English_literature_in_20th_century__20世紀英國文學.ppt

1、Chapter 8 English Literature in the 20th Century,General View of English Literature in the 20th Century,English Poetry in the 20th Century,English Novels in the 20th Century,English Drama in the 20th Century,Proletarian Literature in the 20th Century,. General View of English Literature in the 20th

2、Century,History Background,Literary Characteristics,History Background,For Britain ,it was a time of declining in national fortune and power. During the 19th century, in order to pay for the wars,Britain had to give up many of its investments abroad. Since World War Two, Britain has become subordina

3、te to the United States.,Different kinds of philosophical ideas appeared in the Western world. In the mid-19th century,Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put forward theory which became the guiding theory for the steuggle of the working class and encouraged the oppressed people to fight for their faith

4、in the church.,Albert Einsteins theory of relativity provided new Ideas for the concepts of time and space.based on These ideas,HenriBergson established his irrational philosophy.,Literary Characteristics,The important and striking features of the 20th century English literature:realism and modernis

5、m.,Features of modernism: (1) Complexity (2) Radical and deliberate break with traditional aesthetic principles (3) Back to Aristotle,There are three periods in English literature development.,The first period(1900-1918):,The playwright: Bernard. Novelist:John Galsworthy;H.G.Well; Arnold Bennett Poe

6、t: THOMAS HARDY,This new tendency was found in Oscar Wildes writing,The second period(1918-1939),It provided a favourable condition for the further development of modernism.,1920s:the best literary works of modernism appeared one after another. Famous person: James Joyce(Irish novelist) Virginia Woo

7、lf(brilliant womanwriter),The third period (20th century):,This is the period of the contemporary English literature. In poetry,”purity of diction”: Ted Hughes、Philip Larkin In fiction and drama: appeared a group of vigorous young writer,called “the Angry Young Men”(1960-1970),Representatives: John

8、Osborne、Kingsley Amis、John Wain and John Braine,In late 1960s to1970s: representative novelist: William Golding、 John Fowles and Graham Greene. In 1950s,appeared new type of plays. Samuel Beckett(Waiting for Godot),English Poetry in the 20th Century,Outline,Briefly introduction,Poets of Realism,Poet

9、s of Modernism,In a literary sense, the 20th century can be said to have begun in the 1890s, in the political sense it was ushered by the First World War (1919-1918) which had a very shocking influence upon Great Britain, which cost it almost a whole generation of most promising young men.,In the ye

10、ars that followed, the colonies of the Empire gradually broke away and formed independent states until the British Empire was transformed into the British Commonwealth in 1931, consisting only Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, etc., all of which were joined to the mother country in only a loose

11、 association. The downward slide of Great Britain, which was brought by the first war, continued through the second (1939-1945), in which it was finally destroyed as a great world power.,In the early years of this century, a major technical revolution occurred in English, as well as in American, poe

12、tic theory and practice. W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were the leading characters in this revolution. In different ways, they revolted against the imprecise language and sentimental emotions of the late Victorian poets. The result of this revolt was the literary movement that has come to

13、be called Modernism and has great influence on the poetry as well as the fiction of the century.,Alfred Edward Housman,Philip Larkin,Rupert Brooke,Poets of Realism,Thomas Hardy,Thomas Hardy (托馬斯 哈代)was a English poet, a last and one of the greatest of Victorian novelist, famous for his depictions of

14、 the semi-fictional country “Wessex”. Hardys works reflected his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life.,(1840-1928),Life experience,1840 Born at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset. His father : a stonemason and local builder. His mother : well-read and educated Thomas until he went to school.

