Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Henry Green wrote stylized novels, the precursors of the terse, compressed fiction.
Iris Murdoch’s fiction combines allegory and symbol with realistic rendition of character; she is famous for elaborately artificial works. Her fiction is engaged with themes of goodness, authenticity, selfishness, and altruism. ‘A Severed Head’ is the most incisive and entertaining of her works.
Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym continued the tradition of depicting emotional and psychological nuance – comedies of sense and sensibility. Barbara Pym began writing in about 1950 but did not gain wide recognition until the 1970s. Pym’s fame rests on low-keyed stories about genteel English life, such as ‘The Sweet Dove Died’.
There was another type of fiction, produced by writers deeply influenced by ‘Angry Young Men’, such as Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, David Storey – novels ruggedly autobiographical in origin and near documentary in approach. The predominant subject of these books was social mobility, usually from the northern working class to the southern middle class. Anthony Powell wrote a 12-volume series of novels titled ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’. The series portrays upper middle-class society from the early 1920s to the 1970s.
Sir Charles Percy Snow wrote a series of 11 novels called ‘Strangers and Brothers’ about changes in university and government life; about a man’s journey from the lower class to London’s ‘corridors of power’.
But the most inspired fictional work of social and cultural life in 20^th century Britain was Angus Wilson’s ‘No Laughing Matter’, a book that set a triumphant seal on his progress from a writer of ironic short stories to a major novelist whose work unites 19^th century breadth and enthusiasm with 20^th century formal versatility and experiment.
Widening social divides in 1980s were registered in works that purposefully imitate the Victorian ‘Condition of England’ novel (the best is David Lodge’s ‘Nice Work’).