English Literature

C

The Victorian Novel

The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian Age. A fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of romanticism to literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems and social relationships. The close observation of a restricted social milieu in the novels of Jane Austen early in the century (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816) had been a harbinger of what was to come. The romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, about the same time (Ivanhoe, 1819), typified, however, the spirit against which the realists later were to react. It was only in the Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the new spirit of realism came to the fore. Dickens's novels of contemporary life (Oliver Twist, 1838; David Copperfield, 1849-1850; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create living characters; his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged less in the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable of greater subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows. Nevertheless, the restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle- and upper-class life, and his lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens in many readers' minds.

Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable for a variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently ironic surveys of English ecclesiastical and political circles; Emily Brontë, for her penetrating study of passionate character; George Eliot, for her responsible idealism; George Meredith, for a sophisticated, detached, and ironical view of human nature; and Thomas Hardy, for a profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance.

A second and younger group of novelists, many of whom continued their important work into the 20th century, displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel, in part by a choice of exotic locale, in part by articulating their themes through plots of adventure and action. Kipling attained fame also for his verse and for his mastery of the single, concentrated effect in the short story. Another tendency, in a sense an intensification of realism, was common to Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. These novelists attempted to represent the life of their time with great accuracy and in a critical, partly propagandistic spirit. Wells's novels, for example, often seem to be sociological investigations of the ills of modern civilization rather than self-contained stories.

D

19th-Century Drama

The same spirit of social criticism inspired the plays of the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw, who did more than anyone else to awaken the drama from its 19th-century somnolence. In a series of powerful plays that made use of the latest economic and sociological theories, he exposed with enormous satirical skill the sickness and fatuities of individuals and societies in England and the rest of the modern world. Man and Superman (1903), Androcles and the Lion (1913), Heartbreak House (1919), and Back to Methuselah (1921) are notable among his works. His final prescription for a cure, a philosophy of creative evolution by which human beings should in time surpass the biological limit of species, showed him going beyond the limits of sociological realism into visionary writing.

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VIII

Literature of the 20th-Century to the Present

Two world wars, an intervening economic depression of great severity, and the austerity of life in Britain following the second of these wars help to explain the quality and direction of English literature in the 20th century. The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways.

A

Post-World War I Fiction

Among novelists and short-story writers, Aldous Huxley best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in the period after World War I (1914-1918) in his Point Counter Point (1928). This novel is composed in such a way that the events of the plot form a contrapuntal pattern that is a departure from the straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel.

Before Huxley, and indeed before the war, the sensitively written novels of E. M. Forster (A Room with a View, 1908; Howards End, 1910) had exposed the hollowness and deadness of both abstract intellectuality and upper-class social life. Forster had called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses and for a satisfaction of the needs of one's physical being. His most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), combines these themes with an examination of the social distance separating the English ruling classes from the native inhabitants of India and shows the impossibility of continued British rule there.

D. H. Lawrence similarly 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 (1913), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), are for the most part more clearly experimental than Forster's. The obvious symbolism of Lawrence's plots and the forceful, straightforward preaching of his 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.

Even more experimental and unorthodox than Lawrence's novels were those of the Irish writer James Joyce. In his novel Ulysses (1922) he focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce went beyond this to create a whole new vocabulary of puns and portmanteau (merged) words from the elements of many languages and to devise a simple domestic narrative from the interwoven parts of many myths and traditions. In some of these experiments his novels were paralleled by those of Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) skillfully imitated, by the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique, the complexity of immediate, evanescent life experienced from moment to moment. Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett appeals to a small but discerning readership with her idiosyncratic dissections of family relationships, told almost entirely in sparse dialogue; her novels include Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives (1931), and Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

Among young novelists, Evelyn Waugh, like Aldous Huxley, satirized the foibles of society in the 1920s in Decline and Fall (1928). His later novels, similarly satirical and extravagant, showed a deepening moral tone, as in The Loved One (1948) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). Graham Greene, like Waugh a convert to Roman Catholicism, investigated in his more serious novels the problem of evil in human life (The Heart of the Matter, 1948; A Burnt-Out Case, 1961; The Comedians, 1966). Much of the reputation of George Orwell rests on two works of fiction, one an allegory (Animal Farm, 1945), the other a mordant satire (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)—both directed against the dangers of totalitarianism. The same 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 (1937), an account of life in the coal-mining regions of northern England during the Great Depression, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), about the Spanish Civil War.

B

Fiction after World War II

No clearly definable trends have appeared in English fiction since the time of the post-World War II school of writers, the so-called angry young men of the 1950s and 1960s. This group, which included the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, attacked outmoded social values left over from the prewar world. Although Amis continued to write into the 1990s, his satirical novel Lucky Jim (1954) remains his most popular work. The working-class or lower-middle class realism in the work of the angry young men gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to a less provincial emphasis in English fiction.

Anthony Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, also wrote wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the title A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), is a highly readable account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics from before World War II to many years afterward. His four-volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalized details that form the basis of his novels.

