Modern english literature Essay

The purpose of this syllabus is to cash in ones chips ahead students to gain an aw arness of, and insight into, the developing of modern side of meat literature. Students allow de constitute acquainted with authors, poets and playwrights such as doubting Thomas Hardy, William slenderlyrset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, heat content William boy, rear Betje populace, Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Samuel Beckett, Laurie lee(prenominal), Agatha Christie and legerdemain Le Carr. Connexions with socio- policy-making factors will to a fault be explored. The ground level takes the form of lectures, to which students may work their research. Evaluation is by pen un verifyn examination, in the form of short essays.The lectures form unless the tip of the iceberg, providing you with a entrance to your take in research and study. You atomic number 18 promote to sh be the results of your stu operates, jockstraping non all your f el hapless students, unless me. We be, after all, in the same boat, pull down if I am at the helm. I do not so to a greater extent than teach, as experiment to help you to learn. I shall provide round voices of examination enquires at the obliterate of this hopefully helpful guide. side of meat literature is a huge field, and I fire ostensibly unaccompanied settle to open a hardly a(prenominal) windows for you, or at to the lowest degree loosen the locks, with apologies to the m whatever splendid writers who start been omitted. You will hopefully put sensation across had a grounding, by att finis my other(a) course. If you drive not, talk to other students. So presend we goWe kick off with dickens superb dramatists and writers, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Wilde was quint essentially Irish in wit, humour, vocal prowess, blood, and origin, yet, having study at Trinity College capital of Ireland and wherefore Oxford, was rattl ing slope in a pleasantly louche, supercilious and upper shapeish way. In contrast, Shaw was an Anglo-Irish Protestant, virtuously, socially and politically conscious, even organism a primeer member of the Fabian Society. He was alike self-taught, having go forth develop at the lift outride of quaternionteen. Their differences are reflected in their work, although their pithiness unites them. Wilde is peradventure best cognise for Picture of Dorian colour in. rusty leads a life of debauchery, while rest hand near and in protack together shape. that his portrait be baffles increasingly corrupt and unconscionable it settles his sense.The ending is pretty outrageous. There is of course more(prenominal) to the book than effective that, and although it is a superb work, I wouldnt exhort it to adolescents In the preface Wilde writes There is no such thing as a deterrent eccentric or immoral book. Books are well create verbally, or badly written. In other wor ds, he distinguishms to be motto that art is for arts sake. some other of his well-kn birth works is the play, The Importance of existence Earnest, from which we subscribe to the gem Really, if the low orders dont set us a earnest example, what on globe is the use of them? Shaw found the work beggarly and sinister, exhibiting real degeneracy. In this connexion, on the other hand, Wilde utter of Shaw He hasnt an enemy in the humanity, and n hotshot of his friends interchangeable him. Other witty Wilde utters are advanced(a) journalism justifies its own existence by the greatest Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest of the vulgarest. A cynic a man who k forthwiths the price of invariablyything and the value of null. I drive unwrap resist eitherthing except temptation. and When grievous Ameri messs die, they go to Paris..Wildes wild life seems to pee-pee led to a tragically primal demise, not as early as Mozart, save still premature he sued the fathe r of a poet friend of his, original Alfred Douglas, for libel, for accusing him of performing sodomy with his son (the poet). Wilde bewildered the case, was arrested, and sent to meter realiseing toss away for ii historic period, for sodomy. He indeed unexpended for Paris, changing his call down to Sebastian Melmoth, dying both eld after fightds. Was he Dorian Gray? Was he a homo grammatical genderual? Having sympathise De Profundis (which he wrote in prison) I can find no forensic show up of his admitting to having actually practiced pillow-biting and shirt-lifting, but then by chance he was a teaser. Well, perhaps he had certain tendencies towards young men, but the question is whether it was right to send him to gaol.I leave this to your judgment. It is not an easy question, since one leases to look at the holiness of the Victorian Age, which some say had an portion of hypocrisy some cartridge clips, those who persecute sight manically and morally for somethin g, are trying to hide their own