by his war experiences, whose
psychological health is restored by a woman friend. Her other novels include The Judge (1922) which
concerns a suffragette, who is an unmarried mother; Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929) is a love
story be-tween idealised characters; Thinking Reed (1936) discusses the hazard of gambling in the
context of the family, The Birds Fall Down (1966) is an intrigue set in the pre-revolution Russia. In
1957, West published an autobiographical novel, The Fountain Overflows. This Real Night (1984),
Cousin Rosamond (1985) and Sunflower (1986) were published posthumously.

IN 1914 Mina Loy (1882- 1966), an English poet, painter and dramatist, published a Feminist
Manifesto aligning herself with futurist aesthetics (she later rejected both Futurism and Fascism). She
advocated the need for alternative gender ideologies. In her poems, collected in Lunar Baedecker
(1923), she looks at the female experience in both the social and political context, and her play The
Pamperers (1920) is a satire on futurist "avant-gardism."

Among women writers of the period is Rosamund (Nina) Lehmann (1901 -1990),whose first novel,
Dusty Answer (1927), describes the sexual and emotional awakening of the heroine in a women's
college. The Weather in the Streets (1936) recreates the forms of traditional nineteenth century
narratives, although her topic is definitely contemporary. The novel relates the experiences of Olivia,
a secret lover of a married man, an aristocrat. Lehmann’s other novels include The Ballad and the
Source (1944) and A Sea Grape Tree (1976). The Swan in the Evening (1967) was a fragment of her
unfinished autobiography.

Antonia White (1899 - 1980) used her own experiences in her novels. Her Frost in May (1933) is yet
another pronouncement in the public debate on child's sexuality as seen through the eyes of an
adolescent girl, Nanda. After the war she published The Lost Traveller (1950), The Sugar House (1952)
and Beyond the Glass (1954), the latter recreating her experiences in a mental hospital.
In 1930, there appeared a union of professional writers called the Detection Club, whose members
aimed at exploring and protecting the formulae and practices of the detective writer. Agatha Christie
(1891 – 1970) continued the tradition of the detective stories of Arthur Connan Doyle. She began
her long line of books with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, which introduced the Belgian
detective Hercule Poirot. The main character of her books is, however, Miss Marple, a quiet old
English lady who makes her-self useful to society by solving various mysterious crimes. Among her
other works are The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) in which the narrator turns out to be a
murderer., Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Ten Little Niggers (1939), and The Mousetrap (1952).
Christie's only rival was Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 – 1957), Her first novel, Whose Body? (1923),
introduces a detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and his manservant Bunter. Her most distinctive works
are The Five Red Herrings (1932), Murder Must Advertise (1933) and The Nine Tailors (1934).

Two other women writers, Margery Allingham (1904 - 1996) and Ngaio Marsh (1899 – 1982), were
also major crime writers of the 1930s. Allingham wrote thrillers and detective novels, beginning with
The Crime at Black Dudley (1929) and continuing with Dancers in Mourning (1937) and The Fashion
in Shrouds (1938). During the Second World War she produced spy thrillers such as Traitor 's Purse
(1942). Her other novels are More Work for the Undertaker and The Tiger in the Smoke (1952).
Marsh, a New Zelander, created the figure of detective Roderick Alleyn. Her first detective story was
A Man Lay Dead (1934). In 1966 she published her autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydews,
revised in 1981.

F. Tennyson Jesse (1888- 1958) began as a war correspondent. Her Sword of Deborah (1919) relates
the experiences of the British Women's Army in France and A Lacquer Lady (1929) is about an
Eurasian woman in Burma. Her Pin to See the Peep Show (1934) is a fictionalised account of murder
trial of 1922. In 1924, she published an essay Murder and its Motives, which discussed the idea of
"born murderee," and edited volumes on notable British trials. Her works are interesting portrayals
of women entangled in crime.

