Of the rabuplic of uzbekistan samarqand state institute of foreign languages english faculty II

Chapter 1. English literature of the XIX-XX centuries
1.1. Political, social, literary environment in the XIX-XX century

The second period in the development of English literature of the 20th century was the decade between 1930 and World War II.

The world economic crisis spread over the whole capitalist world in the beginning of the thirties. The Hunger March of the employed in 1933 was the most memorable event in Britain. The employed marched from Glasgow to London holding meetings in every town they passed.
In Germany Hitler came to power in 1933.
In 1936 the fascist mutiny of general Franco led to the Civil War in Spain. The struggle of the Spain people was supported by the democratic and anti-fascist forces all over the world. An International Brigade was formed, which fought side by side with the Spanish People's Army against the common enemy – fascism.
Many British intellectuals and workers joined the ranks of the International Brigade. Every one of them clearly realised that the struggle against fascism in Spain was at the same time a struggle for the freedom of their own country.
The Second World War broke out in 1939.
A new generation of realist writers, among them Richard Aldington, J.B. Priestley, A.J. Cronin and others appear on the literary scene.
An important event in the literary life of the thirties was the formation of a group of Marxist writers, poets and critics. Their leader was Ralph Fox (1900-1937). He came from a bourgeois family, was educated in Oxford University, but later broke away from his class. His ideas were formed by the Great October Socialist Revolution. In 1925 he joined the Communist Party. Being a journalist, historian and literary critic, Ralph Fox devoted all his activity to spreading Marxism and fighting the enemies of the British working class. When the Civil War in Spain broke out, Ralph Fox was one of the first to join the International Brigade. He was killed in action in January 1937.
Ralph Fox's main work is his book The novel and the people, published posthumously in 1937. The aim of the author was to show the decline of bourgeois art, and the novel in particular, together with the decline of the bourgeois in general. At the same time Ralph Fox sought to point out the way literature should develop in the future.
Ralph Fox considers that the novel reached its highest point in England in the 18th century. This was a time when the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, therefore Fox concludes that the optimistic view of the world expressed in the novels by Fielding is the best manifestation of the epic quality of the novel. Man in the novels of the Enlightenment is treated as a person who acts, who faces up to life.
Contrary to the active hero of the 18th century novel, the hero in the modern novel is an active figure, a passive creature. Fox speaks about 'death of hero'. He means that contemporary literature is not occupied with heroic characters. Psychological subjectivity, typical of Joyce and other authors, has nothing to do with the wide epic scene of social life described by great classics. Socialist Realism must put an end to this crisis of bourgeois literature, Fox says. It should bring forward a new man, a man who knows the laws of history and can become the master of his own life. Fox speaks of Georgi Dimitrov at the Leipzig trial as an example of such a new hero. The future belongs to the heroic element in life.
This feeling of important change and the heroic spirit of the anti-fascist struggle found its outlet in the first place in the development of poetry. The trio of poets, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis, had in many ways inaugurated the new movement which sought to fuse poetry and politics. They stood out as representative figures, and on the whole they held this position till the year 1938. Then began the rapidly extending crisis of the movement. This group, usually known as the Oxford Poets, was very popular in its time. But the movement did not last long. A Marxist critic, Christopher Caudwell, in his book Illusion or Reality explains why the movement lost its popularity. "They often glorify the revolution as a kind of giant explosion which will blow up everything they feel to be hampering them. But they have no constructive theory – I mean as artists: they may as economists accept the economic categories of Socialism, but as artists they can not see the new forms and contents of an art which will replace bourgeois art."
