UNIT 57

GREAT BRITAIN IN THE INTER-WAR YEARS AND

DURING
THE
WORLD
WAR
II.
MOST
REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS.
OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION.
1.1. Aims of the unit.
1.2. Notes on bibliography.
2. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE INTER-WAR YEARS AND THE WORLD
WAR II.
2.1. Before the First World War.
2.2. The First World War (1914-1918).
2.3. The inter-War years (1918-1939).
2.3.1. The 1920s.
2.3.2. The 1930s.
2.4. The World War II (1939-1945)
3. A LITERARY BACKGROUND: THE 20TH -CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE.
3.1. Main literary features.
3.2. Main literary forms.
3.2.1. Poetry.
3.2.2. Drama.
3.2.3. Prose.
3.3. Most representative authors.
3.3.1. In poetry.
3.3.2. In drama.
3.3.3. In prose.
4. MAIN EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS.
5. CONCLUSION.
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

1/57

1. INTRODUCTION.
1.1. Aims of the unit.
The present unit, Unit 57, aims to provide a useful introduction to Great Britain in the interWar years and during the World War II so as to examine the life, works and style of the most
representative authors in this period. In general, the literature of the time was both shaped by
and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day, in which the main social, economic, political,
and cultural conditions were overshadowed by the two World Wars. A new age had come, and
after the First World War, modernism and experimentalism was felt all over the world, and in
particular, in Great Britain where poets, dramatists and novelists constructed a major literary
tradition based on the calmness of spirit and leisure of mind as a reaction against the two World
Wars (Albert, 1990).
Then, we shall further analyse all this information within a historical and literary background so
as to provide an appropriate context for the way they lived and a better understanding of their
literary works. Therefore, we shall divide our presentation in five main chapters.
Chapter 2 namely offers a historical background for the inter-War years and the World War II
in Great Britain regarding social, economic and political changes so as to provide an overall
view of the context in which the most representative authors lived and produced their works. So,
we shall divide our study in four main sections regarding the main events occurred (1) before
the First World War, during (2) the First World War (1914-1918) in terms of (1) home and (2)
international affairs; during (3) the inter-War years (1918-1939), in which we analyse the most
outstanding events of (a) the 1920s and (b) the 1930s; and finally, the period during (4) the
World War II (1941-1945).
In Chapter 3, with this historical overview in mind, we shall provide a literary background of
the period which ranges from the inter-War years to the end of the World War II with the aim of
going further into the most representative authors and their masterpieces within the three main
literary forms: poetry, drama and prose. Therefore, we shall start by providing first an overview
of the (1) main features of the inter-war years and World War II; and second, (2) the main
literary forms and their most reprentative authors. Therefore, within (a) poetry, we shall
examine the life, works and style of Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) in England, Dylan
Thomas (1914-1953) in Wales, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) in Ireland, and also, out of Britain, the
relevant American poets T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Secondly, within
(b) drama we include Sean OCasey (1884-1964) in Ireland, Sir Nol Coward (1899-1973) and

2/57

J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) in England, and the first American dramatist of international
significance, Eugene ONeill (1888-1953); and, finally, within (c) prose, we shall review the
following authors: David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Aldous
Huxley (1894-1963), Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966),
George Orwell (1903-1950), and Graham Greene (1904-) in England, and James Joyce (18821941) in Ireland.
In Chapter 4 will be devoted to the main educational implications in language teaching
regarding the introduction of this issue in the classroom setting. Chapter 5 will offer a
conclusion to broadly overview our present study, and Chapter 6 will include all the
bibliographical references used to develop this account of Great Britain literature in the
twentieth century.

1.2. Notes on bibliography.

An influential introduction to Great Britain in the inter-War years and during the World War II
so as to examine the life, works and style of the most representative authors in this period is
based on Thoorens, Panorama de las literaturas Daimon: Inglaterra y Amrica del Norte. Gran
Bretaa y Estados Unidos de Amrica (1969); and Palmer, Historia Contempornea (1980).
The literary background includes the works of Rogers, The Oxford Illustrated History of
English Literature (1987); Albert, A History of English Literature (1990); Magnusson &
Goring, Cambridge Biographical Dictionary (1990); Sanders, The Short Oxford History of
English Literature (1996); and Speck, Literature and Society in Eighteenth -Century England:
Ideology Politics and Culture (1998).
The background for educational implications is based on the theory of communicative
competence and communicative approaches to language teaching are provided by the most
complete record of current publications within the educational framework is provided by the
guidelines in B.O.E. (2004) for both E.S.O. and Bachillerato; the Council of Europe, Modern
Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European Framework of reference
(1998); and van Ek and Trim, Vantage (2001). Other sources include Enciclopedia Larousse
2000, Editorial Planeta.

3/57

2. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE INTER-WAR YEARS AND THE WORLD

WAR II IN GREAT BRITAIN.
Chapter 2 namely offers a historical background for the inter-War years and the World War II
in Great Britain regarding social, economic and political changes so as to provide an overall
view of the context in which the most representative authors lived and produced their works. So,
we shall divide our study in four main sections regarding the main events occurred (1) before
the First World War, during (2) the First World War (1914-1918) in terms of (1) home and (2)
international affairs; during (3) the inter-War years (1918-1939), in which we analyse the most
outstanding events of (a) the 1920s and (b) the 1930s; and finally, the period during (4) the
World War II (1941-1945).

2.1. Before the First World War.

The years before the First World War coincide with the accession of Victorias son, Edward VII
(1841-1910) to the crown, and his reign was known as the Edwardian Age (1901-1910) or the
age of the House of Saxe -Coburg-Gotha. Edward was the only British monarch who reigned for
nine years at the beginning of the modern age in the early years of the 20th century. He was
replaced on his death by King George V (1865-1936), who replaced the German-sounding title
with that of the English Windsor during the First World War. Actually, the Windsor title
remained in the family under the figure of Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor (1894-1972) and, as
we know, the family name is still present in the current Royal Family.
Broadly speaking, under the rule of Edward VII, known as Edward the Peacemaker for his
diplomacy in Europe, the kingdom of Britain still felt secure after the Boer War despite the
growing forces of discontent and resentment felt by most members of British society due to the
international situation. It must be borne in mind that the balance of power in so many areas was
shifting in a Europe because of the rise of a united Germany, and in a world in which the United
States would soon dominate. Yet, the death of King Edward would mark the dividing line
between the security and stability of the nineteenth century and the uncertainties of the
twentieth, not only in Great Britain but also on the rest of the world.
Following Laurousse (2000), the First World War came about the result of a breakdown in the
European diplomatic system and of the profound economic changes that had been at work
within European society. As stated above, Englands domestic problems had dictated foreign
policy decisions, such as not to see Germany defeat France again or to lose her imperialist

4/57

position as the worlds leading power. Eventually, World War I broke out in August 1914, when
Germany declared war on Russia, and trouble in the Balkans precipitated the outbreak of
hostilities, which had been stewing for a long time.
Regarding Englands domestic policies in the pre-War years, the following major changes are to
be mentioned. Economically, the crisis on the question of tariff reform, which divided the
Conservative and Liberal parties; in politics, the rapid rise of men from humble origins to high
positions in the government; the greatest industrial unrest in Britains history (1911) where
nationwide strikes of dock workers, railway men and miners brought the country to a standstill;
and finally, in social terms, the passing of the National Insurance Act to ensure the welfare of its
citizensby means of which the worker, the employer and the government would contribute to a
general fund to pay for free medical treatment, sick pay, disability and maternity benefits.
Moreover, this flood of reforms which took place under the label of socialist experiment
brought about important changes in society, such as the introduction of a salary for the Members
of Parliament (M.P.s), the entry of working class members to Parliament; the Union Trades
liability for strike damage, and the freedom to use their funds in politics. Hours and conditions
of labor were also regulated, slum clearances effected, eighty-three labor exchanges set up, and
old-age pensions inaugurated as the first installment of social security. All this cost a great deal
of money and, as we stated above, came from the pockets of the rich (tariff reform).
Actually, these reforms were further incensed by the Home Rule Bill of 1912 and, since Irish
M.P.s wanted their reward in Home Rule, they helped the Liberals gain power. Yet, the
Conservatives did not agree with the idea of Britain splitting up in the face of increasing
German hostility and defined this situation as ludicrous. Hence they were aided by the
Protesta nt forces of Ulster (most of Northern Ireland), who were equally alarmed at the prospect
of being ruled from Dublin. As a result, major civil war loomed in Ireland, and in the mutiny at
the Curragh the British Army regulars made it clear that they would not fight against their
brothers in Ulster. In 1914, the Home Rule Bill was finally pushed through, but the outbreak of
the Great War pushed everything else aside.
On the other hand, regarding foreign policy, it is worth mentioning that by the turn of the
century, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1902-1905) saw that Britain needed to strengthen its
defenses after the humiliations of the Boer War and a Committee of Imperial Defence was
created. Hence the Civil Service was itself enriched by a steady stream of educated, qualified
young men and Britains naval defenses were also improved so as to further meet the threat
from the new German fleet. Moreover, it had become increasingly apparent to many, both in

5/57

and out of government, that the possession of an Empire would not cure Britain's domestic
problems but, on the contrary, could only waste the nations resources (the costly adventures in
Afghanistan, the Sudan and South Africa), sorely needed to aid its own people and its own land.
Actually, in the heady day of Empire, Germanys support of the Boer farmers (arms and guns)
boded ill for future relations between the two countries and also developed a new rivalry over
their respective navies. So, Britains foreign policy changed drastically during the first few
years of the new century and, instead of the old cordiality towards Germany and fear of a
combined France and Russia, she now became friendly towards France and Russia and hostile
to Germany. As a result, an Anglo-French agreement in 1904, mainly over their respective
interests in Egypt and Morocco, alarmed the Germans.
The question now arose of what would be Britains response on a dispute concerning Morocco.
The answer can be found in the summer maneuvers of the English army that assumed Germany,
not France, would be the enemy. Germany also felt humiliated by the Treaty of Algeciras that
temporarily settled the Morocco question, and felt surrounded by hostile powers, a feeling that
grew alarmingly after the 1906 Anglo-Russian Entente. Its reply was to build up its navy,
including the Dreadnought, a threat to Englands long-held supremacy at sea.
Yet, the troubles began out of the British Isles, in Bosnia, with the assassination of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June, 1914 since, after it, the military chiefs of many nations were
all ready to go to war. Then two main events created a huge dilemma for Britain: first, Austria
declared war on Serbia (with the Kaisers support) and, second, Germany declared war on
Russia and on France. This meant that Britain should give full military support to France (and
her allies) and also to stay out of Europe altogether in a policy of complete neutrality. Yet,
Germany violated the neutrality of Belgium in August and eventually Britain went to war on the
side of France.

2.2. The First World War (1914-1918).

The length of the First World War was completely unpredicted as well as its enormous death
toll and resources. Actually, from beginning to end the years of warfare are regarded as a costly
war of attrition since neither side (the German offensive and the combined French-British
armies) gained any real advantage. In this section we shall try to provide an overall view of the
situation of Great Britain in and out home under the heading of (1) home and (2) international
affairs.

6/57

2.2.1. Home affairs.

Regarding domestic affairs, there was a strong feeling of unrest all over Great Britain during the
War in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. In Scotland within the industrial belt the intense labor
conflict gave the name Red Clyde to its shipbuilding region. After it, a series of episodes, pitting
managements use of semi- or unskilled labor against the militant unions, produced such wellknown activists as James Maxton, John Wheatley, John Maclean and Emmanual Shinwell, and
culminated in the George Square riot in Edinburgh of 1919 that practically ensured the Labour
Partys national victory in the General Election of 1922.

Also, the matter of Ireland became a serious trouble to the confidence of a seemingly-united
Great Britain. The war had presented the opportunity the Irish nationalists had been waiting for
since the postponement of the Home Rule Act of 1914. When they seized their opportunity to
attack British rule in Ireland, the execution of many of their leaders following the Easter
Monday Rising in Dublin (1916), made reconciliation between the two countries impossible
since the British government failed to separate its important Irish prisoners.
Finally, an internment camp at Frongoch, in North Wales, later known as "Sinn Fein "
University, brought together many who would later become key figures in the fight for
independence, including Michael Collins (later to become Director of Intelligence as well as
chief organizer) and Richard Mulcahy (later to become Chief of Staff). Prisoners were inspired
by hearing the Welsh language all around the camp declare a republic in which Gaelic would be
the national language. In 1918, following the General Election, the successful Sinn Feiners
refused their seats at Westminster and formed the Dail Eireann that proclaimed the Irish
Republic on January 21, 1919.
2.2.2. International affairs.
Regarding international affairs, the war produced one large-scale battle and a few smaller
engagements. At sea, the first British actions (1914) resulted in the German fleet heading for
home, allowing the Royal Navy to continue to dominate the sea routes, to supply new fronts in
the Eastern Mediterranean (with limited successes), and to impose an economic blockade upon
Germany and her allies. Yet, in reply, Germany showed the strengths of a new kind of weapon:
the submarine, which was followed by the sinking of the Lusitania off Kinsale Head, Ireland in
May 1915. This new weapon would have enormous consequences for the later stages of the war
as the entry of the United States in the warfare in 1917.