The period between the wars is also notable for many romantic novels (or r contemporary
romances) by writers such as Berta Ruck (1878- 1978), Daphne du Maurier (1907-- 1989), Georgette
Heyer (1902– 1974) and Ethel M. Dell (1881 - 1939). Berta Ruck was a prolific romantic novelist. Her
novels include His Official Fiancée (1914), The Lad with Wings (1916), The Girls at His Billet (1917),
The Land Girl's Love Story (1918) and Sweethearts Unmet (1918). They deal with wartime romance
and related problems. Daphne du Maurier's first successful romance was Jamaica Inn (1936). Her
Rebecca (1938) is an old time classic of love and mystery woven by the first Mrs. de Winter whose
unspoken presence overshadows the second younger and innocent Mrs. de Winter. Spiced with
murder mystery, which turns out to be suicide, the book provided the model for the Gothic revival in
the 1960s. Her other novels included Frenchman 's Creek (1941), My Cousin Rachel (1951)and The
Scapegoat (1957). Georgette Heyer's first success was These Old Shades (1925); she used a comic
formula, placed in a Georgian setting, and claimed to have taken Jane Austen as her literary model.
Her novels include The Masquerades’ (1928), A Convenient Marriage (1934) and Regency Buck
(1935). An Infamous Army (1937) and The Spanish Bride (1940) were based on historical research.
Ethel M. Dell published her first novel, The Way of an Eagle, in 1912. Her other novels, which
repeated the romance formula, include Knave of Diamonds (1913), The Keeper of the Door (1915)
and The Lamp in the Desert (1919).

The Edwardian and later Georgian period found avid readers among children and adolescents. The
writers of children's and adolescent literature such as Enid Bangold (1889- 1981), Alison Uttley
(1884- 1976) and Enid Blyton (1897 - 1968) were most popular in this period. Bangold was a
playwright and novelist. Her novel Serena Blandish (1925) was later dramatized for the New York
stage. Her book National Velvet (1935) proved to be a very popular success among young readers.
Alison Uttley was primarily a children's author. Her Little Grey Rabbit (1929) was followed by many
similar books for children. A Traveller in Time (1939) repeats the Wellsian motif of time travel, as a
modern child is transported back into the intrigue-filled world of Elizabethan England, Tales of Four
Pigs and Brock the Badger (1939) created a well-known persona of Sam Pig. Enid Blyton dominated
the market with children's stories such as The Adventures of a Wishing Chair (1937). She created the
"Famous Five" series describing the adventures of five children without adult supervision, in novels
such as Five on a Treasure Island (1942). She also wrote the schoolgirl stories, The Naughtiest Girl in
the School (1940) and The Nicest Girl in the School (1909).

The Celtic Revival

After political leaders had abandoned their efforts to effect reforms within the British Parliament, the
rise of national enthusiasm which prepared the way for Home Rule was maintained through the Irish
Literary Renaissance. The Celtic Revival, or Celtic (Irish) Twilight, began in Romanticism with the
interest in national and traditional (folk) literature . From about 1830, Trinity College in Dublin
became a centre of political and literary activity, and in 1833 The Dublin University Magazine was
founded. Among its contributors were James Clarence Mangan (1803- 1849), Charles Gavan Duffy
(1816– 1903) and Thomas O. Davis (1814– 1845). These men and their collaborators created a group
called Young Ireland which, however, dwindled after 1848. Davis, a Protestant, founded The Nation
newspaper with the help of Duffy, a Catholic. Between 1840 and 1845, he discussed there in a variety
of subjects, from education to cultural issues. He attacked the philistine utilitarianism of English
civilisation in contrast to the spirituality of the Irish.

In 1888, an anthology of Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland appeared. Among the poets
represented was John Tod hunter (1839 - 1916) who, after several earlier volumes of verse, directed
his interests towards bardic legends in The Banshee and Other Poems. He belonged to the expatriate
Anglo-Irish writers of London. Katherine Tynan (afterwards Mrs. Hinkson) (1861 - 1931) is another
poet represented in that anthology She wrote a kind of devotional poetry in the style of the Pre-
Raphaelites, associating herself with religious lyric and Gaelic themes, which dominate her
Shamrocks (1887) and Ballads and Lyrics (1891). "Young Ireland" raised interest in national history,
and indeed the Gaelic language itself, while at the same time fostered a pride of accomplishment.

Interest in Gaelic was also furthered by scholars, e.g., Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886). Ferguson
through his poetry sought to restore social awareness of the great heroic past. His major works are
Lays of the Western Gael (1864), Congal (1872) and Deirdre (1880). Another eminent personality was
James O'Grady (1846– 1928), who wrote a History of Ireland: Heroic Period (1878 – 1880).

