On Queen Victoria's death in 1901 her son Edward VII succeeded to the throne and ushered in an age of hedonism, in which the strict moral code of Victorian England began to give way to modern influences. However, at the beginning of the 20th century Victorian ideals of progress and reform still prevailed: New Liberal governments instituted a series of important social reforms: free school meals for children, the first old age pensions and also Labour Exchanges where the unemployed could look for jobs. In 1911 national insurance was introduced: all working people contributed to funds which would protect the sick or the unemployed. These were the beginnings of the so-called welfare state, which was to reach its apex under the Labour Government after the Second World War. An important Parliamentary reform also occurred: in 1911 with the Parliament Act the House of Lords lost the right to veto financial legislation approved by the House of Commons, and had its powers limited in other matters too: it could now only delay legislation for a maximum of two years and not prevent it altogether. The rise of the Labour Party also began and by 1906 there were twenty-nine Labour MPs in Parliament.
The crucial feature in the period was the build-up to the First World War. Germany was now unified and becoming increasingly strong, expanding its industries and in particular its navy. Britain's domination of world affairs in Victorian times was now called into question, its natural resources appeared limited compared to those of other countries, such as France and the USA, and it fell behind in education in the areas of science and technology. The rigid class system also ensured that the working classes were never made to feel they really participated in Britains greatness. The South African war in 1899-1902, in which the rest of Europe sided with the Boers against Britain, led the government to seek agreements to ensure the balance of power within Europe, including treaties with France and Russia.
Tension in Europe increased steadily and led to the First World War. The bitter trench warfare, which characterized the First World War, leaving a total of 750,000 dead and two million seriously injured among the British alone, not only destroyed the flower of European youth but left deep scars on European life for generations. At the close of the war in 1918 Europe was shattered and exhausted, winners and losers.
Literature in the early twentieth century. The First World War, though the end of an era in many ways, was not the only factor producing decisive change in the intellectual climate of the early years of the century. This was a new age of uncertainty: scientific discoveries such as relativity and the quantum theory destroyed assumptions about reality. Freud 's work, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams in 1901, revolutionized the view of the human mind, and numerous philosophical developments undermined firm 19th-century beliefs in the solidity of observed reality. Darwin s theory of the evolution of the species had contributed to the demolition of the Victorian world-view, and this process was accelerated by the interest in Marxism and socialism. In music and painting, too, the avant-garde broke away from 19th-century concepts of what was beautiful, often radically changing the basis of their art. Modernism in the visual arts began to be exhibited (Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910, Cubism first exhibited in 1907) and revolutionary manifestos of Futurism aggressively challenged Victorian popular taste. Virginia Woolf went so far as to claim that human nature changed in 1910.
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The literary avant-garde became extremely distinct from traditional conceptions of what verse or prose was. In the twenties in particular, the poetry of Eliot and the prose of Joyce were truly revolutionary. After the intensity of literary experiment in the 1920s, the 1930s seemed relatively sedate, a time of consolidation. The avant-garde in literature had in a certain sense become rapidly assimilated by the literary establishment, and writers returned to more traditional methods of conveying their message, albeit with a tone and style fitting to the times, and with a wide-ranging mastery of form. The thirties reached fever pitch in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the so-called Poet's war in which many of Britain's leading writers actually took an active part in fighting for the Republican side against General Franco. The failure of the cause led to a new mood of disillusionment with ideals that had once been held passionately.
One curious fact was the rather reactionary stance that many of the modernist poets and novelists came to expose during their life: their revolutions were very much personal ones and their artistic tensions often showed themselves in a near-obsession with the cult of the artist as creator, as seer, as god, leaving precious little room for other people (Yeats, Lawrence, Pound).
In the first years of the 20th century the work of French writers (Zola, Flaubert) as well as Russians (Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy) began to affect the evolution of English literature, leading to a more intellectual and philosophical approach. In prose, this period is dominated by the major works of novelists such as Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, all remarkable for their modern outlook and very original fictional technique.
Lytton Strachey s Eminent Victorians (1918) was a fairly vitriolic attack on the sacred cows of Victorian morality and culture, and this point of view was very influential for a time. Two novelists were outstanding for their attack on the ideals of scientific progress: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Huxleys novels often depict a cultured elite moving in its own small circles, surrounded by elements of brutality and savagery which occasionally impinge in a violent fashion on so-called civilization. The hollowness of the values of the elite is often more dramatically portrayed in the satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh, novels such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. George Orwell, on the other hand, especially in his non-fictional works, is remarkable for his gritty realism, his refusal to keep silent over the uncomfortable truths and contradictions prevalent in highly ideological societies, like Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, or Spain during the civil war. He is also remembered for his emphasis on the first-hand experience of suffering, as well as for his keen satirical and moral vision of a totalitarian future as expressed in the novels Animal Farm and 1984. In the field of non-fictional works also are outstanding essays on philosophical and moral issues by E.M. Foster and Bertrand Russell as well as criticism represented by the essays of T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards Practical Criticism.
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One of the major technical developments of 20th-century fiction was the so-called stream of consciousness developed more or less independently by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, though the forerunners of the technique were Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, Henry James, George Meredith and many other English novelists. The term was introduced by the American philosopher W. James, who thought that stream of consciousness was a river where all thoughts, feelings, ideas, and sudden associations were mixed without any logical explanation. In this form, the writer attempts to create the illusion of actual thought processes, depicting the free flow of a characters thoughts through an equally free association of words, without any explicit connection. The reader must try to follow the characters as they drift through a succession of ideas, memories and sensations. Joyce called the stream-of-consciousness technique a stream of life.
Alongside with the Modernist trend, in the 20th century realistic tendencies continued to develop in the works of G.B. Shaw, H. Wells, J. Galsworthy and others.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950)
Shaw was a novelist and short-story teller, book reviewer, art, music, and theatre critic, socialist essayist. But he is best remembered as a dramatist, the author of 47 plays. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his drama Saint Joan.
