English literature in the 20th century
20世纪的英国文学
1. Historical Background
⏹Historically：
Modernism rose 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 losses 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. Frequent economic depressions and mass unemployment sharpened the contradictions between the rich and the poor.
⏹Ideologically:
The rise 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, eclipsed by the rapid rise 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, comic satires on the English upper class by Evelyn Waugh; and Catholic novels by Graham Greene.
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 used. Having been merged and interpenetrated with modernism in the past several 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 diverse 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.