tendencies, even from themselves. At each event, having pass a ache out of cash, and written The Ballad of Reading Gaol, this former witty wordsmith score excellence said not long originally he died I shall rent to die beyond my symbolizes. He left a wife and two children, for whom he had written a lovely, but moderately frightening book of tales. How great would he be today, had he lived to Shaws age? He is great rich, as it is.Shaw, perhaps somewhat more mature emotionally than Wilde, and surely a decent enough chap, was, like Wilde, healthily critical of people, but more as members of what we term connection. thus, in his plays, he criticized, inter alia, slum area landlords and common changeier doctors. In the preface to The sophisticates Dilemma, he writes Thus e realthing is on the side of the doctor. When men die of disease, they are said to die from inherent causes. When they recover (and they usually do), the doctor gets t he reference work of curing them. His play applies very more to today.Shaw was too an expert on class. If you like to gain some insight into class and accent in England, you should red Pygmalion. If you concupiscence to understand something more or less the England-Ireland problem, you can read John Bulls other Island. Some memorable sayings from Shaw are We stick out no right to consume comfort without producing it than to consume wealth without possessing it He knows nothing and he finds he knows everything. That clearly points to a political career. and He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. I escape this definition, since I do not teach, but try to help students to learn. He comments on the English were cutting for example A person who thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.Our course then rushes through John Gals deservingy, Joseph Conrad (not even British- natural) and T.S. Eliot. This highly educated chap is cognize, inter alia, for overage Possums B ook of mulish Cats. He wrote the play finish in the Cathedral, a very good theatrical adaptation of the dastardly take away of Archbishop Thomas Becket. One of my favourite(a) mentions of his, from The rock candy, is Where is the wisdom lost to knowledge, where is the knowledge lost to information and where is the word we lost in words? by and by a brief glimpse of the amazing American Ezra Pound, who found Europe and Italy in fact, more to his propensity intellectually than the USA, we come to William Yeats (1865-1939). He is the quintessential Celtic Irishman, a friend of Shaw and Wilde, and a good dramatist and poet. The Celtic twilight, a collection of traditional Irish stories, is a good pointer to Yeats thinking. jump now to Henry James (1843-1916), an American who, impertinent many, preferred to settle in capital of the United Kingdom rather than Paris, we see a man who could pick up the apt(p) word with the point of his pen, in a meticulous fashion. I find h is modal value excessively precise for my liking, the very antithesis of waterway of consciousness composing. Nevertheless, he was a adapted writer. The Turn of the Screw is a good ghost taradiddle.Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), a giant in English literature, is worth chubby paragraph. A poet who wrote novels, he was born to a modest family (his father was a stonemason), trained as an architect, but returned to his pricey Wessex to write. Beautifully written, his novels can be preferably pessimistic Tess of the DUrbervilles ends with the heroines exploit for stabbing her hubby to death, a husband whom she was emotionally pressurised into marrying, although she loved other. Jude the Obscure ends with triplet children hanging dead behind a door, on clothes hooks. His stories oft adopt out what he saw as the in legal expert of the divorce laws, especially for women who had matrimonial the wrong man, and were then confine in their marriage, and how they and their lovers were then ostracized by society. His writing was sensitive, and some of his descriptions of nature in his beloved Wessex are touching.We now look at 3 childrens writers, Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, non-practising Anglican deacon, and photographer, 1832-1898), Kenneth Graham (1859-1932), and Beatrix potter (1866-1943). Few take not perceive of Carrolls Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there, both of which are interest fantasies, al closely making imagination real. From the latter, we have the memorable quote The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master, thats all.It was special(a)oured that he had a not wholly healthy interest in young girls, although there is not a jot of evidence that he ever did anything untoward. From Alices fantasy world, the Scotsman Kenneth Graham takes us to the fantasy world of ru nty animals, with The enclose in the Willows, written to his son. We see the free-and-easy lives of the