Shaw was born in Dublin and was descended, in his own words, from a family of an Irish gentleman who lacked the income of a gentleman. At the age of 14 he started to work as a clerk in a land agents office. At 20 he went to London. He studied Marx and Engels, but rejected the idea of a revolutionary reconstruction of the world. He became a member of the Fabian society that preached an unrevolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism. Shaw believed in active and individually willed kind of evolution, urged on by what he called the Life Force.
In 1895 he became dramatic critic for the Saturday Review: his deliberately provocative reviews stirred up contemporary English ideas about plays and acting and enlarged the intellectual horizons of his readers. He championed Henrik Ibsen and published in 1891 a study of Ibsen titled The Quintessence of Ibsenism, which presented the Norwegian dramatist as a realistic and reforming playwright, who addressed himself to the problems of modern life and introduced genuine discussion in his dialogue.
Shaw introduced on the English stage a new type of play the British social drama (also known as the publicistic drama, or the drama of ideas). He did not reject the drama which treated universal human problems, such as love and death. He admitted that plays of this type were more lasting while social plays were of interest only as long as the particular problem existed. But he said: If people are rotting and starving in all directions and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must. The reviewing of new plays over a period of years had given Shaw an expert knowledge of the structural devices employed by the authors of the well-made play of the late nineteenth century, and when he came to write his own plays, he was able to use conventional dramatic structure and even conventional themes for highly unconventional purposes. From the beginning, his aim as a dramatist was to shock his audiences into taking a new view of their society and the moral problems that arose out of it. I must warn my readers, he wrote, that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures. Not only did he delight in standing the popular view on its head but he went further: beginning by persuading his audience by means of dramatic action and dialogue that the conventional hero was the villain and the conventional villain was the hero, he would swing everything around again to show that the conventional hero was the hero after all, but in a very different sense from that which the audience had originally thought.
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The dramatical situations of Shaws plays are significant not so much in themselves but as the starting points for the discussion by the heroes of various social problems. At the nucleus of each play lies a central idea. In Widowers Houses it is the exploitation of the urban poor by capitalists; in Philandere r, free love; in Mrs. Warrens Profession, prostitution; in Candida, the womans position in the family; in Caesar and Cleopatra, the policy of conquest and the principles of government; in Man and Superman, love, marriage, socialism, and capitalist civilization; in John Bulls Other Island, therelations between the English and the Irish, the national character, practicality and romanticism; in On the Rocks and The Apple Cart, bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism, etc. Grouped around a central problem is a multitude of other problems. The plays are provided with prefaces in which Shaw explores the themes more fully.
Shaws artistic device is the paradox, i.e. the opinion contradicting that which is regarded as obvious. In Man and Superman, for example, they are:
Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation: prove all things, hold fast that which is good.
Do not love your neighbour as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence; if on bad, an injury.
The very action of Shaws plays is based on paradoxical situations. Respectable members of society live on immoral earnings (Widowers Houses). A priest becomes a rebel, while a godless man performs an act of Christian self-sacrifice (The Devils Disciple). In his earlier plays Shaw would take a conventional stage type, reverse it and then prove that the reversal was the truth. In Arms and Man the romantic stage soldier is substituted by a mercenary who knows fear and hunger; in Mrs. Warrens profession he replaces the romantic courtesan with the woman conducting the profitable, but unpleasant, trade of prostitution.
As a rule Shaws characters are highly original. Some of them are closer to him: John Tanner in Man and Superman, Richard Dudgeon in The DevilsDisciple, Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Captain Shotover in HeartbreakHouse. However they are not idealized and do not win an easy victory in their discussion with their opponents.
Shaws greatest innovation were his female characters. The 19th century English drama admitted two kinds of women: either a weak, tender martyr figure, or a strong-willed impassioned heroine. Shaw created the emancipated woman who is not only equal to man but often surpasses him in intelligence, will-power, and spiritual strength. Some of his heroines are faultless (Candida). Others are invested with features typical of people of a particular social standing (Cleopatra).
The 19th century novel and drama were frankly didactic. Shaw chose a different way of reaching the public. One of his characters, Father Rogan, says the words which could be said by Shaw himself: My way of joking is to tell the truth. Its the funniest joke in the world. In the play Back to Methuselah another character says: Most of the extraordinary ideas have come up first as jests. That Shaws humour had a profound effect cannot be denied but some critics air the opinion that the message would have been greater if the wit had been less.
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Shaws literary career can be divided into two major periods: from the 1870s to World War I and from World War I to the end of his life. He devoted more than 70 years to intensive creative quest, mastering different genres, defending the theory and embodying in practice the principles of realism in art. In his essay Three Plays byBrieux (1909) he stated that great art cannot be created for its own sake. He believed that great writers are apostles doing what used to be called the Will of God. He placed such emphasis on the idea of the high priesthood of artists that in his appraisal a mediocre dramatist could be compared with Shakespeare as long as he exposed evil. As a playwright Shaw himself attacked the ills of the society in which he lived.
The first cycle of Shaws plays, Plays Unpleasant, appeared in 1892-93. The most remarkable plays of the cycle Widowers Houses and Mrs. Warrens Profession are interesting not only for the revelation of lifes contradictions, but also for their gripping dramatic action. The plays have long provocative prefaces attacking a great variety of problems including theatrical censorship.
The cycle of Pleasant Plays (1894-97) is concerned, as the writer saw it, less with the crimes of society, and more with its romantic follies and the struggle of individuals against these follies. The cycle incorporated the antiromantic comedy ArmsandtheMan, the psychological drama Candida, the historical extravaganza TheManofDestiny, and the comedy You Can Never Tell.
