20th Century British Literature in context.
· Week 1, Introduction
English literature reflects its culture, its state of the nation. What was the condition of England at the turn of the century?
- Industrialization; railway, electricity, urbanisation (by 1900 the majority of the population lived in cities)
- Scientific progress:
1895 Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud launch an Age of Analysis
1896 Marconi patents wireless telegraph
1909 Construction of RMS the Titanic at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast
- Crisis in religion: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Science challenged religious beliefs, urbanisation leads to secularisation. This belief in Darwinism stays popular throughout the 20th century, the idea of absence of a God.
1897 Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (height of the British empire)
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Important events involved in the British empire
- James Cook’s explorations of Australia and New Zealand (1770s)
- Empire expands during the Victorian Age (1837-1901)
- Late 19th century: Britain owns one quarter of the world’s land surface because of their colonies
- First Boer War. Initially, there were Dutch settlers in South Africa (think of Kaap de Goede Hoop). England annexed this area and wanted to conquer it, which caused war between the English invaders and the decedents of Dutch settlers. England won this and the Dutch settlers moved to the north.
- Second Boer War ( 1899-1902). The discovery of diamonds and gold in the Dutch area (north) led to this second war. This was one of the first wars of which photographs were published. This created bad publicity, people became aware of what was wrong with imperialism and this caused a shift in their attitude towards the Empire.
- Colonial practices were questioned in literature, for example in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was published in 1902.
- In the First World War, soldiers from overseas colonies were killed, which changed the relationship between oppressed and oppressor.
- 1931 British Commonwealth of Nations
- After the Second World War high valued colonies like India, Ireland and South Africa became independent
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The Woman’s Question
1897 NUWSS formed to promote voting rights for women. Their leader was Millicent Fawcett.
1903 First meeting of the WSPU organised by Emmeline Pankhurst.
1905 Militancy begins, Christabel Pankhurst interrupts a Liberal Party meeting and spits at
a policeman.
1907 NUWSS’ Mud March
The Great War (1914-1919), in short
28 June, 1914 Assassination of Franz Ferdinand
August, 1914 Germany declares war to Russia, France and Belgium
4 August, 1914 Britain declares war to Germany
31 May 1915 First Zeppelin raid on London
February 1916 Britain introduces conscription.
New features in the Great War were gas attacks, tanks and press causing bad publicity
Modernism
- Flourished in the interbellum
- The sense of apocalypse: “the civilisation is breaking down”
- Break with the past, new norms and new values
- A distinction between high and low literature
- New art forms for a new age (Marcel Duchamps, Dadaism)
Georgianism is a label for a specific style of writing during the time that George V was king of Britain. This flourished from 1910 onwards. Throughout time this style, saying: “war is glorious” was less appreciated. The First World War destroyed the ideology of extreme nationalism and patriotism.
Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’
He talks about the horror, destruction and the trenches of the war. The very descriptive language he uses creates a lively image, which disgusts people. This specific work by Owen is addressed to Jessie Pope, a nationalistic woman who tried to persuade men to enlist. This can be seen at the very end: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.”
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’
Hardy was a Romantic poet. His gloomy poem is about the turn of the century. As we can see in the second stanza “The Century’s corpse outleant” – meaning that the 19th century is dead now, the twentieth century is about to begin. He describes the ‘dead’ 19th century as a winter’s landscape and the upcoming twentieth century with a songbird that is singing – dawn of the new century.
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
The title stands for the second coming of Jesus Christ. He describes a nightmarish situation, ‘ things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ but then relaxes by the idea that there must be a second coming of Jesus. Yeats, however, after a second knows that this is impossible to happen, and concludes that his God is absent.
Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’
Brooke describes dying on the battlefield as an honourable thing to do. He uses the image of a rich, open field and rivers to create a sense of tranquillity and beauty. He repeats the words ‘English’ and ‘England’ to indicate his nationalism and the pride he has for his country. If he dies on the battlefield he will make this soil better. Rupert Brooke was an officer during the war, so he was higher in rank. This contributes to the fact that he describes war as a glorious, positive thing. The poem was also written early on in the war when the majority of the people thought it would end soon. The use of the ‘Eternal Mind’ goes back to Greek classics; as a drop returns to the ocean, souls return to the Eternal Mind. Even if they are dead, they will be respected and remembered by the English people.
Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’
Poppies are symbols of the First World War and Rosenberg was the first to establish this. They grow on every soil possible, even on corpses on chemicals, this is what Rosenberg means with “poppies whose roots are in man’s veins”. Rats have been all over the world and can walk through the trenches without being shot because it’s German or French – this is meant with the “cosmopolitan rat”. Rosenberg reverses life and death, even the strong men are marked for death: “strong eyes, fine limbs haughty athletes, Less chanced than you for life”. He obviously portrays war as leading to suffering and the trenches give a feeling of imprisonment. Ambiguous is if the narrator is dead by the end of the poem, because his poppy in his ear is safe.. A sign that poppies have already rooted in his body?
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’
Sassoon describes women here as ignorant. He thinks that women whose husbands are at war romanticise the battlefront. The tone of the poem is extremely sarcastic, and Jessie Pope would be the ultimate example of the kind of woman Sassoon describes here. He uses sarcasm and bitterness to show that the situation at the front and the situation at home are incomparable. Women were employed during the war in factories, to make ammunition (see “You make us shells”), and they, by doing this, fuelled the war. It is a sonnet, having 14 lines and a volta: “O German mother dreaming by the fire”; he changes sides here. The first part of the poem is about the excitement of women when their man enlists and the second part is about the real conditions: “his face is trodden deeper in the mud”.
