The modern Period

Women’s rights

-1882 – Married Women’s Property Act allows married women to own property in their own right

-1878- Women allowed to attend university -1918- Women gain right to vote

Karl Marx 1818-1883

Karl Marx: German political theorist who, along with Friedrich Engels, wrote “The Capital”

Sigmund Freud 1856-1939 Austrian Psychologist

- the subconscious mind, repression, dream interpretation

- saw sexual desire as the driving motivator of people

- Id, Ego, Super Ego, Oedipus Complex

Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

· First coined\employed by French novelist Emile Zola

· Deals with those raw and unpleasant experiences which reduce poor or middle class characters to “degrading” behavior in their struggle to survive

· Life is usually the dull round of daily existence.

· But characters are usually associated with the heroic or adventurous acts of violence and passion leading to desperate moments and violent death. The suggestion is that life on its lowest levels is not so simple as it seems to be. (Stephen Crane, Jack London, Thomas Hardy)

World War 1 1914-1918

• Causes include imperialistic foreign policy, fighting extends to colonies
• The end of Victorian Era in England. Shock, disillusionment, bitterness, Rejection of old societal values.

Literature

· English writers during these turbulent and unhappy years turned inward for their subject matter and expressed bitter and often despairing cynicism.

· T.S. Eliot best summerised their despair in “The Waste Land”, the most influential poem of the period. Its jagged style, complex symbols, and references to other literary works set a new pattern for poetry.

· During the 1950s, a number of young writers expressed their discontent with traditional English politics, education, and literature.

· These writers were labeled the Angry Young Men.

· A number of authors wrote about changes in English society.

Bernard Shaw 1865-1950

· Born Irish, literary critic, journalist, playwright, photographer

· Socialist, upset by exploitation on the working class (Fabian Society)

· Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925

· Pygmalion 1912

· A little eccentric, Shaw was a staunch vegetarian, fought against smallpox vaccination, and was a proponent of eugenics.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a poet, dwelling chiefly on his spiritual relations with god, his poetry only became recognized in 1918 when he became published in Robert Bridges edition. The late publication effectively made the difficulties of his work anticipate modern poetry, and so he made a major influence on later writers.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, short story novel writer, poet and playwright born in Dublin.

Joyce wrote several volumes and an autobiographical novel which follows his life from infancy to his first departure for Paris. Joyce subsequently wrote an unsuccessful play published in 1918 and furthermore a slight volume of verses. These were amid the beginnings of his two great works to come, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. These both occupied the remainder of his life.

Virginia Woolf During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1156