7/57

In 1915 Lloyd George and Winston Churchill designed the Gallipoli campaign for three main
reasons: to attack weaker spots of the enemys front by combining military and naval forces; to
force Turkey to abandon her support of Germany, circumvent Bulgaria's entry into the war, and
bring Greece into the side of the allies. In the campaign, they failed to co-ordinate their
activities, and all the objectives of the bold but totally mismanaged campaign were lost. As a
result, a feeling of hostility was felt in the attitude of Australia and New Zealand (still evident
today in their progress towards republican status, despite lingering affection for the mother
country). On the other hand, the Western front allied losses also caused great concern.
By the end of 1916 (late December), Lloyd George took charge of a coalition ministry so as to
get things done in a time of great crisis, for instance, the conduct of the war, the losses incurred,
and the difficulties in Ireland which needed drastic measures (the brutal suppression of the
Easter Rising almost turned Ireland against Britain though national loyalty to the Crown might
have been kept). In addition, this coalition ministry provided a new test of character of the
British people on accounting for military deadlock, successful U-boat offensive and the onset of
revolution in Russia.
The introduction of an organized convoy system set a barrier in the success rate of the German
submarines in sinking allied supply ships. British efforts were rewarded by the entry of the
United States into the War in April, 1917. It is worth remembering that before this date the great
majority of Americans were firmly neutral and determined to avoid intervention (both in
thought and action) unle ss American rights and interests were violated (an official proclamation
of neutrality was proclamated in 1915). Yet, in April 6, 1917 the United States was finally
drawn into the war against Germany and its allies due to the unrestricted German submarine
warfare on Atlantic shipping.
The United States contribution was decisive in the outcome because of its military superiority
both in armament and people. Hence it provided Britain with the ships to overcome the
submarine threat and also, with the American Expeditionary Force on September 1918 to
France. As a result, this military power inclined the balance on the western front and helped to
end the war in November 1918. As a result, the Armistice of 1918 set the first order of the day
in peace terms for the victorious allies (Britain, France, the USA, Italy, Japan and to a lesser
extent Russia) and also for the defeated powers (Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey and
Hungary).
Next year, the United States was also influential in the writing of the Treaty of Versailles, which
formally ended the war in June, 1919. At Versailles, Britain was represented by Lloyd George

8/57

Britain who pressed for severe penalties against the Germans, and came up against the idealism
of President Wilson (USA), anxious to have his plans for a League of Nations implemented; and
France was represented by Clemenceau of France, who wished for even more severe
recriminations against Germany.

2.3. The inter-War years (1918-1939).

Yet, the period of inter-wars (1918-1939) was, according to Albert (1990:507), overshadowed
by the two World Wars the after-effects of the first and the forebodings of the second. After
the Treaty of Versailles [1919] attention in England was still mainly concentrated on foreign
affairs- the growing pains of the new League of Nations, uncertainty in the Middle East, and
troubles in India and Ireland. The Treaties of Locarno (1925) diminished, at least temporarily,
anxieties in Europe, and home affairs began again to dominate English political thought.
As stated above, the final treaty of Versailles marked the beginning of the inter-War period and
therefore, the reparations in all the nations which took place in the war. Yet, the war-guilt
clauses were later seen as a future cause of discontent since they later became an excuse for
Herr Hitler to begin his efforts to countermand them. The United States did not ratify the treaty,
and the disunity that prevailed after its signing did not bode well for the future of Europe.
Eventually, the United States and Russia did not join the League of Nations that met for the first
time in Geneva in November, 1920.
Broadly speaking, the inter-War period is namely characterized by three main factors: economic
weakness, social conflicts and political reorganization. Hence it is regarded as a period of
rehabilitation, grave economic conditions for the British Empire and the introduction of new
economic measures to improve social welfare; social conflicts (social agitation, the introduction
of new social statements), and politically, the reorganization of the Commonwealth and Irish
problems.

2.2.1.1. The 1920s.

In the 1920s the government policy was namely focus on home affairs. Actually, the AngloIrish war began in 1920, lasting until December 1920 when atrocities and counter atrocities by
both sides finally led to the Government of Ireland Act. This Act divided Ireland into Northern
Ireland (the largest part of Ulster) and Southern Ireland, giving both parts Home Rule, but

9/57

reserving taxation powers for the Westminster Parliament. It seemed that no one in Ireland was
satisfied and guerrilla warfare intensified. Then the coalition government in London was finally
convinced that a policy of reconciliation was needed and a truce in July, 1921 was followed by
the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December.
The Irish delegation was somehow persuaded by Lloyd George to accept the offer of Dominion
status within the Commonwealth rather than hold out for an independent republic, and the Irish
Free State came into being (6 December,1922). Actually, a basic condition was established by
British: the six counties of Northern Ireland (mainly Protestant) should not be coerced into a
united Ireland (that is, the other 32 counties, mainly Catholic).

However, one of the participants in the Easter Rising who had escaped from Lincoln Gaol
(Eamon De Valera) objected to the oath of allegiance to the Crown and formed a new party, the
Republican Party, which was against the government of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins.
This meant the beginning of a bitter civil war which ended in April 1923 when De Valera, who
had been elected President of the Irish Free State in 1919, ordered a cease fire. As a result, Eire
was finally declared a republic in April 1948, with Northern Ireland remaining as part of the
United Kingdom.
In the meantime, the British economy had undergone a major downturn due to the not-so-far
World War I and the more recent Anglo-Irish war. The Government did not fulfill its promises
of a better society in which there would be a higher standard of living and security of
employment and as a result, there was a high public and foreign debt together with a serious
problem of unemployment. Yet, one of the main factors was that productivity rate fell rapidly
since many countries, which had been dependent upon British manufactured goods, were now
making their own. In other words, the traditional industries of cotton, coal mining and
shipbuilding found it difficult to compete in world markets and to adapt to more modern
methods. As a result, millions of workers were unemployed.
Moreover, after 1922 the Liberal Party began to lose its standing in the polls despite the fact that
it had allivated conditions of poverty and had improved social conditions. The main reason is to
be drawn from the increasing social security measures that the political program of the Labour
Party advocated (a national minimum wage, the nationalization of basic industries -coal,
railways and electricity-, the imposition of higher taxation to pay for social welfare, and to
reduce the burden of the National Debt). Hence the dole, commonly known as the
unemployment benefit, allowed workers to survive while unemployed.

10/ 57

So, in October 1924 Britain once more turned to the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin.
Despite the fact that in these days the National Trades Union Congress approved a General
Strike in support of miners caused by the reduction of wages, it proved ineffective to handle the
nation's industrial problems as had Labour. Moreover, in 1925 Chancellor of the Exchequer
Winston Churchill returned Britain to the gold standard, which meant that the pound was
devalued, British goods (coal, steel, machinery, textiles, ships, cargo rates and other goods and
services) became over-priced, and Britains share of the world export market declined rapidly.
The resulting unemployment and wage cuts caused serious repercussions in the industrial areas,
where strikes became common. Actually, a general strike took place in 1926 but the government
took no action to bring about the reoganization of the iron, steel, coal, cotton and ship building
industry and in 1927 passed a statute that declared sympathetic strikes illegal. Then, under the
Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin, only a modest program of social reform took
place, mainly to appease workin g class opinion. The Widows, Orphans and Old Age Health
Contributory Pension schemes extended the Act of 1911 and insured over 20 million people.
In 1928, all women over twenty one were given the vote by the Equal Franchise Act. Also,
under Health Minister Neville Chamberlain, the Local Government Act of 1929 reduced the
number of local government authorities and extended the services they provided. There was still
lacking a coherent policy to deal with the relief of unemployment. A Labour government,
elected in 1929, came to power at the beginning of a world-wide depression triggered by the
Wall Street Crash, but could do little to remedy the situation at home, and eventually, its
government ended in 1931.

2.2.1.2. The 1930s.

So, in the 1930s and, particularly, from 1931 to 1945 the Conservative Party had electoral
success and things improved a little under a national government comprised of members from
all parties, led by Ramsey MacDonald. So, a series of decisions made this government recover
in some areas, for instance, the abandonment of the gold standard and the decision to let the
pound find its own value against the American dollar made British export prices more
competitive in world markets; agriculture was aided by the adoption of a protective tariff and
import quotas in 1931; also, a building boom followed the increase in population which made
possible new health measures; old industries were replaced by newer ones such as automobiles,
electrical appliances, chemicals, steel, textiles; and finally, there were also changes made in the

11/ 57

relationship of Britain to her colonies. As a result, unemployment was controlled before 1941,
that is, before the World War II.
Regarding the British colonies, it must be borne in mind that the white-settled colonies of
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa had been virtually independent of Britain
since the Durham Report of 1839. Yet, the Statute of Westminster (1931) removed much legal
inferiority not addressed in 1839, and Great Britain had to suppress the legislative limitations
over the colonial countries and establish cooperation among the members of the
Commonwealth. So, the independence of the Dominions was now established, and the Crown
remained as a symbol of the free association of the members of the British Commonwealth.
Eventually, in July 1932 the Imperial Economic Conference met in Ottawa (Canada) to hash out
the problems of Dominion economic policies and to settle the matter of their exports to Britain.
At the conference, Britain agreed to abandon free trade and, in turn, the Commonwealth nations
were to provide markets for British exports, including textiles, steel, cars and
telecommunications equipment. Yet, in 1932, King George initiated the Christmas Day radio
broadcasts that served to link the Commonwealth countries to England, but their loyalty was to
be actually proved in World War II during the reign of George VI1 . Then, in the late 1930s
Britains foreign policy was overshadowed by problems at home. While domestic policies still
had to find a way out of the unemployment mess, it was vainly hoped that the League of
Nations would keep the peace, and while the aggressive moves by Germany, Italy and Japan
may not have been totally ignored in Westminster, their implications were not fully grasped.
In Germany, Hitler proclaimed the Third Reich in March 1934 by means of which his regime
was given dictatorial powers and the Nazis opened their first concentration camp for Jews,
gypsies and political prisoners. On July 30 he had become Chancellor on a rising tide of
nationalism and economic unrest and in August, he became President of the Reich at the death
of Hindenburg. Also, early in 1935 he announced open conscription in defiance of the
conditions laid down at Versailles. Unencumbered by obsolete equipment and even more
obsolete thinking that hindered the British and the French, the German republic was able to
dominate Europe in the following years.
Actually, Germany and Italy, headed by their respective dictators, Hitler and Mussolini signed
the pact known as the Rome-Berlin Axis, through which both leaders supported General

Notice that George had come to the throne in 1936 after the abdication of his older brother Edward VIII since he
had to renounce the throne because he wanted to marry the American divorcee Mrs. Simpson.

12/ 57

Francos fascists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Britain and France then stood back for
fear of precipitating a general European war and protested, but they embolded Hit ler to such
extent that his troops marched into Austria (1938), then surrounded Bohemia and also
demanded modifications to the Czech frontier (Sudetenland). On trying to avoid a catastrophic
war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain along with the French Premier agreed in
handing over the Sudetenland to Germany, but soon they realized Hitlers plans: to dominate
Europe, which was a guarantee of immediate war.

2.4. The World War II (1939-1945).

Since then a string of successes followed: on September 3, 1939 Britain declared war on
Germany; two days after Hitlers armies had invaded Poland; France followed Britain by
declaring war on Germany; Stalin also took advantage of the situation to attack Finland; Britain
then prepared for total war2 ; British beaches were mined; tank traps and other obstacles to
invading forces appeared everywhere; air raid shelters were dug in back gardens and London
subway stations prepared for their influx of nightly sleepers. Yet, Hitlers legions occupied
Denmark and then brushed aside a Franco-British force sent to help Norway, and soon German
forces controlled France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and
Romania, leaving Britain alone in the West to face the Nazi hordes.
Hence in May 1940, Norway faced the German attack and, after a long, bloody war, it
eventually emerged victorious. In Britain, the old and retired (playing the role of plane spotters,
air-raid wardens and night watchmen) and namely single women (the so-called Womens Land
Army working as radar operators, mechanics, truck drivers and pilots in non-combat roles) had
a major role in armed services. Then, when France signed an armistice (June, 1940), Mussolini
entered the war and supported Germany, believing that Britain was doomed and that he could
pick up rich spoils in Africa. When France fell, the British army was forced to evacuate the
continent at Dunkirk, but trained millions of new soldiers to defend its Empire. In the meantime,
Soviet troops entered the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to incorporate them into
the USSR.
The Royal Navy destroyed the French fleet anchored at Oran in North Africa after France
formed a Vichy government under Marshal Petain. In the Atlantic, German U-boats were
destroying thousands of allied shipping, but Britain waited patiently for the situation to change.
Actually, Hitler expected Britain to come to terms, but Churchills rejected it. As a result, Hitler
2

Cities were blacked out, rationing was imposed and rigidly enforced; children from the larger cities were moved
into the countryside, clouds of barrage balloons filled the English skies, housewives turned in their pots and pans for