While many other distinguished scholars supported and contributed to the development of the
movement, the political activity of Charles Steward Parnell (1846 - 1891) turned people's attention to
politics rather than culture. It was only after a scandal in which he appeared as co-respondent in a
suit for divorce by Capt. O'Shea, and his subsequent marriage to Mrs. O'Shea, that people began to
turn their attention once more to cultural matters. Parnell convinced William Gladstone (1809-
1898), a British liberal statesman, lo the idea of Home Rule. In 1875 he was elected chairman of the
Home Rule Party. A Protestant himself, he fought for self-government for Ireland. In 1878 he was
elected president of the Irish National League. For many years Parnell was a nationalist icon. The Irish
Literary Society appeared in Dublin 1892, electing George Sigerson (1839- 1925) as its president. In
1893 The Gaelic League, with its president, Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), became a pioneer of the
revival of the Irish language and its literature. Hyde was also a founder of the Abbey Theatre, and
wrote a Literary History of Ireland (1899) and the Love Song of Connacht (1894). The Irish National
Theatre Company was soon created and obtained the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The Abbey Theatre
was opened in 1904 in Dublin with W.B. Yeats's On the Baile Strand and Lady Gregory's Spreading the
News.

Interest in Irish literature was most powerfully stimulated by William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939), an
Irish writer born in Dublin, and educated at the School of Art there. Together with his fellow student,
George Russell he developed an interest in mystic religion and the supernatural. He later abandoned
writing in favour of editing and promoting literary activities. He edited some of William Blake's works
and helped to found Irish Literary Societies both in London and in Dublin. His subsequent efforts to
create an Irish National Theatre were assisted by Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (1859 - 1932) and
others, and partly successful in 1899 when his play, The Countess Kathleen (1892), premiered in
Dublin.

The Countess Kathleen is a poetic episodic drama, combining folkloric elements with nationalism and
images of past and present political injustice. The following year Yeats' play Cathleen Ni Houlihan was
produced and established him as a true representative of the line of poetic dramatists. Yeats
dramatises the vital themes from Irish national history and mythology. Yeats' knowledge of the
legends of Cuchulain, Caoilte, Fand and Emer came from the translations of Sir Samuel Ferguson. He
transformed the nineteenth-century symbolism into modernist drama articulating Celtic mythology
for the nationalist movement. Although under the influence of Maeterlinck, Yeats enlarged his
artistic program with more elaborate elements of the supernatural and the uncanny. His early plays
are a visionary portrait of Ireland. Cathleen Ni Houlihan is set in 1798 in County Mayo, at the
moment of the arrival of a French revolutionary army to help the rebels. Cathleen Ní Houlihan
appears as an old woman who comes to the hut of a peasant on the eve of his wedding and takes
him with her. He persuades him to forgo the marriage and sacrifice himself to a higher cause, that of
Ireland's freedom. After the future groom leaves his household, one of the members of the family is
asked whether he saw an old woman and answers that he saw a woman but she was young and
beautiful. The transformation of an old hag into a beautiful young woman is a symbolic
representation of the new rejuvenated spirit of Ireland. Yeats wrote altogether twenty-six plays,
woman among them, On Bailie Strand (1904) and Where There is Nothing (1904), Yeats' ambition
was to create both a popular and sophisticated literary theatre, a national theatre, which would draw
from Celtic and Christian traditions.

Yeats was interested in the dreamy and exotic poetry of Blake, hated Victorian science, and it was the
visionary poetic works that stimulated his dedication to the Irish folk tradition. In a poem "The Secret
Rose" the Rosicrucian four-leaved rose is shown alongside Celtic and Christian symbols. Fairy and
Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose (1897) all
reflect these Irish traditional nationalist themes. The poet's love for Maud Gonne (1865- 1953), who
was an actress in his first play, a beautiful and ardent revolutionary, provided much of the subject
matter for many of his writings. Gonne was a very active feminist and Republican activist. She
married Major John (Sean) MacBride. Her husband was killed and she was imprisoned after the
Easter Rising, which was commemorated by Yeats in his poem Easter 1916. In the following lines:

This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some
who are near my heart.

