Andijan state university faculty of foreign languages

1.English Literature at the turn of the 20th century
Although in the beginning and in the course of the 20th century books lost some of their influence due to new forms of mass media like the radio, the television and recently the internet, American literature became more and more influential on an internationale level.
By the turn of the century writers of prose as well as poets and playwrights were keen on experimenting with new techniques and topics. The rather idealistic point of view authors had taken in the 19th century was no longer up - to - date and especially after the 1st World War another style of writing got popular. Perhaps it would be the best description to say that realism got even more realistic. Ernest Hemingway e.g. had a very realistic, straightforward style without the romantic ornaments that had been used before. He got first famous with his two anti - war novels «The Sun Also Rises» and «A Farewell to Arms» published in 1926 and 1929.
American authors in general began to reject the emotional aspects of literature more and more. Instead they became fascinated with describing and analyzing the psychologic depths of their characters.
The 1920s, also known as «The Roaring Twenties» brought change again. Society and thus also the society of writers, started to reject the Puritan and Victorian values and ideals that had been established. Writers felt that now they had much more freedom in choosing their topics - and also in choosing their way of life. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to get the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel «Dodsworth».
But the most important persons of the American literature scene at that time were

surely a group of people called the Lost generation. Gertrude Stein, American writer living in Paris gathered some writers around her, for whom she became both mentor and idol. Members of this group were e.g. Thornton Wilder, a famous novelist and playwright and Scott Fitzgerald as well. They were mainly influenced by the consequences of the 1st World War, which were personal disillusionment and the loss of old values. The most important author of the Lostgeneration who was even called the most important American author of the 20th century was certainly Ernest Hemingway. Another very important person especially for the Lostgeneration but also for every other writer was the Irishman James Joyce. With his stream of consciousness- technique, the use of many symbols and his prose style that was rather lyric, he set new standards not only for Europeans, but also for Americans.

At the beginning of the new decade, the 1930s the Black Friday at the New York Stock Exchange and the following world- wide recession shocked all Americans. Many writers suddenly left their old topics to write in a very realistic way about social problems. One of the authors to do so was John Steinbeck, who expressed all his despair in «Of Mice and Men» in 1937. In 1939 he published his novel «The Grapes of Wrath». In this book he describes the life of poor farmhands in California and their will to live, but he also criticizes American capitalism. In 1940 John Ford made a very successful film out of this story. Steinbeck achieved the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Another very popular subject at that time was the so called Southern Gothic, which means the American South and its problems. William Faulkner e.g. created in his novel «The Hamlet» in 1940 as well as with other books a very humorous picture of the South for which he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1949.
Drama.Concerning drama the beginning of the 20th century brought the most radical changes one can think of. In the 19th century American drama consisted merely of

immitations of European plays and stage adaptations of novels such as «Uncle Tom?s Cabin».There was no real copyright law to protect dramatists and Americans were more focused on seeing famous actors than on attending American plays. But suddenly things started to change and the American drama scene flourished. Along with various other reasons this was due to Eugene O?Neill, probably the most important American playwright.

His plays are, generally speaking about the working class and poor people, obsessions and sex, for O?Neil was influenced by his contemporary Sigmund Freud very much and about the relationships between people. Two of his most famous plays are «Strange Interlude», published in 1928 and «Mourning Becomes Electra» published in 1931.
At the same time, Maxwell Anderson published his plays, which were mostly historical ones. He wrote e.g. «Elizabeth the Queen» (1930), «Mary of Scotland»(1933), and «Anne of the Thousand Days» (1948) about King Henry VIII?s second wife Anne Boleyn.
Poetry.It was the same with poetry as with drama - American poetry and poetry in general was not very influential in the first years of the 20th century. This changed when Harriet Monroe, a poet herself, decided to publish the magazine «Poetry: A Magazine of Verse» in 1912. One of the most famous American poets of the 20th century, Ezra Pound, contributed a lot to this literary magazine, although he was living in London by the time it appeared first. Pound was the leader of a new movement in poetry, called Imagism, which featured a clear, plain presentation of poems. His life work was certainly «The Cantos» a series of poems appearing

