Life and works

Shaw was another of the astonishing Irishmen who, alongside Joyce and Yeats dominated English literature in the twentieth century. He was born in Dublin in 1856, although he left the city forever when he was twenty, and like Joyce had a love-hate relationship with his native land. His early education was musical rather than literary (his mother was a singer) and it was as a music critic that he first became known (despite his strenuous efforts to turn himself into a novelist). His first play, Widower's Houses was published in 1893 and he kept up a regular output for the next thirty years or so. He was one of the founders of the Fabian Society (a non-revolutionary socialist organization) which was committed to reforms in education and to the liberation of women.

His plays are remarkable for their entertaining exposition of social problems and far from being propaganda, they are actually quite generous to his political opponents. He also preceded the plays by prefaces which are often brilliant socio-political pamphlets, justifying and explaining the issues behind the plays. These comedies of ideas, fashioned with the intention of morally improving the audience, have not all maintained their vigorous charm to the present day, but the best of them are still performed in theatres today and seem to have stood the test of time. His major works are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), Major Barbara, Pygmalion (1913), Man and Superman, Heartbreak House (1919), as well as more philosophical works such as Back to Methuselah (1921), an ambitious play taking several evenings to perform and stretching from the Creation to a future epoch 'as far as the mind can see'. He became something of a celebrity and media figure towards the end of his long life.

Prose

In the first years of the twentieth century the work of French writers (Zola, Flaubert) as well as Russians (Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy) began to affect the evolution of English literature, leading to a more intellectual and philosophical approach. In prose, this period is dominated by the major works of novelists such as Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, all remarkable for their modern outlook and very original fictional technique. The crisis of the First World War is well represented by the works of Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, 1915).

The early novels of E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf explore the upper-middle-class world of the Bloomsbury Group and its circle, and the liberal humanism espoused by them, although Forster's Maurice, which was not published until after his death is remarkably frank and lucid in its depiction of salvation through homosexual love.

Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorfans, first published in 1918 was a fairly vitriolic attack on the sacred cows of Victorian morality and culture, and this point of view was very influential for a time. Two novelists were outstanding for their attack on the ideals of scientific progress: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Huxley's novels often depict a cultured elite moving in its own small circles, surrounded by elements of brutality and savagery which occasionally impinge in a violent fashion on so-called civilization. The hollowness of the values of the elite is even more dramatically portrayed in the satirical novels of Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), novels such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies.

George Orwell, on the other hand, especially in his non-fictional works, is remarkable for his gritty realism, his refusal to keep silent over the uncomfortable truths and contradictions prevalent in a highly ideological societies, like Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, or Spain during the civil war. He is also remembered for his emphasis on the first-hand experience of suffering, as well as for his keen satirical and moral vision of a totalitarian future as expressed in the novels Animal Farm and 1984.

Later in the period, even though these authors were to continue their careers well into the second half of the century, we have the rather philosophical thrillers of Graham Greene and the early prose works of Samuel Beckett, which already contain, alongside the Irish writer's considerable lyric gifts, the seeds of the nihilism which was to become so pronounced in his later dramatic works.

In the field of non-fictional works, apart from the works of Lawrence, Orwell and Huxley mentioned above, E.M. Forster's and Bertrand Russell's essays on a variety of philosophical and moral issues and the advances if criticism represented by the essays of T. S. Eliot and U Richards' Practical Criticism are outstanding. For further information about the main trends if twentieth-century prose see the sections dealing wit the respective authors.