Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Lecture 6.
English Literature after World War I and World War II

1. 
   Impact of World War I
   
2. 
   The literature of 1930s
   
3. 
   The literature of World War II (1939-1945)
   
4. 
   The literature after 1945
   

4.1 Fiction
4.2 Poetry
4.3 Drama

1. 
   Impact of World War I
   

World War I cut forever the ties with the past. It brought discontent and disillusionment. Humankind was plunged into gloom at the knowledge that ‘progress’ had not saved the world from war.
In fiction there was a shift from novels of the human comedy to novels of characters. Fiction followed the twisted, unnatural development of a single character or a group of related characters.
World War left its record in literature. Rupert Brooke, who died during the war, has been idealized for what is actually a rather thin performance in poetry. Wilfred Owen, also a war casualty, was far more realistic about the heroism and idealism of the soldier. Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, both survivors of the carnage, left violent accounts of the horrors and terror of war.
In the wake of the war the dominant tone, at once cynical and bewildered, was set by Aldous Huxley’s satirical novel ‘Crome Yellow’. His pessimistic vision found its most complete expression in the 1930s, however, in his most famous and inventive novel, the anti-utopian fantasy ‘Brave New World’, which describes a terrifying future society that eliminates individuality and personal liberty. Aldous Huxley best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in the period after World War I in his ‘Point Counter Point’. The novel is composed in such a way that the events of the plot form a dual pattern that is a departure from the straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel. He worked with the external world. He found it false, brutal, and inhuman.