13/ 57

planned to destroy the Royal Air Force on an invasion of England since the English coast was
only a few minutes away from conquered France. In fact, the Battle of Britain began in July 10,
1940, with an attack of German bombers on England, and all that stood between the German
armies and the planned invasion of Britain was the Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force.
Hitler attacked London by air, concentrating mainly on airfields and radar installations, but the
German pilots lost their way and missed their intended targets. Then, when British planes
bombed Berlin to retaliate for bombs dropped on London, Hitler was determined to take
revenge but he miscalculated the resilience of the Royal Air Force. So, on ordering the
Luftwaffe to destroy London, he made a grave error. The British Air Force used a secret new
weapon: the Radar, which gave them a decided advantage over incoming German airplanes.
So, the RAF fought on in what was a war of attrition in the air. Eventually, after many losses
Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain on September 17, 1940 and turned his attention to
Russia. In June 1941, Hitler delayed his assault on Russia since he feared a British attack
against his flank from Greece. Next, in September 1940, German boats sank 160,000 tons of
British shipping after a total blockade of the British Isles. Yet, British merchant ships were set
out into the Atlantic to bring supplies from America as if nothing had happened. Then, their
courage in carrying on business as usual relayed to the United States by radio commentators and
had a profound effect upon American opinion, especially upon the President.
This is the reason why President Roosevelt came to the aid of the beleaguered island nation
despite that fact that America was neutral in the war and still at peace with Europe. Then he
ordered his fleet to sink German submarines on sight and in November, British ships destroyed
the Italian fleet at Taranto, which helped the Royal Navy manage to keep control of the
Mediterranean throughout the war. Yet, on December 7, 1941 Japan, which had concluded a
pact with the Axis powers in order to fulfil her designs on the Pacific three months before,
attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, almost at once, Roosevelt directed
organization of the Nations manpower and resources for global war.
Four days later (December 11) Germanys and Italys declarations of war against the United
States brought the nation irrevocably into the war. Japanese forces then captured the British
possessions of Malaya, Burma, Hong Kong and Singapore, the great symbol of the British
Empire, and then advanced practically unopposed to the borders of India in the West and
Australia in the South. Roosevelt then became the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces
and felt that the future peace of the world would depend upon relations between the United

scrap, iron fences, railing and gateposts disappeared into blast furnaces, gas masks were issued to every single person,
including babies; total blackout was imposed and rigorously enforced by air Draid wardens

14/ 57

States and Russia. So, he devoted much thought to the planning of a United Nations, in which,
he hoped, international difficulties could be settled.
He moved to create a great alliance against the Axis powers through The Declaration of the
United Nations on January 1, 1942, in which all nations fighting the Axis agreed not to make a
separate peace and pledged themselves to a peacekeeping organization (now the United
Nations) on victory. The United States and its allies invaded North Africa in November 1942
and Sicily and Italy in 1943. The D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches in France on June
6, 1944, were followed by the allied invasion of Germany six months later. By April 1945
victory in Europe was certain and on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered. The War in Europe
came to an end on May 8, 1945, but the War in the Pacific ended four months later, on August
14, 1945, when Japan surrendered after the American Airforce dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

3. A LITERARY BACKGROUND: THE MOST REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS.

In Chapter 3, with this historical overview in mind, we shall provide a literary background of
the period which ranges from the inter-War years to the end of the World War II with the aim of
going further into the most representative authors and their masterpieces within the three main
literary forms: poetry, drama and prose. The two periods are to be characterized by the
dominance of the novel as a vehicle for the sociological studies which attracted most of the
great artists, and the rebirth of drama, which appeared after more than a hundred years of
insignificance since the time of Shakespeare. Like the novelists, most of the important
dramatists were namely concerned with the contemporary social scene, and though, towards the
end of the period, there are signs of a revival of poetic drama, and prose continues as the normal
medium.
Yet, the period of inter-wars (1918-1939) and the World War II (1939-1945) was, according to
Albert (1990:507), overshadowed by the two World Wars the after-effects of the first and the
forebodings of the second. After the Treaty of Versailles, attention in England was still mainly
concentrated on foreign affairs- the growing pains of the new League of Nations, uncertainty in
the Middle East, and troubles in India and Ireland. The Treaties of Locarno (1925) diminished,
at least temporarily, anxieties in Europe, and home affairs began again to dominate English
political thought.

15/ 57

The thirties was a period of great distress, since there was mounting tension abroad due to the
rise to power of the Nazis in Germany from 1934 until 1939, and also at home, where spiritually
the period saw the immediate post-War mood of desperate gaiety. Also, determined frivolity
gave way to doubt, uncertainty of aim, and a deeper self-questioning on ethical, social, and
political problems, until the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, followed by the critical situation
after the evacuation of Dunkirk, which enabled the nation to achieve a new unanimity of
purpose.
Therefore, we shall start by providin g first an overview of the (1) main features of the inter-war
years and World War II; and second, (2) the main literary forms and their most reprentative
authors. Therefore, within (a) poetry, we shall examine the life, works and style of Wystan
Hugh Auden (1907-1973) in England, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) in Wales, W.B. Yeats (18651939) in Ireland, and also, out of Britain, the relevant American poets T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
and Ezra Pound (1885-1972).
Secondly, within (b) drama we include Sean OCasey (1884-1964) in Ireland, Sir Nol Coward
(1899-1973) and J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) in England, and the first American dramatist of
international significance, Eugene ONeill (1888-1953); and, finally, within (c) prose, we shall
review the following authors: David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), Virginia Woolf (18821941), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), Evelyn Waugh
(1903-1966), George Orwell (1903-1950), and Graham Greene (1904-) in England, and James
Joyce (1882-1941) in Ireland.

3.1. Main features of the inter-war period and WWII.

The main features of literature in the inter-war period and WWII are summed up in five key
concepts: the breakdown of established values, the resurgence of poetry, the variety of technical
experiments in most literary genres, the influence of radio and cinema, and the speed of life.
Thus,
(1) a breakdown of established values because of the perplexity and uncertainty which
sprang from the post-War situation. Many different reactions regarding spiritual values
were equalled by a great variety of literary work.
(2) Hence the resurgence of poetry whereas the novel and drama were the protagonists in
the previous years. Actually, the pre-War years had seen relative eclipse of poetry, and
the dominance of the novel and drama as literary forms, but a new and living poetical

16/ 57

tradition was demanded and was met between the Wars in his own work and in that of
the new poets (T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice). Following
Albert (1990:508), poetry again became a vital literary form closely in touch with life,
and if it did not oust the novel from its primacy it certainly outstripped the drama.
(3) Also, there was a desire for new forms and methods of presentation, and in all the major
literary genres the age produced revolutionary developments thanks to two important
inventions of the twentieth century: the radio and the cinema.
(4) Actually, the radio and the cinema had an enormous impact on the rapid development of
the media and also, had important effects on the literature of the time, which applied
these two media techniques. It must be borne in mind that this novelty reduced the time
devoted to reading (prose) and going to the theatre (drama) since the radio brought
literature at home and the cinema brought a new form of leisure activity. In the form of
broadcast stories, plays, films, or literary discussion, a new field was opened for authors
who applied film techniques to a number of experiments in the novel.
(5) Finally, since people lived in a new atmosphere of fear and restlessness, the demand
was for more and faster action, stronger and more violent stimulus, and the general
atmosphere thus created was by its very nature inimical to the cultivation of literary
pursuits, which necessarily demand a degree of calmness of spirit and leisure of mind
(Albert, 1990:509).

3.2. Main literary forms.

3.2.1. Poetry.
Broadly speaking, the hopes for a new world quickly disappeared in peoples minds after the
World War I and even less during the WWII, which caused a general feeling of disillusionment
and despair. Writers witnessed how culture disintegrated with no positive values to replace it
and soon they felt the need for a new world, for a new outlook on life. Following Albert (1990),
the overall impression of this inter-war years coincide with a new awareness of sociological
factors which affect poetry, for instance, developments in poetic technique, the difficulty of
modern poetry, the combination of psychology and politics, the rise of surrealism and new
traditionalism, and the quest for stability. Thus,

developments in poetic technique were soon demanded to show a more realistic way to
face up to those difficult years. So, there was a change from old poetic forms to free

17/ 57

verse, and also to sprung rhythms, complex verba l patterns, and disregard for normal
syntax.

The emphasis on the evolution of new forms gave way to a great difficulty of modern
poetry, thus the dominance of form on content and the use of eccentric themes. Hence
this difficulty caused an increase in the use of vers libre and obscurity to appeal the
complex states of mind. This trend was encouraged by the popularity of the
metaphysical conceit, which accompanied the rebirth of symbolism (Yeats, French
Symbolistes) and the imitation of allusiveness (Eliot). Poetry reflected the situation of
those inter-war years: complexity, a refined sensibility, and the use of allusive and
indirect language.

Psychology and politics tried to come together under the figures of Sigmund Freud and
Karl Marx, respectively, so as to find a solution to the world problems. Already in the
1920s psychological research made poets turn their attention to the investigation of the
hidden impulses of man, and the development of techniques such as the internal
monologue and the stream of consciousness in characters. On the other hand, political
ideas took up the cause of the masses, whose lives they studied with genuine sympathy
and often with striking realism. The Republican support to the Spanish Civil War
together with a proletarian sympathy was seen by contemporary England in the form of
cheap satire.

The rise of surrealism and new traditionalism also contributed to poetry writing, for
instance, the former as an over-simplification of a complex and constantly shifting
situation which meant the escape from the complex problems of contemporary life by
means of experiments; the latter as the expression of the individual emotional
development and their reactions to their environment. Poetry was then characterized by
a detailed observation and lucid phraseology, concise expression, ironic style, stirred by
love and sex, out of the scope of experiments, and also on the line of dramatic
monologue.

Finally, the quest for stability increased as there was still no strongly established poetic
tradit ion to compare in stability with that of the Victorian age, but a constructive
approach to life. During the inter-War years we find a great proportion of didactic verse,
and the numerous attempts to find a solution to the problems of a perplexed generation
through the use of lyric poetry.

3.2.2. Drama.
As for poetry, the situation of the inter-War years was deeply felt in the English theatre, and
therefore, in Ireland within the Irish Literary Revival Drama. Following Albert (1990), after the
18/ 57

war the sociological factors which affected this literary form were, broadly speaking, the
conditions in the theatre, the decline of realism, the development of comedy, the popularity of
the history play, the revival of poetic drama and the experiments abroad and at home. Thus,

By the 1920s the conditions in the English theatre was defined as poor since there were
no worth productions since Shaws Pygmalion (1913). The increasing demand for light
and escapist entertaintment for troops had made spectacle and musical comedy supreme
on the London stage. It must be borne in mind that in the early part of this period the
cause of serious drama in England depended almost entirely on a few enlightened
individuals (Lilian Baylis, Sir Barry Jackson, Sir Nigel Playfair). In addition, the arrival
of the cinema constituted a new threat to the theatre since it quickly became the main
way of entertainment of the masses. The cinema was a powerful competitor as it is
today due to the ability to offer sensation, spectacle on a scale impossible in the theatre,
and the novelty of a new art form.

Other hopeful aspects of dramatic activity are found under the growth of the amateur
dramatic movement regarding the British Drama League (1919) and the Scottish
Community Drama Association, both created to stimulate drama. Yet, it must be born in
mind that and this growth of repertory in England and Ireland (1890-1918) was
promoted by the arduous struggle to create an audience for the new drama (troops). This
led to seek additional support in the provinces, and thus came into being the repertory
movement 3 , whose chief aim was to encourage the writing of realistic problem plays in
the new tradition, and among the dramatists who there came to the fore were St John
Ervine (1883-1971), W. Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) and Allan Monkhouse (18581936).
Repertory companies of distinction were founded in Liverpool (1911) and Birmigham
(1913). But most important of the theatrical developments outside London was the
creation of the Irish National Theatre in Dublin. Of the dramatists who wrote for this
theatre, Yeats and Synge looked on the drama as a thing of the emotions, and, reacting
against realism, sought their themes among the legends, folklore, and peasantry of
Ireland.

The decline of realism takes pla ce after the 1920s, that is, after realism and naturalism
had dominated the work of most English dramatists. Yet, the movement from realism is

A season of Shaw repertory was given in 1904 at the Court Theatre under the Vedrenne-Barker
management, and in 1907 Miss A.E.F. Horniman (1860-1937) abandoned her active interest in the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin to found Miss Hornimans Company, which, at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester,
developed into the Manchester Repertory Company.

19/ 57

the keynote of the inter-War period and is namely reflected in the greatest new interWar dramatist, OCasey, though he bases his plays on a truthful picture of Dublin slum
life, and has the ability to transform his works into real poetry, where the new literary
trends are sentimentalism and the concern with the after-life.

The development of comedy caught the atmosphere of the later twenties and therefore
was quite popular. Yet, there were not major comedy writers as in the novel.

Similarly, the popularity of the history play was only second to that of comely. Yet, the
vogue of this genre in modern times began witht he work of John Drinkwater (18821937), who was one of the founders of the Birmingham Repertory Company, where
numerous history plays took place.

The revival of poetic drama is another development of the inter-War period which,
according to Albert (1990:556) illustrates the dissatisfaction with realism and the
tradition of naturalistic prose dialogue. Many experiments in verse drama followed,
but their success on the commercial stage was very limited. Thus,, T. S. Eliots plays
attracted considerable attention and also those of James Elroy Flecker. Yet, as in the
pre-War period, the real spirit of poetic drama was caught by one whose normal
medium was prose. Even apart from his expressionist experiments, we may say that
OCaseys works show more of the genuine poetic fire than that of any of the dramatists
here mentioned except T.S. Eliot.

Finally, the experiments abroad and at home also affected the literary forms. The
reaction against realism was felt on the Continent before it was felt in England. By 1920
there was experimental drama being written in Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy,
and France. Expressionism was the most influential experiment since drama was
concerned not only with society but also with man. It aimed to offer a deep, subjective,
psychological analysis, not so much of an individual as of a type, and it made much of
the subconscious (Albert, 1999:557). In addition, the expressionists threw the
conventional structure in favour of an unrestricted freedom, full of a mix between verse
and prose, symbolic figures, embodiments of inner, secret impulses so as to make clear
the psychological complexities of character.
The most outstanding expressionist dramatists were the American Eugene ONeill and
Elmer Rice. In England the influence of expressionism is to be seen in OCasey,
Priestley, and James Bridie.

20/ 57

3.2.3. Prose.
There is no doubt that the Victorian era was the age of the English novel, namely realistic,
thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. By the end of the period, the novel was
considered not only the premier form of entertainment but also a primary means of analyzing
and offering solutions to social and political problems, only challenged by the revival of drama
towards the last two decades. This king style, the novel, is presented with a political,
philosophical or social overtone since was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to
entertain the middle class.

