Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918) Последнее лето Форсайта

In Chancery (1920) в петле

Awakening (1920) Пробуждение

To Let (1921) Сдаётся в наём

He depicted the representatives of an English upper-middle class family of the Forsytes. Galsworthy presented the story of the Forsytes in two trilogies. It took him twenty-two years to accomplish his monumental work. As a writer Galsworthy was one of the last representatives of bourgeois realism in English literature. He was a conservative himself. Nevertheless, he gave a vivid picture of the society of the 20th century.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

George Bernard Shaw has introduced a new form of drama, the publicistic drama. An important aim of most of his plays was to face his audience with completely new points of view and ways of looking at themselves and the society they lived in. His ideas are expressed in short, wise, witty sayings. He enjoyed the shock when his ideas were expressed with much wit. He turned to drama as the medium of expression, as the means to criticize and educate society. Shaw delighted in saying and showing the opposite of what his audiences expected.

When writing on the social problems of the 20th century, he often uses striking paradoxes and aphorisms.

His plays are divided into the following periods:

1896

«Пьесы неприятные» (Plays Unpleasant, опубликованы в 1898 году)

• «Дома вдовца» (Widower’s Houses, 1885—1892)

• «Сердцеед» (The Philanderer, 1893)

• «Профессия миссис Уоррен» (Mrs Warren’s Profession, 1893—1894)

«Пьесы приятные» (Plays Pleasant, опубликованы в 1898 году)

• «Оружие и человек» (Arms and the Man, 1894)

• «Кандида» (Candida, 1894—1895)

• «Избранник судьбы» (The Man of Destiny, 1895)

• «Поживем — увидим» (You Never Can Tell, 1895—1896)

1896—1904

«Три пьесы для пуритан» (Three Plays for Puritans)

• «Ученик дьявола» (The Devil’s Disciple, 1896—1897)

• «Цезарь и Клеопатра» (Caesar and Cleopatra, 1898)

• «Человек и сверхчеловек» (Man and Superman, 1901—1903)

1904—1950 (other plays)

• «Смуглая леди сонетов» (The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, 1910)

• «Пигмалион» (Pygmalion, 1912—1913)

• «Дом, где разбиваются сердца» (Heartbreak House, 1913—1919)

• «Горько, но правда» (Too True To Be Good, 1931)

• «Шекс против Шо» (Shakes versus Shav, 1949)

• «Почему она не пожелала» (Why She World Not, 1950)

The most significant plays are ''Widowers' Houses" (1892), "Mrs Warren's Profession" (1894), "The Man of Destiny" (1895), "Pygmalion" (1912)

The high spirits which characterized his plays before 1914, often bringing into his comedy a lively element of farce, did not appear so much afterwards. His plays are full of brilliant dialogues and witty paradoxes. He mocks at bourgeois charity, satirizes bourgeois businessmen. Shaw called himself a jester of English society. A jester can say whatever he likes. Nobody can be offended by jester's jokes. His method of developing a play often involves a turn which takes the audience half by surprise, as it may have taken the dramatist himself. Shaw wrote: "When I am writing a play I never invent a plot: I let the play write itself and shape itself, which it always does even when up to the last moment I do not foresee the way out. Sometimes I do not see what the play was driving at until quite a long time after I have finished it."

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

William Somerset Maugham is one of the best known English writers of the 20th century. He was not only a novelist, but also one of the most successful dramatists and short-story writers. He believed that the charm of a story lied in its interesting plot and exciting situation. More than that, Maugham's story always implicates deep thought and signifies critical approach to the characters. The writer points out that a short story "can be read at a single sitting", it must have a beginning, a middle and an end. His short stories are usually very sincere and logically explained. His first novel "Liza of Lambeth" came out in 1897. It gives a realistic picture of slum life, and much is taken from his own experience as a doctor. Maugham went on producing books, but his first masterpiece, "Of Human Bondage", appeared only in 1915. His own life, hardships and difficulties are described in this novel. It brought the writer fame. But it was "The Moon and Sixpence" (1919) which made his reputation of a novelist established.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE

The author uses the life story of the French artist Paul Gauguin. The main character of the novel, Strickland, is a middle-aged stockbroker who takes up painting, throws over his family, escapes to Tahiti where he dies soon. The author reveals Strickland's independent and unpredictable character. He is indifferent to everything except painting. He is concen­trated on his art, though "Strickland made no partic­ular impression on the people who came in contact with him in Tahiti." His pictures "seemed to them absurd", they "couldn't make head or tail of them". Recognition comes to him only after death when "agents came from the dealers in Paris and Berlin to look for any pictures which might still remain on the island" and "offered ... thirty thousand francs" for his picture. The title of the book is a symbol of two different worlds — the world of money quit by Strickland, and the world of beauty reflected in his pictures. Besides the numerous plays and stories Somerset Maugham wrote his famous novels "The Painted Veil" (1925) and "Cakes and Ale" (1930).