15、 First schooling at Bockhampton. Studied architecture and continued his reading in English and Latin. Went to London. Assistant to Arthur Blomfield in designing church restorations. Won two architectural prizes. 1865 Writing poems at this time.,Gave up architecture to devote himself entirely to writ

16、ing. Married on September 17 to Emma Lavinia Gifford.,Married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior.,Emma,Died on January 11. His heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets Corner.,Hardys Poetry,Born in 1840, Thomas Hardy became known as a prominent n

17、ovelist and poet in British and American literature. He published 8 volumes of poetry, one being published posthumously(于著作者死后出版地) . Hardys poetry is commonly referred to as pessimistic and was not received well during his lifetime. One of the most common elements seen throughout Hardys poetry is hi

18、s use of autobiographical information within the poems,Wessex Poems, 1898 Poems of the Past and Present今昔詩篇 The Dynasts, 列王 Times Laughingstocks時間的笑柄 Satires of Circumstance, 1914環(huán)境的諷刺 Moments of Vision, 1917 幻覺的瞬間 Human Shows, 1925 人性面面觀,A. E. Housman阿爾弗雷德愛德華 豪斯曼,A.E. Housman (short for Alfred Edwa

19、rd Housman) was born on March 26th of 1859 in a family of a country solicitor as the eldest of seven children and died on April 30th, 1936. He was an English classical poet, scholar and one of the foremost classicists, best known for his cycle of poems- A Shropshire Lad. Housmanpublishedonlytwovolum

20、esofpoemsduringhislifetime: AShropshire Lad (什羅浦郡的浪蕩鬃). (1896)andLastpoems （最后的詩篇）(1922),Stylistic feature,A.E Housmans works are so abundant, and so does his features of the style. He was homosextual(同性戀） , so he wrote a lot of works to justify the legality and chanllenge the conservative perceptio

21、ns. He also wrote a lot poems with deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation; however, he then changed his stylistic features with an idealised pastoral light, as his land of lost content.,Rupert Brooke魯伯特布魯克,Rupert Chawner Brooke was born in 1887. The son of the Rug

22、by Schools housemaster, Brooke excelled in both academics and athletics. He entered his fathers school at the age of fourteen. A lover of verse since the age of nine, he won the school poetry prize in 1905. Brooke published his first poems in 1909; his first book, Poems, appeared in 1911.,Philip Art

23、hur Larkin菲力普-拉金,Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 2 December 1985) is an English poet, novelist, and jazz critic. He graduated from St Johns College, Oxford. His works include The Whitsun Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974), etc. He was offered, but declined, the position of poet laureate in 198

24、4. In 2008 The Times named him Britains greatest post-war writer.,菲力普-拉金（1922 1985）英國詩人，小說家、爵士樂評論家。畢業(yè)于牛津大學圣約翰學院，著有詩集降靈節(jié)婚禮，高窗等。1984年曾被授予英國桂冠詩人稱號，但是他謝絕了。2008年拉金被泰晤士報評為英國戰(zhàn)后最偉大的詩人。,Modernism,The 20th century has witnessed a great achievement in English poetry. The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeat

25、s, with its hardening and maturing style, marked the rise of “modernist poetry”, which is, in a way, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The modernist poets fight against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry

26、writing such as to use the common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poetic creation.,Wystan Hugh Auden,T.S. Eliot,William Butler Yeats,Poets of Modernism,Ted Hughes,William

27、Butler Yeats(1865-1939)威廉巴特勒葉芝,W. B. Yeats is generally acknowledged as the foremost poet of the modern age. T.S. Eliot wrote of him in 1940 as “the greatest poet of our timecertainly the greatest in this language, and so far as in am able to judge, in any language.” Yeats was born in Dublin. His fa

28、ther was a famous portrait painter. His early life was spent in Dublin, London, and Sligo, his mothers home in the west of Ireland, and each of these places exerted an influence on his life and work.,In Dublin, he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism; in Sligo he obtained a knowledge

29、of Irish peasant life and folklore; and in London, the center of English literature and art, he met many outstanding literary men of the time, such as William Morris and Oscar Wilde, later, T.S. Elito and Ezra Pound. Yeats early poetry was under the influence of the romantic poets, but his Irish the

30、me and his special use of language soon showed him to be a poet of distinction Yeats visited Paris in 1894 and was introduced to modern French poetry, esp. the symbolists, by the poet-critic, Arthur Symons.,Literary Career,Altogether, Yeats wrote eleven volumes of poetry, twenty-six plays, nine book

31、s of prose, five autobiographical volumes, and four volumes of philosophy. His chief poetic works include The Responsibilities (1914), The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933).,William Butler Yeats is considered to be one of the greatest poets in the English lang

