Modern literature and education Literary modernism Postmodernism Feminist literature

Literary significance and reception
The novel was popular in England and over the years has achieved notable status, being adapted into films in 1958 and most recently in 2002 by Miramax, featuring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser and earning the former a Best Actor nomination. However, after its publication in the United States in 1956, the novel was widely condemned as anti-American. It was criticised by The New Yorker for portraying Americans as murderers, largely based on one scene in which a bomb explodes in a crowd of people. According to critic Philip Stratford, "American readers were incensed, perhaps not so much because of the biased portrait of obtuse and destructive American innocence and idealism in Alden Pyle, but because in this case it was drawn with such acid pleasure by a middle-class English snob like Thomas Fowler whom they were all too ready to identify with Greene himself". The title of a 1958 book, The Ugly American, was a play on Greene's title, however authors Eugene Burdick and William Lederer thoroughly misunderstood the novel as their book argued that the American diplomatic corps needed to be more modern, technically proficient, and friendly in assisting Third World countries—some of the exact qualities that blinded Alden Pyle. 
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed The Quiet American on its list of the 100 most influential novels.
LECTURE 10. WOMEN WRITERS IN XX CENTURY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF FEMINIST LITERATURE
PLAN:

1. 
   The use of new imagery tools in the works of Virginia Wolf
   
2. 
   Catherine Mansfield - as the author of many stories about the fate of women
   
3. 
   Iris Murdoch – a representative of existentialism, and her philosophical views
   
4. 
   Novels on the issue of the modern woman and her role in society
   

Women have long had a presence in British literature, but this was largely forgotten by the mid-20th century and so had to be recovered. Since the 18th century, for instance, some educated women with dependents wrote to avoid destitution and the workhouse. Aphra Benn (1640–89) was one of the first women writers to earn her living by her pen, opening the door to other professional women writers in the 18th century. Most famously, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot shaped 18th- and 19th-century literature, and the opinions of the readers who read their work. It is a sign of the patriarchal society of the time that Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot both used male pseudonyms under which to publish their work: Charlotte Brontë wrote initially as Currer Bell, while George Eliot’s real name was Mary Anne Evans. Female authors such as Virginia Woolf led the way to modernism and the reinvention of the novel in the early 20th century. Woolf famously claimed that a woman needed a room of her own and £500 a year to write. She also suggested that Shakespeare’s sister, if he’d had one, would, like so many women, have been more likely to die in childbirth than become a successful playwright.
Though there have been professional women writers for centuries, women’s writing tended towards specific genres – travel, health, fiction and histories – and this work received comparatively little attention from both men and women. Much research by feminist presses and on the part of feminist historians and writers went into unearthing many lost and forgotten women writers from the past. By the mid- to late 20th century, with increased education and higher standards of living, a broader spectrum of women’s voices began to be heard.