Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

William Somerset Maugham achieved the greatest popular success. ‘Of Human Bondage’ portrays a character who drifts. ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ is based on the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, continues the examination of the character without roots. ‘Cakes and Ale’ – shows how the real self is lost between the two masks – public and private – that every person wears.
James Joyce was one of the most influential writers of the 1900s. Like many other Irish authors, Joyce lived outside Ireland. He believed that Ireland’s strict nationalistic and religious attitudes prevented writers from portraying Irish experience and contribute to Ireland’s national literature. Joyce revolutionized the structure and literary style of his novel. His first major work, a short-story collection called ‘Dubliners’, offers a realistic picture of life among the Irish lower-middle class.
James Joyce was searching for the secret places in which the real self is hidden. He believed he had found the way to it through human vocal language. For him language was the means by which the inner, subconscious feelings gained expression. Whereas ‘civilized’ people try to control the spoken language, he believed, ‘natural’ people let their language flow freely. If one could capture this free flow of language in writing, he would have the secret of humankind’s nature. Thus was born stream of consciousness, a technique– reading the characters’ thoughts exactly as they occur, without a moment by the author. In his autobiographical novel ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, Joyce used this technique. In the novel ‘Ulysses’ he focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. It was banned in some countries but has nevertheless greatly influenced modern fiction. In ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ Joyce created a whole vocabulary of puns and merged words from the elements of many languages.