Yeats comments on MacBride's bad treatment of Maud Gonne and his rehabilitation through the
sacrifice of his life to the cause. Yeats also authored The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
(1889), The Land of Heart 's Desire (1894), The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) and The Shadowy
Waters (1900). From the very beginning, his plays on Irish mythological themes show the power of
symbolic action and imagery, which suggests multiple levels of meaning in their drama. His later
plays were based on a neo-Platonic order and other such mystic notions and symbols. With each
succeeding collection of poems, Yeats moved further away from his early Pre-Raphaelites influence,
with works such as In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Wild Swans at Coole (1919).

His mounting disillusionment with Irish politics came to a head in 1912 and 1913 with the
controversy over the Lane Bequest of French Impressionist paintings. The Easter Rising of 1916,
however, restored his faith in the heroic character of his country. The poem entitled Easter 1916
concerns that event. The incidents described are simple and well-known. Many men died in that
premature uprising. The poem builds up from a casual description to a more complicated image,
ending with the celebration of death as a con-summation. The "terrible beauty" born in Easter Week
transformed Ireland into a symbol of freedom fighting for the whole of Europe but at the same time
the country threw itself into the factionalism of post-Parnellite era. Concurrently with many other
Yeats' poems, Easter 1916 is based on opposition between violence and peace, freshness and
decadence, Ireland and Byzantium, oppositions that define and re-define their own meanings.

Yeats returns many times in his work to this particular point, where his celebration of Art, Intellect,
Heroism-the things that are tinged with eternity-is held in tension by an opposing enchantment; of
youth, love, transience, "whatever is begotten, born and dies".

The following year, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, a woman who was interested in spiritism and
sought communication with the other world. A result of this was Yeats ‘work A Vision, the System of
Symbolism (1925) and many poems. Yeats believed that the major task of a poet is the creation of
myths. The system of his doctrines assumed that civilisations run through cycles: periods of growth,
maturity and, finally, decline. Cycles are spiral in their nature, hence they are never complete circles
but rather of partial advancement and partial retreat. In "The Second Coming," Yeats presents a
pessimistic view of humanity. The awareness of relativity de-stabilises seemingly constant sets of
values, like religion or a sense of dignity, bringing revolutions and anarchy, but in fact nothing
changes, apart from the fact that an old regime is replaced by a new one. The poet ex-presses the
views that the twentieth century is the last gyre. The complex symbolic image of God the Falconer,
and humanity the Falcon, is linked with the enumerated signs of the second coming of the Beast.
Such pessimistic views, however, arc contrasted with Yeats deep conviction in the immortality of art
as the highest spiritual value.

In one of his later poems, "Sailing to Byzantium," he explores the problem of ageing and the need of
an old man to find something for his spirit. Referring to Keatsian aesthetics, Yeats advises age to
follow art. Old age is only a state of mind which, however, can be-come a driving force in a process of
gradual alienation and withdrawal from the society of the young. Therefore, one has to be spiritually
alive in order to avoid a living death. This deeply humanistic poem deals with the problem of the role
of art in every man's life, especially in the life of the elderly. The reference to the mosaic in
Byzantium with the sages of the past reminds one of the ode "On a Grecian Um." Art for him
functions as an immortal thing of beauty carrying unconditional truth about the spiritual world. In
the poems written after his marriage, Yeats achieved a spare, colloquial lyricism wholly unlike his
earlier style. Yeats' other works include collections of essays on various topics, such as ldeas of Good
and Evil (1903), Discoveries (1907), Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), The Cutting of an Agatae (1918),
and On the Boiler (1939). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

George William Russell (1867- 1935) started his literary career encouraged by Yeats. In 1894 he
published Homeward: Songs by the Way, a volume of mystical verses. His poetic drama Deirdre was
performed in the Irish National Theatre in 1902. His other volumes of poetry were The Divine Vision
(1904), The Gods of War (1915), The Interpreters (1922), and Midsummer Eve (1928). Between 1905
and 1923, he edited The Irish Homestead, a journal which encouraged interest in Irish arts, crafts and
writing. The editorship of this journal earned him the title of the saint of the literary revival. In 1934,
he published what he considered his opus vitae: The House of the Titans, a long poem on Celtic
mythology. He was also very active politically supporting the Free State and publishing number of
political essays on the issue.

Another famous literary figure connected with the Celtic Revival is the playwright John Millington
Synge (1871 - 1909), who was educated at Trinity College in Dublin, and who then spent his early
adult years in Paris. It was there in 1899 that he met W.B. Yeats and was persuaded to apply his
talents to the description of Irish peasant life. He visited the Aran Islands annually from 1898 to 1902
and published The Aran Islands in 1907. His remarkable dramas follow in quick succession: In the
Shadow of the Glen (performed in 1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), and The Well of the Saints (1905).