At once an invitation and a provocation, The Socio-Literary Imaginary represents the first collection of essays to illuminate the historically and intellectually complex relationship between literary studies and sociology in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. During the ongoing emergence of what Thomas Carlyle, in "Signs of the Times" (1829), pejoratively labeled a new "Mechanical Age," Britain’s robust tradition of social thought was transformed by professionalization, institutionalization, and the birth of modern disciplinary fields. Writers and thinkers most committed to an approach grounded in empirical data and inductive reasoning, such as Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill, positioned themselves in relation to French positivist Auguste Comte’s recent neologism "la　 sociologie." Some Victorian and Edwardian novelists, George Eliot and John Galsworthy among them, became enthusiastic adopters of early sociological theory; others, including Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford, more　 idiosyncratically both complemented and competed with the "systems of society" proposed by their social scientific contemporaries. Chronologically bound within the period from the 1830s through the 1920s, this volume expansively reconstructs their expansive if never collective efforts. Individual essays focus on Comte, Dickens, Eliot, Ford, and Galsworthy, as well as Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Virginia Woolf, and others. The volume's introduction locates these author-specific contributions in the context of both the international intellectual history of sociology in Britain through the First World War and the interanimating intersections of sociological and literary　 theory from the work of Hippolyte Taine in the 1860s through the successive linguistic and digital turns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
In the 1930s, English literature entered a new stage in its development. Byron and Shelley, Keats and Scott have passed away. Romanticism was not replenished with new names. True, he did not cease to exist, but the ranks of his supporters clearly and significantly thinned out. Therefore, in English literature, as in a number of other European literatures, democratic and realistic tendencies were gaining strength in the 1930s and 1950s.
To understand the literary process of the second third of the 19th century, it is necessary to take into account the alignment of social forces in England of this period, the features of the social and ideological struggle that unfolded in the country after the adoption of the electoral law of 1832. The content and character of the English literature of those years are due to the originality of the historical, political and socio-economic development of England during the formation of the Chartist movement, the aggravation of contradictions in the country that entered the Victorian era (1837 - 1901).
In the historical and literary process of England in the middle of the 19th century, 3 main periods can be distinguished: 1) the 30s; 2) 40s or "hungry forties"; 3) 50 - 60s.
The classical country of capitalism, England became in the 30s of the XIX century the scene of sharp social, political and ideological battles. By the beginning of the 1830s, factory production was finally victorious in the country. Industry is developing at a rapid pace. The huge successes of the national industry, the abolition in 1834 of the "corn" laws were accompanied by the expansion of England's activities in other countries of the world, the development of its foreign trade. By the middle of the century, England is becoming richer and richer and becomes not only the most powerful capitalist power, but also a colonial power. The development of industry and the previously unheard of growth in the wealth of the propertied classes was accompanied by a terrible impoverishment of the bulk of the working population. Never before has the country known such poverty for the majority of its citizens, never before have the contrasts in property status been so striking.
Almost immediately after the adoption of the law on reform, the policy of the parliament, in which the bourgeoisie received the decisive word, showed for whose interests the nationwide struggle was going on on the eve of 1832. Already two years after the electoral reform, the famous Poor Law passed, depriving the worker of parish unemployment assistance and giving him a choice between beggarly earnings in a factory and a workhouse - dungeons, called the "Bastille for the poor" by the English workers.
While the masters of industry were still fighting for undivided dominance with the historically doomed aristocracy, Chartism was born and quickly began to develop - the first mass, politically formed labor movement. The participants in this movement, who had independent goals and interests, opposed themselves to the exploiting classes. The political program formulated by Chartism provided for the complete reorganization of society. Chartism unfolded in the mid-1930s and did not fade for two decades.
The decades that followed the electoral reform of 1832 were a time of struggle in English literature between different trends and tendencies. This period was characterized by the activation of both progressive and reactionary forces in literature.
The main issues discussed in the late 1920s and early 1930s were issues related to romanticism and the fate of a romantic hero.
The criminal-romantic or "Newgate" (from the name of the criminal prison in London - Newgate) novels by E. Bulwer, W. Ainsworth and their school gained great popularity. In these novels, a strong energetic personality, considered outside of public relations, was brought to the fore, the underworld was romanticized.