Yet, the twentieth century witnesses the development of the novel into new revolutionary
techniques as well as the genres of poetry and drama. Thus, we shall examine the novel in
relation to, for instance, the new approach as an interpreter of life, experiments in the evolution
of a new technique, the influence of pshychology, the lack of popularity of the new novelists,
writers in the established tradition, war books, satire, escapist novels, the autobiographicalnovel-sketch comedies, and the growth of the American novel under the figures of the lost
generation.

The novel was regarded as an interpreter of life since it reflected the disillusionment,
cynicism, despair, and bewilderment in face of the crumbling of established moral
values which characterize the post-War world and even the WWII. These features,
combined with its form and content, made the inter-War generation look to the novel
for an interpretation of the contemporary scene. According to Albert (1990:521), we
may distinguish three main groups of novelists: first, those who attempted to replace the
old values for new ones; second, those who portrayed the complexities of inter-War life;
and finally, those who focused attention on the impact of life on the individual
consciousness and on characters rather than action.

This practice is closely connected to impressionism which gives way to expressionistic

techniques based on experiments, which establish a clear difference between the preWar novel (Henry James) and that of the inter-War years (James Joyce). Namely the
novel develops from having a controlled, finished, artistic form to have a more loose,
fluid, and less coherent one; from presenting an outward appearance to inner realities of
life; from a simple chronological development of plot to a complex and discontinuous
one. Apart from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley, other who
experimented in this way included Dorothy Miller Richardson and May Sinclair.

Yet, the most representative technique of this period is drawn from the influence of
pshychology so as to present the mind of the characters: the stream of consciousness,

21/ 57

the use of the interior monologue, the detailed tracing of the association of ideas, and an
allusive style. The rapid development of the science of psychology did much to deepen
and enrich the study of human character in the early years, but its full impact came with
the works of Sigmund Freud about the study of personality. This opened the way to the
exploration of the vast fields of the subconscious and the unconscious so as to dwell the
mind of characters, which meant a breakdown of Victorian moral attitudes.

The lack of popularity of the new novelists is not surprising, according to Alfred
(1990:524) as their concern with the subtlest shades of motive and inner impulse called
for readers while the preoccupation of some with the morbid mental states provoked
distaste. So, it is not surprising either that writers in the Established tradition were
inevitably more popular since they wrote after the manner of an earlier generation.
Among these writers we find Sir Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), William Somerset
Maugham (1874-1965), John Boynton Priestley (1894-), Sir Compton Mackenzie
(1883-1972), Francis Brett Young (1884-1954), and Robert Graves (1895-), among
others.

Another reflection of the disillusionment of the post-War generation is to be found in

the literature on the War itself, which began to appear once the catastrophe was
sufficiently remote. Among the War writers we include Edmund Blunden (1896-1974),
Robert Graves (1895-), and C.E. Montague (1867-1928), among others.

Satire was also common as a form of fiction. Satirist writers are Rose Macaulay (18811958), Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), and Cyril Connolly (1903-1974).

Another genre was escapist novels, characteristic of all periods of great emotional and
moral tension. This type of novel was highly demanded in the 1920s, which was partly
met by imaginative, fantastic, and light writing. Among the most representative writers
we include Norman Douglas, Walter de la Mare, and David Garnett.

We also find autobiographical-novel-sketch comedies with tragic implications which

particularly show the after-war situation in the 1930s. Thus, popular writers are
Christopher Isherwood, Richard Hughes, and Leopold Hamilton Myers, among others.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the growth of the American novel since it is one of the
most striking features of the period. Following Albert (1990:528), since the turn of the
century, not only has the U.S.A. given encouragement and shelter to artists whose work
met with opposition in this country, but Americans have been among the boldest so far
as experiments in technique are concerned. The basis of most of their work was realism,
the depiction of the contemporary scene no matter how unlovely, the exposure of
corruption and lack of moral values in organizations and in people , the consideration of

22/ 57

emotional crises and moral dilemmas at all levels of society, and the portrayal of the
individual and the depths or heights with which he can be faced.

3.3. Most representative authors.

3.3.1.

In poetry.

Among the poetry figures of this period (Geoffrey, 1996), we may mention Gerard Manley
Hopkins (1844-1889), Stephen Spender (1909-1977), C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), Louis
MacNeice (1907-1963), and Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), among others. Yet, we shall
particularly focus on the most representative ones in Great Britain: Wystan Hugh Auden (19071973) in England, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) in Wales, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) in Ireland,
and also, out of Britain, the relevant American poets T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound
(1885-1972).

3.3.1.1. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973).

Following Albert (1990:538-540), he was the son of a doctor and was educated at Greshams
School, Holt, and Oxford. On leaving the university he spent some time in Germany. During the
Spanish Civil War he served with the Republican forces in non-combatant capacities, and his
interests in Spanish politics was reflected in one of his finest poems, Spain . He left England for
the U.S.A. in 1939, became a citizen of that country, and lived there until 1972, save for the
period when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
Though still a young man, he was accepted as a leading poet, and one whose influece was felt
in much contemporary verse. It has been said that he merely followed the fashion; rather, in his
day he set the fashion. He came under the influence of Hopkins and Eliot, and, like the latter, he
was deeply aware of the hollowness of a disintegrating civilization during A time of crisis and
dismay, to quote his own words. But, unlike Eliot, Auden found his solution to the worlds
problems in left-wing political ideologies. A spokesman of the masses (whom he contemplated
with warm understanding, compassion, and deep insight), Auden showed clearly in his early
poetry a faith in violent social upheaval as a means to a better order.
Yet he was outspokingly anti-Romantic, and, like others in his group of writer-friends, stressed
the importance of clinical and objective attitudes. At times he over-simplified issues for the

23/ 57

sake of emphasizing his radical views, often he swept on in generalizations; but he had the
ability to experience and express the spirit of the age, the questionings and hopes and dreads of
a generation about to confront fascism. However, the frequent image of a lone wanderer in an
empty landscape makes one consider whether Auden himself had any sure faith in the creeds
which were supposedly his guides. His later poems revealed a new note of mysticism in his
approach to human problems. The change resulted partly from his living in the U.S.A. away
from the European war and partly from a new stirring towards Christianity; this concern with
religion and the effect it had on his poetry may be compared with T.S. Eliot. The best poetry in
this later style is to be found in Nones (1951).

He attempted, with considerable success, to prevent poetry from becoming exclusively

highbrow, and found subjects among the everyday, often sordid, realities of a diseased social
order. Modern influences strongly felt in his work were those of the psychologists, particularly
of Freud; and Auden was profoundly conscious of sex and its importance in human
relationships. His approach to everything around him was that of the intelligent intellectual, and
he followed Eliot in his partiality for the poetry of the Metaphysicals, especia lly in their use of
allegory and of detailed images unified into a pattern.
It is therefore not unexpectedly that one finds much of his best work in exquisite and often
movingly tender lyrics, songs and sonnets, where he is least concerned with sociological
theories. Nor should one forget that he was a poet of landscape sometimes the wild, empty hills
and barren places, sometimes the industrial scene with its crowded figures; this latter, perhaps,
offered him the greater attraction, for it showed Man at his fines as the inventor and the reshaper
of Nature. Technically, Auden was an artist of great virtuosity, a ceaseless experimenter in verse
form, with a fine ear for the rhuthm and music of words.
Essentially modern in tone, Auden had a wide variety of styles often he wrote with a noisy
jazziness and gaiety, often in a cynically satirical vein, and on occasions he could be slangily
tough. But usually he showed a delight in elliptical thought and closely packed imagery, and,
if his proletarianism sometimes led him into flaws of taste, it alsoled him to exploit more fully
than any of his predecessors the riches and vigour of everyday idiom and vocabulary.
His best poetry is to be found in Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), Look, Stranger (1936),
New Year Letter (1941), The Age of Anxiety (1948), Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944
(1950). His two anthologies The Poets Tongue (1935) with John Garrett, and The Oxford
Book of Light Verse (1938) greatly stimulated interest in popular literature which is a sincere
expression of emotion even though it cannot be dignified by the name of poetry.

24/ 57

3.3.1.2. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914 in Swansea, Glamorganshire (Wales). He
was educated at Swansea Grammar School and became well-known for his neurotic personality,
obscure poetry and amusing plays and prose. Since he preferred reading on his own, his
favourite books were those of D.H. Lawrences poetry who impressed him due to Lawrences
descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and
reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen.
From 1931 to 1932 he worked as a reporter for The South Wales Daily Post, in Swansea, and as
a free-lance writer from 1933. Between May and October 1934, Thomas poems first appeared
in the Sunday Referee in a feature column called the Poets Corner, where he won a prize for
the second of seven poems called The Force that through the Grass Fuse Drives the Flower.
Then, when Thomas was only nineteen, he published his first book, a volume of poetry called
Eighteen Poems (1934) as a result of this prize. In the same year he published a prose work,
Notebooks (1934).
This work was followed by Twenty-five Poems (1936), a period of poverty in England and
Wales, and his marriage to Caitlin Macnamara (1937). Then he began to concentrate on prose,
with such works as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), The Doctor and the Devils
(1953), Quite Early One Morning (1954), A Child's Christmas in Wales (1954), Under
Milkwood (1954), A Prospect of the Sea (1955), Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Other
Stories (1955), Letters to Vernon Watkins (1957), The Beach of Fales (1964), Collected Prose
(1969), and Early Prose Writings (1971).
He had wanted to serve in World War II, but was rejected. So, during the war, he worked with a
documentary film unit. By this time, he also published many short stories, wrote film scripts,
broadcast stories and talks, did a series of lecture tours in the United States and wrote Under
Milk Wood (1954), the radio play for voices. In 1949, he began frequent visits to the US, touring
colleges to read poetry. In 1950 Thomas first visited America and had reading tours in the
United States, which did much to popularize his poetry. It is worth mentioning that Thomas did
not sympathize with T.S. Eliot and W.H. Audens thematic concerns with social and intellectual
issues, since his writing has more in common with the Romantic tradition (intense lyricism,
highly charged emotion).
Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was
flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his
work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. So, during his fourth lecture tour of the United
States in 1953, he had a particularly long drinking bout in New York City after his thirty-ninth

25/ 57

birthday. As a result, he collapsed in his New York hotel and died from alcoholism on
November 9th at St Vincents Hospital, in the same year in which he received the Foyle Prize.
Then his body was sent back to Laugharne, Wales, where his grave is marked by a simple
wooden cross.
He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Thomas was
a man with a Keatsian style and manner, being both energetic and vivid when it came to his
imagery. He was Welsh and his voice brought many to enjoy poetry through his readings, he
also used words not just for the denotation or connotation meaning, but also for the sound of the
word and the meaning that sound creates. The key to Dylan Thomas is reading him aloud,
slowly, hitting every vowel and consonant, and worrying about what it all means later.

3.3.1.3. W.B. Yeats (1865-1939).

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in a cultured Irish family (his father was a
well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats). He spent his childhood in County Sligo and was
educated in London, but he returned to Dublin in 1880 (at the age of fifteen) to continue his
education and study painting. Soon afterwards he discovered he preferred poetry and embarked
on a literary career. In 1891 he became member of the Rhymers Club, he began writing plays,
and, as a strong adherent to the Nationalist Movement, he did much to assist in the creation of a
national theatre. Actually, in 1902 the Abbey Theatre (Dublin) came under management of the
Irish National Theatre Company.
Since he was born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic
Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the
Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Irelands native heritage. Yeats was
deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from
England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest
of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T.
S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision
and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. In later
years his interest in the cause of Irish freedom led him first to an active participation in the
disturbances of 1916 and then to a public career which culminated in his election to the Senate
of the Irish Free State (1922-1928). Yet, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a
major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as

26/ 57

one of the very greatest poets of the century. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. Some years later, he died in the South of France (1939) at the age of 73 and his body
was interred in Ireland in 1948.
Following Albert (1990:483-485), his poetry was affected in his early years by the spiritual
barrenness of his age and the sordid materialism and later by a new positive deal and the PreRaphaelites. Yeats sought to escape into the land of faery, and looked for his themes in Irish
legend and the simple, elemental impulses of mans primitive nature. The best remedy for the
emptiness of the present seemed to lie in a return to the simplicity of the past. To this period
belong his narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), which first established his
reputation, Poems (1895), The Wind among the Reeds (1899), and The Shadowy Waters (1900);
and it was in these early days that he wrote many of the lyrics, whose simplicity of style and
melodic beauty have found them a place in numerous collections of modern verse, out of which
the best-known is The Lake Isle of Innisfree (written in 1893).
Between 1900 and 1910 Yeats poetry shows a gradual movement away from the escapism of
his early work, and a steadily growing courage in grasping the nettle of contemporary reality.
The increasing realism of this period is clearly seen in The Green Helmet and Other Poems
(1910) and Responsibilities (1914), which strike a more personal note. It was, however, the
impact of the 1914-18 war, and even more of the Irish troubles of 1916, which brought him face
to face with the need to grapple with the realities of life. It must be borne in mind that he had a
strong interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he
remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to
grow stronger as he grew older.
Hence his mystical and philosophical studies and his excursions into spiritualism led to the
promulgation of a new philosophical system, and much of the poetry of this period was devoted
to the expounding of his theories, which are most fully stated in his prose work A Vision (1925).
In 1919 he published The Wild Swans at Coole , a collection of poems similar to those in
Responsibilities, but with the added force of a new maturity which is most clearly to be seen in
the poems dealing with his own experiences.
Yet, the peak of his achievement is reached in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and
other Poems (1933), in which he handles philosophical themes with a compact precision of style
and a great mastery of rhythm and language. He continued to write with undiminished vigour
until his death, and to his last period belong the Crazy Jane poems, some of which had appeared
in The Tower and The Winding Stair. In them his philosophy, hidden beneath a mask of
childlike simplicity, is put into the mouths of such characters as The Fool. They appeared in
New Poems (1938) and Last Poems (1939).

