Theme 8: English Writers at the Turn of the Century (end of 19th and beginning of the 20th century).

Plan:

1. Thomas Hardy – his life and work. 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles'.

2. Oscar Wilde – his life and work. His best plays and tales. 'The Picture of Dorian Grey'.

3. Herbert Wells – his life and work. His best scientific fantastic novels.

4. John Galsworthy – his life and work. 'Forsyte Saga' and 'Modern Comedy'.

5. 'Forsytism' as a phenomenon of the English society.

THOMAS HARDY

(1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy was born in southwestern England, western Dorsetshire. His father, a skilled stone-mason, taught his son to play violin and sent him to a country day school. At the age of fifteen Hardy began to study architecture, and in 1861 he went to London to begin a career. There he tried poetry, then a career as an actor, and finally decided to write fiction.

Hardy's home and the surrounding districts played an important role in his literary career. The region was agricultural, and there were monuments of the past, that is Saxon and Roman ruins and the great boulders of Stonehenge, which reminded of the prehistoric times. Before the Norman invasion of 1066

First, Hardy aimed his fiction at serial publication in magazines, where it would most quickly pay the bills. Not forgetting an earlier dream, he resolved to keep his tales 'as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow.' The emotional power of Hardy's fiction disturbed readers from the start. His first success, 'Far from the Madding Crowd' (1874), was followed by 'The Return of the Native' (1878), 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'(1885), and 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891). Hardy wrote about the Dorset country-side he knew well and called it Wessex (the name of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom once located there).

He wrote about agrarian working people, milkmaids, stonecutters, and shepherds. Hardy's rejection of middle-class moral values disturbed and shocked some readers, but as time passed, his novels gained in popularity and prestige. An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a design that was architectural, employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The final impression was one of a malign. He showed fate functioning in men's lives, corrupting their possibilities of happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy. While he saw life thus as cruel and purposeless, he does not remain a detached spectator. He has pity for the puppets of Destiny, and it is a compassion that extends from man to the earth-worm, and the diseased leaves of the tree. Such a conception gave his novels a high seriousness which few of his contemporaries possessed.

No theory can in itself make a novelist, and Hardy's novels, whether they are great or not have appealed to successive generations of readers.

In 1874 he married and in 1885 built a remote country home in Dorset. From 1877 on he spent three to four months a year in fashionable society, while the rest of the time he lived in the country.

In 1895 his 'Jude the Obscure' was so bitterly criticized, that Hardy decided to stop writing novels altogether and returned to an earlier dream. In 1898 he published his first volume of poetry. Over the next twenty-nine years Hardy completed over 900 lyrics. His verse was utterly independent of the taste of his day. He used to say: 'My poetry was revolutionary in the sense that I meant to avoid the jeweled line. ...' Instead, he strove for a rough, natural voice, with rustic diction and irregular meters expressing concrete, particularized impressions of life.

Thomas Hardy has been called the last of the great Victorians. He died in 1928. His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey, but, because of his lasting relationship with his home district, his heart is buried in Wessex. His position as a novelist is difficult to asses with any certainty. At first he was condemned as a 'second-rate romantic', and in the year of his death he was elevated into one of the greatest figures of English literature. The first view is ill-informed and the second may well be excessive, but the sincerity and courage and the successful patience of his art leave him a great figure in English fiction. In the world war of 1914-18 he was read with pleasure as one who had the courage to portray life with the grimness that is possessed and in portraying it not to lose pity. Often in times of stress Hardy's art will function in a similar way and so enter into the permanent tradition of English literature.

OSCAR WILDE

(1854 — 1900)

Oscar Wilde was regarded as the leader of the aesthetic movement, but many of his works do not follow his decadent theory 'art for art's sake', they sometimes even contradict it. In fact, the best of them are closer to Romanticism and Realism.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854. His father was a famous Irish surgeon. His mother was well known in Dublin as a writer. At school and later at the Oxford University Oscar displayed a considerable gift for art and creative work. The young man received a number of classical prizes, and graduated with first-class honors. After graduating from the University, Wilde turned his attention to writing, traveling and lecturing. The Aesthetic Movement became popular, and Oscar Wilde earned the reputation of being the leader of the movement.

Oscar Wilde gained popularity in the genre of comedy of manners. The aim of social comedy, according to Wilde, is to mirror the manners, not to re-form the morals of its day. Art in general, Wilde stated, is in no way connected with the reality of life; real life incarnates neither social nor moral values. It is the artist's fantasy that produces the refined and the beautiful. So it is pointless to demand that there be any similarity between reality and its depiction in art. Thus, he was a supporter of the 'art-for-art's sake' doctrine.

In his plays the author mainly dealt with the life of educated people of refined tastes. Belonging to the privileged layer of society they spent their time in entertainments. In 'The Importance of Being Earnest' the author shows what useless lives his characters are leading. Some of them are obviously caricatures, but their outlook and mode of behavior truly characterize London's upper crust. Wilde rebels against their limitedness, strongly opposes hypocrisy, but, being a representative of an upper class himself, was too closely connected with the society he made fun of; that is why his opposition bears no effective resistance.

The most popular works of the author are 'The Happy Prince and Other Tales' (1888), 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1891), and the come-dies 'Lady Windermere's Fan' (1892). 'A Woman of No Importance' (1893), 'An Ideal Husband' (1895), 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (1895). At the height of his popularity and success a tragedy struck. He was accused of immorality and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. When released from prison in 1897 he lived mainly on the Continent and later in Paris. In 1898 he published his powerful poem, 'Ballad of Reading Gaol'. He died in Paris in 1900.

'The Picture of Dorian Gray' is the only novel written by Oscar Wilde. It is centered round problems of relationship between art and reality. In the novel the

author describes the spiritual life of a young man and touches upon many important problems of contemporary life: morality, art and beauty. At the beginning of the novel we see an inexperienced youth, a kind and innocent young man. Dorian is influenced by two men with sharply contrasting characters: Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton. The attitude of these two towards the young man shows their different approach to life, art and beauty. The author shows the gradual degradation of Dorian Gray. The end of the book is a contradiction to Wilde's decadent theory. The fact that the portrait acquired its former beauty and Dorian Gray 'withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage' lay on the floor with a knife in his heart, shows the triumph of real beauty — a piece of art created by an artist, a unity of beautiful form and content. Besides that, it conveys the idea that real beauty cannot accompany an immoral life.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 3312