between 1925 and 1960, but which he tried to improve and complete until his death in 1972. The Cantos contains many allusions to literature and art as well as to many different eras and cultures and thus it is very difficult to understand. The second big American poet of the 20th century is Thomas Sterns Eliot, Pound?s contemporary. Getting a very good education and being a very intelligent man, Eliot?s poetry is on a very high intellectual level. What he writes seems sometimes illogical and too abstract to understand, but exactly because of this innovative style his lyric was a turning point or revolution for American poetry. In his poems e.g. in «The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock» Eliot wrote about disillusionment and the loss of old traditions and values. Later on the so called lost generation will be of interest to us and thus one of the poets belonging to this movement is to be presented here: Edward estlin Cummings. He was one of the first poets to realize that poetry had become a visual more than an oral art. Thus he didn?t just write, he designed his poems, by unusual punctuation, spacing, indentation and by dropping the use of capital letters. Furthermore he used colloquial language and a lot of words from popular culture. One of his ideas was e.g. to write a poem with gaps that had to be filled in by the reader.

The XX century had been marked by Great Britain's unparalleled colonial and industrial expansion. Colonial expansion transformed the economic structure of British capitalism. Instead of the old and vanishing industrial monopoly, there was a more complex large-scale colonial and financial monopoly, an extension of British state power over vast distant regions of the earth.
Fundamental political, social and economic changes on the British scene deeply affected the creative writing of the new century. Men-of-letters of different

generations and aesthetic views were critical of the new era; they were spiritual explorers voicing their discontent with life. For a number of these writers an understanding of the artist's duty towards society, an earnest desire to give expression to the feelings and thoughts of the British people was at the basis of their approach to literature; their work therefore became a new investment in the heritage of English realism and stimulated its further development. We find this brilliantly exemplified in the art of H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and others.

H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw held the public attention for more than half a century. While Shaw essentially expounded the intellectual, social and moral problems of his time, Wells laid heavier stress on the consciousness of his changing compatriots and analysed the feelings and ambitions of the present in the light of the nation's future. Wells believed that the very existence of civilization was in jeopardy unless men of the highest intelligence seized the initiative, or communicated their wisdom to the masses until they reached the point where they would be capable of governing themselves. Being a scientist he turned his knowledge into science fiction in which he emphasized the social implications of the problems of space, time and technical revolution. When presenting his imaginary picture of the future he is really concerned with the present. Wells depicts the old order seeking in vain to perpetuate itself in a changing world and the new one rising assertively, chaotically in cities which grow and throw out their suburban tentacles far into the country-side.
The beginning of the century was an epoch of incessant debates, of criticizing, evaluating and rejecting old conceptions of life. Bernard Shaw was increasingly involved in these activities, castigating social defects in his plays, essays, lectures and letters to the papers. His surgical frankness in uttering plain truths to the nation

was all , the more impressive as they reached the public through the medium of the theatre. In Mrs. Warren's Profession he demonstrated that it was society which was to blame for the evils of prostitution rather than the procuress; in Widower's Houses again it was society rather than the individual landlord, who created abuses of the right to property that proved disastrous to the lower classes. Shaw's contemporaries never failed to take in his message because apart from being an expert in stagecraft, he was a master of forceful simple English and an irresistible wit. His plays may be said to have won the day for realism in the theatre.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century English literature was also greatly influenced by writers and poets who made persistent attempts to break away from established literary conventions. The new century heralding changes in every sphere of life and human knowledge and foreshadowing the inevitability of more profound upheavals -- all this, the writers felt, called for a different, a new approach to literary representation. These trends gained an especially strong impetus after the holocaust of World War I. And many of those who wanted to express their disillusionment and hopelessness, their loathing of the revolting realities of bourgeois society, felt it their duty to reject traditional literary forms. Unable to form a clear conception of how to change things, they limited their protest to extravagance of form, relegating the rational meaning to the background.
The writers experimenting with poetic form have received the much debated and still not clearly defined title of "modernists", as distinct from traditionalists. This term cannot be accepted without certain reservations. To begin with, we must distinguish between the earlier modernists (those belonging to the first decades of the present century), who were certainly critics both of social and literary conventions, and the later ones in whose art experimentation with form became a convenient device to impart an aura of novelty to unclear or even reactionary ideas.

It should also be emphasized that modernism cannot be used as a universally disparaging designation of all that was negative in literature. Some of the innovations introduced by modernists exercised a certain influence upon the realistic trends of twentieth-century art and were accepted by progressively minded artists.

