Charpter 5---------The Modern Period(晒黑了怎么办英国)
Historical background:
1. The 1st World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great sufferings to its people as well
2. The 2nd World War marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire.
Cultural background:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put forward the theory of scientific socialism
Einstein’s theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space. 关于善的名言
Freud’s analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature.
Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy, which put the emphasis on creation, intuition, irrationality and unconsciousness.
Modernism
—theoretical ba and theme
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical ba. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himlf. The modernist writers concentrate on the private and the subjective. They are mainly concerned about the inner being of an individual.
definition
水利设计院Modernism is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective material world; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama梦见别人送鞋.
Stream of consciousness
It is a literary technique that prents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they develop.
With the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one’s prent was the sum of his past, prent and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual, writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts to digging into the human consciousness.
Literature:
1. Poetry:
The poetry in the early years of the 20th century was a continuation of the Victorian poetry.
新闻感想
In the 1920s, the early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeat’s matured poetry marked the ri of “modern poetry” which was a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry.
The 1930s is called “the red thirties”.
In the 1950s, there was a return of realistic poetry again.
In the 1960s, there was no significant poetic movement.
2. Novels
The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened both in width and depth. (John Galsworthy).
In the 1930s, novelists enriched the traditional ways of creation by adopting some of the modernist techniques, but the novels were (1) touched by a pessimistic mood (man’s loneliness) (2) there ro a few working-class writers.
In the mid-1950s and early 60s, there appeared “the Angry Young Men”. Kinsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe.
The first three decades were golden years of the modernist novel. (James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence)
曹冲怎么死的3. Drama
The greatest dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
The Irish National Theater Movement began in the early 20th century. Sean O’Cay.
The 1930s witnesd a revival of poetic drama in England. (T.S.Eliot)
The English dramatic revolution came in the 1950s, developing in 奇珍异宝的近义词two directions: the working-class drama and the李花开 Theater of Absurd. (Look Back in Anger of John Osborne, Waiting for Godot of Samuel Beckett)
Modernism（删）
The term Modernism usually refers to the early part of the twentieth century — sometimes beginning with the First World War in 1914, and continuing through the 1930s or so — perhaps up to the Second World War. Some of the most influential Modernist writers tried some radical experiments with form: poets like Pound and Eliot working in free ver, for instance, and novelists like Joyce, Woolf, and Stein experimenting with stream of consciousness and elaborate language games.
Waiting for Godot, Beckett's most famous work
premiered in Paris in 1953, and the theater was changed forever, its limits and conventions dashed to bits. What audiences found on their innocent night out was a t consisting simply of a scruffy, barren little tree beside an equally barren country road. And there they were, Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of destitutes from the fringes of vaudeville, patiently, and not so patiently, waiting for Godot. And how long will they wait? Why, as long as it takes; until he comes; or until the end, if he doesn't come; or forever. And so it g
oes, this classic of twentieth-century theater, a tragicomedy in two acts, during which nothing changes, nothing happens (twice), time pass, and Godot never comes.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Points of view:
1. Politically, Shaw was a reformist.
