Literature

• English writers during these turbulent and unhappy years turned inward for their subject matter and expressed bitter and often despairing cynicism.

• T.S. Eliot best summerised their despair in “The Waste Land”, the most influential poem of the period. Its jagged style, complex symbols, and references to other literary works set a new pattern for poetry.

• During the 1950s, a number of young writers expressed their discontent with traditional English politics, education, and literature.

• These writers were labeled the Angry Young Men.

• A number of authors wrote about changes in English society.

Bernard Shaw 1865-1950

• Born Irish, literary critic, journalist, playwright, photographer

• Socialist, upset by exploitation on the working class (Fabian Society)

• Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925

• Pygmalion 1912

• A little eccentric, Shaw was a staunch vegetarian, fought against smallpox vaccination, and was a proponent of eugenics.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a poet, dwelling chiefly on his spiritual relations with god, his poetry only became recognized in 1918 when he became published in Robert Bridges edition. The late publication effectively made the difficulties of his work anticipate modern poetry, and so he made a major influence on later writers.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, short story novel writer, poet and playwright born in Dublin.

Joyce wrote several volumes and an autobiographical novel which follows his life from infancy to his first departure for Paris. Joyce subsequently wrote an unsuccessful play published in 1918 and furthermore a slight volume of verses. These were amid the beginnings of his two great works to come, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. These both occupied the remainder of his life.

Virginia Woolf During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Post modernism

• The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature, relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators.

• Unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the "metanarrative" and "little narrative", Jacques Derrida's concept of "play", and Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest.

Jean Francois Lyotard

Lyotard's work is characterised by a persistent opposition to universals, he is fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the Enlightenment, and several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate these broad claims.

Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetic matters. He was, despite his reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter of modernist art. Lyotard saw 'postmodernism' as a latent tendency within thought throughout time and not a narrowly-limited historical period. He favoured the startling and perplexing works of the high modernist avant-garde. In them he found a demonstration of the limits of our conceptuality, a valuable lesson for anyone too imbued with Enlightenment confidence. Lyotard has written extensively also on few contemporary artists of his choice: Valerio Adami, Daniel Buren, Marcel Duchamp, Bracha Ettinger and Barnett Newman, as well as on Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky.

• Kurt Vonnegut is a well known Post modernist author, with his works winning fame after they were published in 1969. The classic combines science fiction elements with an analysis of human condition. The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own experience in World War II. Slaughterhouse Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history, the firebombing of Dresden.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States. Kurt Vonnegut used humour to tackle the basic questions of human existence.