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LATE VICTORIAN AND POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE

1880-1930

Beyond the Literary Curtain

Most Victorians regard the last decades of the 19th century with calm and security, as the age of large parties and long outings in the country. For many, life in London was full of promise and entertainment. The Irish-American writer Frank Harris (1854-1931) thus describes the lifestyle of London in the 1880s: "London: who would give even an idea of its varied delights: London, the center of civilization, the queen city of the world without a peer in the multitude of its attractions, as superior to Paris as Paris is to New York." Meanwhile, the prominent social critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) tried to expose the ills of the apparently flawless social institutions of Victorian Britain, and after the 1870s the defects made themselves felt. The tense relations with Ireland, the status of the Roman Catholic church, the growing threat of Bismark's Germany after its victory over France in 1871, the unstable military position of England on land and at sea, the recovery and reconstruction of the USA after the Civil War of 1861-1865 — all these factors affected Great Britain politically, economically and culturally.

During the 19th century the English were proud that the sun never set on their Empire. The contemporaries of Queen Victoria were aware that her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and, moreover, her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 symbolized the end of the past era, of which she, Queen Victoria, was symbol for over sixty years. She died in 1901, as well as did the values during her reign — strict morality, quick prosperity, supremacy of royal authority. As the 20th century began, the Empire gradually transformed into the British Commonwealth, a federation of independent states under the symbolic power of the British sovereign. Many writers, as different as Rudyard Kipling and Edward Morgan Forster, dealt with this problem, often bringing imperialist and anti-imperialist attitudes to a conflict.

Britain entered World War I in 1914, not being ready enough. With the introduction of new weapons, like planes, tanks and poisonous gas, one million Britons were killed. Those who fought on the front never forgot the gruesome reality of 20th century warfare. It seemed to many that the world turned into a place made of dirt and death. Poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, revealed the torture and bravery of those who lost their lives and those who, though still alive, lost their spirit.

The social status of women was also changing during this period. The Married Woman's Property Act of 1882 allowed married women to own property, to enter universities, to vote, which was partial in 1918 and full in 1928. Such and other related innovations changed the general attitude towards women and were reflected in the literature of the period.

The coronations of Edward VII in 1901 and George V in 1910, were taken with a new sense. It was the time when the Empire was wearing itself out, questioning the established social order, the role of the monarch, church and court. King Edward continued the Victorian stability and assertiveness, adding to it more exuberance, new demands and attitudes from art, and unsophisticated pleasure seeking. The most popular literary genres were the drawing-room comedy, melodrama or adventure stories authored by Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Rider Haggard, John Buchan, Herbert George Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. They little challenged the former artistic principles and kept to the previous realistic fiction. And the main publications of Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster initiated the transition to Modernist literary period.



Although the literary peak of anti-Victorian tide fell on the publication in 1918 of Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), the first criticism of the Victorian middle class came with Samuel Butler's (1835-1902) novel The Way of All Flesh (1884).

On the Literary Stage

By the 1870s, later Victorian generations of literati grew disillusioned with 19th century industrialism and science, and were generally confused by the ever expanding world. This difficult world began to talk of art, detached from the practical concerns of society. The foundations of such pure art were laid down in the 1850s with the emerging of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which encouraged new artistic ventures into the realm of passionate imagination and deep psychology. At the close of the 19th century, Victorian optimism began to fade out. Previously, the poets Tennyson and Browning had already addressed the grim sides of human life in their best verse, and Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) contributed to the gloomy poetry of the end of the Victorian Age and the rise of pessimism. Signs of this stoicism, determination, human dignity and endurance can be seen in Robert Louis Stevenson's essays, the assertive poems of the editor and journalist William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books and many of his short stories.

It is customary to distinguish between two groups of writers in this period: the first one, including Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) and Francis Thompson (1859-1907), championed the principles of art for art's sake, and postulated the ideas that art should not deal with any non-artistic or debatable issues, such as politics. Instead, art should respond to beauty in its diverse aspects and depict it in a most appropriate style. These aesthetes, as they are otherwise referred to, resorted to the ideas of the last Romanticists, such as Rossetti, Tennyson, even Keats; they planted the seeds of melancholy reminiscences, bright sensationalism, worldly apathy, and emotional revolt.

The second group of writers united around the poets William Ernest Henley and Rudyard Kipling, who are often called the Hearties of the period. Although both were aware of the contradictions and sufferings of their era, the reigning mood in their poems was positive, realistic and assertive. They consciously carried on the idea of England's supremacy in the world, what they called "the white man's burden," by representing grim episodes of war experiences. However, it was Kipling, who, instead of extreme patriotic celebration of Queen's Jubilee in 1897, wrote a complicated hymn-elegy Recessional about his country's achievements and weaknesses.