In the Shadow of the Glen is a grim one-act comedy in which an elderly husband wants to test his
wife's faithfulness. A tramp encourages the young wife, Norah, to experience the exciting outside
world against the monotony of life inside the house. The play was at first unfavourably received due
to the episode contained of the infidelity of an Irish wife to her husband. In The Well of the Saints
Synge presents a pair of blind beggars who have their sight miraculously restored and then complain
that they prefer blindness because the imagined world is much more beautiful and colourful. Such a
turn of action is Synge’s commentary on the grim and sordid life of the village. Riders to the Sea and
Deirdre of the Sorrows (performed and published posthumously in 1910) are more fatalistic than his
early plays. In the former, a mother watches her six sons being taken by the sea and being unable to
find comfort in either pagan or Christian rites she is left desolate. She is left waiting for the "great
rest." In the latter, death is seized by the young queen as a way out of her loveless marriage. The
Playboy of the Western World was first produced in 1907, and is based on poetic prose and the
speech rhythms of the Irish peasantry. The play is a rather bitter comedy with constant tragic
overtones. It is the story of Christy Mahon, a slight young man, very tired and frightened," who
arrives at a village in Mayo. He turns out to be a fugitive from justice who, in a quarrel, has killed his
bullying father, splitting him to the chin with a single blow. He is hospitably entertained, and his devil
dare character gives him a great advantage with the women over the milder spirited lads of the
place. But admiration gives way to angry contempt as the father himself arrives in search of the
fugitive, who has merely given him a crack on the head and run away. The suggestion that The Play
Boy condoned a murder and the harbouring of the murderer gave rise to fierce public controversy.
The play, however, is now recognised as one of Synge's best. His The Tinker's Wedding (1908) was an
anti-Catholic play, and his Works also include the descriptive essays such as ln Wicklow, West Kerry
and Connemara (1911).

Sean O'Casey (1880 - 1964) was born in Dublin and, according to his own account, educated on the
streets of the city. His plays are informed by his own experience of poverty and violence, and show a
strong sense of tragic irony as well as of humour. One of his best-known plays is The Shadow of a
Gunman (1923), set in the War of Independence against the British, and depicting events as they
influence the lives of the ordinary people who suffer most from them. Juno and the Paycock (1924)
successfully links the public events with a tragic private melodrama based, in part, on the violence of
the Civil War of 1922. The new born state is the setting of the story of a poor family's expectations of
an in-heritance and their subsequent disappointment. Bitter comedy and stark tragedy clash in
violent disparity. Humour and irony of circumstance create an original and impressive unity. The chief
characters are Juno, a Dublin housewife, who tries to hold her family together despite a lack of
money, her weak and often drunk husband (the paycock), her daughter deserted by the father of her
child, and a wounded son who is taken away at the end of the play to be shot as a spy. The play's
structure conveys the idea that false illusions invite catastrophes; each act is built upon the
discrepancy between the characters' expectations and the very different actuality they confront.

The Plough and the Stars (1926), about the Easter rebellion of 191 6, reaches a final climax of horror
in which national and private tragedy intermingle. The title of the play refers to the flag of the Citizen
Army. The play powerfully claims that during wars, men dream and try to be heroes while it is often
the women who suffer most from the realities of the conflict. The Silver Tassie (1928), Red Roses for
Me (1943), Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949), and The Bishop 's Bonfire (1955) were his other major
successes. He also published his autobiography in six volumes (1939 – 1954). O' Casey consistently
wrote of the poor and the humble. He abandoned realism and naturalism in favour of a drama,
which combined light, music and dance. His work was closer to the lower classes and common
people than Yeats', and created new national myths.

In 1920 the Government of Ireland Act was adopted, creating an independent republic with its
northern part belonging to the United Kingdom. In 1921 the Irish Free State was created with a new
Constitution, ratified in 1937. From the 1920s onwards, many writers abandoned the heroic vision of
Ireland, which before was so important for the new state and new literature.

