The Second Part of the 20Th Century

The Second Part of the 20Th Century

The second Part of the 20th Century

History, Society and Culture

  • 1945: World War II ends after the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan
  • 1947: India wins independence from Britain and is partitioned into Pakistan and India
  • 1948: NATO is formed by Western democracies to counteract Soviet influence in Europe
  • 1951-64: Conservative Party in power
  • 1952: Elizabeth II becomes Queen
  • 1956: Suez Crisis
  • 1969: British troops are sent to Northern Ireland
  • 1973: Britain joins the European Economic Community
  • 1979: The Conservatives win the general election under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher
  • 1990: Margaret Thatcher is forced to resign office and is substituted by John Major
  • 1992: The Maastricht Treaty (which had strongly been opposed by Thatcher) establishes an European currency, a central bank, homogeneity of defence, foreign and social policy in the EEC, which becomes the European Union (EU)
  • 1997: New Labour with Tony Blair as P.M
  • 2002: A new currency, the euro, is adopted in 12 countries but not in Britain
  • 2003: The Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair sides with the US in the war against Iraq

The development of British and Irish Literature

  • In the second half of the century, the clear-cut division between the genres became blurred under the influence of post-modern writers who often employed the technique of the merging of genres.
  • The 50s were characterised by a number of important literary movements. Various poets rejected both modernist experimentalism and Neo-Romanticism.Philip Larkin (1922-85), Donald Davie (1922-95), John Wain (b.1925) and Tom Gunn (b.1929) became known as “The Movement”. In their poems they presented contemporary life in intelligible language and traditional verse forms.
  • The 60s: Poetry in “performance” was the typical phenomenon of this period. The “Liverpool Poets”, Brian Patten (b.1946), Roger McGough (b.1937), Adrian Henri (1932-2000), were part of the “Pop” poetry movement and wrote poems about typical issue such as the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War. “The Mersey Sound” was the best-selling books of British poetry in the last decades of the 20th century. In this period a Neo-Romantic trend emerged with the poetry of Ted Hughes, who attached importance to imagination and feeling.
  • Postmodernism is an extension of modernism and it is a cultural and artistic movement developed in the XX century. Since modernism the individual had undergone a spiritual and existential crisis due to the loss of reference. This trend, exemplified by Italo Calvino in Italy, was develop in England by the works of Angela Carter and David Lodge. David Lodge has written “Thinks…” a postmodern novel.
  • An important features of the literary development of the second half of the 20th century was the rise of the so-called “feminist novel”. Angela Carter is a new female writer, who explore the fast-changing relations between men and women in the modern world with interesting experiment of narrative techniques.
  • The Irish theatre is well represented by the much admired playwright Brian Friel (b.1929), who deals with themes of the past and present history of England. The most promising playwright of the younger generation is Frank McGuinnes. Paul Durcan’s (b.1944) poetry has mystical, surrealist, and facetious aspects. Eavan Boland (b.1944) takes on themes of Irish identity, writing about history and the marginalisation of women. Matthew Sweeney (b. 1952) describes contemporary landscapes. Today the Ulster poet Saemus Heaney is one of the best-known British poets, especially after being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995.
  • Present trends. Exploration of the past seems to be a predominate concern in contemporary British fiction. Historical themes are very frequent with a focus on World War I and II, the Holocaust, the dissolution of the Empire, the post-colonial world, the crisis of Ireland. Other recurrent themes are the war between the sexes, the battle between generation, feminist self-discovery, the disintegration of the family, child abuse. For instance, childhood is the central theme of Nick Hornby’s “About a boy”. Salman Rushdie’s (b.1947) themes are connected with the modern history of India, with identity of immigration, with the conflict between secular and religions views of the world. In “Midnight’s Children” (1981) he modifies historical events with fantasy in a comic, satirical tone. Grace Nichols but focuses on the experience of Caribbean immigrants to Britain.
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