Along with the "Newgate" novel, numerous works of the "silver spoon" school spread - secular novels by such numerous writers as F. Trollope, K. Gore, L. Landon and others. These authors painted an artificial world of feelings and experiences of the "selected" part of society, embellished the life of people who are infinitely far from the suffering and aspirations of the masses.
At the same time, dozens of works of everyday writing realism were created, in which the voice of the new growing bourgeoisie sounded (novels and short stories by M. Edgeworth, T. Hook, W. Koum, and others). The defining feature of these works was the unconditional acceptance of the existing order. The books did not contain accusatory tendencies that appear in the work of critical realists. The hallmarks of English life-writing realism were humor and the painstaking writing out of the details of everyday life of ordinary representatives of bourgeois society. The creators of everyday novels and stories looked at the world through the eyes of utilitarians, and did not at all want to see anything in the world around them that would shake the optimism of the victorious bourgeois.
In poetry, Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892), who received the title of court laureate poet, acted as a singer of the bourgeois system. Tennyson's poems, extremely melodic and revealing the great talent of the poet, almost all (with the exception of works that glorify the beauties of nature) are saturated with the ideas of the Victorian bourgeoisie. The moral of most of Tennyson's lyrical works is patience and humility before the will of Providence, accepting things as they are. The poet, who was widely popular among readers of the middle of the 19th century, sang love, supposedly smoothing out social differences (“Lady Claire”, “Lord Burley”, “Godiva”). In a cycle of poems that the author himself considered his most important work and on which he had been working for decades - "Idylls of the King" - Tennyson, stylized as the Middle Ages (the works are based on medieval legends about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table), preached Victorian bourgeois morality.
Writers and poets who expressed the interests of the bourgeoisie that had come to power occupied a significant, but by no means leading, place in English literature. The best that literature gave during this period was written by those authors who were not only truthful "painters" of people and relations of their time, but most often severe and angry detractors of them. The suffering of the masses, the growth of popular protest against oppression and exploitation were reflected in the works of poets and writers - Chartists (Ernest Jones, Gerald Massey, William Linton, etc.). In the 1930s, Dickens and Thackeray entered literature.
The 40s open a new stage in the development of English literature. This is a period of social upsurge, the scope of the Chartist movement.
Changes in the ideological climate in the conditions of a growing social upsurge were reflected in the literary process, and, above all, in the novel as a genre of great educational value. The social novels of the "hungry forties" - Dickens, Thackeray, the Bronte sisters - imprinted the ideas of the century, the state of the social movement, and the moral principles of the era.
The third stage in the development of English literature of the 19th century falls on the 50s and 60s. It was a time of lost illusions that replaced "great expectations". The appearance of the novel changed significantly along with changes in the social and spiritual atmosphere.
In modern English literary science, the opinion has strengthened about the legitimacy of distinguishing between early and late Victorians. If the former were distinguished by an analytical and critical attitude to reality, then in the work of the late Victorians there is a noticeable desire to focus on a person who is able to abstract from the environment and immerse himself in a world that has its own moral and ethical values.
Literary traditions are also changing: if Fielding and Smollett used to attract word artists, now they often rely on the traditions of a sentimental everyday novel with a predominant emphasis on the mundane, prosaic. Immersion in human psychology means changing the scale of the image of life and the correlation of human fate with the fate of society. Attention to the epic novel is growing, but the epic itself is declining. The narrative line is enriched by its psychologization, the creation of an atmosphere of action. The change in the nature of the novel was dictated by the requirements of the time, the conditions of the social and spiritual development of England. The Victorian era was entering a new phase of its development, bringing it closer to the culture of the turn of the century.
Thus, considering English literature of the second third of the 19th century, it should be noted that the leading trend in it was critical realism, represented by such prose writers as Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte.
