Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
LECTURE 8.
British literature between World War I and World War II. Development of English 
literature after the 2nd World War (1950-60).
Problems to be discussed: 
1.British literature between World War I and World War II. 
2. Development of English literature after the 2nd World War (1950-60). 
3. English Literature of the 20th Century .(1970-90) “Lost Generation”. J. Joyce, T. Eliot. 
4. Postmodernism period. Angry young men. 
Key words: humanitarianism, espouse, utilitarianism, prevalence, despise, orthodoxy, 
liberalism, medievalism, grotesque, morbid, abusive, idolatry, virtually, mysticism. 
XX century English literature. Introduction. Modernism 

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The Twenties 
The period between 1917 and 1930 was a time when the crisis of the bourgeois 
world reached its highest point and revolutions took place in several countries: in Russia, 
in Germany and in Hungary. 
The writers of this period tried to show how a new society might be built up. But 
many bourgeois writers who were opposed to revolutions saw nothing but chaos and 
anarchy before them. They explained this crisis as a failure of civilization. 
A symbolic method of writing had already started early in the 20th century. It was in the 
twenties, that there appeared writers who refused to acknowledge reality as such. They 
thought reality to be superficial - it was only a world of appearances. The cause of 
everything that happened,- that is what led to events - was the irrational, the unconscious 
and the mystical in man. These writers called the inner psychological process "the stream 
of consciousness" and based a new literary technique upon it. 
The most important to use this new literary technique was James Joyce (1882-
1941). He influenced many writers on both sides of Atlantic. 
James Joyce, a native of Ireland, spent nearly all his life in voluntary exile. He could not 
live in his own country for it was enslaved by England. This fact may partly explain his 
pessimistic view on life, which is reflected in his work. 
The portrayal of the steam of consciousness as a literary technique is particularly 
evident in his major novel Ulysses (1922). The task he set before himself was to present a 
day in ordinary life, as a miniature picture of the whole of human history. 
Among the writers of short stories who used the realistic method were Katherine 
Mansfield and Somerset Maugham. Though the works of these writers differ very much 
in their artistic approach, their authors had one feature in common. To them the stability 
of the existing social and political order seemed unquestionable. 
The Thirties 
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 realized 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. 

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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 
Georgiy 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." 
The Twentieth Century
(1901-2000-....07 = i.e. today.) 
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of kaughter, one of anguish, anguish of body 
and mind cutting the heart asunder to tear. We all feel motherless today...We are to have 
no more of little mysterious Victoria."-Henry Tomas. 
On January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died at the age of eighty-two. She had reigned for 
sixty- three years, and few of her subjects could recall a time when she had not been 
Queen. Victoria left her name on an era marked by incredible difficulties middle -class 

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srowth, conservative family values, and a strong national spirit. A grandmother of forty 
children, Victoria died an idol of many and a symbol of a solid British Empire. Edward 
VII, Victoria's oldest son took the throne in 1901 at the dawn of a new era. Edward was 
his mother's child in name but not in spirit. He was far less conservative than Victoria, 
and many people feared that his personal life would carry over to the public domain. 
As the new King began his reign, a new century was also beginning, and with it would 
come an era of monumental, sweeping changes to England. 
Modernism. 
A new approach to literature appeared with the new century -modernism. The term 
modernism covers a variety of movements united by the desire to break with the past, to 
change the structure and content of the arts. Spurred by new ideas in anthropology, 
psychology, and philosophy, writers and other artists were both creating and responding 
to new ways of perceiving. 
At first exuberant and optimistic, as in the world of imagists such as Wezra Pound, the 
tone of the movement was chanced by the horrors of World War I to one of 
disillusionment and alienation- as conveyed in T.S.Eliot's poem "the waste Land for 
example. Poets broke out of established meters to experiment with free verse, and prose 
writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf incorporated. 
With their work the ideas of psychology, such as stream of consciousness. Through 
modernism, writers were able to capture and express the soul of their rapidly charging 
world. 
A modernist writer or poet feeling isolated in the reality of bourgeois society, where faith 
in progress seems meaningless and naive, inclined to identify this society with humanity 
as a whole. The outcome of his precarious attitude, of his inner uncertainly, and a kind of 
protest against a hastily world is the obscurity of his art. 
The two most prominent figures in modernist literature were Thomas S. Eliot in poetry 
and James Joyce in prose, Eliot's major poetic creation "The Waste Land" was a model 
for poets, for it became a symbol of the world's sickness of a civilization gone to seed. 
"The Waste Land" is a world of spiritually displaced people of every nationality and 
creed, of people emotionally and intellectually starved and hopelessly alienated from 
decency and dignity in a barren land of rock and stone with dry bones strewn 
everywhere. Eliot's influence was strongly exerted on several Robert Graves, W. H. 
Auden and Dylan Thomas. 
In prose fiction James Joyce's "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" are representative of a 
writer's reaction to man's alienation from life and society. Even Virginia Woolf, one of 
the leaders of the modernists and an experimentalists she admitted how difficult she 
found it to read Joyce. 
Virginia Woolf sees the duty of the new generation of writers in "breaking the windows" 
of stifling and stuffy over finished rooms of contemporary middle-class fiction and 
letting in the fresh air of experiment. The products of this approach are her novels "Mrs. 
Dalloway", "To the high house", "The Waves", etc. all of them demonstrating that the 
events and happenings of practical living are for Virginia Woolf the least part of life. Her 
problem is the projection of mental processes, the subordination of observable actions to 
private thoughts and feelings, which in her understanding, from the real flux of living. 
Criticism of modern civilization also finds a very strong and peculiar expression in the 
work of D. H. Lawrence. The underlying purpose of his art was to restore the natural 
balance in living destroyed by the evils of industrialism. His novels and short stories, his 