27/ 57

The qualities of his poetry are to be found in his philosophy, his use of symbols, and his artistry.
First of all, regarding his philosophy, Yeatss preoccupation with the attempt to formulate a
philosophical system which could replace the scientific materialism of his age underlies most of
his later verse makes him difficult to read. After his brief period of Pre-Raphaelite escapism
he gradually evolved his own positive faith. His trust was in the imagination and intuition of
man rather than in scientific reasoning, and his attempt was to reach back, through the study of
Irish folklore and legend, to the primitive impulses of human life. Moreover, we cannot forget
that Yeats believed in fairies, magic, and other forms of superstition, and his later thought was
much influenced by his study of Indian and other mystical philosophies andthe excursions into
spiritualism, which became more frequent after his marriage in 1916.
Regarding his symbolism, Yeatss philosophy is often expressed through a carefully devised
system of symbols, some purely private, others drawn from his study of philosophy or his
reading in the works of the French symbolistes, or of earlier symbolical poets, particularly Blake
and Shelley. The readers difficulties arise mainly from Yeatss use of the same symbol to
represent a variety of things; thus the Tower may represent, among other things, an intellectual
refuge, or the souls yearning for the world of the spirit. Others of his well-known symbols are
the moon, the swan, and Byzantium.
Finally, his artistry is characterized by his mastery of language and rhythm. From the PreRaphaelite aestheticism of his early verse, with its quest for beauty, its conscious, often
sentimental, simplicity, and its languid, melodic grace, he developed a more direct and virile
expression. There is the same delicacy of workmanship, and the gorgeous phrase still flashes
among the everyday language and personal direct expression of his maturity. Always he uses
the traditional verse forms, modified sometimes to suit his own needs, but now his rhythms
approach more closely to those of ordinary speech.

3.3.1.4. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965).

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888, but the became a naturalized
British subject in 1927. As an adult, his influence on poetry was enormous during the 1930s
since he is considered to have given a new impulse to the poetic field. Son of Henry Ware Eliot,
president of the Hydraulic -Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a former
teacher, he was brought up in commerce and academic traditions. Following Albert (1990:533538), he entered Harvard in 1906, Paris in 1910-1911, and Oxford in 1912. After a brief
experience of teaching at Highgate School, he entered business (1916), and spent eight years in
Lloyds Bank in the City.

28/ 57

At this time he was assistant editor of The Egoist (1917-1919), and in 1923 began his career as
editor of The Criterion. Later he became a director of Faber and Faber, the publishers. Among
the many literary honours bestowed upon him mentioned may be made of: Charles Eliot Norton
Professor of Poetry at Harvard (1932-33), President Classical Association (1944), Nobel Prize
for Literature (1948), and Order of Merit (1948). At various times he received honorary degrees
from twelve universities in Europe and America.
Since he was a prolific author, he experienced all fields of literature: poetry, drama and prose
(hence we cannot establish a clear cut literary field). So, he produced seven dramas: Sweeney
Agonistes (1926-27), The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion
(1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953), The Elder Statesman (1958).
They contain some of the best dramatic poetry since the Elizabethans, and mark definite stages
in Eliots emotional growth, yet mostly lack the essential qualities of drama.
Regarding his prose, his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wook (1920)was published in the
1920s whereas the greater part belongs to the 1930s. His main concern is literary criticism,
though The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) is a significant indication of the direction of his
development. Among the more frequently stated of his fundamental ideas are: the essential
oneness of the Western literary tradition and its influence on the modern writer; the importance
of poetic form and its ability to convey meaning through the feelings as much as through the
mind; the need for the poet to reduce to universal significance his individual experiences. Eliots
prose style is remarkable for ist compact lucidity and precision. Among his prose workd
mention may be made of the following: For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), Selected Essays 19171932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Elizabethan Essays (1934),
After Strange Gods (1934), Points of View (1941), and What is a Classic? (1945).
Yet, he is better known as a great poet because of his style, which is characterized by its
difficulty and imagery. First of all, the nature and cause of this difficulty have changed during
his career. In his earlier poetry the obscurity seemed to result from a technique deliberately
cultivated. A condensed and often oblique expression, in which necessary links were frequently
omitted, Eliot acquired from the French Symbolistes, and his admiration of Pound and the
Imagist theories strengthened this. He was extremely allusive and deliberately vague and
ambiguous and in his later poetry, the difficulty of subjects increased (states of mind and
experiences incapable of precise formulation and, therefore, difficult to understand).
Yet, his imagery is essential to understand his work. Like the Imagists, he is always concrete,
and his pictures are clearly realized and based on close and accurate observation. Many images,

29/ 57

such as those of the sea, appear time and again with different effects, and in Four Quartets the
development of the poem can best be traced in the changing significance of recurrent images.
Eliot show a particular fondness for the metaphysical conceit with its subtle blend of emotion
and intellect as well as for the striking images.
With this in mind, we can now review his poetry works. Eliots first volume of verse, Prufrock
and Other Observations (1917), portrays in contemptuous, and often wittily ironical, satire, the
boredom, emptiness, and pessimism of its own day. The poet tries to plumb the less savoury
depths of contemporary life in a series of sordid episodes. The irregularities of rhyme scheme
and line length in his verse form, the pressure of his condensed and often vividly contrasted
images, the skilful use of rhythmic variations, and the restrained power of his style distinguished
Eliot as a gifted, original artist.
Poems (1920) is in much the same mood, but, as often happens in Eliot, the verse form is
completely changed, the irregular verse paragraph giving place to a four-line stanza rhyming
abcb. The difficult monologue Gerontion in this volume shows Eliots free adaptation of the
blank verse of the later Elizabethan dramatists. Yet, his much-discussed poem The Waste
Land (1922) made a tremendous impact on the post-War generation, and is considered one of
the most important documents of its age. The poem is difficult to understand in detail, but its
general aim is clear. Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, it presents
modern London as an arid, waste land.
The poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood, representing death and rebirth, and
this fundamental idea is referred to throughout. Other symbols in the poem are, however, not
capable of precise explanation. In a series of diconcertingly vivid impressions, the poem
progresses by rather abrupt transitions through five movements The Burial of the Dead, The
Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water,and What the Thunder Said.
Throughout appears the figure of Tiresias, whose presence helps to give the work unity. Its real
unity, however, is one of emotional atmosphere. The boredom of his earlier poetry gives way to
a mood of terror in face of an outworn and disintegrating civilization, a terror deeply felt, even
when hidden beneath the surface irony of some parts of the poem.
The style shows a typical compression of clearly visualized, often metaphysical imagery, a
vocabulary essentially modern, and a subtly suggestive use of the rhythms of ordinary speech.
One of its greatest difficulties lies in the numerous allusions to out-of-the-way writers, and the
notes which Eliot himself provided are often inadequate. But, in spite of its complexities and

30/ 57

apparent ambiguities, the poem is a powerfully moving presentation of sterility and disruption.
Poems 1909-1925 adds only The Hollow Men to his earlier work.
His next major work, Ash Wednesday (1930), is problably his most difficult. It marks the
beginning of a new hase in the poets development, in which he finds hope in the discipline of
the Christian religion, though, as yet, the old outlook persists in his mind and constantly comes
to the fore. Consonant with this new attitude are his use of medieval mysticism and allegory, his
imagery from the Old Testament prophets, and the allusions to the offices of the Church.
Obscure images and symbols and the lack of a clear, logical structure make the poem difficult.
Its six parts are six impressions of a mental and emotional state. This work is more lyric al in
spirit where it worth noticing the use of repetition, assonance, internal rhyme and musical
suggestiveness.
During the 1930s he namely wrote poetical drama and literary criticism, hence Four Quartets
(1944) contains his next and most recent non-dramatic poetry. The four pems in this work
appeared separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and
Little Gidding (1942). In them we become aware of the intensity of Eliots search for religious
truth, which leads finally to a new hope in the Christian idea of rebirth and renewal. The poems
are again difficult, but this is now owing to subject matter rather than technique. The main
theme of this deeply serious meditation is the consideration of Time and Eternity; other themes
are Eliots exploration of the artistic consciousness,and of the potentialities and significance of
words.
The mood of the poems is one of restrained but deeply emotional contemplation. Their general
tone is mellower and the underlying experiences more varied. The thought is closely woven, but
the style is less involved. As the title of Four Quartets suggests, each poem is built on a musical
pattern; it has five movements, in which the themes stated in the first are developed through
variations to a resolution in the last, and the inner structure of all four poems is very similar. The
accentual verse, which he began to use in The Hollow Men, is now seen in its most flexilble
form.

3.3.1.5. Ezra Pound (1885-1972).

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1905.
After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London,

31/ 57

where he lived from 1908 to 1920. There he worked as the literary executor of the scholar
Ernest Fenellosa, became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry, married Dorothy
Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. During this period
he wrote A Lume Spento (1908), Personae (1909), Exultations (1909), Provenca (1910),
Canzoni (1911), Lustra and Other Poems (1917), Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Umbra:
Collected Poems (1920).
In 1924, he moved to Italy and stayed there until 1945. During this period of voluntary exile,
Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and his admiration of Mussolini resulted in his being
charged with treason at the end the Second World in the USA. His life in Italy was largely
devoted to writing The Cantos which appeared part by part and were always in the process of
being revised, and eventually, they remained unfinished. Thus, he wrote Cantos I-XVI (1925),
Cantos XVII-XXVII (1928), A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI (1934),
Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934), The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937), and Cantos LII-LXXI
(1940). The Cantos were a vast survey of history from his own point of view and were
extremely erudite, highly allusive and expressive of personal, fragmented experiences which
referred to foreign languages and literatures.
In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in
Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress
Award recognized his poetic achievements (despite his political involvement), and awarded him
the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948), an attractive work due to the sympathy, humanity and
beauty of its words. When in prison awating trial, he was deprived of books, but he was forced
to rely on his own mind and personality for emotional sustenance. Two years later he published
Patria Mia (1950) and after continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital
in 1958. Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died in 1972. His last poetry
works were Annotated Index (1958) and the last twenty-one The Cantos (1972), regarded as an
encyclopedic epic poem.
Following Albert (1990), He was always a centre of controversy because of his iconoclastic
views on everything from poetry to economics and is said to have promoted a modernist
aesthetic in poetry: Imagism. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal
exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the
generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as Marianne Moore,
W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T.S. Eliot.
To him poetry was the embodiment of melody, images, and provocative thought basics of
most good poetry- but they produced an originality in Pounds verse which Eliot considered
lacking in most poetry of the past century. His own significant contributions to poetry begin

32/ 57

with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from
classical Chinese and Japanese poetry (stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language,
and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter).
Among this prose works we many mention Gaudier Brzeska (1916), Pavannes and Divisions
(1918), Instigations (1920), Indiscretions (1923), Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924),
Imaginary Letters (1930), How To Read (1931), Prolegomena: Volume I (1932), ABC of
Economics (1933), Make It New (1934), The ABC of Reading (1934), Social Credit and Impact
(1935), Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), Polite Essays (1936), Digest of the Analects (1937),
Guide to Kulchur (1938), What is Money For? (1939), The Spirit of Romance (1953), Literary
Essays (1954), and the posthumously published Selected Prose: 1909-1965 (1973). In them we
may appreciate Pounds confused political ideas through a personal and elliptical language.

3.3.2.

In drama.

Among the drama figures in the English theatre and within the Irish Literary Revival Drama, the
most representative figures are, among others: Sean OCasey (1884-1964) in Ireland, Sir Nol
Coward (1899-1973) and J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) in England, and the first American
dramatist of international significance, Eugene ONeill (1888-1953). Other less notorious drama
writers which contributed to the growth of repertory in England and Ireland were James Bridie
(1888-1951), William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), St John Ervine (1883-1971), Miss
A.E.F. Horniman (1860-1937), and Allan Monkhouse (1858-1936), among others.

3.2.2.1. Sean OCasey (1884-1964).

Following Albert (1990:548-550), Sean OCasey was born in Dublin, and worked as a
labourer, living in the crowded tenements of Dublins slums, which he describes so vividly in
his early plays. After his early stage successes he made literature his career, and in 1926
received the Hawthornden Prize. OCaseys first play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was produced
at the Abbey Theatre in 1923. Its setting is the slum tenements of Dublin, in their crowded
squalor, and it is an unflinching study of the Anglo-Irish War of 1920, capturing well all the
bloodiness and violence of the struggle and the dangerous intensity of the lives of the
participants, his characters.

