English literature in the 20th century
20世纪的英国文学
1. Historical Background
⏹ Historically：
Modernism ro out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. The First World War and the Second World War had greatly influenced the English literature.
⏹ Economically:
The Second World War marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire. Britain suffered heavy loss in the war: thousands of people were killed; the economy was ruined; and almost all its former colonies were lost. People were in economic, cultural, and belief crisis. 树状结构图Frequent economic depressions and mass unemployment sharpened the contradictions between the rich and the poor.
⏹ Ideologically:
The ri of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships. (Scientific Socialism, Social Darwinism)
2. Artistic features of modern period
Realism
Realism was, to a certain extent, eclipd by the rapid ri of modernism in the 1920s.
In the 1930s, novelists began to turn their attention to the urgent social problems. They also enriched the traditional ways of creation by adopting some modernist techniques. However, the realist novels of this period were more or less touched by a pessimistic mood, preoccupied with the theme of man’s loneliness, and shaped in different forms: social satires by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, 苁蓉的用途comic satires on the English upper class by Evelyn Waugh; and Catholic novels by Graham Greene.
周末去哪The Angry Young Man: A group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
They demonstrated a particular disillusion幻灭 over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded过时的 social and political values in their society.
Kingsley Amis was the first to start the attack on the middle-class privileges and power in his novel Lucky Jim (1954). The term “The Angry Young Man” came to be widely ud. Having been merged and interpenetrated with modernism in the past veral decades, the realistic novels of the 1960s and 1970s appeared in a new face with a richer, more vigorous and more diversified style.
二十世纪英国现实主义文学改变了维多利亚时代那种高雅温和的倾向，加强了对英国社会的保守性和虚伪性的批判，具有一种冷峻地直面人生的特点。
Modernism
Modernism was a complex and diver international movement in all creative arts, originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness.
1. A reaction against realism
2. Modernism takes the 哺育的读音irrational philosophy and psycho-analysis as its theoretical ba.
3. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted扭曲的, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, man and himlf.
络绎不绝4. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an i
ndividual. In their writings, the past, the prent, and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual污泥浓缩池
网络学习心得体会
The basic characteristics of Modernism in literature:
1. Complexity and obscurity: They express the subjective world of the individual writers. As the consciousness and sub-consciousness of a particular writer shifts from time to time, usually there is no time quence in their writings. The old tradition of Time and Space is done away with.
2. The u of symbols: The modern poets and writers find in symbol a means to express their inexpressive lves.
3. Allusion: By means of allusion, the modernist writer tries to unite the past, prent, and future. Allusions helps to achieve effects of irony, for allusion t the past against the prent and thus exhibit a decay of past standards of morality and glory, showing the shallowness and degradation of the modern world.通往广场的路不止一条
4. Irony: As modernist writers think themlves helpless in this chaotic world, they find their life ironical.
Symbolism
象征主义是19世纪末起源于法国的一种艺术思潮。是当时欧洲一部分知识分子对社会生活不满的反映。他们不敢正视现实，不愿直接表述自己的意思，往往采用象征和寓意的手法，在幻想中虚构另外的世界，抒发自己的愿望，这样便产生了近代象征性的艺术。1886年诗人让·莫雷亚斯发表《象征主义宣言》首先提出这个名称
Expressionism
它强调反传统，不满于社会现状，要求改革，要求“革命”。在创作上，他们不满足于对客观事物的摹写，要求进而表现事物的内在实质；要求突破对人的行为和人所处的环境的描绘而揭示人的灵魂；要求不再停留在对暂时现象和偶然现象的记叙而展示其永恒的品质。