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verse, essays and travel books reveal - that to him sex was the creative alternation of life 
as opposed to a deadening, sordid and mechanical age. 
Auldous Huxley used the powerful weapon of satire to castigate his contemporaries, to 
depict the follies and hypocrisy of corrupt society. 
Evelyn Waugh satirized the post-war young people of Britain in a series of comical 
novels such as "Vile Bodies" and "Decline and Fall". 
Sean O'Casy wrote a number of plays of political importance bearing upon the crucial 
problems of our times. Richard Aldington won be world for an audience with his "Death 
of a Hero", and a more limited, but appreciative attention with the criticism of English 
middle-class ways in "very Heaven" and other novels of the period. 
The widespread success of dr.Archibald Joseph Cronin's novels "Halters Castle", "Te 
Stars Look Down", "The Citadel" revealed a general interest for books that are plain and 
straight stories dealing with the uphill struggle of common men and women, with the joys 
and sorrows of ordinary life, with characters who have in them to fight adverse fate. 
John Boynton Priestley novels include comically optimistic scenes obviously determined 
by wishful thinking and the desire to lift the low spirits of British people oppressed by 
post-war hardships ("The Good Companions"), but also sad and true pictures of life as it 
is actually lived by hundreds of Smiths and Browns all over England it is a playwright, 
however, that Priestley took the popular fancy most. His numerous plays can roughly be 
divided into five groups: 
1) detective plays ("The dangerous Corner, An Inspector Calls" and many others) where 
the technique of detection is used for the sake of a serious social message; 
2) realistic psychological plays ("Eden End", "The Linden Tree"); 
3) experimental plays based on idealistic theories of time and on highly subjective 
treatment of consciousness ("Music at Night", "Time and the Conways", "Johnson over 
Jordan"); 
4) political pamphlets ("Home is Tomorrow"); 
5) light comedies (Mr. Kettle and Mrs. moon, etc.). 
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) 
Joseph Conrad was one of the first truly modern British novelists, In 1878 when he first 
arrived in England at the age of twenty, he spoke virtually no English. Yet he wrote his 
first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), in English and continued to use his adopted language 
to create a string of great novels including Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and 
Victory (1915). Conrad was born Josef Teodor Conrad Nalecz Korzeniowski in Russian-
occupied Poland. His father was exiled to northern Russia because of activities on behalf 
of Polish independence, and both his parents died before Conrad was ten. Conrad left 
Poland at the age of sixteen and, inspired by books about the sea, became an apprentice 
seaman first for France and then for England. He sailed to Asia, South America, and 
Africa, exotic locales that would later become settings for his fiction. In 1886 he became 
a British subject and a ship's captain. After the publication of his first book, Conrad 
married, left the sea, and devoted himself to his family and to his literary-career. Conrad 
wrote fiction about the sea and the "mysterious corners" of the world that had captivated 
his youth. His stories and novels convey the glamour and terror of the nomadic life of a 
nineteenth-century seaman. Yet they are much more than adventure stories. Dark seas, 
winding inlets, and dense jungles serve as backdrop and symbol for Conrad's real 