33/ 57

OCasey, as later, uses the device of a mouthpiece character, who here gives an ironical
commentary on the events. The chief heroic character is a woman, as in Juno and the Paycock
(1924), an infinitely more mature play, and his masterpiece. Again the setting is the Dublin
slums: the time now the civil disturbances of 1922. It is a vivid and intensely powerful play, in
which rich, almost grotesque humour covers yet emphasizes the underlying bitter tragedy.
Three of OCaseys finest creations figure here the deeply pitying Juno, her worthless
husband, the Paycock, and his boon companion, Joxer Daly. The Plough and the Stars (1926),
a tragic chronicle play dealing with the Easter rising of 1916, is equally realistic in its exposure
of the futility and horror of war. There is the same blend of grotesque humour and deep tragedy,
and once again OCasey makes use of the mouthpiece character.
His next play, The Silver Tassie (1929), was refused by the Abbey Theatre and failed on the
boards, though some have described it as the most powerful tragedy o our day. War is still the
theme, now the 1914-1918 War. OCasey gives an impassioned and bitter picture of the
footballer hero retuning paralysed from the trenches. It is unflinching in its truthfulness, and the
suffering in the play is intense perhaps there is too much suffering and too little action. It is of
particular interest because here OCasey experiments with the mingling of the realistic and
expressionistic types of drama.
His introduction of a symbolic technique is seen in the blending of prose and rhythmic chanted
verse, which gives tremendous power to the second act in particular. How far his experiments
have, as has been thought, subdued his great gifts it is difficult to say, but his later plays Within
the Gates (1933), The Star Turns Red (1940), Purple Dust (1940), Red Roses for Me (1946),
Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), and Cockadoodle Dandy (1949), do not have the intense life
of his best three, though the magic of his language remains.
Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Silver Tassie marked OCasey out as
the greatest figure in the inter-War theatre. His own experience enabled him to study the life of
the Dublin slums with the warm understanding with which Synge studied the life of the Irish
peasantry, and, like Synge, he coud draw magic from the language of the ordinary folk he
portrayed. His dialogue is vivid, racy, and packed with metaphor, and his prose is rhythmical
and imaginative. He had, too, Synges gift of mingling comedy with the tragedy that is his main
theme. In OCasey the mood changes rapidly. Comedy is seldom long absent, yet one can never
forget the grim, underlying sadness. He draws what he sees with a ruthless objectivity and an
impressionistic vividness of detail.

34/ 57

3.2.2.2. Sir Nol Coward (1899-1973).

Nol Coward was born in London and was privately educated at Chapel Road School, in
Clapham. Since he had an active personality, he studied acting at the Conti Academy in
Liverpool in his early years, and later on, he served the British Information Service and
entertained the troops during the Second World War. Hence he is said to be an actor, a nightclub entertainer, a composer, a lyricist, a short story writer, and a prolific writer, among others.
Actually, it was as a dramatist that he achieved his commercial success. He began with light
comedy, for instance, Ill Leave It to You (1920), The Young Idea (1923), and The Rat Trap
(1924) and continued with a group of plays which made him notorious since they exposed the
emptiness and triviality of the smart set, and satirized county society, the new rich, and
conventional morality (Albert, 1990:550), for instance, The Vortex (1924), Fallen Angels
(1925), Hay Fever (1925) and Easy Virtue (1926). These frivolous-cum-sentimental works were
followed by more easily acceptable works, thus Bitter Sweet (1929), Private Lives (1930),
Cavalcade (1931), Design for Living (1933), Conversation Piece (1934), Blithe Spirit (1941),
Present Laughter (1943), and This Happy Breed (1943).
His popularity rested on the brilliance of a sophisticated but rather shallow wit, blas and
cynical, which produced a dialogue of scintillating epigrams; the appeal to sentiment popular at
the moment; the effervescent excitement which was the dominant mood of many of his later
plays; and above all his superb theatrical technique. He made the most of all the possibilities of
stage and actors, and the handling of some of his plays by such an expert man of the theatre as
C.B. Cochran increased the popular appeal still further (Albert, 1990:550).
In fact, Coward did not move towards a revolutionary theatre as Beckett or Shaw did, but
intended to emphasize entertainment and not message. He is regarded as one of the great
masters of the drawing-room comedy and the well-made play. In his plays he has an often
nostalgic and sentimental style with a naive cynicism that keeps the effect from being cloying.
Hence his works may appear brittle and trivial. Yet, he was a craftsman at combining malice
and cynicism with a touch of sexual spice.

3.2.2.3. J.B. Priestley (1894-1984).

John Boynton Priestley was a British prolific novelist, playwright, and essayist which published
over one hundred and twenty books, usually light and optimistic in their tone. His prolific

35/ 57

production continued nearly sixty years, and even between the age of 70 to 84 he produced 21
books. Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in the north of England, lost his mother when he was
an infant and his father, Jonathan Priestley, was a prosperous schoolmaster. As a child, Priestley
attended Bradford Grammar School, but left his studies at the age of sixteen to work as a junior
clerk in a firm (1910-1914). It was in Bradford that Priestley began to write poetry for his own
pleasure and contribute articles to local and London papers (The Chapman of Rhymes, 1918).
During the First World War Priestley served with the Duke of Wellingtons and Devon
regiments, and survived the front lines in Flanders. From 1919 he studied literature, history and
political science at Bradford and at Cambridge, where he first wrote literary criticism as a
student, producing thereafter such celebrated volumes as The English Novel (1927) and
Literature and Western Man (1960). After his graduation in 1921, he worked as a journalist in
London, starting his career as an essayist and critic at various newspapers and periodicals,
including the New Statesman. By then he had written Balconninny, and Other Essays (1921),
which was followed by his first collection of essays, Brief Diversions (1922) and Papers from
Lilliput (1922).
After the outbreak of World War II Priestley gained fame as the voice of the common people
since he was a patriotic radio broadcaster. At the early stage of the Cold War, he became known
for his support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and in 1946-47 he was a U.K.
delegate to UNESCO conferences. Priestley married three times between 1919 and 1953, for
instance, for the first time with Emily Tempest; then with Mary Wyndham Lewis; and finally,
with the archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes. They lived in Warwickshire in Kissing
Tree House, situated near Stratford-upon-Avon until he died on August 14, 1984.
This extraordinarily prolific writer worked in a variety of genres. His many novels include I for
One (1923), Figures in Modern Literature (1924), The English Comic Characters (1925), his
autobiography J.B. Priestley (1926), Thomas Love Peacoc (1927), The English Novel (1927),
Adam in Moonshine (1927), Apes and Angels (1928), Too Many People (1928), English
Humour (1929), the novel which made him gain international popularity, The Good
Companions, a tale about the adventures of a troop of traveling players; and Angel Pavement
(1930), which depicted the people of London and what happens when an adventure comes to
them in the person of the mysterious Mr Goldspie.
Other books are English Journey (1934), a seminal work in arousing social conscience in the
1930s; Literature and Western Man (1960), a survey of Western literature over the past 500
years, and his memoirs; Margin Released (1962). Priestleys novel The Magicians (1954)

36/ 57

showed the influence of the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung; he last of his nove ls was
Found, Lost, Found (1976), which is an old-fashioned fairy tale and love story in a modern
setting.
As an essayist Priestley wrote for the middle brow audience with a wide range of topics and
themes. In his pamphlet Letter to a Returning Serviceman (1945), Priestley shared the common
sentiment that Britain was obliged to rebuild after the war along socialist lines. Also, in Britain
and the Nuclear Bomb (1957) he argued for the moral superiority that unilateral nuclear
disarmament would bring. In Disturbing (1967) he criticized contemporary playwrights for
creating works that sought to disturb a reading public already disturbed by their own problems,
and in Particular Pleasures (1975) he stated that works of art should meet some need, and not
be evaluated on programmatic grounds. In addition, we include Priestleys highly The Toy Farm
(1929), an enjoyable essay which tried to answer why toys enchant even adults.

As a playwright Priestley started in the 1930s and wrote more than thirty plays since he began
with Dangerous Corner (1932). In style, Priestley is considered a reformer which showed much
of his typical Yorkshire humour in his works. According to Albert (1990:551), his characters
are soundly drawn, the dialogue is pungent, and his plays are always good theatre. His chief
lack is of poetic insight, which alone can make the greatest drama out of the metaphysical
problems that engaged his mind in his experimental work. Among his more conventional and
popular comedies, we include a well-made theatrical piece, Laburnun Grove (1933), which is an
unmasking of hypocrisy.

Among other comedies we find Eden End (1934), When We Are Married (1938), and Time and
The Conways (1937), in which Priestley draws his ideas of Time from the works of J.W. Dunne
and Ouspensky, who led him to numerous experiments in construction (expressionist forms and
psychological themes). Other similar works are I Have Been Here Before (1937) and An
Inspector Calls (1946). The last named is possibly his most interesting, for the unexpected timeshift is used to illustrate his humanitarianism and his disgust at social pretence. Priestley also
founded his own production company, English Plays, Ltd., and in 1938-39 he was director of
the Mask Theatre in London, where he produced the stimulating but commercially
unsuccessful Johnson Over Jordan, a modern morality play in which he uses the techniques of
expresionism (Albert, 1990:551).
Other works worth mentioning were written in the 1940s when he became heavily allegorical
and symbolic , with a loss of dramatic interest, for instance, They Came to a City (1943), Desert

37/ 57

Highway (1943), The Linden Tree (1948). Thoughts in the Wilderness (1957), and The Happy
Dream (1976). His works of history include The Edwardians (1970) and Victoria's Heyday
(1972). His reminiscences, published between 1962 and 1977, cover the full spectrum of British
20th Century culture.

3.2.2.4. Eugene ONeill (1888-1953).

Eugene Gladstone ONeill was the first American dramatist of international significance
(Albert, 1990:552) who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, and Pulitzer Prizes for four
of his plays: Beyond the Horizon (1920); Anna Christie (1922); Strange Interlude (1928); and
Long Days Journey Into Night (1957). This American playwright was born in a Broadway
hotel room in New York City on October 16, 1888, and was the son of James ONeill, one of
nineteenth-century Americas most popular actors.
Hence young Eugene spent much of his early years in a great variety of occupations, among
which was going on national tours with his father. In 1906 he entered Princeton University but
was soon expelled. In the next six years he married, had a son, and was divorced. By 1912,
ONeill had worked as a journalist, gold prospector in Honduras, clerkman, as a merchant
seaman, and had become a regular actor at New York Citys cheap saloons, which gave him the
experience of real life, so valuable in his plays. By 1913 he became ill with tuberculosis, and
was inspired to become a playwright while reading during his recovery. In fact, he wrote his
first play and was produced by the Provincetown Players. In 1920 he was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize.
ONeills career as a playwright is said to consist of three periods: early realism, expressionism
and late realism. First of all, he began in the realist tradition in which his early plays utilize his
own experiences, especially as a seaman. Yet, in the 1920s , after publishing The Emperor Jones
(1920), Beyond the Horizon (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922) and Anna Christie (1922), a strongly
realistic work dealing with the redemption of a prostitute, he rejected realism in an effort to
capture on the stage the forces behind human life.
In his second period, his expressionistic plays were influenced by the ideas of philosopher
Freidrich Nietzsche, psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and Swedish playwright
August Strindberg, who made him experiment unceasingly with new techniques of presentation,
new dramatic forms, and original dialogue. Thus, Strange Interlude (1931) illustrates his use of
aside and soliloquy, be means of which the action of the play is carried on at two levels.

38/ 57

Similarly, Desire under the Elms (1924), All Gods Chillun got Wings (1924), The Great God
Brown (1926), and Lazarus Laughed (1927).
During his final period ONeill returned to realism. We may observe that his later works depend
on his life experiences for their story lines and themes. He used the revival of the chorus,
stylized speech and confusing masks. Sometimes his originality led to obscurity, but he
achieved scenes of immense force and powerful imagination, obtaining then a real sense of
theatre. Regarded as a serious dramatist, he was concerned with major issues of his time, thus
religion, philosophy, psycho-analysis, and scientific thought and, therefore, the basis of many of
his works. Thus, Dynamo (1929), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah! Wilderness (1933),
and Days Without End (1934), this latter being twice the length of a normal play whereas his
latest play, The Iceman Cometh (1946), contains ten acts.
ONeill continued to write until 1944 when he was stricken with a debilitating
neurodegenerative disease which prevented further work. Despite his illness, ONeill lived his
life to the fullest. A revival of his work in 1956 lead to the first production of Long Days
Journey Into Night, for which he won his final Pulizer Prize posthumously in 1957.

3.3.3.

In prose.

The novel was regarded as an interpreter of life since it reflected the disillusionment,
cynicism, despair, and bewilderment in face of the crumbling of established moral
values which characterize the post-War world and even the WWII. These features,
combined with its form and content, made the inter-War generation look to the novel
for an interpretation of the contemporary scene. According to Albert (1990:521), we
may distinguish three main groups of novelists: first, those who attempted to replace the
old values for new ones; second, those who portrayed the complexities of inter-War life;
and finally, those who focused attention on the impact of life on the individual
consciousness and on characters rather than action.

This practice is closely connected to impressionism which gives way to expressionistic

techniques based on experiments, which establish a clear difference between the preWar novel (Henry James) and that of the inter-War years (James Joyce). Namely the
novel develops from having a controlled, finished, artistic form to have a more loose,
fluid, and less coherent one; from presenting an outward appearance to inner realitie s of
life; from a simple chronological development of plot to a complex and discontinuous

39/ 57

one. Apart from James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley, other who
experimented in this way included Dorothy Miller Richardson and May Sinclair.

Yet, the most representative technique of this period is drawn from the influence of
pshychology so as to present the mind of the characters: the stream of consciousness,
the use of the interior monologue, the detailed tracing of the association of ideas, and an
allusive style. The rapid development of the science of psychology did much to deepen
and enrich the study of human character in the early years, but its full impact came with
the works of Sigmund Freud about the study of personality. This opened the way to the
exploration of the vast fields of the subconscious and the unconscious so as to dwell the
mind of characters, which meant a breakdown of Victorian moral attitudes.

The lack of popularity of the new novelists is not surprising, according to Alfred
(1990:524) as their concern with the subtlest shades of motive and inner impulse called
for readers while the preoccupation of some with the morbid mental states provoked
distaste. So, it is not surprising either that writers in the Established tradition were
inevitably more popular since they wrote after the manner of an earlier generation.
Among these writers we find Sir Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), William Somerset
Maugham (1874-1965), John Boynton Priestley (1894-), Sir Compton Mackenzie
(1883-1972), Francis Brett Young (1884-1954), and Robert Graves (1895-), among
others.

