Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

The literature of 1930s

WW I created a profound sense of crisis in English culture and this became even more intense with the worldwide economic collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War. Much of the writing was bleak and pessimistic. The turbulent 1930s, ending in World War II, turned many of the already established writers towards traditional values.
Divisions of class and the burden of sexual repression became common and interrelated themes in fiction. Writers neglected the modernist revolution in technique of the 1920s, and returned to the realist modes of the first decade of the century.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) gives a panoramic account of Scottish rural and working-class life. Graham Greene turned increasingly to Christianity and produced desolate studies of the loneliness and guilt of men and women trapped in a contemporary England of conflict and decay. Graham Greene wrote about people troubled by difficult moral or religious problems in ‘The Power and the Glory’ and other psychological novels. George Orwell wrote recollections of lower middle-class existence. The anguished concern about the fate of society is at the heart of his nonfiction, especially in such vivid reporting as ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, an account of life in the coal-mining regions of northern England during the Great Depression, and in ‘Homage to Catalonia’, about the Spanish Civil War. Elizabeth Bowen made a sardonic analysis of upper-class values. Ford Maddox Ford described changes in English society after WW I in four novels titles ‘Parade’s End’.
Poetry was identified as the authentic voice of the new generation, for it matched despair with defiance. The poetry of Day-Lewis,_Stephen_Spender_and_Louis_MacNeice'>Wystan Hugh Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice expressed extremely liberal political ideas in verse; criticized injustices in an unequal society by means of different genres, rapid shifts of tone and mood, strange juxtapositions of the colloquial and esoteric. They envisaged freedom from the bourgeois order being achieved in various ways. For Day-Lewis and Spender technology held out particular promise. For Auden sexual repression was the enemy. Wystan Hugh Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender criticized injustices they saw in an unequal society. For these poets, society suffered from a feeling of rootlessness and isolation.