The number of critical realists in English literature is not limited to the names mentioned. The best novels by B. Disraeli and C. Kingsley, written in the late 1940s, cannot be attributed to any other literary movement. Realism is also associated with the work of such a well-known writer in her time as George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).
Describing the English realism of the 19th century, it can be noted that it acts as a successor to the realistic traditions of the Enlightenment. From their predecessors, the Enlighteners, the realists borrow the concept of the social determinism of a person, but they cannot but take into account the experience of the romantics, inheriting from them the idea of ​​the individual's dependence on the contemporary historical situation and his mental characteristics. Like the realists of other European countries, English writers most often focus on the problems of an ordinary person taken from life, devoid of traditional heroic qualities, and the opportunity to manifest these qualities. Writers strive to show the personality in various relationships, public and private.
The overwhelming majority of English writers and poets show a keen interest in social topics, an accentuated desire to pose and, in one way or another, resolve the fundamental problems of our time. The English realists, who painted the face of contemporary capitalism, also touched upon the basic contradictions of bourgeois society. Neither Dickens, nor Thackeray, nor other representatives of critical realism shared the views of the Chartists. All of them stood far from the labor movement and were not free from many ideas and prejudices of the bourgeois class. But no matter how strong the dependence of these writers on the bourgeois worldview, they all rebelled against the worst aspects of modern society, against the self-interest, hypocrisy and selfishness of the bourgeoisie.
At the same time, having revealed the biggest contradictions and discovering the diseases of modern society (snobbery, excessive egoism, vanity), the writers sought to highlight noble humanistic ideals - the ideals of people who are morally healthy and pure, capable of self-sacrifice.
Having unleashed ruthless criticism on all aspects of modern life, the English realists relied on the rich traditions of the everyday writing and moralizing novel of the enlightenment novel, combative journalism in tone, materials from newspapers and magazines of their time. They enriched the novel, introducing into it an element of publicism, posterity, direct polemics with existing ideas and philosophical concepts.
The realists, whose brilliant pages of works revealed to the world more political and social truths than all professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, showed in their creations all layers of the bourgeoisie, starting with the rentier and the holder of securities, who looks at any entrepreneurship as something vulgar, and ending with a petty shopkeeper and a clerk in a lawyer's office.
The best representatives of critical realism - Dickens, Thackeray and others - were not limited to depicting individual types, building typical characters. In their novels they gave a broad picture of life, exposed the gloomy underside of those social relations that the recently triumphant industrial oligarchy was building, and at the same time achieved a high mastery of typification, the perfection of an artistic form.
In the 19th century, the novel reached its peak in England, connected with the active political and social life of the country, reflecting the spiritual needs of society. Writers most often create such varieties of novels as social or socio-psychological. "Dombey and Son", "Bleak House" by Dickens, "Vanity Fair" by Thackeray became the most striking generalizations, a symbol of the era.
The national specificity of realism, which certainly exists in all literatures, is explained both by the peculiarities of the development of a particular country and the specifics of the national mentality.
The originality of English realism is determined primarily by the critical orientation of the work of most writers, "painting", based on the traditions of moral descriptive satirical painting and graphics by Hogarth and Cruikshank, and manifested itself not only in descriptions, landscape sketches, but also in the very principle of depicting the individual and the environment.
In addition, comparing the works of English realists with the works of realists of other countries, one cannot fail to notice that the English novel depicts the working class, its suffering, deprivation and even its struggle more widely and more often. So, people from the people are shown with great sympathy in almost all the works of Dickens, from the first stories and essays (“Essays of Boz”) to the last novels of the writer. In "Hard Times" (1854), Dickens depicts a clash between entrepreneurs and workers, a strike at an enterprise. S. Bronte in the novel "Shirley", written after the events of 1848 and published in 1849, depicts the struggle of the Luddites against the machines during the Napoleonic wars.
