Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique was refined by Virginia Woolf. For her, reality or consciousness, is a stream. Life, for both reader and characters, is immersion in the flow of that stream. V. Woolf transformed the treatment of subjectivity, time, and history in fiction and helped create a feeling among her contemporaries that traditional forms of fiction – with their frequent indifference to the mysterious and obscure inner life of characters - were no longer adequate.
Her eminence as a literary critic and essayist did much to foster an interest in the writing of other significant women novelists, such as Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson. Together with Elizabeth Bowen they were concerned with the realities of the mind.
Perhaps the outstanding novelist between 1910 and 1930 was David Herbert Lawrence. David Herbert Lawrence is famous for experimental novels. He related his sense of the need for a return from the complexities, overintellectualism, and cold materialism of modern life to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the race. His numerous novels and short stories, among which some of the best known are ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘Women in Love’, ‘The Plumed Serpent’, are for the most part experimental. The obvious symbolism of plots and forceful message broke the bonds of realism and replaced them with the direct projection of the author’s own dynamically creative spirit. His distinguished but uneven poetry similarly deserted the fixed forms of the past to achieve a freer, more natural and more direct expression of the perceptions of the writer.
Among young novelists, Evelyn Waugh, like Aldous Huxley, satirized the ignorance of society in the 1920s in ‘Decline and Fall’. His later novels, similarly satirical and extravagant, showed a deepening moral tone, as in ‘The Loved One’ and ‘Brideshead Revisited’. Together with Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley, E. Waugh investigated in his more serious novels the problem of evil in human life.
Much of the reputation of George Orwell rests on two works of fiction, one an allegory, ‘Animal Farm’, the other a bitter satire, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. The both directed against the dangers of totalitarianism.

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