The first modernists to put forward a program of some consistency were the "imagists" -- a group formed shortly before World War I and listing among its members E. Pound, T. E. Hulme, R. Aldington, and others. The theoretical concepts of the group were put forth in the writings of Т. Е. Hulme. The imagists scornfully rejected melodious, rhythmically flowing verse abounding in poetic imagery or a logical, straightforward prose style, in short, all that is commonly denoted by poetic and prose diction.
The two most prominent figures in modernist literature were Thomas S. Eliot in poetry and James Joyce in prose. Eliot's major poetic creation The Waste Land was a model for poets, for it became a symbol of the world's sickness, of a civilization gone to seed. The waste land is a world of spiritually displaced people of every nationality and creed, of people emotionally and intellectually starved and hopelessly alienated from decency and dignity in a barren land of rock and stone with dry bones strewn everywhere. Eliot's influence was strongly exerted on several generations of poets, among whom were such diverse talents as Robert Graves, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.
In prose fiction James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are especially representative of a writer's reaction to man's alienation from life and society. Joyce depicts the psychic movement of his characters by creating a chaotic play of sensations and emotions in arbitrary succession without seeming relevance to a unifying idea. To present the workings of the human mind he evolved a special

technique defined by literary criticism as the "stream-of-consciousness" technique disregarding linguistic norms in an attempt to approximate mental processes below the level of consciousness. Deliberate obscurity has rendered Joyce's books practically unintelligible to all but the most zealous and scholarly students. And while Joyce's influence on later writers has been considerable, they have refrained from competing with his inaccessibility.

Criticism of modern civilization also finds a very strong and peculiar expression in the work of D. H. Lawrence. Often accused of obscenity and immoral treatment of sex, Lawrence devoted his great literary talent to the pursuit of a life more full, free and intense than the contemporary world could grant to men and women. The underlying purpose of his art was to restore the natural balance in living destroyed by the evils of industrialism. His novels and short stories, his verse, essays and travel books reveal that to him sex was the creative affirmation of life as opposed to a deadening, sordid and mechanical age.
After the 2nd World War poetry can be divided up into several main directions. The first one is Traditionalism. Traditional poets are mostly coming from the South or the East Coast of the U.S. and use, as the name tells, traditional topics as well as a traditional style of writing. What?s interesting is that many poets like e.g. Robert Penn Warren were supporters of Traditionalism first, but turned to completely different directions of poetry later. The second group are the so called Idiosyncratic Poets. The fundaments of idiosyncratic poetry are traditional, but the poets just use them to explore and experiment with new forms of poetry. Experimental poetry, being created in the 1950s is a very complex area, which has to be divided up. Donald Allen defined five different directions in his book «The New American Poetry». Poets belonging to the New York School mostly had a very good education

and their topics were moral questions, political issues, or the urban lifestyle. The fith group Allen defined are the surrealists and extentialists, the American followers of an initially European movement. Surrealism?s main feature is the use of a complex, dazzling imagery. No matter which kind of poetry one favours, poetry in general is very popular in the U.S. tody. There are many literary magazines, colleges offer poetry workshops everybody can attend and many poets earn their money by teaching students how and what to write.

In general prose after the 2nd World War can be divided into two categories. On the one side there was the realisitc and naturalistic way of describing things, on the other side there was literature full of black humor and strange phantasies. Kurt Vonnegut was one of the many authors to publish anti - war novels because of his own experiences. His most famous book is «Slaughterhouse - Five"»(1969), which is about a group of prisoners in Germany during 2nd World War who are suddenly sent to a fictitious planet, a subject that is very similar to Science- Fiction Literature.
Another very important novel of the 1950s is J. D. Salinger?s «The Catcher in the Rye» published in 1951. This novel is about a boy / young man called Holden Caulfield who is expelled from school. But instead of going home to his parents he goes to New York and spends some days there, thinking about his past life as well as about his future. Although Holden Caulfield is not in love and doesn?t comitt suicide in the end «The Catcher in the Rye» ist often associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?s «The sorrows of young Werther», because both Werther and Holden are lonley, desperate and looking for their real purpose in life. When talking about recent literature in the U.S. black literature should of course also not be forgotten. Basically Afro - American authors still write about the same subjects

as their predecessors of the Harlem Renaissance: the problems of black people in American society. A famous Afro - American writer is Toni Morrison, who wrote e.g. ,,Beloved" published in 1987. «Beloved» is about a female slave, who tries to escape with her children, but who fails and decides to kill her kids, so that they don?t have to suffer under their cruel owner. She only suceeds in killing her oldest dughter, who haunts her as a ghost 20 years later. In 1993 Morrison was awarded with the Nobel Prize.