Lecture 8 (на самостійне опрацювання)

The English Literature of the 20^th century

The literary process in England was greatly influenced by deep social changes of the first decades of the 20th century as well as by the new tendencies in English art. The wars and revolutions of the time brought to general crisis of the 1920s and economic depression of the 1930s, which sharpened the relations of classes in England.

Two trends dominated the development of English literature: Realism (John Galsworthy, Bernard Shaw, Richard Aldington) and Modernism (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence). Realistic prose by John Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw presented the characters shaped by the social environment. Bernard Shaw believed that socialism would make for a more socially just society. His other major belief was in what he called the 'Life Force', the power of the human will and genius, which enables humanity to make progress.

Herbert G. Wells, the writer of scientific fantasies, held to a belief in the inevitable progress of mankind, which would result from the rapid development of science and technology. With the economic depression of the thirties and the consequent threat of totalitarianism which the English felt from both Fascism and Communism, mass culture was seen to be manipulated, through technology, for political and commercial reasons. Realistic novels of John Galsworthy marked the peak of realistic achievements of the period and brought their creator the Nobel Prize for literature.

Realism was aimed at depicting life and all person's conflicts through a critical investigation into the complex interaction of the social and the psychic, the general and the individual in the person. Such were the best novels of Archibald Joseph Cronin: The Hatter 's Castle (1931), The Stars Look Down (1935), The Citadel (1937), many of which are written from his own experience as a medical mining inspector which gave him the knowledge and understanding of the conditions of life and work and the aspirations of miners in England.

Realism, a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or 'reflecting' faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description and to a more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of "romance in favor of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life. Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality (a 'slice of life') but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some 'real' world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader. In its methods and attitudes, realism may be found as an element in many kinds of writing prior to the 19th century (e.g. in Chaucer or Defoe, in their different ways); but as a dominant literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th-century novel of middle- or lower-class life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of social life. The outstanding works of realism in 19th-century fiction include Honore de Balzac's Illusions perdues (1837 - 1843), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872). In the work of some novelists, realism passes over into the movement of naturalism, in which sociological investigation and determinist views of human behavior predominate. Realism also established it self as an important tradition in the theatre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the work of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and others; and it remains a standard convention of film and television drama. Despite the radical attempts of modernism to displace the realist emphasis on external reality (notably in the movements of expressionism and surrealism), realism survived as a major current within 20th-century fiction, sometimes under the label of neorealism.

In the 1930s the ideas of the Realism were most clearly expressed in the works of Ralf Fox (1900—1937), an outstanding literary critic. The author of a series of political works about the struggle of British proletariat and a member of the British Communist Party, he went to fight with Fascism in the ranks of the English-Irish battalion of the International Brigade in Spain and was killed in the front in 1937.

Many young writers whose talent will flourish after the 1940s came to the English literature in the 1920s, among them a brilliant master of satire Evelyn Waugh (1903—1966), a realistic novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley (1894 – 1984) and others.

The literature of the 1920s and 1930s embraced new tendencies born by World War I which gave rise to the art of the' lost generation' – the term used by Gertrude Stein to name the generation of authors who suffered the terrors of the war and post-war loss of illusions. Their best representative in English literature is Richard Aldington.

RICHARD ALDINGTON (1892—1962)

With the beginning of World War I Aldington enlisted as a private in the British Army and was at the front till 1919. During World War I Aldington suffered the effects of gas and shell-shock. His war experience is expressed in his powerful anti-war novel, Death of a Hero (1929) which presents a savage indictment of the social and intellectual climate of the pre-war era, which so disgusts the 'hero that he invites his own death by exposing himself to enemy fire.

DEATH OF A HERO

This is one of the best 'lost generation' novels. The writer called it "a mourning cry, a feeble attempt to make a monument to the generation which had its own hopes, fought courageously and suffered deeply" The young generation brought to the war front is represented by George Winterborn. The novel is close to the tragedy in its genre and style. Artistic unity of the novel is achieved through the interconnection of the three main lines: firstly, the scenes from the dramatic war life of the hero, in which the questions of the reasons for the death of the hero and many of his generation, secondly, lyrical digressions of the narrator who informs the reader of the hero's death at the very beginning of the novel, thirdly, motives of ancient Greek tragedies included into the novel. Aldington borrowed much of the classical tragedy technique but created a very modern work of art: here the narrator stands for the Greek choir, the novel has its prologue, three parts and an epilogue, it is rich in dialogues and monologues. Death of a Hero is an intellectual social and political novel, a tragedy-novel with satirical edge, a symphony-novel and, as Aldington said himself, 'a jazz-novel'.

His other novels include The Colonel's Daughter (1931), satirizing English village life, and All Men are Enemies (1933) which shows the effects of the war defeat on civil life: in the time of peace people continue living according to the savage rules and norms of the war time morale. Anti-war novels by Richard Aldington were a powerful call to stop war and a means of anti-war propaganda.