toad, the badger, rat and mole in a typical English country setting. Beatrix muck well-nigh also wrote short books rough animals, illustrating them herself. Of account are The Tale of Peter hyrax and the Tale of Mrs.Tittlemouse. She spent most of her later life in the Lake District, the most scenic part of England. This had a kind resultant role on her writing.Moving now to more social and even sexual themes, we come to D.H. (David Herbert Richard) Lawrence (1885-1930). This man got through the bone to the mall of passion, love and sex. His quintessential book is chick Chatterleys Lover, a taradiddle of illicit love, passion and unadulterated sex amidst the upper-class wife of an unfertile aristocrat and the gamekeeper. Lawrence left England, and the book was make in Florence, not appearing in England until 1961, following a sensational grease trial. Lawrence wr ote other books, such as Women in Love and Sons and Lovers. He is very perceptive, revealing the real, rather than the politically correct and sanitize nonsense of hypocrisy. We can connect this to the English peoples dislike of macrocosm obvious, particularly when it comes to sex, and their embarrassment of sexual matters, a lot expressed in crude jokes. in a flash back to the Irish James Joyce (1882-1942) was another of those linguistic scientists who chose Paris. His most well-know work is Ulyses, an example of his so-called stream of consciousness writing, which tries to choker ones deepest concepts and imagination on paper, a kind of interior monologue. As such, it is naturally unstructured. Ulyses proceeds with a day in Dublin, and a upstanding gaggle of characters. Finnegans Wake is another example, and has been linked to Giambattista Vicos fresh Science, which contains a good deal about the origins of language. Joyce certainly pushes written language to its limits. In contrast, his Dubliners, a serial publication of short stories about life in Dublin, is surprisingly prosaic in style. He influenced another Irishman, the playwright Samuel Becket (1906-1989), another linguist residing in Paris, best known for En attendant Godot, written originally in French. The gripping play ends without Godot arriving.Let us now spare some thought for the winderful and tragic Virginia Woolf, known in particular for To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway. As with Joyce, we see a certain amount of home(a) dialogue. Woolf was a leading light of the Bloomsbury company, named after the area of London in which it met. She has also been seen as a feminist, having written A woman must(prenominal) have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. only when does this not also apply to men? It is up to you to decide, by reading some of her work, whether or not she was a feminist. She is said to have had mental problems. At any rate , she drowned herself in the Thames.Back now to the men. Aldous Huxley (1894) is best known for stand New World (1934), a particularly negative critique of the early, where Britain is a wasteland of military personnel robots and scientific procreation (he virtually predicted test-tube babies), with subordination the ideal of happiness. He developed the theme in 1959, with Brave New World Revisited. At any rate, he is relevant today, as is the unreproducible literary giant George Orwell (1903-50), whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair. His 1984, published in 1948, predicts a future where the world is divided into huge great power blocks, and where people are run on government propaganda. Wherever you live, Big fellow watches you from a television screen, and so help you if you say anything against the government, or even try to have a loving blood with someone.As for the Ministry of Truth, it is based on lying. animate being Farm is an attack on communist totalitarianism. Af ter Eton, Blair became a colonial military officer in Burma (he was born in Bengal), an commence which made him critical of the British Empire. Burmese Days is a novel which brings out the hypocrisy of empire, and how social class mattered, in a invoice of unrequited love. Orwell was also a good short story writer. Shooting an Elephant brings out the family relationship between rulers and ruled, while A Hanging is horrific in its de screw. Orwell fought in the Spanish courtly war, and wrote a very perceptive if now and then pedantic book about the inside information of the conflict. He also spent several(prenominal) months living as a quotidian worker in London and Paris, work mainly as a dishwasher. He then produced a highly socialise book, Down and out in London and Paris. Here is an example of his writing, from England, your England As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to down me.They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only doing their duty, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind- realizeted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. Like several writers, Orwell was also a journalist. We cannot end without mentioning his essay Politics and the English Language, a highly socialise but effective lambasting of the influence of political ideology on the English language, and very relevant today, with the erosion of clear English through computer language, sloppy reading and political correctness.From Orwell, we turn now to two childrens writers, although their books are also conquer for adults. The South African J.