Like all English literature of the second third of the 19th century, the realistic novels of the same period were by no means homogeneous. The creators of novels shared different beliefs, fought for different ideals and principles, and, although these ideals were often diametrically opposed, the image of modern life, and in particular pictures of the life of the people, got up from the pages of almost all works.
The creators of English critical realism expressed the people's dream of a better life. At the same time, all of them, in one way or another, showed a desire to protect the foundations of the capitalist system, which, in their view, requires only decisive reforms and urgently needed, but still not cardinal changes. The writers were clearly looking for ways to reconcile class forces and preached class peace.
The works of the English realists are notable for their pronounced didacticism, partly associated with the Protestant-Puritan traditions, partly borrowed from the Enlightenment. Didacticism and moral categories, which were formed in the Victorian era in the general course of the development of sciences, especially political economy, sociology, philosophy, leave their mark on the works of such writers as Dickens, Eliot, Bronte and others. and alleviate the sharpness of social conflicts through the preaching of Christian humanism and moral perfection. Moral re-education is considered by the majority of realists as the only correct way to resolve social contradictions.
The defeat of the revolution of 1848, the decline of Chartism after 1854 led to a crisis in the work of even the greatest writers of critical realism. In the 1860s, during the period of economic prosperity of the bourgeoisie, the industrial boom in England, which was accompanied by the decline of the labor movement, all English literature entered a new phase of its development.
1.2. Literary genres in XIX-XX centuries
The article deals with a special genre of "history" in the English literature of the 19th century, the originality of which is manifested in the integration of history and literature. The "stories" of W. Scott (History of Scotland), C. Dickens (History of England for young people) and W. Thackeray (Miss Tickletoby's lectures on the history of England. History of the next French revolution) are analyzed. The artistic concept of famous writers is compared with the concept of English historians T. Carlyle, J. Mill, T. Macaulay. It is concluded that Scott and Dickens create a novelized history, and Thackeray creates a parody of the genre of historiography. The relevance of the article is related to the increased interest in the problems of national identity, national myth, national image, etc. The presented materials can be used in the study of the courses "Children's Literature" and "History of Foreign Literature of the 19th century".
The Victorian era is characterized by a peculiar synthesis of historiography and historical genres in literature. The novelists made up for what was not covered by the actual historical works, little-known or forgotten pages of history, carefully studying historical documents, striving for scientific accuracy in describing the culture and customs of distant eras. At the same time, elements of artistic creation penetrate into historiographical and historical-philosophical works. In domestic and Western European literary criticism, the problem of the genesis and theory of the English historical novel is considered by many researchers, we note the works of recent years (G. Shaw, V. M. Vekselman, E. V. Somova, M. A. Maslova) [18, 1,10, 6].
According to D. Simmons, historians of the XIX century. considered history primarily as a narrative (“narration”), and not as a scientific study. T. Carlyle develops the idea of ​​history as a narrative drama ("narrative drama"), calling the historian a narrator ("teller"), recreating the past in a visible dramatic manner. S. Dale in the work of T. Carlyle notes a kind of synthesis, a fusion of history, philosophy and poetry [15, p.78]. D. Simmons singles out among the creators of historical novels of the 30-40s. 19th century school of "novelists-historians" - F. Palgrave ("Truth and Fiction of the Middle Ages: The Merchant and the Monk", 1837), E.J. Howard ("Sir Henry Morgan, Pirate", 1842), C. Macfarlane ("Refugee Camp", 1844), depicting only genuine historical events recorded in documents that exclude folklore elements and anachronisms from the narrative. Their novels are characterized by factual accuracy and "scholarship". The emergence of "novelist-historians" was facilitated by T. Carlyle and T. Macaulay, who, in contrast to abstract, analytical, stylistically "dead" history
S. Turner, J. Mill, G. Hallam created history "as a narrative drama" [19, p.
39].