Another reflection of the disillusionment of the post-War generation is to be found in

the literature on the War itself, which began to appear once the catastrophe was
sufficiently remote. Among the War writers we include Edmund Blunden (1896-1974),
Robert Graves (1895-), and C.E. Montague (1867-1928), among others.

Satire was also common as a form of fiction. Satirist writers are Rose Macaulay (18811958), Ronald Firbank (1886-1926), and Cyril Connolly (1903-1974).

Another genre was escapist novels, characteristic of all periods of great emotional and
moral tension. This type of novel was highly demanded in the 1920s, which was partly
met by imaginative, fantastic, and light writing. Among the most representative writers
we include Norman Douglas, Walter de la Mare, and David Garnett.

We also find autobiographical-novel-sketch comedies with tragic implications which

particularly show the after-war situation in the 1930s. Thus, popular writers are
Christopher Isherwood, Richard Hughes, and Leopold Hamilton Myers, among others.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the growth of the American novel since it is one of the
most striking features of the period. Following Albert (1990:528), since the turn of the
century, not only has the U.S.A. given encouragement and shelter to artists whose work
met with opposition in this country, but Americans have been among the boldest so far

40/ 57

as experiments in technique are concerned. The basis of most of their work was realism,
the depiction of the contemporary scene no matter how unlovely, the exposure of
corruption and lack of moral values in organizations and in people, the consideration of
emotional crises and moral dilemmas at all levels of society, and the portrayal of the
individual and the depths or heights with which he can be faced.
Among the most relevant writers we mention Erners Hemingway (1898-1962), William
Faulkner (1897-1962), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), J. Steinbeck (1902-1968), John
Dos Passos (1896-1970), and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), among others.

Therefore, among all the prose figures of this period4 , such as the War writers we include
Edmund Blunden (1896-1974), Robert Graves (1895-), and C.E. Montague (1867-1928), among
others. Yet, we shall particularly focus on the most representative ones in Great Britain and
Ireland: David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) , Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963), Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), George Orwell
(1903-1950), and Graham Greene (1904-) in England, and James Joyce (1882-1941) in Ireland.

3.3.3.1. David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930).

Following Albert (1990:509-512), D. H. Lawrence was the most striking figure in the literary
world between the Wars. He was born at Eastwood, in Nottinghamshire, the son of a miner, and
was educated at Nottingham High School. On leaving school he had a brief experience of
business life, and then became a pupil teacher in his native village. He trained for the teachers
certificate at University College, Nottingham, and then was for some time a teacher in Croydon,
but, on the publication of The White Peacock (1911), he abandoned teaching for literature.
He married Fireda Weekley, a German, and previously wife of a Nottingham Professor.
Because of his attitude toward the War and his wifes nationality, he was cruelly persecuted,
and this, with the suppression of The Rainbow (1915) as obscenen, and the banning of an
exhibition of his paintings by the police, made Lawrence try to leave England. His passport was
withheld, however, and it was 1919 before he got away. From then on his life was a continuous
search, in many parts of the world, for a society more suited to one of his ideals Italy, Malta,

Among other inter-war representative figures we may mention Rebecca West (1892-) with The Judge (1922);
Theodore Francis Powys (1875-1953), with Mr Westons Good Wine (1927); his brother John Cowper Powys (18721963), with A Glastonbury Romance (1932); Wyndham Lewis (1884-1957), with Time and Western Man (1927);
Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), with The Death of the Heart (1938); and Ethel F. Robertson (1870-1946), with The
Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917-1929), among others.

41/ 57

Ceylon, Australia, California, and New Mexico were among the places where he lived. In 1929
he returned finally to Europe, and in the following year died of tuberculosis at Vence in
France.
He was a prolific writer in prose and poetry. As a poet, Lawrence contributed to magazines
(1919) in his early years and later on he continued to write poetry throughout his life. In it his
most striking feature is its fundamental similarity to prose, and even in the themes (what man
has made of man, passionate belief in the primitive and elemental impulses, acute sensitivity to
natural beauty). His collection includes Love Poems and Others (1913), Amores (1916), Look!
We have come through (1917), New Poems (1918), Tortoises (1921), Birds, Beasts and Flowers
(1923), Collected Poems (1928), Pansies (1929), and Last Poems (1933).
Regarding his prose production, Lawrence is another example of the prolific modern writer. In
the nineteen years between his first published novel and his death he produced over forty
volumes of fiction (novels and short stories), poetry, plays, treatises, and essays, and not a year
passed withouth the publication of something from his pen. It is, however, as a novelist that he
is chiefly remembered. The White Peacock (1911) is a story of unhappy human relationships set
in the area he knew so well, and, if the book lacks the depth and seriousness of his later work, it
already reveals his concern with one of his chief themes, the conflict between man and woman,
and much of his remarkable gift for fine description and lyric emotion.
A slighter work, The Trespasser (1912), was followed by the largely autobiographical Sons
and Lovers (1913), an extremely powerful novel of deep sincerity, which studies with great
insight the relationship between son and mother. By many it is considered the best of all his
work. Then came The Rainbow (1915), suppressed as obscene, which treats again the conflict
betweeen man and woman. Not until 1921 was he able to find a publisher for its sequel, Women
in Love, an important novel for the student of Lawrences views upon human life.
Equally significant is Aarons Rod (1922), a more mature work of greater stylistic quality.
From his experiences during the War and his later visit to Australia sprang Kangaroo (1923),
which he called a thought adventure. The discussion of the world situation at times
overweights the novel, but, both in this and in The Boy in the Bush (1924), Lawrence depicts the
Australian background with striking vividness. This same faculty for capturing the spirit of a
country is one of the better features of The Plumed Serpent (1926), an over-lengthy work which
deals with Mexican life, and which is typical of Lawrence in its stress on the values of the
primitive as opposed to the civilized. Two years later appeared in Florence Lady Chatterleys
Lover (1928), a novel in which sexual experience is handled with a wealth of physical detail and

42/ 57

uninhibited language which until 1960 caused its supression in this country. It is Lawrences
last embittered fling at what he felt to be the prurience of mind which sheltered behind
conventional notions of sex.
Lawrence was also a short story writer of considerable power, and he published many
collections, among which are The Prussian Officer (1914); England, my England (1922); The
Ladybird, The Fox, The Captains Doll (1923); St Mawr, together with The Princess (1925);
The Woman who Rode Away, and other Stories (1928); The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930); and
The Lovely Lady (1933). Of his essays and travel books mention may be made of Twilight in
Italy (1916); Sea and Sardinia (1921); Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925); and
Mornings in Mexico (1927).
His novels are namely characterized by its themes, the theme treatment, style and characters.
First of all, regarding his themes, he shows his own interpretation of life, concerned with the
basic problems of human existence, mans relationships with his fellows and with the universe
beyond himself. He combined a violent hatred of the values of modern mechanized civilization
with a love of the primitive and natural, and a passionate belief in the importance of the
development of each unique individuality.
Regarding his treatment of his themes, he shows little concern with the novel as an art form,
and the reader is less impressed by his technical skills than by the verse and passionate intensity
of his writing. He mixes extravagances of violent over-earnestness, poetical utterance and
direct statements. His style is said to be vivid and spontaneous, where he achieves a perfect
naturalness of diablogue, which is seen particularly in his masterly handling of the coarse
dialects of Australia. Finally, his characters show bitterness and darkness of spirit, and like him
they live passionately and fully. They are creatures of strong impulse and pr imitive emotions,
and they are studied with a remarkable depth of understanding and keeness of insight.

3.3.3.2. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).

Following Albert (1990:515-517), she was the daughter of an eminent Victorian critic and
scholar, Sir Leslie Stephen. Hence Virginia Woolf was born into a circle of friends where
standards of culture, taste, and intelligence were of the highest. From the reading and
conversations of her formative years she acquired an unusually wide literary background and a
cosmopolitan culture. She began her writing career as a contributor to literary journals, and,

43/ 57

after her marriage (1912) to Leonard Woolf, she shared in the activities of the Hogarth Press,
which published the work of many rising men and advanced thinkers.
Though her first novel appeared in 1915, her reputation was originally made as a critic of
penetration and independent judgment. In fact, it was only with Orlando: a Biography (1928)
that she scored anything like a popular success, and she is likely to remain a nove list for the
few. Among her most representative works, we shall mention her first novel, The Voyage Out
(1915) which was told in the conventinal narrative manner, but with a concentration of interest
upon character and delicacy of touch typical of all her work.

The same emphasis on character-analysis and the same lack of incident characterize Night and
Day (1919), another study of personal adjustment and development. Then came her first really
mature work, Jackobs Room (1922), in which her distinctive technique is fully used for the first
time. By a series of disconnected impressions, revealed mainly through the consciousness of
people with whom he came into contact, we are made aware of the personality of Jacob. These
momentary impressions, which shift and dissolve with the bewildering inconsequence of real
mental processes, are revealed by the use of the internal monologue, and from them we are
intended to build up gradually a complete conception of the young man.
This same method, handled with greater firmness, is again used in Mrs Dalloway (1925).
Though what little event there is occupies only one day, Virginia Woolf is enabled to create
not only the lives of her chief characters, which are studied with a penetrating subtlety, but even
the London background. To the Lighthouse (1927) shows a still firmer mastery of the stream of
consciousness technique, and is by many accounted her finest work. Its study of the
relationships of the members of the Romney family achieves a greater artistic unity than is
found in her previous novels, and yet preserves all her usual subtlety of analysis.
The ultimate development of her method appears in The Waves (1931), from which plot, in the
normally accepted sense, is almost entirely lacking. It is a symbolic work of great poetic beauty,
in which the consciousness of the six characters is studied in a series of internal monologues.
An ambitious, and clealry an experimental, work, it is remarkable for its sensitive perception of
changing moods, and the skill with which the six characters are distinguished. It has been well
described as a prose-poem. Flush (1933), The Years (1937), in which she again deals with
family relationships, and the unfinished Between the Acts (1941) show her usual delicacy of
touch and brilliant technical mastery, but the first two fall below the level of her major works,
while of the last it is difficult to attempt an assessment.

44/ 57

www.eltemario.com

Standing alone among her novels, and therefore last to be considered here, is the fantasy,
Orlando, a Biography (1928), which may be said to have established her reputation with the
wider reading public. With a verve and spirit utterly different from the movement of her other
novels, it traces from Elizabethan to modern times the life of Orlando, who not ony appears as a
number of different people, but even changes sex in the middle of the story. It is full of vivid
colour and striking evocations of historical peridos and settings. In addition to her novels,
Virginia Woolf wrote a number of essays on cultural subjects, which appear in Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown (1924); The Common Reader (1925); A Room of Ones Own (1929); the Second
Common Reader (1932); Roger Fry (1940); The Death of the Moth (1942); and The Moment
(1947). They reveal her as a critic of penetrating insight and superb stylistic gifts.

Much has been said about her themes, her technique, her characters and her style. Thus,
regarding her themes, she reacted against the novel of social manners as produced by writers
like Arnold Bennett, and she was none the less concerned with the realities of life, which were
inward and spiritual for her rather than outward and material. These inner realities are the
recurrent themes of her novels; regarding her technique, she used the stream of consciousness
and the analysis of mental states; moreover, her characters seem to be disconnected and
incoherent in appearnace, but penetrating and subtle inside; finally, her style is that of a cultured
woman, charming and poetic, rhythmic and musical, precise and delicate.

3.3.3.3. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).

Following Albert (1990: 519-521), he was the descendant of the famous scientist, T.H. Huxley,
and was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he began his literary career as a
poet. In 1917 he was editor of Oxford Poetry, and he was a contributor to the Sitwell anthology,
Wheels. Under the pseudonym Autolycus, he wrote for The Athenaeum when he left the
University. He was a man of the widest culture, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and he
travelled widely. In 1939 he settled in California, where he stayed for the rest of his life.
To trace the development of Huxleys writing from the romantic tone and artistic finish of The
Burning Wheel (1916) and The Defeat of Youth (1918), or the blas cynicism and sensuality of
Leda (1920) the three volumes which contain his youthful verse to the point where he writes
Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is to watch a steadily growing seriousness of manner, and a deeper
concern with the attempt to show the barrenness of contemporary values, and to present a
positive ideal which will serve a disenchanted and hopeless world.

45/ 57

The lighthearted satire on contemporary society found in Crome Yellow (1921) gives way to
the equally lively, but more sensational and more daring, study of post-War disillusionment and
immorality in Antic Hay (1923). In Those Barren Leaves (1925) a more earnest note enters in
the discussions of moral problems. It was followed by his most successful piece of fiction, Point
Counter Point (1928), which is technically of interest as Huxleys attempt to musicalize
fiction, and is even morer striking as a mordant, unflinching picture of a disillusioned,
frustrated society, in which the healthy life of the senses has been paralysed by the bonds of an
inhibiting ethical code.
Brave New World (1932) gives a satirical picture of what he imagines the world would be
under the rule of science no disease, no pain, but no emotion, and, worse, no spiritual life.
Technically this novel leaves much to be desired, but it provokes much frightening thought. In
Eyeless in Gaza (1936) Huxleys faith in the life of the spirit, which first became evident in
Those Barren Leaves, again finds expression. Whole portions of the book, particularly toward
the end, consist of little more than dissertations on moral themes. After settling in America, he
produced two satirical novels int he witty, daring manner of his early works, though both have
obvious links with his more philosophical books. These two, After Many a Summer (1939) and
Time must have a Stop (1944), were followed by The Perennial Philosophy (1946), which stated
his views on the importance of spiritual integrity directly and seriously.
Huxleys prime importance is as a reflector of the feelings of his age. As a novelist he has
limitations; he has no deep characterization, and his novels are slight in plot, but, like those of
T.L. Peacock, they provide plenty of opportunity for conversation and discussion. The subjects
discussed reveal him to be a man of great knowledge and wide culture. He is, above all things, a
satirist, whose tone can vary from jovial irony to biting malice, and the striking incisiveness of
his satire springs from an easy, polished style, a great gift for epigram, a ready wit, and an alert
mind.

