Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Peculiar features of 1950s
After the war there appeared two groups of writers: 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 1950s there appears a very interesting trend in literature, the followers of which were called ‘The Angry Young Men’. 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.
Most of writers were of lower middle-class backgrounds. The members of this group, although not all personally known to one another, had in common an outspoken irreverence for the British class system and the pretensions of the aristocracy. They strongly disapprove of the elitist universities, the Church of England, the darkness of the working class life.
The four best known are novelists Braine'>Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, and the playwright John Osborne. As regards literary techniques, the Angry Young Men are conservatives: they look upon modernist writers of the 20s as museum pieces. Their style is close to the straightforward narrative of 19^th century fiction. They are not interested in the philosophical problems of men’s existence.
The trend was crystallized in John Osborne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’, but it had been evident earlier in the writings of John Wain, author of ‘Hurry on Down’, John Braine, author of ‘Room at the Top’, Allan Sillitoe, author of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, and in ‘Lucky Jim’ by Kingsley Amis. Osborne’s drama ‘Look Back in Anger’ describes a young working-class man’s resentment of the English class system. In ‘Room at the Top’, Braine created an ambitious working-class hero who has little respect for traditional English ways of life.
Kingsley Amis is considered by many to be the best of the writers to emerge from the 50s. The social discontent he expressed made ‘Lucky Jim’ a household name in England. His ‘The Old Devils’ won the Booker Prize.
While Amis was a realist, he was also a humanist, attempting to put the writer’s talent in the service of society. Other novelists in this tradition are Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark.
By the late 1950s Iris Murdoch gained recognition as one of the foremost novelists of the generation. Iris Murdoch’s novels are psychological studies of upper middle-class intellectuals. Often they are satirical, as in ‘A Severed Head’ and ‘The Accidental Man.’ Her best novels include ‘Under the Net’, ‘The Red and the Green’, ‘Nuns and Soldiers.’
Angus Wilson took as his subject the crisis of the educated British middle class after World War I. His collection of short stories ‘The Wrong Set’ portrays the emotional crisis of WW II. His first novel, ‘Hemlock and After’, is considered among his best.
Anthony Burgess was a novelist whose fictional exploration of modern dilemmas combines wit, moral earnestness, and touches of the bizarre. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was both comic and violent. His other successful novels are ‘Earthly Powers’, ‘The End of the World News’ and ‘The Kingdom of the Wicked.’