Jessie Pope, ‘Socks’
Pope was criticized for her nationalism and push to enlist for the army. Owen dedicated his poem to her for this reason. ‘Socks’ has a trochaic tetrameter. She suppresses the fear for the paper boy (fear for bad news) by knitting franticly on the rhythm of this trochaic metre. All the italicized phrases are knitting terms. This poem shows the condition of the women sitting at home while their husbands or sons are in danger.
Wilfred Owen, “From Owen’s Letters to His Mother”
Owen compares the situations at the battlefront with the ordinary life at home: “Towards 6 o’clock, when, I suppose, you would be going to church”. The mud sucks the soldiers in, gives a feeling of gloom and hopelessness – there is no escape to death. This letter is descriptive while his poems are invocative. In the letter of 31 December he calls himself “the master of elision”, master in suppressing his feelings.
· Week 2, Modernism (I)
There are no dates defined as the beginning or ending of modernism, but we can place it between 1890 and 1945, with High Modernism in the interbellum. The most important modernist texts are written in this interbellum, for example TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Modernism as a literary movement keeps pace with important critics of society, religion and mortality: for example Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and James Frazer.
WO I caused disruption and destruction of a well-ordered world view. Modernist literature mirrors this disruption of order. The Linguistic Turn problematizes the relation between language and reality: language is not transparent, it only gives a limited view of the world.
Modernism and language
- Scientific and logical view of language did not discourage poets and novelists to use language
- On the contrary: it incited them to develop new forms and styles of language.
This is what Ludwig Wittgenstein did.
Modernism:
- Contained a sense of changed realities
- Death of conventions (traditional belief is dead)
- Issue of form: broken images and use of intertexts.
TS Eliot used intertexts a lot. He used various sources and expects his reader to know these texts he refers to and recognises allusions. He alluded to:
- Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet from the 13th/14th century. He wrote an epic poem about a journey into earth. His love Beatrice has died and has to go through hell, and to come out of hell he has to climb a mountain and go through all the stages of heaven. This idea appealed to Eliot
- William Shakespeare
- Andrew Marvell (‘To His Coy Mistress’)
TS Eliot himself did not find his own poetry chaotic. He was interested in a quest for order.
This quest for order involved:
- Medievalism: some perception of a build-up world. Eliot looks nostalgic upon this. Dante’s poetry brought the ideas of order. Other examples of medievalism scholars are CS Lewis (Narnia) and Tolkien (Lord of The Rings).
- Allegory: Eliot was fond of this style, naming it an ‘universal language’
- New mythologies
- A return to Christianity
Modernism involved high art versus low art (as we can see later in Dadaism) and a break with the past and a reworking of tradition.
Impact of modernism as a cultural movement:
- Imagism: practised by Ezra Pound, H.D Richard Aldington and William Carlos Williams, artists are focusing on one image
- Cubism: practiced by Picasso and George Brasque. Paintings consist of surfaces that form something
- Surrealism: portrays a distorted reality
- Vorticism: collaboration between visual art and literature. Vorticism is a bit like cubism but wants to incorporate movements.
- Dadaism: practised by Marcel Duchamps, takes ordinary objects and presents them as art.
Thomas Ernest Hulme, ‘Autumn’
This poem is an example of Imagist poetry
H.D. ‘Oread’
This poem is an example of Imagist poetry
TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’
The poem begins with the sentence “April is the cruellest month” – which is an allusion to Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Eliot turns this idea around: April makes the soil fertile again and brings back memories “mixing Memory and desire”. Eliot uses old literature to talk about recent things. The “Unreal City” he talks about is London, specifically a post-war London and its civilization; war had caused so much chaos and hurt that his ‘Waste Land’ actually is London itself, and the people in it have no ideals and no belief. The phrase “Ï had not thought death had undone so many” is almost literally copied from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.
TS Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
There are many modernist features that one can find in this text. The images that spring up and stir up things for example. The “yellow fog” represents chaos in a city like London. The I-person speaking here is very vain – socially vain: “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair – they will say: How his hair is growing thin!”. He is worried what people might say or think of him. There is a lot circumstantial information in the text, which is unnecessary. The text is about a man who wants to ask a woman for her love, but he is not daring enough to do it. There is a stream of consciousness, an internal chaos in this person who has an unorganised mind. He thinks about mortality (he is already old) and is incapable of asking this important question. The words he would like to use have died, he is not saying what he wants to. The you-person is a lady, and he talks her for a walk. There are various signs of femininity in the poem: bracelets, shawls, hints of arms (all very feminine features). Important intertexts is Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. In this poem, the I-person says to his love that they have to make love now, because he is getting old and someday time will run out. There is a contrast between the speaker in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and To His Coy Mistress though. In Marvell’s poem, the speaker is confident and daring, while J. Alfred Prufrock is insecure and postpones the question: “Oh do not ask, What is it? Let us go and make our visit.” and “There will be time”. He is scared it might backfire upon him, this is maybe so because he already has lost one love: “And I have known the eyes already”. He describes himself as “the Fool”. This is incapability of saying what you want to say is very modernist.