Theme: British literature of the xxth century

Objects of the research: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of leading poets and writers wrote in English literature. Among them are Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Thomas, Lawrence, Eliot, and a number of other great writers. These writers wrote extensively at the time and made significant contributions to English literature.
Practical significance coursework is based on possibility of usage of these guidelines, assignments and methods by teachers of foreign languages at different stages of teaching English, in writing course papers and scientific articles on the theme of investigation and in further professional activity of graduates of foreign languages faculties.
The structure of course work. It consists of the following parts: Introduction, Two chapters, Conclusion and The list of used literature.


CHAPTER I. General background
The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, human kind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Life and Thought and A Modern Utopia , both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the growth of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited era had begun [3,238].
1.1 The literature of world war I and the interwar period
Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the XXth century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman and Major Barbara published are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance and Waste the hypocrisies.
The dates for each age can vary by religion. On the epoch starts at the end of the last glacial period of the current ice age and continues to the present. The beginning of the Mesolithic is usually considered to correspond to the beginning [4,99].
The outbreak of World War I represented a setback for the budding modernist movement for a number of reasons: firstly, writers like Aldington found themselves in active service; secondly, paper shortages and related factors meant that publication of new work became increasingly difficult; and, thirdly, public sentiment in time of war meant that war poets such as Wilfred Owen, who wrote more conventional verse, became increasingly popular. One poet who served in the war, the visual artist David Jones, later resisted this trend in his long experimental war poem "In Parenthesis", which was written directly out of his trench experiences but was not published.
The war also tended to undermine the optimism of the Imagists. This was reflected in a number of major poems written in its aftermath. Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" uses the loose translations and transformations of the Latin poet Propertius to ridicule war propaganda and the idea of empire. His "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" represents his farewell to Imagism and lyric poetry in general. The writing of these poems coincided with Pound's decision to abandon London permanently [4,106].
Sound poetry emerged in this period as a response to the war. For many Dadaists, including German writer Hugo Ball and New York poet and performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, sound poems were protestations against the sounds of war. As Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo write, “Born as the trench warfare intensified, phonetic poetry was the language of trauma, a new language to counter the noise of the cannons”. The Baroness’s poem “Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)”, written in response to her husband’s suicide after the war’s end, was “a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries”. Working from a confrontational feminist and artistic agenda, the Baroness asserted a distinctly female subjectivity in the post-World War I era.
The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-war disillusionment is T. S. Eliot's epic "The Waste Land" Eliot was an American poet who had been living in London for some time. Although he was never formally associated with the Imagist group, his work was admired by Pound, who, in 1915, helped him publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which brought him to prominence. When Eliot had completed his original draft of a long poem based on both the disintegration of his personal life and mental stability, and the culture around him, he gave the manuscript, provisionally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices", to Pound for comment. After some heavy editing, "The Waste Land" in the form in which we now know it was published, and Eliot came to be seen as the voice of a generation. The addition of notes to the published poem served to highlight the use of collage as a literary technique, paralleling similar practice by the cubists and other visual artists. From this point on, modernism in English tended towards poetry of the fragment that rejected the idea that the poet could present a comfortingly coherent view of life [5,208].
T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a foundational text of modernism, representing the moment at which Imagism moves into modernism proper. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative. The motif of sight and vision is as central to the poem as it is to modernism; the omni-present character Tiresias acting as a unifying theme. The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of broken images. The narrator, however (in "The Waste Land" as in other texts), promises to show the reader a different meaning; that is, how to make meaning from dislocation and fragmentation. This construction of an exclusive meaning is essential to modernism. Although London and Paris were key centres of activity for English-language modernists, much important activity took place elsewhere, including early publication in Poetry magazine in America. When Mina Loy moved to New York in 1916, she became part of a circle of writers involved with Others: A Magazine of the New Verse which included William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, among others. This magazine, which, was edited by Alfred Kreymborg. Contributors also included Pound, Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens [6,194].
The U.S. modernist poets were concerned to create work in a distinctively American idiom. Williams, a doctor who worked in general practice in a working-class area of Rutherford, New Jersey, explained this approach by saying that he made his poems from 'the speech of Polish mothers'. In this, they were placing themselves in a tradition stretching back to Whitman.
After her initial association with the Imagists, Marianne Moore carved out a unique niche for herself among 20th-century poets. Much of her poetry is written in syllabic verse, repeating the number of syllables rather than stresses or beats, per line. She also experimented with stanza forms borrowed from troubadour poetry.
Wallace Stevens' work falls somewhat outside this mainstream of modernism. Indeed, he deprecated the work of both Eliot and Pound as "mannered." His poetry is a complex exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality. Unlike many other modernists, but like the English Romantics, by whom he was influenced, Stevens thought that poetry was what all humans did; the poet was merely self-conscious about the activity.
In Scotland, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid formed something of a one-man modernist movement. An admirer of Joyce and Pound, MacDiarmid wrote much of his early poetry in anglicised Lowland Scots, a literary dialect which had also been used by Robert Burns. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and was invalided out in 1918. After the war, he set up a literary magazine, Scottish Chapbook, with 'Not traditions - Precedents!' as its motto. His later work reflected an increasing interest in found poetry and other formal innovations.
In Canada the Montreal Group of modernist poets, including A.M. Klein, A.J.M. Smith, and F.R. Scott, formed at that city's McGill University in this. Though the poets of the group made little headway for the next twenty years, they were ultimately successful in establishing a modernist hegemony and canon in that country that would endure until at least the end of the 20th century [7,155].
The spread of education in Britain in the decades leading up to World War I meant that British soldiers and the British public of all classes were literate. Professional and amateur authors were prolific during and after the war and found a market for their works.
Literature was produced throughout the war with women, as well as men, feeling the 'need to record their experiences' but it was in the lates that Britain had a boom in publication of war literature. The next boom period was in the 1960s, when there was renewed interest in World War I during the fiftieth anniversaries and after two decades focused on World War I
Published poets wrote over two thousand poems about and during the war. However, only a small fraction still is known today, and several poets that were popular with contemporary readers are now obscure. An orthodox selection of poets and poems emerged during the 1960s, which often remains the standard in modern collections and distorts the impression of World War I poetry. This selection tends to emphasize the horror of war, suffering, tragedy and anger against those that wage war [8,183].
In the early weeks of the war, British poets responded with an outpouring of literary production. Rudyard Kipling's For all we have and are was syndicated extensively by newspapers in English speaking countries. Robert Bridges contributed a poem Wake Up, England! at the outbreak of war that he later wished suppressed, John Masefield, who later succeeded Bridges as poet laureate, wrote August, a poem that was admired widely.
Wilfred Owen was killed in battle; but his poems created at the front did achieve popular attention after the war's end,.e.g., Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting. In preparing for the publication of his collected poems, Owen tried to explain:[9,185].
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. This brief statement became the basis for a play based on the friendship between Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
From the war itself until the late the genre of war poetry was almost exclusively reserved for male poets. This was based on an idea of an exclusive authenticity limited to the works of those who had fought and died in the war. It excluded other forms of experience in the war, such as mourning, nursing and the home front, which were more likely to be experienced by other demographics such as women. There were over 500 women writing and publishing poetry during World War Examples of poems by female poets include Teresa Hooley's A War Film, Jessie Pope's War Girls, and Mary H.J. Henderson's An Incident. In addition to giving women greater access to work, the war also gave women greater artistic freedom and space to express their identities as artists.