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concerns—the contrast between individuality and human communication, between 
illusion and reality. Life at sea provides a model for Conrad's ideal of human 
interdependence; exotic ports-of-call represent the dark, unknown areas of human 
experience where characters wrestle with moral choices that will shape their lives. 
Conrad experimented with unusual, sometimes multiple, points of view to demonstrate 
the complexity of experience and the difficulty of human communication, His first-
person storytellers are often intermediate narrators, characters who are not directly 
involved in the action and, therefore, can provide both first¬hand information and 
objective detachment. At his dramatic climaxes characters and readers alike arrive at 
what Conrad called a "moral discovery [that] should be the object of even' tale," 
The sea, the jungle, and the moral tug-of-war that they represent are all present in "The 
Lagoon." As with all of Conrad's best work, this story requires that the reader patiently 
follow the seemingly pointless turns and the seemingly unrelated events that are the 
scattered clues to Conrad's vision of reality. Gradually patience is rewarded as the various 
pieces fall into a pattern and the reader is faced with a moment of discovery. 
The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century. Queen 
Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 was felt by many to represent the end of an era. An end-of-
century stoicism, and a growing pessimism among writers and intellectuals, may be 
traced to several sources, not least the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the 
Origin of Species which put the existence of God into radical question. Across the whole 
population, and in the face of rapid economic and social changes, radical doubts about 
the stability of the existing order were expressed.
By the end of the nineteenth century the pre-industrial economy and way of life had 
almost disappeared. In 1911 nearly 70 per cent of the country’s 45 million inhabitants 
lived in urban areas. The sense of ‘local’ community was being lost: a greater anonymity 
of the individual in the urban context was a result. Society became more fragmented and 
individual identities more fluid.
The British Empire, which had expanded under Queen Victoria and in 1900 had reached 
13 million square miles, also began to disintegrate. The Boer War (1899–1902), which 
was fought by the British to establish control over the Boer republics in South Africa, 
marked the beginning of rebellion against British imperialism. 
Culturally too, increasing access to literacy, and to education in general, led to profound 
changes in the reading public. The Education Act of 1870 made elementary education 
compulsory for everyone between the ages of 5 and 13. This led to the rapid expansion of 
a largely unsophisticated literary public, the rise of the popular press, and the mass 
production of ‘popular’ literature for a semi-literate ‘low-brow’ readership. By the time 
of the First World War there was a whole new generation of young soldiers who not only 
could read but, very important, were able for the first time in the history of war to write 
letters home describing war in all its unheroic horror. The twentieth century saw more 
and more of this broadening of artistic trends, extending into the other cultural forms of 
radio, television, cinema and popular music. Some writers reacted to this situation by 
concentrating on a narrow, highly educated audience who would understand their 
alienation from this changing world; thus, the avant-garde era in writing began. This 
‘intellectualisation’ has been criticised as restricting literature to a cultural and academic 
elite. However, this tendency has been balanced by other writers who have made use of 
popular forms in order to communicate with a wider audience. 