An atmosphere of experimentation and intellectual unrest produced such masterworks in English literature as Dubliners (1914), The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882-1941), The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), and Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). They depicted the ever increasing complications of life, and as a consequence, man's sense of alienation from society and each other.

At the beginning of the 20th century, writers consciously tried to alienate themselves from the Victorians. It turned fashionable to view the Victorian predecessors as ridiculous and moralistic personalities. Especially delighted in such criticism were the writers of the Georgian period from 1910s to 1930s, such as Lytton Strachey, a member of Virginia Woolf's circle. A more delicate attitude is seen in Woolf's Orlando (1928), a fictionalized examination of English literature from Elizabethan times, where the Victorians are represented in the context of rain and mud.

The English novelist and poet David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) discarded civilisation as such and, like Blake, wanted man to return to the natural world. His novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), are much concerned with the relationship between man and woman, which are for him the source of strength and virtue.

Late Victorian Poetry

Poetry in this period was noted for the unadventurous romanticism of John Masefield (1878- 1067), Alfred Noyes (1880-1958), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), and by the experiments of the imagists, such as Richard Aldington (1892-1962), Herbert Read (1893- 1968), and D. H. Lawrence. The finest poet of the period was William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), whose poetry mixed romantic vision and contemporary political and aesthetic concerns. Other poets, like Walter Pater (1839-1894) were concerned with art as another religion, and the motto art for art's sake was elaborated in his books Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Another alternative of religion was Imperialism, and Rudyard Kipling, especially in his war poems, was the great promoter of the Empire. The poetry of such writers like John Davidson, Ernest Dowson and Alfred Edward Housman expressed constant pessimism. Other poets searched a new meaning in the Catholic faith, like Francis Thompson in the brief In No Strange Land, and turned to a highly-coloured style in The Hound of Heaven (1893), a fusion of the Romantic and the Metaphysical.

On the other hand, Robert Bridges (1844-1930) in the philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929) told about love and countryside. T. S. Eliot, an American emigrant, detested the horror of World War I and the subsequent postwar confusion in The Waste Land (1922), a fragmented poem of disillusion and the difficulty of human communication in the modern world. His greatest

poems depicted a spiritual crisis, and he helped to reintroduce poetry back into the theatre in his verse plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1950).

During the war, under the influence of the poet-philosopher Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883- 1917) and the American poet, resident in England, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the movement 55 called Imagism developed. Hulme said that poetry should be hard and dry, i.e. exact rather than emotional, denotative rather than connotative, expressive and precise rather than sentimental and general. However, Pound's own best poems, such as the highly influential Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), are full of sophisticated references to literature and myth, and his Cantos (begun in 1919), are a great collection of meanings, often too difficult to comprehend.

One of the poets who turned the war anger into bitter despair was Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Other poets of the war, like Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Robert Graves (1895-1985), UJ shared in Owen's despair.

Late Victorian Prose

Though the 19,h-century tradition of the novel continued in the work of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), and John Galsworthy (1867-1933), new writers like Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), and Joseph Conrad (1867-1924) voiced their scepticism and estrangement that became the most characteristic features of post-Victorian literature.

As World War I shocked people everywhere, so it found its after-effects in literature. Ford Madox Ford's (1873-1939) milestone tetralogy, Parade's End, consisting of Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could

Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928), is the finest depiction of the war and its effects.

In 1922, the expatriate Irishman James Joyce published his most important novel Ulysses. Though V regarded as controversial at first, it became a signpost of the new century; revolutionary in language and content, it raised Joyce to the level of an undisputed master of style, and his inner monologue, q or stream of consciousness, was given new life in the following generations of novelists.

Delicacy and psychological perceptiveness reign in the marvellous novels of Virginia Woolf q (1882-1941), who was keen on experimenting with different forms of narration. She gathered around her personality the famous Bloomsbury group, including the novelist E. M. Forster (1879- 1970), the biographer Lytton Strachey, and many progressive intellectuals of early 20,h-century England. Forster's influence on the construction of the novel has been enormous, his theme is about the value of individual life, as seen in such novels as A Room With a View (1908), which celebrates passion rather than control. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) and, later, q Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) went on to write in their mood, while Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) and Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) criticized both the group and the period generally.

A vast panorama of a typical middle-class English family life from Victorian days till the 1920s is presented through the artistic vision of a traditional writer John Galsworthy (1867-1933) in his Forsyte Saga, a series of six novels.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1956) and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) concentrated on Catholic ^ Christianity. Chesterton in particular was an admirer of a joyful spirituality which, to his mind, was medieval and approached Chaucer. His detective-stories The Innocent Father Brown (1911) were in accord with the great tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), whose tales of master detective Sherlock Holmes have never been out of fashion. Another well-known and legendary character was Count Dracula created by Bram Stoker (1847-1912).