The Poetry of the Thirties and Forties

The writers of the thirties revised their stance in relation to the previous generations. The poetry of
the thirties reflects the personal experiences of human beings thrown into the chaos of the pre-war
Europe. Evident is a growing anxiety about Fascism and its repercussions, as well as the unknown
dangers of Communism, already established in the Soviet Union. The First World War produced a lot
of memoirs and intellectual contemplation upon the past. In the thirties the impact of that war
literature started to dwindle as the world was facing new significant events and the coming of the
unknown future.

One such representative of the thirties is Dylan Thomas (1914- 1953), a Welshman, who moved to
London where he did journalistic work and later film writing and broadcasting. His poetry, which is
full of vitality and powerful but often obscure imagery, had a tremendous influence on the younger
poets of his generation, and also roused profound controversy among critics. He died during a lecture
tour of the United States, after having achieved the status of a legend for his poetry readings and his
bohemian lifestyle. His volumes of poetry include Eighteen Poems (1934) and Twenty Five Poems
(1936). The Map of Love (1939) and Deaths and Entrances (1946) are his volumes of stories, the
latter relates his impressions of the bombardment of London and his fascination with the pathos of
death. His Collected Poems appeared in 1952.

Thomas' poetry of the thirties is very different from Auden's. Thomas belongs to the second
generation of the Modernists. His early poems experiment with syntax, wordplay and unusual
metaphorical links to force the reader into unusual and demanding perceptions. A flower set is a
"green fuse," the writer's heart "sheds syllabic blood," the dead "hammer" their way back to daylight
through the daisies. Thus, while Thomas' Carly poems deal with romantic subjects such as love,
beauty, death and transience, they do so with a violently heightened emotional tone employing a
startling variety of literary devices. In his later poems, he delights in the life of the countryside, the
forces of birth, sex and death, and the powerful feelings they all create. One of his most famous
poems is about his father as he lay dying. His father was always an emblem of strength for the poet,
but he could not be strong enough to overcome death. "Fern Hill" is one of the most popular of
Thomas' poems simply because it is much more easily accessible. The poem celebrates a vulnerable
childish freshness and communion with nature. Still, Thomas compounds commonplace words to
"defamiliarise" the objects by shifts of grammatical function or a reversal of words. Wordsworth, in a
similar case, referred to childhood remembrances, moving towards the mystical and trying to find
the fusion with Nature and the transcendental. Thomas' sense of wonder comes from participation
in life itself. He is spellbound by transcendental reality itself, not by its mystical appearance.

Thomas prose works include the semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940)
and Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955). The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is a celebratory
exuberant piece of prose, which retains the style of the realistic writing of Dickens. Under Milk
Wood: A play for voices had its first public hearing in may 1953, at Cambridge, Massachusetts when
he read it himself in a still unfinished version. He completed it and it was published the following
year.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 - 1973) is one of the poets of the thirties whose work reflected the
emotions of that decade. He was born in York, educated at Oxford, and lived in Berlin in the time of
the Weimar Republic. His early verse is infused with social criticism and this protest shows the
influence of psychoanalysis as well as Marxist ideas. After his return to England he published Poems
(1930), The Orators (1932) and, with Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (1937), one of the best
English travel books. He also collaborated with Christopher Isherwood in the writing of plays such as
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The Ascent of F 6 (1936). With Isherwood, he wrote Journey to
a War, a travel book about China. During the Spanish Civil War, he served on the Republican side and
in 1939, he immigrated to the USA. Spain 1937 is probably the most celebrated of all poems of the
1930s. It was originally sold as a pamphlet for a shilling and the royalties were given to Medical Aid
for Spain. Auden perceives the conflict between Fascism and Marxism as similar to the one between
pessimism and optimism. It was the time to act if Western civilisation was to be preserved from
decay. Hence, the vitality and invigorating energy of the poem. The images of gulls and seeds evoke a
sense of the multitude of people who responded to this challenge and who came from all parts of
the world. A spirit of light poetic fun intermingles with an awareness of doom, capturing for Auden
the atmosphere of his times. Auden's later verse includes New Year Letter (1941), The Age of
Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947), and The Shield of Achilles (1955). The poem "The Shield of
Achilles" is a transposition of remembrances of the Second World War into the times of the Trojan
War. The comparison serves the purpose of understanding the experience of death through
reference to classical concepts. Auden does not believe in sympathy and honesty as the two
fundamental virtues of our society; it is violence and murder that be-come the natural aspects of life
for him. In Homage to Clio (1960) and About the House (1967), he abandons, to some extent, his
earlier Marxist ideas and writes from a Christian standpoint.