In the first third of the XIX century. history, although it has emerged as an independent science, continues to coexist closely with literary creativity. The genre of the historical novel, created by W. Scott, influenced not only fiction, but also the method of creating a historiographical work. Leading English historians J.S. Mill, T. Macaulay, T. Carlyle, choosing the principle of documentary accuracy, combine scientific and artistic principles in their research. T. Macaulay argued that "an impeccable historian, following the facts, must at the same time have an imagination strong enough to make the story exciting and picturesque" [5, Vol. VI, p. 48].
In the 19th century the experience of creating a “history” belongs to the outstanding novelists of the era W. Scott (“History of Scotland” (“Tales of a Grandfather being the History of Scotland from the earliest period to the Battle of Flodden in 1513”, 1827–1829), C. Dickens (“ History of England for the Young” (“A Childs history of England”, 1851–1853), W. Thackeray (“Miss Tickletoby`s Lectures on English History”, 1842, “The History of the Next French Revolution", 1844). Moving, in the words of A. Fleishman, along the path of "integration of history and literature" [16, p.134], writers turn not only to the novel form, but also choose special genre varieties. Colloms, one of the peculiarities of the novelists' creativity in the middle of the 19th century is the love for experimentation, when the variety of art forms allows one to reflect the complex processes of time and era [14, p.365].
B.G. Reizov notes that V. Scott, in contrast to the "antique" historians (Sh. Turner "History of the Anglo-Saxons", 1799-1805), who understood history as a description of tools, clothes, ancient monuments, follows the romantic concept of the historical narrative of I.G. Fichte, when history does not present facts in chronological order, but transfers contemporaries to the historical past [8, p.152]. W. Scott and C. Dickens develop a special genre form - a romanized story, in which the narrative includes not only references to historiographical works, but also little-known facts, curious details, historical anecdotes, texts of folk ballads, legends.
The task of W. Scott in "History of Scotland from ancient times to the Battle of Flodden in 1513" is to present a general picture of national history, recreating the most striking and important events. In the preface, W. Scott notes that his history is “a collection of retellings or transcriptions of some stories from the Scottish chronicles”, which, nevertheless, “gives a holistic view of the history of the country” [9, p. 23].
The book was written for W. Scott's grandson J.H. Lockhart, so W. Scott also calls it "A Brief History of Scotland for the Young". Later, a similar name will be used by
C. Dickens. A model for V. Scott was the popular at the beginning of the 19th century. J. Crocker's book "Episodes from the History of England".
For V. Scott, it is important, according to B.G. Reizov, "the moral meaning of the historical process" [8, p. 177], when the activities of a historical person must be subject to the requirements of duty and justice. "We must not do evil, even if it promises to lead us to good" [9, p.116]. At the same time, W. Scott refuses the category of fate, fate, trying to see expediency and regularity in the historical process. This is evident from the description of the clash of two civilizations: “The Norman Conquest, which became a monstrous misfortune and catastrophe for those who happened to survive it, ultimately made England a more civilized and powerful country ... There are many cases in history when, by the will of the Lord, great good came from what at first glance seems to be the blackest evil" [9, p. 70].
Thus, "The History of England for the Young" is a special genre variety, including elements of the novel, farce comedy, and author's digressions that give the style a journalistic tinge.
The experience of turning to the genre of "history" of the creators of historical novels, W. Scott, E. Bulwer-Lytton, C. Kingsley, C. Dickens, W. Thackeray, shows that in the English historical and literary process of the 19th century. there is a convergence of historical science and artistic creativity. Historiographical and chronological accuracy, fidelity to historical facts penetrates the artistic narrative (W.H. Ainsworth, E. Bulwer-Lytton, W. Collins, C. Kingsley). At the same time, T. Macaulay, T. Carlyle, D.S. Mill, possessing the skill of eloquence, combine in historical research the talent of a historian and a writer. Elements of artistic creativity - psychological details, descriptions, inserted stories, discussions of moral problems, landscape sketches, attention to composition - bring historical works closer to the genre of the novel.