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Looking back on the nineteenth century, it is easy to see it as falling into distinct
moments: before and after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815; before and after the accession 
of Queen Victoria in 1837 (in effect, she gives her name to almost the whole century); 
and, in intellectual terms, before and after Darwin. Although On the Origin of Species 
was published in 1859, its ideas had been circulating for some thirty years before then, 
and their currency and effects define the later years of the century. It is less easy to 
define the twentieth century. The First and Second World Wars (1914–18 and 1939–45 
respectively) mark, in time and in their effects, momentous changes on a global scale: 
this kind of worldwide effect is a phenomenon of the century. 
Before 1914, English literature and ideas were in many ways still harking back to the 
nineteenth century: after 1918, Modern begins to define the twentieth century. But as 
literacy increased after the 1870 Education Act and, as a result, many more people could 
read and write, the effect on literature was to expand its range, to fragment its solidity, to 
enlarge and profoundly change its audience, its forms and its subject matter.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, a few major names stand out as those
who will probably define the 1900s – and it is easier to pick out such names from the first
part of the century (say, to 1945) than it is from the second half. Novelists such as 
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence will probably remain among the most 
significant of the century; poets from Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats to T.S. Eliot and 
W.H. Auden will probably still be read in a hundred years’ time. It is more difficult to
point to major dramatists after the Irish theatre’s flowering with J.M. Synge and Sean 
O’Casey: the plays of W. Somerset Maugham have lost much of their appeal, and the 
early comedies of Noel Coward are now often seen as light and insignificant.
This serves to underline the difficulty of reaching lasting critical judgments on a period 
which is close to the present. There is also the fact that there was much more literature, 
more cultural production in general, in the twentieth century than in any Modernism is 
one of the key words of the first part of the century. Among its influences were the 
psychological works of Sigmund Freud and the anthropological writings of Sir James 
Frazer, author of The Golden Bough (1890–1915), a huge work which brought together 
cultural and social manifestations from the universe of cultures. 
Modernism is essentially post-Darwinian: it is a search to explain mankind’s place in the 
modern world, where religion, social stability and ethics are all called into question. 
Against Modernism it was said that it produced chaotic and difficult writing, that it 
moved beyond the capacity of many readers and became elitist. Indeed, it is true that 
readers need a background awareness of psychology, anthropology, history and aesthetics 
to master some of the literature of the early years of Modernism: T.S. Eliot even 
furnished footnotes to help the reader with his The Waste Land. But all through what
might be termed the period of Modernism there were writers who kept working away in 
more traditional modes. Often they enjoyed greater popular success than the 
experimenters, but it is largely the innovators who are seen to have defined the new tastes 
of the times. Figures like John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett in the novel tend now to 
be consigned to history as relics of Victorianism, rather than being read as 
contemporaries of Woolf, Joyce and Eliot. What is significant is that both kinds of 
writing could flourish at the same time.
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) 

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Thomas Hardy was born in southwestern England, western Dorsetshire. His father, a 
skilled stone-mason, taught his son to play violin and sent him to a country day school. 
At the age of fifteen Hardy began to study architecture, and in 1861 he went to London to 
begin a career. There he tried poetry, then a career as an actor, and finally decided to 
write fiction.
Hardy’s home and the surrounding districts played an important role in his literary career. 
The region was agricultural, and there were monuments of the past, that is Saxon and 
Roman ruins and the great boulders of Stonehenge, which reminded of the prehistoric 
times. Before the Norman invasion of 1066
First, Hardy aimed his fiction at serial publication in magazines, where it would most 
quickly pay the bills. Not forgetting an earlier dream, he resolved to keep his tales “as 
near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow.” The emotional power of 
Hardy’s fiction disturbed readers from the start. His first success, “Far from the Madding 
Crowd” (1874), was followed by “The Return of the Native” (1878), “The Mayor of 
Casterbridge”(1885), and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” (1891). Hardy wrote about the 
Dorset country-side he knew well and called it Wessex (the name of the Anglo-Saxon 
kingdom once located there). He wrote about agrarian working people, milkmaids, 
stonecutters, and shepherds. Hardy’s rejection of middle-class moral values disturbed and 
shocked some readers, but as time passed, his novels gained in popularity and prestige. 
An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a design that was architectural, 
employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The final 
impression was one of a malign. He showed fate functioning in men’s lives, corrupting 
their possibilities of happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy. While he saw life 
thus as cruel and purposeless, he does not remain a detached spectator. He has pity for 
the puppets of Destiny, and it is a compassion that extends from man to the earth-worm, 
and the diseased leaves of the tree. Such a conception gave his novels a high seriousness 
which few of his contemporaries possessed.
No theory can in itself make a novelist, and Hardy’s novels, whether they are great or not 
have appealed to successive generations of readers.
In 1874 he married and in 1885 built a remote country home in Dorset. From 1877 on he 
spent three to four months a year in fashionable society, while the rest of the time he 
lived in the country.
In 1895 his “Jude the Obscure” was so bitterly criticized, that Hardy decided to stop 
writing novels altogether and returned to an earlier dream. In 1898 he published his first 
volume of poetry. Over the next twenty-nine years Hardy completed over 900 lyrics. His 
verse was utterly independent of the taste of his day. He used to say: ”My poetry was 
revolutionary in the sense that I meant to avoid the jeweled line. ...” Instead, he strove for 
a rough, natural voice, with rustic diction and irregular meters expressing concrete,