In the third cycle, Three Plays for Puritans (1898-99), Shaw, in the struggle for a socially engaged and realistic art, campaigned both against naturalism of modern drama and against pseudo-romanticism of sentimental drama. In The Devils Disciple he threw new light on the world of Puritanism with its pretence of virtue. Caesar and Cleopatra is directed against militarism. Captain. Brassbounds Conversion studies the correlation of formal legality and true morality.
Within the first twenty years of the 20th century Shaw continued to demonstrate creative inventiveness with his philosophical comedy Man and Superman (1901-03), the satirical dramas John Bulls Other Island (1904), MajorBarbara ( 1905), the fable-play Androcles and the Lion (1912), the poem Pygmalion (1912-13), and the tragicomedy HeartbreakHouse (1913-17), subtitled a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes that suggests Anton Chekhov in its depiction of the imminent collapse of a civilization.
The most important features of Shaws artistic method and the originality of his theatre are the keen sense of social commitment, the pronounced intellectual atmosphere, and the brilliance of the dialogue.
JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924)
Conrad was as much a pessimist as Hardy, but he expressed his pessimism in subtler ways. He was also a great master of English prose, an astonishing fact when we realize that he was 21 before he learnt English, and that to the end of his life he spoke English with a thick foreign accent.
His name was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski and he was born in Poland in 1857. He came from an aristocratic family: his father was a translator and writer and also a leader of the Polish nationalists. They moved to Warsaw in 1861, where Conrad's father was arrested after the insurrection of 1863 and exiled. Thus Conrad was orphaned at 11 years of age and was looked after by a rich uncle.
At 16 he went to France to begin a career as a ship's officer: he had inherited a romantic temperament and longing for adventure from his father. In 1874 he was involved in gun-running activities and attempted suicide after an unhappy love affair. By some miracle the bullet went straight through his body and out the other side, missing his heart.
He made a new start by going to England and joining a merchant ship. Incredibly, this was where he began to learn the English he was to use so tellingly in his fiction. He spent sixteen years at sea, rising to be captain of his own ship and in 1889 began his first novel, Almayer's Folly. In 1890 he made a trip to the Belgian Congo which was to provide the source material for one of his best known works, the novella Heart of Darkness, published in 1899. He returned sick and disillusioned, having undergone a spiritual crisis. He finally gave up the sea in 1894 and devoted himself to a literary career, marrying in 1896 and frequenting distinguished friends such as Henry James, H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford. He was a slow and meticulous worker, but nevertheless produced a long series of works, including the story The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), and the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1906) and Under Western Eyes (1910). For much of his life he had lived in poverty, but the publication of Chance in 1912 brought him success, although critics do not consider this work as good as those from the first decade of the century. His last first-class work was Victory (1914). Conrad's work is closely related to his own life, but it is remarkable for the intense artistic transformation that his experience undergoes in his works, each novel or story creating its own unique form and technique. In his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus he wrote: A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art may itself be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of visible justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential - their one illuminating and convincing quality - the very truth of their existence.
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Conrad was for a long time regarded as a sea writer whose exotic descriptions of eastern landscapes gave his work a special kind of splendor. But this is only one aspect of his work. He used the sea and the circumstances of life on shipboard or in remote eastern settlements as means of exploring certain profound moral ambiguities in human experience. In The Nigger of the Narcissus he shows how a dying black seaman corrupts the morale of the ships crew by the very fact that his plight produces sympathy, thus symbolically presenting one of his commonest themes the necessity and at the same time the dangers of human contact. In Lord Jim he probes the meaning of a gross failure of duty on the part of a romantic and idealistic young sailor, and by presenting the heros history from different points of view he keeps the moral questioning continuing to the end. The use of intermediate narrators and multiple points of view is common in Conrad; it is his favourite way of suggesting the complexity of experience and the difficulty of judging human actions.
This notion of difficulty of true communion, coupled with the idea that the communion can be forced on us sometimes with someone who seems to be our moral opposite but who later we may recognize as our true self is found in many of Conrads works, e.g. in The Secret Shorer
Other stories and novels explore the ways in which the codes we live by are tested in moments of crisis, revealing either their inadequacy or our own. Under Western Eyes is the story of a Russian student who becomes involuntarily associated with antigovernment violence in czarist Russia and is maneuvered by circumstances into a position where, though a government spy, he has to pretend to be a revolutionary among revolutionaries. This is the ultimate in human loneliness - when you must consistently pretend to be the opposite of what you are.
JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)
AnIrishman by birth, James Joyce, exercised a considerable influence on modern English and American literature. If a poll were taken among authors, critics and scholars to choose the greatest writer of the twentieth century, the likeliest name to emerge at the top of the list would be his.
Joyce was born in Dublin to the family of a rate collector. He was educated first at Coglowes Wood College and then at Belvedere College, both Jesuit-run. Joyces first publication came in 1891, when he was only nine. It was an essay Et Tu, Heaaly, an attack on the main political opponent of the recently dead Charles Steward Parnell, the great Irish nationalist and hero to many, including Joyces father, who paid to have the essay printed as a broadside. A brilliant student, Joyce completed his education at University College in Dublin, from which he received his degree in 1902. While in college, he discovered the work of the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, famous for uncompromising realism and attacks on bourgeois complacency and conformity, that was to have a great influence on his future writing. These years were also marked by the kinds of controversy that would become part of his life: he published a pamphlet, The Day of the Rabblement, assailing the insularity and philistinism of the Irish Literary Theatre, and found himself becoming increasingly estranged from the Catholic faith in which he had been raised.
In 1902 Joyce went to Paris, and his time there left him with a permanent taste for life on the Continent. In 1904 he briefly taught at a Dublin school. That year he met Nora Barnacle, and on June 16, 1904 (which date he would later make into the day upon which his Ulysses is set) there was some transformation of Joyces feelings that began the lifelong bond between Nora and himself. In October 1904 he took Nora to Zurich, Switzerland, and later to Trieste, where he taught English and tried to have his works published. Although Joyce never again lived in Dublin after the age of twenty-two, all of his fiction is set there.