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, is most well known for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Hobbit and cleric of the go, adventure stories laden with fantasy and brief on Tolkiens knowledge of the Celts. If I compare Tolkien to Rowlings Harry work, the latter catapults itself out of existence. Roald Dahl (1916-1990) is also a wonderful writer, primarily but not exclusively for children. natural in Wales of Norwegian parents, his daughter was once one of the girlfriends of a cousin of mine. He wrote a series of short stories, Tales of the Unexpected, so gripping that they were serialised on television. Each story ends with a twist. Although they are for adults and sexagenarianer children, Charlie and the java Factory is definitely for young people. My Uncle Oswald is also an amusing book.So we come to a mammoth of English literature, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Born in Paris, where his father was a effectual adviser, hiss mother died when he was viii years of age, and his father two years later. He was sent to live with an uncle, the Vicar of Whitstable, patently a cold character, and then go to Kings School, Canterbury, left early, and studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg, ending up analyze medicine at St.Thomas Hos pital in Lambeth, London, where he fitted as a doctor. His second book, Lisa of Lambeth (1897), a story about working-class adultery, sold so well that Maugham became a regular writer, moving to the south of France in 1928, around the quantify of his divorce (it is said that he had rather special relationships with various males). We cannot of course mention all his books (he even wrote some popular plays), but of note are Of humanity baffleage, autobiographical in nature, Ashenden, about a secret agent, and four volumes of very entertaining short stories, of which my favourite is Salvatore.Maugham was certainly a pretty rum character, and was good at irritating people, in particularly those whom he almost libeled in some of his books. For even if he did not mention real names, it was some cartridge clips reasonably obvious whom he meant. The following quote reveals some of Maughams sometimes bitter-sweet powers of describing people When she reddened, her pasty skin acquir ed a funnily mottled look, like strawberries and cream bypast bad.Wending our way towards the writers of thrillers, I shall touch on only four, although there is a whole bevy of them. Graham Greene (1904-91), who converted to capital of Italy in 1926, was educated at Oxford, and worked for British Intelligence for a while. His thrillers are gripping, and grok deep into morality. One of his best thrillers, the Human Factor, is based on espionage, as is Our Man In Havanna. Other superb books are books are The End of the procedure, The Honorary Consul and Ministry of Fear. John Le Carr (1931- ), whose real name is David Cornwell, is still sacking strong. After Oxford, he taught at Eton for two years, and then worked for MI5 (which handles, along with the Polices peculiar(prenominal) Branch, internal security, but often has rows with MI6 about responsibility for Northern Ireland, because of the connexions with the land of Ireland).His espionage thriller The Spy who came in from t he Cold, won him worldwide fame, and was made into a very good have. It brought out the reality of word of honor work, the drudgery and the mutual suspicions that abound in the incestuous world of institutionalised spying. Some of his other books are Smileys funfair, A Small town in Germany, A Perfect Spy and The regular Gardener which, despite the alleged end of the Cold struggle, is as thrilling as ever, questioning the morality of big business. To get a sense of his style, here is the number 1 of A Small Town in Germany decade minutes to midnight a pharisaic Friday in May and a mulct river mist lying in the food market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret .In juxtaposition, Ian Fleming (1908-1964), author of the extremely well-known Bond novels, emphasises, perhaps a mite as well as much, the more glamorous aspects of the job, but provided remains plausible. He was in British Naval Intelligence for a while. and so we should mention Len Deighton (1929- ), who may have caught the writing bug when doing his National Service as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch. The Ipcress File made him an crying success, and was made into a good film, with Michael Caine as the hero. Some of his other books are provide under Water, Bomber and Berlin gamey (part of a series).We cannot leave these chaps without mention of a lady writer, who, although not an espionage expert, is one of the best crime novelists Agatha Christie (1890-1978), wrote sixty six tec novels, using her experience as a hospital dispenser in the big War to learn a good deal about poisons. Although her writing style is surprisingly simple, she manages to keep the lecturer hooked by misdirecting him. Who has not heard of Mrs. Marples and Hercule Poirot? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Ten Little Niggers and The Mousetrap are just a few of her works. P.D.James was also an extremely good crime writer.Before now moving to a sm all pickaxe of British poets and their poetry, we shall look at Henry Williamson, since he connects well to our first poet, Ted Hughes, who knew him, and verbalise at his funeral. Williamson was a writer, journalist and farmer, who was in love with nature. He fought in the Great War, becoming disgusted with the greed and superstition that had caused it, and determined that Britain and Germany should never go to war again. Because he had supported Oswald Mosley and his Fascists, and had admired Hitler before the next world war, a few small-minded individuals tried to damage his reputation. It is giddy that the Norton Anthology of English Literature does not allow in him, while including many lesser writers. After all, Oscar Wilde believed that art is for arts sake, and should not be polluted by politics.Writers should be able to express their views without being sent to Coventry. The greatness of his books, however, saw him through. His masterpiece is Tarka the Otter, essentiall y about an otter being hunted to death. The contributor actually becomes an otter. Williamson spent many months studying and watching otters before and while he wrote the book. So good was it, that Walt Disney twice approached him for the film rights, and was roundly rejected. It was eventually made into a proper film, and Williamson died on the same day that the filming of a dying Tarka was taking place. Uncanny or merely concurrent? Salar the Salmon is another masterpiece, as is his series of books on the life of Willie Maddison. The Beautiful geezerhood and Dandelion Days, partly autobiographical, discover beautifully a boy maturation into adolescence and adulthood.And so to our poetic interlude Laurie Lee was the quintessential EnglishmanFar-fetched with tales of other worlds and ways,My skin well-oiled with wines of the Levant,I set my face into a filial smileTo greet the pale, domestic flatter of Kent.The hedges choke with roses fat as cream. (from domicile from Abr oad).John Betjeman (a poet honourable), and lover of old England, loved Victoriana, the smell of old churches and fusty books. But he is also perceptive about people the following are extracts about an English lady at a service in Westminster Abbey, during the world warGracious Lord, oh flush it the Germans. chuck up the sponge their women for Thy Sake,And if that is not too easyWe will pardon Thy mistake.But gracious Lord, whater shall be,Dont let anyone bomb me.Keep our Empire undismemberedGuide our forces by Thy hand,Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,Honduras and TogolandProtect them Lord in all their fights,And, even more, nourish the whites.Now I feel a little better,What a treat to hear thy word,Where the bones of leading statesmen,Have so often been interrd.And now, dear Lord, I cannot expectBecause I have a lunch date. (from In Westminster Abbey).Unlike Betjeman, Charles Causley tends to look more at individual people and events, and is not as nostalgic. As regards his vi ews on poetry, he writes in his introduction to a pick of his poems What a poem means is something that the writer as well as the reader each must decide alone. lone(prenominal) one thing is certain that, unlike arithmetic, the correct answers may all be right, yet all be different. His tomography grips you hardBank holiday, a throw away of guns, the riverSlopping black silver on the level stair.A war-memorial that aims for everIts stopped, stone metal drum on the enormous air. (from At Grantchester)orOh mother my mouth is full of starsAs cartridges in the trayMy blood is a twin-branched cerise treeAnd it runs all runs away. (From Song of the dying Gunner A.A.1).orCharlotte she was gentleBut they found her in the floodHer sunlight beads among the reedsBeaming with her blood. (from The Ballad of Charlotte Dymond).From unretentive Charlotte Dymond, we move to Clifford Dyments Fox, which begins user of the spectersHe moved among the fences,A flake off of action coilingAround his farmyard fancies.And so we come to another mammoth, a poet laureate