Late Victorian and Post-Colonial Drama

In the 1890s, the English literary stage was occupied by the decadents, with its leading figures in Arthur Symons (1864-1945), Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde, the leader, with his tireless wit and dazzling paradoxes, and with the finest comedy of the era, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).These writers exposed the hypocrisies of Victorian values and institutions with indignation and contempt, and their hatred of bourgeois self-righteousness led them to extreme behaviour. The brilliant and witty comedies of Oscar Wilde and the comic operettas of Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) and Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), such as Patience (1881), were the best events of 19th-century British drama. Irish by origin, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) wrote stinging dramas about all aspects of British society.

However, Wilde did not establish a dramatic school. He used a personal kind of wit, far from larger social concerns, and generated paradoxes for their own sake. Bernard Shaw, on the other hand, introduced the mastery of theatrical techniques, learned during his years as a dramatic critic, and in his general positions represents anti-Victorianism. With his satirical approach he treated such contemporary and never-ending themes as war, religion, and women's rights. Pygmalion (1913) has been his most popular play ever since, a box-office success and a sharp satire on male- female relationships and British class differences. William Butler Yeats initiated the return to poetic drama with plays based on Irish folklore, such as On Baile's Strand (1904). Yeats helped found the Irish National Theatre, which cradled two remarkable playwrights: John Millington Synge (1871-1909) with his masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Sean O'Casey (1880-1964), best known for Juno and the Paycock (1925) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). But really great dramatic influence came from Norway. Henrik Ibsen's (1828-1906) works were of paramount importance for the English theatre. He explored deep social and domestic problems of his age, and his description of an unhappy marriage in A Doll's House was a real sensation, is Dramatists who followed Ibsen in social problems were Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), John Galsworthy, and John Ervine (1883-1971).

Fantasy in English drama came from the Scottish playwright James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937), who wrote a world famous play Peter Pan (1904). William Somerset Maugham (1874- 1965) wrote three-act dramas, something between comedy and tragedy, on such social themes as marriage, infidelity and the conflict between children and parents. His play Sheppey was his most original one, ironically examining the place of human charity in a non-religious world.

OSCAR WILDE

For the Irish wit, poet, and dramatist Oscar Wilde, life and art were so closely interconnected that in his last years he used to say that his genius went into his life and only talent into his writings.

Oscar Wilde (Oct. 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland — Nov. 30, 1900, Paris, France) was born into a family of a distinguished surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and on the satire of Jonathan Swift. His mother was an innovative poet and knew well Celtic myths and folklore. After finishing Portora Royal School in 1871, he received a brilliant schooling in classics at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1874, and earned a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he achieved remarkable academic success and graduated in 1878 with honours. It was in Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry with Ravenna (1878) and, moreover, got acquainted with the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin, professor of fine arts.

On graduating in 1878, Wilde moved to London, and soon was known as a writer and speaker for the school of art for art's sake. He believed that the English roots of this school went far back to the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti and Keats. He further promoted the cause of this movement in his American lecture tour in 1882. It was an overwhelming success, attributed to his amazing gift as a conversationalist. He was an inborn actor who enjoyed being listened to and this thirst for attention also decided for him what to wear. Like earlier dandies, such as Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Dickens, he loved wearing bright outfits in contrast to the black suits of the middle class. And his long lasting symbols remained velvet knee breeches, black silk stockings and a green carnation in his buttonhole.

However, Wilde's overwhelming popularity came primarily from his writings, where he mastered several literary genres: he wrote literary and social criticism, The Decay of Lying (1889), and The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), novels, poems and plays. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), was a sensation and revealed another side of his artistic vision. It is a highly original story of a handsome youth and his selfishness in seeking life's pleasures. As years go by, he remains young, beautiful and healthy while his portrait strangely changes into a horrible image of his immoral soul. Once, in anger, he stabs the portrait with a knife, but in fact it is himself who is killed. Although Wilde said that art and morality had nothing in common, in the novel's outcome he warned of the evils of unrestricted hedonism.

In his poetic domain, Wilde was outshined by his favourite forerunners like Robert Browning, D. G. Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, but there are such masterpieces as The Harlot's House and Impression du Matin in his collection of 1881. But it was comedies where he at last found his unique voice. His plays, including Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, staged in London and New York through 1892-95 brought him to the peak of his fame.

Meanwhile, in 1884, Wilde married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of a prominent Irish barrister, and their two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, were born soon. At this time he worked as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then edited Woman's World. During this early period of his writing career, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which showed his strong gift for romantic fairy tale.

The crash that followed was no less public than his rise. In the spring of 1895, he was imprisoned for two years for committing a homosexual offence, then punishable by law. The reaction against him from both sides of the Atlantic was violent. The experience of these dark years poured out in his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and his prose confession De Profundis (1905), in which he said: "The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. ... I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. ... I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop."


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1160


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