A novelist who is quite famous today and might also be known to future generations is John Irving, who tries to combine in his novels a satiric and humorous point of view with important lessons about life. His novels are very grotesque and sometimes full of violence, but nervertheless or maybe exactly because of that he is one of the most successful American authors of the present. One of his books ,,The Cider House Rules" was made a film in 1999 and Irving got an Oscar, for he wrote the script for this film.
Last but not least the Pulitzer Prize, the most important American Award for achievements in literature, journalism and music should be mentioned. Joseph Pulitzer was an American publisher who owned several newspapers and who is said to be the creatoir of the modern American daily press. In his will he defined that every year a committee, the Pulitzer Prize Board should choose who is to get the award. There are 5 pizes for literature, eight for journalism and one for music. The winners are announced by the Columbia University in New York and the prizes are given to them there.
After the war there was a significant movement away from the avant-garde, from

the technical experimentation favored by earlier generations of writers. The writers' interest in man's external relationships led to a less associative style, to a style closer to the straightforward narrative of the greater part of nineteenth-century fiction. They often deliberately tried to reestablish conventional prose techniques, old novelistic traditions. Several major writers like С. Р. Snow and Graham Greene came to the fore in the inter-war period, but their specific manner outlined itself most markedly in their post-war work.

C. P. Snow viewed all social problems in large political terms. He invariably expressed his social convictions and attitudes in reference to political power. Throughout his sequence Strangers and Brothers (which forms an impressive study of both great public issues and man's peisonal problems), Snow continually illustrated some form of conflict between individual conscience and the pressure of the political situation. His books provide a valuable commentary on the life of contemporary British society.
Humanistic traditions of English literature have also been taken up by Angus Wilson who appeared on the literary scene immediately after the war. With mingled irony and compassion he gives, both in his short stories and novels, a skilful dissection of post-war England exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of the middle-class milieu, its self-righteous and hollow conventions, the mean devices with which people seek to mask their deep-rooted brutal egotism. In his major novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes he uses the large framework of the traditional nineteenth-century novel, the saga that portrays a society by cutting across numerous class and occupational lines, by raising profound questions of moral honesty. After World War II there appeared young writers, who are ready to keep up the standard of wholesome optimism, and mature

writers, who have passed through a certain creative crisis.

In the fifties there appears a very interesting trend in literature, the followers of which were called "The Angry Young Man". The post-war changes had given a chance to a large number of young from the more democratic layers of society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life; unemployment had increased after the war. There appeared works dealing with such characters, angry young men who were angry with everything and everybody, as no one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain, Kingsley Amis and the dramatist John Osborne.
The sixties saw a new type of literature. The criticism was revealed in the "working-class novel" as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class. The best known writer of this trend is Alan Sillitoe. Much of post-war English literature is in the form of novels, and up to the present the novel remains the most popular literature genre in Britain. Contemporary English novelists are represented by several different trends. Since sixties the literary life in Great Britain has developed greatly. The new time brings new heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works. The specific feature of nowadays literature is the variety of genres and styles, which inrich the world's literature. Alongside with the realistic method the symbolic one takes place and develops further. On the one hand, the themes in the modern literary works concern more global problems: the Peace and the War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and Universe. But on the other hand, the duties and

the obligations of the individual man, the psychology of the human nature, the life's situations and the ways of solving the problems, the power and money have always been in the centre of public attention, that found its reflection in the newest English literature, too. The Angry Young Men

Who are these widely discussed group known as the Angry Young Men? Although their name is not quite correct - they are not angry in the strict sense of the word, they are not all young and not all men - the members of this group have much in common. Most of these were of lower middle- class backgrounds. The four best known are novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and playwright John Osborne. Although not all personally known to one another, they had in common an outspoken irreverence for the British class system and the pretensions of the aristocracy. Their heroes are usually young men from the so- called lower or lower middle class structure of English society. They strongly disapprove of the elitist universities, the Church ofv England, and the darkness of the working class life. Though in most cases they criticise not the essential class distinctions but the outwards signs of bthe Establishment such as the privileges that the top of society has retained from the times of feudalism.
Outside England the influence of the Angry Young Men has been felt mainly in plays by John Osborne. As Osborne has said of himself, "I want to make people feel, to give them a lesson of feeling, They can think afterwards". As regards literary techniques, the Angry Young Men are conservatives. They look upon Kafka, Joyce and other modernist writers of the twenties as museum pieces. Their style is close to the straightforward narrative of most of 19th - century fiction. The Angry Young Men are not especially interested in the philosophical problems of men's existence.