His first book was Chamber Music (1907), a sequence of thirty-six poems, romantic in feeling and traditional in style, which have been frequently set to music.
Dubliner s (1914) was his first mature work. Like other writers of the time Joyce was influenced by Ibsen. Ibsens plays were, on the one hand, merciless social criticism. On the other hand, they, especially those of the last years, symbolically represented the disintegration of human soul. Joyce acknowledged having consciously apprenticed himself to Ibsen. It was the ethical appeal of Ibsens plays to which Joyce responded. Joyces review of Ibsens When We Dead Awaken can be called the aesthetic and ethical manifesto of young Joyce, in which he gives much consideration to Ibsens method, characterized, in Joyces opinion, by analytical style he compressed the life of all his characters into the short space of two days and symbolism.
Beginning with his first prose sketches Joyce tried to convey something about the lifes essence, about the laws that govern it, describing the most ordinary sort of life, uniting realistic naturalist description with symbolic significance. Joyce described Dubliners as chapters in the moral history of my community, written in a style of scrupulous meanness (i.e. simplicity, lack of ornamentation). Always a highly schematic writer, he devised an underlying four-part structure: three stories of childhood, expressing disillusion; four stories of adolescence, expressing entrapment; four stories of maturity, expressing sterility; and three stories of public life, expressing corruption. Shortly before publication Joyce added to the volume a long story entitled The Dead, stunning in beauty and emotional power. The leitmotif of this collection of stories is death and especially the death of the soul in Dublin, that centre of paralysis: death of the soul in childhood, youth, in adulthood, and in old age. The technique is primarily realistic, but it is unmistakably marked by a tendency toward symbolism. Joyces symbolism does not mean a set system of symbols. On the contrary, it implies a realistic recreation of life; the symbols are realities brought to the brink of the symbolic. It is an attempt to see in every event not only its content but also something more, something that perhaps has meaning for mankind in all times and places.
Dubliners shows the result, spiritual death. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1916)tells us about the causes that inevitably lead to what Ibsen calls the death of the soul.
Joyce traces the highly complex path of the formation of an artist and poet in the conditions of the Irish reality at the turn of the century. The stages represent the life story of Joyce himself: childhood in a family that is a microcosm of the Irish society of that time; education in a Jesuit college; religious doubts, rebellion and loss of faith; ties with an Irish nationalist circle; self-knowledge as an artist, a poet; falling in love; rejection of the Irish life; the decision to leave the native land. The novel is different from novels of reminiscences that were written before him. The events that conditioned Stephens personality are presented in a qualitatively different way, which was later assimilated by the European novel. Joyce selects the most characteristic moments from Stephens life or those that make the greatest impression on the youth, e.g. Hes a little boy. They are telling him a story. Hes charmed by the sound of the words.
One event does not follow another. Instead just a few of lifes pages are recalled. Joyce violates the canons of the classical realistic novel. The correlation world-man-consciousness is converted to man-consciousness-world. The world is not distorted. Realism of description acquires a new facet. At the centre of the writers concentrated attention is personality a complex of conflicting, and often mutually exclusive, emotions, impressions, and associations.
Joyce presents a new vision of life. An important event can be pressed to the dimensions of what seems to be an insignificant hint or, v.v., some episode can be embodied in the novel on an almost epical, psychological, monumental scale.
The description of reality in the first chapter is presented through Stephens still very naïve eyes. As he grows, the prose, which matures with him, shows how reality is transformed into a poetic image in the consciousness of a poet. The capacity of the prose to mature is one of the essential merits of the novel.
Joyce didnt associate himself with his character, he said that his attitude to Stephen was primarily ironic: The only book I know like this is Lermontoffs Hero of Our Days. There is a likeness in the aim and at times in the acid treatment.
The novel consists of 5 long chapters, each of which might be broken down farther. Joyce chose the five-act division of his novel under the influence of Ibsen. In each chapter Joyce touches upon the themes that are most essential for him politics, religion, and art. This method was based on Joyces esthetical principles the trinity of beauty: wholeness, harmony, and radiance. He did not define Stephens or his own attitude once and for all. He wanted to show how Stephens views changed, to portray his spiritual life in its entity.
Joyce was the originator of the stream of consciousness technique in the 20th century literature. Discussions of the stream of consciousness technique usually refer to the influence of Freud. Certainly the psychoanalytical schools ideas affected Joyce. He gave several lectures on Shakespeares Hamlet in which he analysed the tragedy from the Freudian point of view. But in Ulysses Stephen Daedalus who depicts himself as a follower of Freud says he doesnt believe in that theory. Joyce referred to Edouard Dujardin (Les lauriers sont coupes) as the one who influenced him in creating the technique. In fact in English literature Laurence Sterne foreshadows the stream of consciousness of the 20th century.
Ulysses (1914-1922) coincided with the war and post-war period. It grew out of the 20th century drastic redefinition of civilization. While the Europeans of the 19th century had assumed that technological advancements would foster peace, prosperity and unchecked progress, artists and intellectuals of the new century not only started questioning technologys contribution to the humanity on moral and ethical grounds, but they also began to allocate progress to the realm of myth. Writers like Joyce focused on the dissolution of the world order.
Besides Freud had recently posited the existence of id, a great psychic repository of the unconscious impulses and urges that lay deep within the human soul. So writers and artists courted a far less sanguine view of the individual and his experience than previous writers had entertained. In the tragic wake of World War 1, they discovered both a profound pessimism and a new emphasis of the individual.
Ulysses was intended to present a unique re-creation of mans internal life, conscious and unconscious, and to symbolically portray life as a whole, with its fundamental laws. The stories of the three main characters Stephen, Bloom and Molly are not just the stories of an Irish artist, an ordinary citizen, and a middle-class woman, but a tale about intellect, matter, and flesh.
