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Responses to War and Colonialism

When Yeats edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, he raised a furor by deliberately leaving out all the war poets, including Wilfred Owen,whom he later ridiculed as “unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper.” In truth, the poets of World War I were not wildly original when it came to form; they wrote in the same style as an earlier generation. However, what they had to say was radically new and powerfully influential.

Most of the war poets were soldiers themselves, and their early poems—such as those of Rupert Brooke,who was idolized for his handsome face and untimely death—reflected the enthusiastic patriotism of young men eager to win honor and glory by fighting for their country. Their idealism soon gave way to disillusionment and despair, however, as they realized with horror that the carnage was leading to no higher end. Owen, who died just a week before the armistice, conveyed a melancholy tone, while Siegfried Sassoon’spoetry expressed his anger and frustration with those responsible for sending his friends to their deaths.

Soon, a new strain of pacifism and anti-imperialism entered British literature. Based on his own experiences as a police superintendent in Burma, George Orwell became increasingly disillusioned with British colonialism, sharing his thoughts in classic essays such as “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.” He also made it his goal to expose and criticize totalitarianism in all forms. The “Ministry of Truth” in his novel 1984 was based on his own experiences writing wartime propaganda for the BBC during World War II. Similarly, Graham Greene,who looked with disdain on both the remains of the British Empire and the new influence of the United States, filled his novels with images of a sad, tawdry world stained by its colonial past.

Postwar Writers

War and Colonialism • WWI poets were unoriginal in form but radical in content. • Orwell and Greene criticized colonialism. Postwar Writers • Writers responded to change in different ways. • The “angry young men” championed the working class. • Postmodernism dismantled literature to examine its inner workings. Legacy of Empire • Writers from former colonies grapple with issues stemming from their countries’ colonial pasts. • Some of these writers are political, others not. • Their multicultural perspective has broadened literature.
The writers who emerged after World War II struggled to come to terms with their changing world. They responded in various ways: poet Ted Hughes with brutal imagery, novelist Muriel Spark with cool irony; and the “angry young men”—writers such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe—with anti-authoritarian rage and working-class resentment. In the words of a character from Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, “There aren’t any good brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.”



Most significant, however, was the shift to postmodernism, a style of writing that took modernism to a logical—though extreme—conclusion, dismantling literature entirely to examine its inner workings. The pioneer of British postmodernism was the playwright Samuel Beckett, whose first play, Waiting for Godot, stripped drama to its essence with minimal sets, darkly humorous circular dialogue, and—to the dismay of some audience members—absolutely no action at all.


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 869


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