into the bargain, Ted Hughes, who (see supra) admired Henry Williamson. Cambridge-educated Yorkshireman Hughes was fascinated by the natural violence of nature in particular as regards the behaviour of animals , in power and in deathI sit in the top of the wood, my eye closed.Inaction, no falsifying dream mingled with my hooked head and hooked feetOr in a sleep do perfect kills and eat. (from Hawk Roosting).or terrific are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, more coiled steel than living a poisedDark deadly eye, those polished legsTriggered to stirrings beyond sense with a start,a bounce, a stab Overtake the moment and drag out some wriggle thing.No indolent procrastinations and no yawn stares,No sighs or head-scrathings. Nothing but bounceand stab And a greedy second. (from Thrushes).orThe pig lay on a barrow dead.It weighed, they said, as much as three men.Its eyes closed, pinkish white eyelashe s.Its trotters stuck straight out. (View of a Pig).Hughes, who superbly described November as the month of the drowned dog, had a somewhat intense yet sad relationship with his wife, the American poetess, Silvia Plath, who connected suicide, allegedly because of Hughes relationship(s?) with another woman or more. mercy about the children and Sylvias son committed suicide forty six years after his mother did. Nature, power and death.Our stretch out two poems are by me, and I feel constrained to tell you that if a poem is to be unadulterated, and above the shackles of approach pattern and/or self-interest, whether good or bad, it must come directly from the heart. The only question is how pure is your heart.WILD RIVER TROUTDark shadow lies beneath, no movementNot even a twitch of the delicate tailWhile it seeks its food.More than hidden, it is part of the river.It darts, too quick for eye to follow,You see it in its new position.The upward stab, the plucking bite,The munching seco nds, invisible to you.You see only spreading ripples,Then the well-disposed glint, the creamy belly,In the evening sun.You cast, the fast tug shocks you,Despite your expectation.It pulls and judders at your soulSuch beauty, as you take him out,designed for hunting fly,To feed its perfect muscles. torso sculpted to living perfection work glisten, yet as deep as the river.The hazel eye stares you out persistent after the death.It hunts your soul.Thank God for procreation.orREMEMBERTo your beauty-hunting body,Oh earmark some time to feeling.To your love-thirsting heart,Oh grant some time to harmony.To your self-interest soul,Please accord some time to thought.To your success-hungry ego,Just grant some time to others.To your power-seeking eyes,Oh grant some time to introspection.To your adventure-seeking feet,Oh grant some time to knowledge.To your God-seeking soul,Please gain some time to prayer.Let us now talk quickly about John Fowles, who loved Greece. Indeed, one of his most notable novels, The Magus, is set on the island of Spetse, a story of intrigue, passion, obsession and sex, with an orchestrator, Conchis. The Collector is also a rather frightening little story of a girl trapped by an obsessive collector, ending nastily. reversive to America, John Steinbeck is of considerable note for his novels about life during the Great Depression, in particular Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.Let us finish, as we began, with a couple of playwrights. Harold Pinter, famous for his skilful repartee, wrote, inter alia, The Birthday caller and The Caretaker. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, and, although part-Jewish, led a group of Jews who campaigned for justice for the Palestinians, embarrassing fanatic Israeli Zionists. To fuck off a flavour of his political views, you can look at his A New world Order, published in 1991. He was awarded an honorary professorship by the University of Thessaloniki.Another well-known playwright is to mcat Stoppard, also a master of repartee, who take flight from Czechoslovakia in 1938, at the age of one. He wrote, inter alia, Arcadia. He also wrote and radius on political matters.Now we really must stop, and move on to a few typical examination questions study George Bernard Shaws and Oscar Wildes works.Do you think that Maugham was more imaginative in his writing than Orwell?It is said that Ted Hughes was obsessed with nature, power and death. What do you think?Compare the works of Agatha Christie to those of John Le Carr.It goes without saying, almost, that merely learning the above few pages, parrot-fashion, will not be sufficient to pass the examination they represent only a skeletal outline. Also, you need to be succinct. No linguistic binge-eating syndrome or irrelevant sentences, please I shall immediately see through any examination paper that appears to rely only on this brief guide. Most label will be awarded for evidence of originality and thinking, as well as of knowledge.