In the 1970s interest focused on writers as disparate in their concerns and styles as V. S. Pritchett and Doris Lessing. Pritchett, considered a master of the short story (Complete Stories, 1990), is also noted as a literary critic of remarkable erudition. His easy but elegant, supple style illuminated both forms of writing. Lessing moved from the early short stories collected as African Stories (1965) to novels increasingly experimental in form and concerned with the role of women in contemporary society. Notable among these is The Golden Notebook (1962), about a woman writer coming to grips with life through her art. In 1983 she completed a series of five science-fiction novels under the collective title Canopus in Argus: Archives.

Iris Murdoch, who was a teacher of philosophy as well as a writer, is esteemed for slyly comic analyses of contemporary lives in her many novels beginning with Under the Net (1954) and continuing with A Severed Head (1961), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), and The Good Apprentice (1986). Her effects are made by the contrast between her eccentric characters and the underlying seriousness of her ideas. Other writers noted for novels of ideas are Margaret Drabble and her sister, A. S. Byatt. Drabble has explored the predicament of contemporary educated women in such novels as The Realms of Gold (1975) and The Gates of Ivory (1991). She investigated the dilemmas faced by intelligent women entering late middle age alone in The Seven Sisters (2002) and other recent novels. Byatt won the Booker Prize, England’s highest literary award, for Possession (1990), about a romantic involvement between two academics. She completed an ambitious quartet of novels tracing changing patterns of family life in England from the 1950s to the 1970s with A Whistling Woman (2002). Art historian Anita Brookner writes of women in search of human connection and established her reputation with Hotel du Lac (1984), which won the Booker Prize.

Other distinctive talents of the second half of the 20th century include Anthony Burgess, novelist and man of letters, most popular for his mordant novel of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a successful motion picture in 1971; and John Le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell), who won popularity for ingeniously complex espionage tales, loosely based on his own experience in the British foreign service. Burgess’s prolific output ended with A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), which vividly recreates the life and times of 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe. Le Carré’s novels include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Russia House (1989), and The Constant Gardener (2001). William Golding displayed a wide inventive range in fiction that explores human evil: the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954); The Inheritors (1955), about Neandertal life; The Spire (1964); and The Paper Men (1984), about an English novelist's cruel behavior to an American scholar. Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1983.

John Fowles produced several highly experimental novels, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which he brings the fictional nature of the novel to the foreground, and A Maggot (1985), a mystery set in the 18th century. Julian Barnes established his reputation with Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which is about scholarship and obsession, and followed it with other experimental and satiric works, including England, England (1999).

Dark humor permeates the novels of Muriel Spark, who is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), about a schoolteacher who turns out not to be what she seems. It was successfully adapted for stage and screen, with actress Maggie Smith in the role of Brodie. Darkness was the dominant mode of much of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, produced ferocious satires of modern society in such works as Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and The Information (1995). Short stories and novels by Ian McEwan have dealt with moments of extreme crisis, as when his characters face their own mortality in Amsterdam (1998), which won the Booker Prize. In Atonement (2002), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, McEwan deals with a child’s lies and her later attempts to come to terms with them by writing fiction. Another comic novelist, William Boyd, had an immediate success with A Good Man in Africa (1981), about a British diplomat who uses sex and alcohol to counteract boredom with humorous results. Boyd’s Any Human Heart (2002) chronicled in a tongue-in-cheek manner the decline of the British way of life during the 20th century.

Rose Tremain visited overlooked areas of the past for her quirky historical novels, such as Music and Silence (1999), set in the 17th-century court of the king of Denmark, Christian IV, and The Colour (2003), set in New Zealand during the 19th-century gold rush. Beryl Bainbridge also mined the past, but from unusual viewpoints, in Every Man for Himself (1996) and According to Queeney (2001). Every Man for Himself, which takes place during the voyage and sinking of the Titanic in 1912, is narrated by an assistant to the doomed ship’s designer. According to Queeney portrays British lexicographer Samuel Johnson as observed by his friends the Thrales and their daughter Queeney. Michael Faber produced a contemporary novel of Victorian England, The Crimson Petal and the Rose (2002). The novels of Penelope Fitzgerald reflected a biographer's skill of creating an extremely vivid picture of her subjects' lives and included The Bookshop (1978), Offshore (1979, winner of the Booker Prize), and The Blue Flower (1995).

Other perspectives reinvigorating English fiction in the late 20th century came from novelists born outside England; some of these novels looked at colonialism or its aftereffects. V. S. Naipaul produced the semiautobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), about a writer’s migration from the British colony of Trinidad to the English countryside. South African Nadine Gordimer, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize, wrote of conflict in a society divided by race. English-educated Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based many of her comedies of manners on her observations as a European living in India. Indian-born Salman Rushdie satirized society in such novels as Midnight’s Children (1981) and drew the condemnation of Islamic fundamentalists for Satanic Verses (1988). British-born Kazuo Ishiguro, of Japanese ancestry, elegantly portrayed upper-class English society of the 1930s through the eyes of a butler in his best-known novel, The Remains of the Day (1989). Anita Desai, who chronicles Indian society, counterpoints Indian and American culture in Fasting, Feasting (1999). Zadie Smith, though British born, looked at the lives of immigrant and mixed race families in contemporary London in her dazzling first novel, White Teeth (2000). She continued to explore ethnicity in her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002).

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