Ulysses is an autobiographical novel, as it was vital for Joyce to find the truth about himself, to evaluate himself at different times of his life. Autobiographical art, according to Joyce, is the fullest expression of the artists understanding of life at the given moment and of himself as an artist describing the world. Thus a novel ought to be about a person and, at the same time, about the world.
In Ulysses Joyce crossed his two favourite genres: the novel and the drama. A great importance is given to the dialogue. Joyce likened his novel to Tom Jones and called it a comic epic in prose.
The name of the novel alludes to Odyssey by Homer whom he considered the originator of Western literature. Joyce was interested in myth because he believed that all epochs were alike in meaning and history is a constantly revolving cycle. Joyce turned not only to Homers epic but to Dantes Divine Comedy and to the interpretation of the name Odysseus given by Aldous Huxley. Dantes Odysseus leaves home and sets out wandering about the world to quench his thirst for knowledge. Huxleys interpretation interested Joyce because it coincided with his own views on the nature of man. According to Huxley the name Odysseus originally consisted of two words: nobody and god. Joyces aim is to show life in its splendour and its insignificance. Homers Odyssey has 24 books. Joyce cut the number to 18 and divided them into 3 parts: Telemachus, The Adventures of Odysseus, and The Return. Symbolically they are the stories of youth, maturity, and old age. All the episodes fall into triads that contain a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis.
A new conception of time made it possible for Joyce to fit the history of Ireland from ancient times to the early 20th century into one day June 16, 1904, the longest day in literature. An extended chronicle of the struggle of the Irish for liberation is reproduced in Stephens stream of consciousness.
In Ulysses Joyce depicts individual experience as far too fragmentary and multi-faceted to be subjected to the constraints of traditional plot. Thus no consistent story emerges in the novel. Instead Joyce focuses on the psychology and perceptions of Leopold Bloom, the middle-aged Irish Jew who is Joyces modern Ulysses. Like Homers Greek voyager making his way home to Itaca after the Trojan War, Bloom lives the life of exile, wandering from adventure to adventure, before he returns home to his wife. In contrast to Homers epic The Odyssey where heroes and gods are truly heroic and godly Bloom trudges the wasteland streets and pubs of lower middle class Dublin in search of lifes meaning. Blooms wanderings are depicted in a single, ordinary Dublin day. And as the routine of the day unfolds, the reader is offered the encyclopaedia of modern life.
The contradiction between the Greek motifs and the troubles of the present day, the myth of Homers Odysseus and the story of the modern Odysseus represent two lines of the novel. The myth performs the function of social and ethical criticism. The novel is mock-heroic, with Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman, is a modern Odysseus; his wife Molly, unlike the faithful Penelope, is an adulteress; and Telemachus is Stephen Daedalus, back from Paris, more mature now but still trying to come to terms with himself. Stephens encounter in the pub with the Citizen, a fierce nationalist, echoes the Cyclopss episode in Odyssey. Bloom is sexually separated from Molly like Odysseus is separated from Penelope physically. The system of correspondences enables Joyce to take a panoramic view of human situation, yet his Ulysses is realistically set in Dublin in1904.
The motif of travel is very important in Ulysses. Joyce combines two meanings of wandering. His heroes move through the streets of Dublin, which for Joyce symbolize the world, and down the roads of consciousness, digesting the experience they have acquired. In Ulysses Stephen is learning to know real life. This is the reason why Bloom is made his spiritual father. Blooms ordinary life carries a higher meaning that Stephen is yet to learn. Stephen must learn to trust time and experience instead of hysterically claiming that history is a nightmare from which he must awaken. Only then will he have the right to call himself an artist, to attain harmony.
Story overview: The day is June 16, 1904 in the city of Dublin, Ireland. The principal characters of the novel are Leopold Bloom, a canvasser at the local newspaper; Molly Bloom, his wife; Stephen Daedalus, a recent college graduate and a young Latin poetry instructor; and a host of characters, including a number of journalists, an old mariner, a caretaker, priests and drunken soldiers. Stephen Daedalus awoke. Dawn had come as usual too soon. Stephens life lacked any hint of happy anticipation. Still in mourning for his mother, who had died of pneumonia the year before, Stephen brooded once again over his guilty memories and the aimless condition of his life. He had no faith, no true friends. He had no sympathy in his grief from his roommate and only close companion, the vulgar, bullying medical student Buck Mulligan.
After breakfast Stephen made his way to the academy. The work is tedious for him but he realizes what keeps him in paralysed, hopeless conspiracy with these boys: in them he sees his own awkward, fearful, impoverished childhood.
After the classes the principal of the academy, Mr. Deasy asks Stephen to use his influence with the local newspaper to have his (Deasys) article on the foot and mouth disease published. Stephen does not feel he is in any position to deny the request; he goes to the newspapers offices.
Meanwhile on the other side of the town, a middle-aged Jew named Leopold Bloom is just beginning his day with an appetizing breakfast of grilled mutton kidneys. Bloom works as an ad salesman at the newspaper and carries a dead weight within him: since the death of his infant son Rudy he is unable to complete the act of sexual intercourse with his wife Molly. Yet, after Rudys death they have often sought comfort in the arms of others.
After breakfast Bloom rides off in the carriage to the funeral of his friend Patrick. However, as the service commences he decides he doesnt like funerals. He thinks its because his kneecap is hurting him when he kneels in prayer. In truth, the service reminds him of little Rudy and his father, who had died a suicide.
Later he spends his working day negotiating the terms of advertising space with a tea merchant. The editor, Myles Crawford, screams when he reviews the final agreement for approval. When Stephen comes to talk with the staff about Deasys article, Crawford refuses to publish it.