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904 – 1972) was also associated with Auden and the left wing poets. He was a
member of the Communist Party whose early works reflect such views, but later he turned towards
more personal and pastoral themes. The influence of Auden, and then of Victorian novelists and
poets Hardy and Meredith, result in a heavy indebtedness to their works that definitely lessens his
own achievements. "O Dreams, O Destinations'" is a son-net sequence made up of nine sonnets,
which appeared in the thirties. The poet reflects on the growth of his mind from childhood to
maturity: in theme, his poem is a kind of shortened Wordsworthian Prelude. "The symbols are
charming and evocative but not irrefutable; they are even tendentious, in that they evoke one
particular interpretation of human experience... along with the experiences themselves". Lewis was a
professor of poetry from 1951- 1956, the first poet of distinction to hold such position since Matthew
Arnold. He published Collected Poems (1954) and then The Poems of C. Day-Lewis 1925- 1972 (1977).
He also did some work in translation of Virgil, and wrote a number of detective stories (under the
pseudonym of Nicholas Blake). In 1960 he published his autobiography, The Buried Day, and in 1968,
as if against all his youthful convictions, he was appointed Poet Laureate.

Louis MacNeice (1907- 1963) was associated during the 1930s with Auden and Spender but was less
politically involved then they were. He worked at first as a university teacher of the classics, and then
at the BBC. His early poems have an urbane, high-spirited and almost Horatian quality whose
metrical control has often distracted readers from their moving observational quality. His works
include Poems (1935); The Earth Compels (1938); Autumn Journal (1939), a portrayal of the
atmosphere of Munich of the pre-war years; Plant and Phantom (1941). One of his most famous
poems, "Snow," written in the thirties, displays MacNeice's sensitivity to the "Proustian moments
“those moments in our lives in which one particular image provokes a chain reaction of recollections
of the past. "Snow" refers to Christmas-like symbolism with its symbolic as well as realistic
significance playing with juxtapositions of snow and rose, white and red, winter and summer. In a
simple scene, the magic can harmonise with the real, transcending the logical accession of facts.
Such is the poet's vision of the world of coinciding oppositions MacNeice also did some work in
translating Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Goethe's Faust. His upbringing, as the son of an Ulster
Protestant clergyman ("between a smoking fire and tolling bell"), his training as a classical scholar,
and his appreciation of the ordinary pleasures of life are elements which all impinge upon his work.
Moreover, all of them are handled with a well-judged lyrical virtuosity.

Stephen Spender (1909- 1995) left Oxford for Germany, spent a period of time in Spain during the
Civil War doing propaganda work for the Republican side, and spent much of the Second World War
as a member of the National Fire Service. After the war, he lectured in America and was co-editor of
the Encounter magazine. His work includes Collected Poems (1954), a verse play Trial of a Judge
(1938), and political and literary studies such as Forward from Liberalism (1937), Life and the Poet
(1942), The Destructive Element (1935), The Creative Element (1953) and The Struggle of the Modern
(1963). During the thirties he wrote poetry of a Shelley a quality in a modern idiom, which, however,
never achieved a truly powerful romantic quality as he gradually lost faith in the power of verbal
expression. Spender's socialistic views are expressed in poems like The Landscape Near Aerodrome.
The poem presents two contrasting images of aeroplane as the symbol of the technological
achievements of civilisation and the chimneys of factories, ugly landmarks of industrialised countries.
Spender expresses here his own despair and inner conflict between faith in progress and Romantic
nostalgia about the "green pastures of England" which are irretrievably lost. After the war, Spender
wrote little poetry and concentrated on academic life. He produced many critical works, including
The Creative Element (1953), The Struggle of the Modern (1963) and Love-Hate Relationships: A
Study if Anglo-American Sensibilities (1974), World Within World (195 1) is a testimony of his and his
generation's lives. In 1985 he published his Collected Poems 1928-1985.