32、uage; and his poetic achievement stands at the center of modern literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats is not a poet of nature, but of man. His poems tend to present life in the mode of drama and conflicts in place and time with the value residing in the conflict ra

33、ther than in the final victory,Comments,T.S. Eliot（ 1888-1965）托馬斯艾略特,Thomas Stearns Eliot,A poet, dramatist, literary critic, and modernist.,He was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. It was in Lon

34、don that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporaryd, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines. In 1927 he became a British citizen . In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1965 he died in London.,Life,His

35、Aesthetic Views,1. A poem should be an organic thing in itself, a made object. Once it is finished, the poet will no longer have control of it. It should be judged, analyzed by itself without the interference of the poets personal influence and intentional elements and other elements. 2.Modern life

36、is chaotic, futile,fragmentary, so poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of life and this kind nature of life should be projected, not analyzed.,1915: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 普魯弗洛克的情歌 1922: The Waste land荒原 1930 :Ash Wednesday 灰色的星期三 1935-1942: Four Quartets四個四重奏 1935: Murder in

37、the Cathedral 大教堂謀殺案 1939: Family Reunion 合家團聚 1949: The Cocktail Party 雞尾酒會,Major Works,The Waste Land （荒原）,his masterpiece, published in 1922. It revealed the spiritual crisis of postwar Europe. It reads like the manifesto of the “l(fā)ost generation” and established Eliots position as the leader not

38、only of American poetry, but of a whole generation of writers later to be identified as “Waste Land Painters like Hemingway and Faulkner.,The Waste Land,a 434-line modernist poem published in 1922 It has been called “one of the most important poems of the 20th century.”,Style Eliots poetry is diffic

39、ult to read. For one reason, the images and symbols seem very much disconnected. And another obvious source of difficulty lies in his learned quotations and allusions. To appreciate him it is good to understand that the essence of his thought lies in the interaction between the past, the present and

40、 the future.,Wystan Hugh Auden 威斯坦休奧登 (1907-1973),Born: 21 February 1907 Birthplace: York, England Died: 29 September 1973,Life Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is n

41、oted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous,

42、impersonal world of nature.,Major Work religious in the Christmas oratorio(清唱劇,神劇) For the Time Being因時間而存在 (1944); aesthetic(美感；審美觀) in the same volumes The Sea and the Mirror海與鏡(a quasi-dramatic類似戲劇的 “commentary評論” on William Shakespeares The Tempest暴風雨); and social-psychological in The Age of Anx

43、iety憂慮時代(1947), the “baroque eclogue(巴洛克風格的田園詩)” that won Auden the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Auden wrote no long poems after that.,Comments Often Audens poetry may seem a rather marginal criticism of life and society written from the sidelines. Yet sometimes it moves to the center of the time in hist

44、ory in which he and his contemporaries lived. Auden was learned and intelligent, a master of form and technique. In his poetry he realized a lifelong search for a philosophical and religious position from which to analyze and comprehend the individual life in relation to society and to the human con

45、dition in general. He was able to express his scorn for authoritarian(極權主義） bureaucracy（官僚）, his suspicion of depersonalized science, and his belief in a Christian God.,Ted Hughes (1930-1998) 泰德休斯,Personal life,Born in Youkshire English poet and childrens writer Critics routinely rank him as one of

46、the best poets of his generation Hughes studied English, anthropology and archaeology at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His first wife: Sylvia Plath the American poet novelist, childrens author, and short story author,works,Earlier poem: nature, the innocent savagery of animals His later work: deeply

47、reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, and ecological viewpoint.,Poetry collections 1957 The Hawk in the Rain雨中的鷹 1960 Lupercal）天狗星 1967 Wodwo沃德沃怪物 1970 Crow: From the Life and the Songs of the Crow烏鴉 1972 Selected Poems 1957-1967 1975 Cave Birds穴居之鳥 1977 Gaudete）高黛特 1979 Remains of Elmet (with photographs by Fay Godwin)愛密特遺跡 1979 Moortown摩爾鎮(zhèn),English Novels in the 20th Century,1.The Development of Novel Writing