Post-War Literature

• Literature of the 40s,50s and 60s

• Angry Young Men

• Theatre of the Absurd

• Postmodern literature

Late 40s and early 50s (writers of the pre- and post-war fiction):

• George Orwell (1903-1950) (Eric Arthur Blair)

• Born in Bengal

• Educated at Eton

• Served in Indian Imperial Police in Burma

• Burmese Days (1934)

• Homage to Catalonia (1938)

• Animal Farm (1945)

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

• Democratic socialist, deeply disillusioned with Communism

• Animal Farm: Discussion with equality: ”all animals are created equal but some are more equal than others”

• 1984 totalitarianism, Big Brother, the Thought Police, newspeak

• Society dominated by slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

• Both 1984 and Animal Farm belong to non-realistic novel

• Fantasy: post-war fantasy literature is interested in alternative worlds, magic

• John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1873)

• Trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

• The Two Towers (1954)

• The Return of the King (1955)

• Working-class novel:

• Alan Sillitoe (b. 1928)

• Philosophical novel:

• Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) Under the Net, The Unicorn (a parody of the 18th century Gothic novel), The Green Knight

• William Golding (1911-1993)

• Lord of the Flies (1954)

• Innate human aggression, evil, and violence appear especially in extreme situations

• Doris Lessing (b. 1919)

• Born in Persia, brought up in South Rhodesia and in 1949 came to England

• 2007 Nobel Prize

• Anti-rascist, psychological, femnist, experimental, sci-fi

• E.g. A Briefing for a Decsent into Hell (1971)

• Love, Again (1996)

• The Sweetest Dream (2001)

• Laurence Durrell (1912-1990)

• Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) the same events narrated from different points of view (the titles of the separate parts indicate it: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

• Love, sex, romance, quite scandalous

• Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

• Irish, self-imposed exile to France

• Writing in French – discipline

• Friend and secretary to Joyce

• Nobel Prize 1969

• Anti-novels – the new novel – nouveau roman

• Against traditional realism

• Subjective, authorial point of view

• Murphy

• Molloy

• Malone Dies

• Experimental novel – novel of the 60s

• Originated with Beckett

• Inspired by John Barth (an American critic and writer)

• ”Literature of Exhaustion” 1967 – v. important – the beginning of postmodernism

• John Fowles (b. 1926)

• The Maggot

• The Collector

• The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

• Postmodern fiction

• Intertextuality – Julia Kristeva

• End of omniscient narrator

• Play with the reader

• Theoretical study of the novel

• Victorian archetype

• Historiograpfic metafiction – Linda Hutcheon

• Campus novel

• Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000)

• David Lodge (b. 1935) Small World

Drama

• The Angry Young Men

• English society as hypocritical

• Working class and lower middle class

• Domestic realism

• Kitchen sink drama

• John Osborne (1929-1994)

• Look Back in Anger 1956

• Jimmy, a university graduate, sweet stall, wife- upper class – frustration, eruption of frustrations, psychological abuse of his wife

• Shelagh Delaney (b. 1939) kitchen sink realism A Taste of Honey 1958

• The Theatre of the Absurd

• Martin Esslin 1961

• Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot

Fr. 1953, Eng. 1955

• Stream of consciousness• Circular time• No God/ pessimistic vision of God• Immobility• Metaphysical despair and inertia• Lack of communication• Cogito ergo sum replaced by Dico ergo

sum

• Deterioration of civilization

• Language games

• Contemporary human being (devoid of dreams, memory)

• Everyman

• Theater of menace /comedy of menace• Harold Pinter (1930-2008)• Nobel Prize 2005• Menace• Unknown danger• Human isolation• Terror• The Dumb Waiter (1957)• The Birthday Party (1958)

• In-Yer-Face Theatre

• Aggressive, provocative

• Sarah Kane (1971-1999) 4.48 Psychosis

• Other important contemporary writers:

• Angela Carter

• Julian Barnes

• Graham Swift

• Jeanette Winterson

• Salman Rushdie

• A.S. Byatt