At daylight fades Stephen meets with Mulligan and some other young scholars at the local tavern. Their talk turns to the analysis of Hamlet. Stephen says that Hamlet represented the playwright Shakespeare himself: He wrote the play in the months that followed his fathers death
Bloom, after leaving the office, went from the pubs to the seaside. There he saw a flirtatious lass named Gerty and said to himself: I begin to like them at that age. He returned to the tavern, the pictures in his mind coming one after another: his dearly departed Rudy, then the lurid vision of his wife in bed with one of his cordial acquaintances. Now his only recourse was to drown his sorrows. He came in the pub just in time to hear the last of Stephens discourse on Hamlet. The conversation then moved to other issues. Mulligan often turned to look at him while he voiced his supercilious views: For the enlightenment of those who are not intimately acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as the morbid-minded esthere and embry of philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in thing scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali.
After a few more hours of drinking and enduring such bluster, Bloom made his way to Mabbot Street of ill-repute. He received sad ethereal visitations from his dead father, an anonymous bearded woman, his wife, and finally from his lover. In this state he came across Stephen, who in a similar state of despondency, was revisited by the ghost of his dead mother, begging her son to pray for her soul.
Strolling on together, Bloom and Stephen stopped to cavort with a group of prostitutes until two soldiers came up and disliking Stephens surely demeanour knocked him, bleeding, to the ground. Bloom helped Stephen up and for refreshment they trudged on to a seaside café and listened to an old sea veteran recount his grandiose tales. Bloom and Stephen listened in a rapturous envy; never had either of them braved such wonderful explorations.
Stephen accompanied Bloom home where they mulled over intricacies of music, religion, and life. Bloom implored his young friend to leave his reckless circle and come live with him and his wife. And though Stephen refused both men knew that, despite an age difference of 16 years, their lives were irrevocably intertwined.
Bloom finally drifted off to sleep leaving Molly lying there awake thinking of her most recent loverof her girlhoodof the mysteries of human body of the possibility of Stephen Dedalus coming to live with them of her long past courtship with Leopold Bloom of how he kissed me under the moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me to would I yes to say yes And so the womans thoughts followed on, earthy, homey, while her far-wandering husband snored in the darkness at her side.
Finnegans Wake, Joyces last novelappeared when fascism was sweeping over Europe. But Joyces protest is not so passionate and desperate as in Ulysses. He doesnt depict the real world but the world of dreams. The text begins in the middle of the phrase; the beginning is found on the last page. The Wake shows the night and early morning as they are reflected in the consciousness of a sleeping man. It is not quite clear who the dreamer in the book is.
The main hero is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Hes not Irisher. He is an outsider in Dublin but unlike Bloom he is Scandinavian. He has a wife, Anna, and three children, a girl and twin boys. The Wake is the wake of one Finn or all the Finns. One allusion is to Finn, a Celtic hero, who, according to the legend, is not dead but fast asleep in a cave. A day will come when he and his sons awake and freeIreland. But theres also a joking ballad about Tim Finnegan, a hod-carrier who fell from a ladder and was crushed to death. His friends had a wake on him, but when somebody broke a bottle and some whiskey splashed on Tims face he returned to life and broke into dance
Joyce once said that he expected the serious reader to devote his whole life to his works (a recommendation which many scholars have followed). Finnegans Wake is full of puns in twenty different languages, is written in a language in which every word is loaded with multilingual allusions and resonances. However, Joyces humanity and humour triumph everywhere in his fiction, and his constant combination of the vulgar and the refined, the sublime and the ridiculous has made him one of the greatest novelists of the century.
ADELINE VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf was the daughter of the celebrated Victorian critic and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen. She never went to school but was educated at home, and, after her father's death in 1904, she and her sister Vanessa became leading figures in the so-called Bloomsbury Group, an avant-garde circle based at the Stephen sisters' home in Bloomsbury, an area of London, and concerned with social issues, anti-imperialism and feminism.
Her first two novels The Voyage Out (1915), and Night and Day (1919) were fairly conventional, but she became increasingly interested in understanding and describing characters from within and in capturing the true nature of human consciousness, so her later works, including Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941) became increasingly experimental in their technique.
Although Virginia Woolf's novels suffer a little from the limited middle-class environment, which was the only one she had experienced, her perceptive experiments in literary technique are striking, and her analysis of them lucid and cogent. She wanted to revolutionize the sense of plot and criticized more solid, traditional novelists such as H.G. Wells, Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett for their obsession with inessential details which often seemed to be the main basis for their novels and described them as materialists for being concerned more with the material aspects of life than with the subtleties of inward experience. She felt that novels should be based on the writer's own feelings, not conventional descriptions. Technically Virginia Woolf makes no attempt to preserve the outlines of chronological events, but breaks down human experience into a series of impressions: these, however, are never drown in shapeless experimentation with form because the author keeps control of structure and pattern so that the meaning emerges through the interaction of images and impressions. She paid close attention to new developments in painting and the shifting perspectives in her later novels seem to have something of the quality of visual art. Other important influences were the philosopher Bergson's notion of duration or psychological time and the role of memory and association in works such as Marcel Proust's cycle A la recherche du temps perdu. She developed a stream of consciousness technique rather similar to that of Joyce, but quite independently. She wrote in the concluding paragraph of her essay Modem Fiction, The proper stuff of fiction does notexist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. She also mused on the idea of inventing a new name for the form of her books to replace the word novel.
ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)
The background of Aldous Huxley is unusually brilliant. He was the son of Leonard Huxley, an editor and writer; his elder brother, Julian, was a well-known scientist. Since his early years he moved among the great of the English literary and artistic world. A prodigious reader, he found his education tragically cut short at Eton on account of failing eyesight. On his partial recovery he went to Oxford where he took his degree in English. In 1919 he became a journalist and later a drama critic. For most of the 1920s he lived in Italy writing fiction, in 1934 he traveled in Central America, and in 1937 he settled permanently in California.