Elizabeth Daryush, b. Bridges (1887- 1977), married a Persian government official in 1923. They lived
in Persia between 1923 and 1927. Her first collection of verse, Charitessi (1911), appeared in 1912.
She then continued with Verses (191l6) and Third Book of Verses (1933), Fourth Book of Verses (1934)
and The Last Man and Other Verses (1936). Most of her work published in the thirties was strongly
influenced by the political and social situation in Europe. Another social activist and a novelist and a
poet was Sylvia Tow send Warner (1893 - 1978). She began her career with a volume of poetry, The
Espalier (1925), and a year later published the bestselling novel Lolly Willows or the Loving
Huntsman. The civil war in Spain inspired some of Warner's best poems. Political disillusionment and
war-time experiences found their way into her novel The Corner that lleld Them (1948).
The work of the Second World War poets is quite distinct than created by the soldier-poets of the
First World War. Sidney Keyes (1922 - 1943) produced his first collection of poems, The Iron Laurel,
which appeared in 1942; the same year he joined the army. His second collection, The Cruel Solstice,
appeared in 1943, after his death in Tunisia. In his first poems, for example, "Europe's Prisoners," he
trusts that justice will eventually prevail. His "Elegy for Mrs. Virginia Woolf' is a stream of
consciousness using the water imagery that drowned her. His "Cervières" depicts a French vineyard
plundered by birds and expecting even fiercer attacks from the Germans. Keith Douglas (1920- 1944)
was killed in Normandy, and managed to publish only one volume of verse, Selected Poems (1943).
Douglas' utilises desert imagery and presents war-time Cairo, e.g. "Cairo Jug." In the poem "Desert
Flowers" he pays tribute to Isaac Rosenberg. His poignant description of a dead German soldier in
"Vergissmeinnicht" shows an affinity with the First World War poets and their ideas of futility and
helplessness. Alun Lewis (1915- 1944),a Welsh poet, joined the army in l1940. His volume of poems,
Raiders Dawn, appeared in 1942. In 1943 he published a volume of stories, The Last Inspection,
which deal with his army life in England. Just like Keyes and Douglas, Lewis pays tribute to the
unwilling soldiers of the First World War. In "AIl Day It Has Rained" he paints a picture of the life in
camps. Lewis was killed in Burma in 1944.

William Empson's (1906 – 1984) poetry was dedicated to the themes prevalent in the thirties. He
published two volumes of verse, Poems (1935) and The Gathering Storm (1940). His rather difficult
poetry makes use of analytical arguments and imagery drawn from modern physics and
mathematics. Empson consciously refers to the achievements of the metaphysical poets, especially
of Donne, modelling his poems on paradoxes and skilful metaphysical conceits. Empson is also the
author of two important critical works, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and The Structure of
Complex Words (1951). His Milton's God (1961) is an assault on Christianity, while his essays Using
Biography (1984) explore the use of biographical information in criticism against the precepts of New
Criticism.

One of the most celebrated critics of the period is Frank Raymond Leavis (1895--1978). He was the
editor and co-founder of Scrutiny (1932– 1953), a critical quarterly review. From the very beginning
he refused to acknowledge the importance of Auden. His publications include Mass Civilization and
Minority Culture (1930), The Great Tradition: George Eliot, James and Conrad (1948), The Common
Pursuit (1952) and D.H. Lawrence: a Novelist (1955). Leavis is a critic in the tradition of Johnson and
Arnold, whose criteria for judgement have to do with the critic's understanding of what is to be
valued in life itself. His pen, however, can be quite sharp, as is evident in his brilliant attack on C.P.
Snow: Two Cultures?: the Significance of C.P. Snow (1962).

One of the first women critics was Queenie Dorothy Le a vis (1906 – 1981) b. Roth, the wife of
Raymond Leavis. In 1932 she published her doctoral dissertation entitled Fiction and the Reading
Public. The book promoted sociological approaches to literature, thus anticipating the interests of
much of post-war criticism. Leavis published her critical pieces in a journal Scrutiny, which began
appearing in the same year.

Another celebrated critic and writer was C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898 – 1963). He converted to
Christianity in 1929, and described his experiences in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy
(1955). One of his most famous scholarly works is The Allegory of Love (1936), a study of the courtly
love theme of medieval literature. His Discarded Image. An Introduction to Medieval and
Renaissance Literature was published in 1964,Lewis also wrote science-fiction novels, for instance,
the trilogy Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1939) and That Hideous Strength (1945). The
Great Divorce (1946) is a fictional work re-working of Blake's allegory of the marriage of heaven and
hell.