Huxleys novels from Crome Yellow (1921) through Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), Point Counter Point (1928) to Brave New World (1932) reveal his detached, ironical manner which gave him stature as a sophisticate with a wry awareness of the ills of the world. Seeing through the hypocrisy and corruption, the complacency of the upper classes and the intellectual elite he creates an inferno-like atmosphere of frustration and meaningless. The key to Huxleys interpretation of societys malaise is contempt for life in its present forms and for individuals as they are.
In the mid-thirties Huxley started a feverish search for spiritual values that could save him and his generation from ineffectual sarcasm and irony. He found these in diverse religious creeds, including Hindu and Buddhist trends, and tried to embody his ideas on the improvement of the human race in his works. Deliberately he gave up satire for crude and inartistic sermons.
In addition to his novels, within his lifetime Huxley published poetry, five volumes of short stories, several volumes of essays of music, art and drama criticism, numerous literary reviews and a number of books on philosophy and morality.
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Formation of the American nation and national identity. The history of America is a story first of discovery, exploration and adventure, next of gradual settlement by patient and courageous pioneers, and finally of rapid expansion and development. Five hundred years after the landing of the Vikings under Leif Ericson (about ad 1000), in 1492, Christopher Columbus happened upon what later became known as the New World whilst seeking a short sea route to the Orient. In the wake of this discovery, explorers, soldiers and settlers from numerous European countries started flocking to the New World. Named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator who journeyed to the New World on behalf of Spanish and Portuguese governments at the end of the 1400s, America was a vast wilderness whose indigenous population consisted of Indians. The centuries which followed the arrival of Columbus witnessed the gradual eradication of these indigenous tribes at the hands of Europeans settling upon their hunting grounds and, later, at the hands of Americans intent upon the great drive westwards in the search of new land and opportunity.
In 1607 the British - led by Captain John Smith established the first permanent settlement of about one hundred people in Jamestown, Virginia. This was followed by that of the Pilgrims in Plymouth (1620), later part of the Massachusetts Bay colony (founded 1628-30) in what became known as New England. Settlers spread out from Massachusetts to form the other New England colonies of New Hampshire (1623), Connecticut (1633), and Rhode Island (1636).
From the early 1600s onwards the British king began granting charters for the establishment of colonies in America. The companies of merchants who purchased these charters recruited people to settle in America, and were initially responsible for issues of government. The majority of settlements which made up Britain's Thirteen Colonies (later to become the United States of America) were well established by the middle of the eighteenth century, and, although each of these colonies had a Governor, they were ultimately answerable to the British crown.
Early settlers on the eastern seaboard faced many difficulties at first. The climate was frequently severe, food was scarce, disease was rife and the presence of hostile Indians an ever present threat. Despite these hazards, early colonists succeeded in establishing a solid foundation for the future, and as colonies grew in size and population, so buildings, towns, roads, churches, schools and small industries began to appear. America was a land of equal opportunity, unfettered by the social, economic and class traditions of Europe, and individual advancement was a more realistic possibility. Land was plentiful and easy to purchase, and agriculture provided the main form of employment in many of the colonies. Plantations and farms were organized successfully in the southern colonies of Virginia and Maryland where profitable tobacco crops flourished. As time passed, many planters became wealthy through the cultivation of cotton, rice, indigo, corn and wheat. Wood was plentiful in the vast, unspoilt forests. Britain became the main trading partner with the colonies, exporting her manufactured goods in exchange for raw materials. Mounting prosperity and an expanding population led to Virginia and Maryland making an appeal to the London Company (an organization of English merchants) for larger measures of self-government. In an effort to attract more newcomers to the colonies, the London Company agreed and in 1619 Virginia established the House of Burgesses, the first representative legislature in America.
The New England colonies in the north were populated mainly by newly arrived Puritans. They were English Protestants who had initially emigrated from England to Holland because of disagreements with the orthodox Church of England. They established a thriving and diversified economy in the north and made a substantial contribution to the development of political practices and social beliefs. Indeed, their belief in government by contract from the governed proved decisive in influencing New England principles concerning the value of individual freedom and democracy. They also believed strongly in the importance of hard work (which conveyed dignity on man and ensured him of a place in God's favour) and education (Harvard and Yale colleges were established in 1636 and 1701 respectively). They were particularly strict on matters concerning morality and religion. The society they built up in the northern colonies was highly theocratic: civil government officials were chosen from among those members of the church who most ardently adhered to the principles of the Old Testament, and who were regular churchgoers. Religious intolerance and persecution in Massachusetts led to the hanging of nineteen people suspected of witchcraft in 1692 in Salem demonstrated. New and less severe ideas took root slowly, and by the time Massachusetts became a royal colony in 1691, Puritan rigour was already in decline.
In 1664 England took over the middle colonies of Dutch-controlled New Netherland (later New York) and Swede-dominated New Sweden. Another settlement in what is now Pennsylvania was chartered to William Penn in 1681. Penn was a member of a much persecuted religious group called the Quakers, and once he became the proprietor of the colony he urged other settlers seeking freedom from persecution to come to his colony. Pennsylvania flourished and its capital city, Philadelphia, rapidly became America's largest city.
Further south, Carolina was chartered out to eight proprietors in 1663: British settlers and French Protestants, called Huguenots, combined with other Americans to populate the colony, which in 1712 was divided into two - North and South. The well established rice and indigo plantations in South Carolina required a substantial work force, and many blacks were imported to work as slaves by the growing numbers of wealthy landowners. The southernmost part of Carolina became known as Georgia in 1733. Plantations and African slaves made up an essential part of what was to become a flourishing economy. Large and self-sufficient estates, plantations and sumptuous mansions formed the social backbone of southern life. The southern middle classes also gained a reputation for being more fun-loving and tolerant in religious matters than their northern counterparts.
Africans, who had been captured during the course of tribal warfare and imported by unscrupulous trading merchants, initially possessed the same rights as the newly arrived white prisoners from overcrowded English jails. At the beginning both were pressed into servitude for a limited number of years, but by the 1660s owners of the Africans (especially in the southern colonies) extended these periods of service indefinitely. Hence the beginning of true slavery in North America.
By the early 1700s there were signs of a growing sense of national identity among the colonists, and although they were still ultimately under British rule, crown regulations and laws were frequently ignored. An increasingly clear conflict of interests was to come to a head during the mid 1700s when relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain began to break down definitively.
The relationship between Britain and the colonies deteriorated slowly but surely during the thirty years leading up to the historic Treaty of Paris in 1783. As a result of this treaty the thirteen colonies, which had virtually made up an English nation in the New World, became a new and independent country, the United States of America. Over the years, the colonists had developed a sense of unity and independence, and had grown increasingly resentful of interference in their social and economic affairs on the part of an external power.
French designs on North America came to a halt following defeat at the hands of the British during the French and Indian War in 1763. Britain gained control of what is now called Canada and all the territory east of the Mississippi River with the exception of New Orleans. Spain was also forced to cede possession of Florida to the British in the same year, and, as a consequence, Britain gained complete control of all North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi. The lengthy war with France had taken a heavy toll, however. Britain's national debt had almost doubled, and the costs of policing the greatly enlarged territorial acquisitions on the eastern American seaboard proved very costly.
In order to raise much needed capital, George III authorized the English Parliament to pass measures restricting the freedom of American colonists and to impose new taxes. A British army was stationed in America in 1763. Its aim was to prevent colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains and thus maintain peaceful relations with the Indians occupying that territory. (In what constituted a further infringement of individual liberty, colonists were required to provide the troops with supplies and living quarters.) Indeed, further war with the Indians would have proved too costly an enterprise. Parliament also believed the colonists should start paying their share of the costs involved in maintaining a growing British empire.
The Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) extended duties to molasses brought into the colonies from the West Indies, and imposed a tax on newspapers, legal documents and other printed material. Colonists were outraged by these measures and declared in a famous slogan that "Taxation Without Representation is Tyranny". The Stamp Act was repealed following an American boycott of British goods, but under the Townsend Acts of 1767 further taxes on lead, paint, paper and tea only served to exacerbate the situation.
British troops moved into Boston and New York, two major centres of colonial resistance, and in 1770 three Boston civilians were killed on the city streets. The Boston Massacre united American public opinion still further against the British, and a worried Parliament repeated the Townsend Acts on all items except tea. British tea sold by the East India Company was subject to lower taxes, and in 1773 a group of colonists dressed as Indians dumped this tea into the harbour in what later became known as the Boston Tea Party. The British replied with the Intolerable Acts in 1774, a number of repressive measures aimed at punishing the rebellious colonists. In 1775, delegates from twelve of the thirteen colonies met at the First Continental Congress of Philadelphia a year later, and called for an end to all trade with Britain until the Intolerable Acts were repealed. George III refused to step down, and seven months later the revolutionary War of Independence broke out in Massachusetts.
At the Second Continental Congress in 1775, George Washington was named Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, and a year later the same Congress officially declared independence from Britain. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776) was an uncompromising indictment of King, Parliament and the British people. It laid forth in no uncertain manner the philosophical and political principles which lay at the very heart of the revolutionary cause, and, like the political writings of his contemporaries, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, was an important factor in arousing American patriotism. The fighting went on until 1781. Under the Treaty of Paris, world powers, including Britain, officially recognized America's newly acquired independent status.
The early to mid 1800s are characterized by a geographical expansion of Americans westward. Attracted by the prospect of good farmland, rich mineral and forest resources, and greater religious freedom, thousands of settlers moved over the Appalachian Mountains into unknown territories, continually pushing the frontier westwards. Most of these pioneers became farmers and landowners, although this movement of the population inevitably led to urban development too: towns and cities sprang up along the trails, providing opportunities for trade and commercial expansion.
In ever greater numbers, Americans came to believe in manifest destiny, a doctrine which held that the United States should control the whole of North America. During the 1840s the pioneers settled in lands as far west as California and Oregon Country, which belonged to Mexico and Britain respectively. Texas was annexed in 1845 following appeals for intervention against its corrupt and tyrannical Mexican government. American forces defeated the Mexicans in a brief war which followed and in1848 Texas, together with California and New Mexico, became part of the United States.
Under a treaty with Britain in 1846, Oregon Country was handed over to the United States. By 1853 the USA owed all the territory currently in its possession with the exception of Alaska (purchased from Russia in 1867) and Hawaii (annexed in 1898).
Territorial expansion was accompanied by growing economic prosperity during these formative years for American society Agricultural surpluses especially cotton were exported to Europe at high prices. Transport was expanded and improved in the form of canals and roads. In industry, though manual labour continued to predominate for some time, developments in large-scale manufacturing were beginning to take place. An expanded postal system combined with the new telegraph (invented by Samuel Morse in 1837) to provide quick and efficient means of communication. Improvements were made to printing methods, and an ever increasing reading public gladly took to a steadily growing and more self-confident national literature.
In reply to demands for reform the state began establishing public school systems to which all children had access from the 1830s onwards. By 1835 certain colleges opened up their doors to women and in 1848 New York became the first state to allow married women ownership of property rights. Appeals for female suffrage were left unanswered until 1920.
The most significant issue, however, was slavery. All northern states had abolished slavery by the early 1800s, but the plantation system of farming in the South depended on a cheap labour force for its economic survival. Denouncing the institution of slavery as a moral sin, the abolitionist movement gained strength particularly in the New England states, and southerners became more and more convinced that federal government would eventually outlaw it.
The dispute between North and South over the issue of slavery came to a head in the 1