3.3.3.4. Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970).

Again, following Albert (1990:518519), Edward Morgan Forster was born in a cultured family,
and was educated at Tonbridge. He was also an intellectual and Fellow of Kings College,
Cambridge, and he is regarded as the most cosmopolitan men of his day. His novels are only
five in number. After the early Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), with its well-drawn
characters, its comedy, and the typical concern with the conflict between two different cultures,

46/ 57

comes The Longest Journey (1907), a less attractive work, which does, however, show the same
skill in characterization.
A Room with a View (1908), like his first novel, is set in Italy, and contains excellent comedy
very delicately handled. Then come his two masterpieces, Howards End (1910), and much later,
A Passage to India (1924), both of which deal with the misunderstandings which arise in
relationships, between individuals in the one case, and between races in the other. Note that the
latest of his novels is unrivalled in English fiction in its presentation of the complex problems
which were to be found in the relationships between English and native people in India, and in
its portrayal of the Indian scene in all its magic and all its wretchedness.

But though his output was small, the quality of his work was such as to place him among the
foremost writers of the period. As well as his novels he published three collections of short
stories, The Celestial Omnibus (1911), The Story of the Siren (1920), and The Eternal Moment
(1928), and two critical works, Aspects of the Novel (1927) and Abinger Harvest (1936). A
collection of miscellaneous essagys, lectures, and talks, some on political and others on artistic
themes, appeared in 1951 under the title, Two Cheers for Democracy.
Basically a moralist, concerned with the importance of the individual personality, the
adjustments it must make and the problems it must solve when it comes into contact with a set
of values different from its own, he is the advocate of culture, tolerance, and civilization against
barbarity and provincialism. He studies the complexities of character with a subtlety of insight
and an appreciation of the significance of the unconscious which mark him as a modern. His
characters are rounded and vital. He has great gifts for telling a story, but he disregards
conventional plot construction and frequently introduces startling, unexpected incidents.
His craftsmanship is of the highest order. With a cool, often ironic, detachment, he presens the
problems arising from his imagined situation with fairness and breadth of outlook, though he is
to some extent lacking in emotional fire and human warmth. He has an excellent faculty for
capturing the very feel and tone of his background A Passage to India offers a good example
of this. Though his best novels often touch tragedy, his true field is comedy, whimsical, delicate,
and biting, which is never long absent from his work. He combines a stule as easy and cool as
his general attitude toward his problems and characters, with a gift for good dialogue, maaarked
descriptive powers, lightness of touch and precision, and conciseness of presentation.

47/ 57

3.3.3.5. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966).

Following Albert (1990:567-568), Evelyn Waugh became the outstanding satirist of the
thirties. Educated at Lancing and Oxford, he was very much a man of intellect who could stand
aside and castigate a world which had no values except the need to make money and have fun;
his main characters were snobs, and one of the cardinal sins was vulgarity. His heroes were
virtuous but nave young men who suffered embarrassment and hardship because they failed to
understand or defeat the many exponents of vice.
Quite impersonally, Waugh treated everything with a lack of seriousness; he did not even show
any indignation at the unfairness which beset his characters. The novels were strings of hilarious
incidents and effervescent dialogue by which he poked fun even at the class to which he
belonged. Examples are Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932),
Scoop (1938), and Put Out More Flags (1942). A sign of his growing seriousness and
disillusion was The Loved One (1948), a savage satire on American funeral customs and the
two-faced affluent society of that country.
Partly as a result of his Army experiences and partly because of his conversion to Roman
Catholicism, Waughs later novels, beginning with Brideshead Revisited (1945), had a new
feeling of concern, though still illuminated by wit and sardonic comment; in them was a
nostalgic sympathy with a world that had ended, and which, for all its foolishness, had been
more joyous and less harmful than the present. The characters were drawn with warm
understanding and developed in depth; the structure too showed careful planning and far greater
complexity.
The later style was seen at its best in the Sword of Honour trilogy Men at Arms (1952),
Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961) which treated of the loss
of ideals as men faced war with its savagery, muddle, cynicism, inefficiency, and
incongruosness. He gradually ceased to believe in all that the central figure stood for, as if he no
longer believed in himself or his class in post-War society. The mood became sombre and
resigned, but to the end there was a vein of rich comedy which lit up the enveloping darkness.
3.3.3.6. George Orwell (1903-1950).
George Orwell, the pseudonym for Eric Hugh Blair, was a typical product of the inter-War
years. His proletarian sympathies and his contempt for the upper-middle-class society from
which he sprang were shown in the sardonic Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Yet there was a

48/ 57

love-hate attitude towards the idea of Empire and the White Mans Burden in Burmese Days
(1934); and in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a picture of squalor and hopelessness during the
Great Depression, he seemed to despise the very type he represented, the left-wing intellectual
striving to identify himself with the victims.
It was only after the Second World War that Orwell became a figure of outstanding
importance, and then it was because of Animal Farm (1945), an expression of his own
disillusion. This was a closely knit allegory on the degeneration of communist ideals into
dictatorship, expressed in an incisive, witty, deceptively simple style reminiscent of Voltaire.
Utterly different was Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a terrifying prognostication of the hatred,
cruelty, fear, loss of individuality, and lack of human love that the future would bring. The
common man whom Orwell admired was reduced to a political and social nonentity; human
dignity and decency were dead because of mass apathy and tolerance of evil.

3.3.3.7. Graham Greene (1904-).

Following Albert (1990:565-566), Graham Greene is probably the best-known novelist of the
period under consideration. He also came from the professional classes and after public school
went up to Oxford University. He has written a considerable number of novels which, while
popular, have none the less pleased the critics because of the tautness of their construction and
their imaginative exploration of character. Whatever he writes seems to be topical, not just in
subject-matter and location but in the emotions stimulated, for Greene has the gift of evoking
the atmosphere of a period as well as giving an accurate depiction of the surroundings.
The world is brutal and humourless; in it his characters pursue or are pursued. Usually they are
insignificant people with a little authority who are forced to make a choice and to suffer the
pangs of indecision and conscience. Greenes Roman Catholicism has encouraged him to see
action as a series of moral dilemmas; he depicts not right and wrong but fundamental good and
fundamental evil; his characters seek after evil sometimes on principle and sometimes from lack
of initiative to do otherwise, and in doing so they acknowledge the reverse of evil. By accepting
the Devil they believe in God. The settings of hisnovels range from West Africa to Cuba,
England to Viet Nam; by selecting significant details he sketches in a background that looks
authentic and then, by symbolic touches, draws ones attention to matters of special
importance.

49/ 57

The most noteworthy of Greenes novels are Its a Battlefield (1934), England Made Me
(1935), Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter
(1948), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), A Burnt-Out Case (1961),
The Comedians (1966), and Travels with My Aunt (1969). Graham Greenes short stories have
become increasingly popular; recent collections are May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967) and
Shades of Greene (1976). He has also written what he calls entertainments. These are stories
of crime and retribution, but they too are concerned with moral difficulties bedevilling people in
a confused and violent world. The best of these books are A Gun for Sale (1936), The Ministry
of Fear (1943), The Third Man (1950), and a satire on contemporary spy novels, Our Man in
Havana (1958).

3.3.3.8. James Joyce (1882-1941).

Following Albert (1990:513-515), James Joyce was born in Dublin and was the son of middle class Irish parents. He was educated in Jesuit colleges and at the Royal University. He
abandoned the idea of taking orders, however, and shortly after the turn of the century he left
Ireland for France. In Paris he studied medicine and thought of becoming a professional singer.
During the 1914-1918 War he taught languages in Switzerland [since he was medically unfit for
service], and afterward returned to Paris, where he settled down to a literary life, struggling
continually against ill-health and public opposition to his work.
Regarding his literary contribution, he used a straightforward narrative technique in his first
work, Dubliners (1914) so as to achieve an objective, short story study of the sordid Dublin
slums. The result was a powerful written prose which, though simple, has a distinct individual
flavour. Set in the same city is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), an intense
account of a developing writer torn between the standards of an ascetic, religious upbringing
and his desire for sensuousness. Though the work is largely autobiographical (Stephen Dedalus
is Joyce), the writer preserves a cool detachment in the precise analysis of his heros spiritual
life. His handling of the sexual problems involved is particularly forthright.
An earlier version, much more conventional in style, was Stephen Hero, which was not
published until 1944. The artistic dilemma of Stephen-Joyce was re-expressed in his
unsuccessful play Exiles (1918). Stephen Dedalus appears again in Ulysses (1922), a study of
the life and mind of Leopold and Mrs Bloom during a single day. It is modelled on the Odyssey
of Homer, but it is set in the squalor of Dublins slums. There are parallel characters in the two

50/ 57

works, and the structure is in each case the same; these likenesses are deliberately invoked to
stress the sordid meanness of modern life as contrasted with life in the heroic age.
The stream of consciousness technique and the internal monologue are used with great
power, and Bloom has been described as the most complete character in fiction. The material is
handled objectively and with a frankness that caused the book to be banned as obscene: the style
shows clearly Joyces mastery of language, his ingenuity, brilliance, and power. Published in
the same year as The Waste Land [1922], it presents a similar view of the hopeless dilemma of
man in the post-War world. It appeared in The Little Review in America, but was banned after
the fifth instalment, and this ban was not lifted in England until 1933.

Joyces only other novel was Finnegans Wake (1939), parts of which had appeared as early as
1927 and 1928 as Work in Progress and Anna Livia Plurabelle. In it he has developed his
technique to a point where subtlety of the history of the human race from its earliest beginnings,
as seen in the incoherent dreams of a certain Mr Earwicker. The use of an inconsecutive
narrative and of a private vocabulary adds to the confusion, but it cannot conceal the poetic
furor, the power, and brilliant verbal skill of the work.
Among his novels features we shall examine his subjects, his technique and his style. First of
all, regarding his subjects, Joyce is regarded as a serious novelist, whose concern is chiefly
with human relationships man in relation to himself, to society, and to the whole race. This is
true also of his latest work, though his interest in linguistic experiments makes it difficult to
understand his meaning. Acutely aware of the pettiness and meanness of modern society, and of
the evils which spring from it, he is unsurpassed in his knowledge of the seamy side of life,
which he presents with startling frankness. He is a keen and subtle analyst of mans inner
consciousness, and, in common with the psycho-analysis of his day, he is much preoccupied
with sex.
Regarding his technique, Joyce is said to be a pioneer in the quest of a new technique to present
the contemporary human dilemma. He was a ceaseless experimenter, ever anxious to explore
the potentialities of a method once it was evolved, and in his use of the stream of
consciousness technique, and in his handling of the internal monologue, he went further and
deeper than any other. His sensitiveness, his depth of penetration into the human consciousness,
give to his character-study a subtlety unparalleled in his day, and if, in his attempts to catch
delicate and elusive shades of feeling and fix them in words, he has frequently become
incomprehensible, the fact remains that a character like Leopold Bloom is a unique and
fascinating creation.

51/ 57

Finally, his style has been defined as a change from an early straightforward and simple writing
to a complex, allusive and original one in his last years. In this latter, Joyce uses a broken
narrative, with abrupt transitions, the omission of logical sentence links and a new vocabulary.
This produces a pure writing which is often private in significance, that is, a writing in which
words are coined by the breaking up of one word and the joining of its parts to parts of other
words similarly split, and roots of words from many languages.
Joyces interest in language and his eager experimentation are unequalled in any period of our
literature. He has a sensitive ear for verbal rhythms and cadences, and uses language in his
books as part of an elaborately conceived artistic pattern, in which much of the unity of his work
lies. With the beauty of language for its own sake only he is usually little concerned, yet his
writing is often of great imaginative power and has a musical quality which enables even his
incomprehensible passages to be read aloud with considerable pleasure. In short, he preferred
the comic to the tragic view of life, and his humour may be comic, intellectual and even
sardonic in tone.

4. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING.

Literature, and therefore, literary language is one of the most salient aspects of educational
activity. In classrooms all kinds of literary language (poetry, drama, prose novel, short story,
minor fiction-, periodicals) either spoken or written, is going on for most of the time. Yet,
handling literary productions in the past makes relevant the analysis of literature in the twentieth
century, and in particular, British literature for our purposes. Yet, what do students know about
the inter-War and WWII authors? At this point it makes sense to examine the historical
background of Great Britain within the twentieth century so as to provide an appropriate context
for these poets, dramatists and novelists in our students background knowledge and check what
they know about them.
Since literature may be approached in linguistic terms, regarding form and function
(morphology, lexis, structure, form) and also from a cross-curricular perspective (Sociology,
History, English, French, Spanish Language and Literature), Spanish students are expected to
know about the history of Britain and its influence in the world. In addition, one of the
objectives of teaching the English language is to provide good models of almost any kind of
literary productions for future studies.

52/ 57

Currently, action research groups attempt to bring about change in classroom learning and
teaching through a focus on literary production under two premises. First, because they believe
learning is an integral aspect of any form of activity and second, because education at all levels
must be conceived in terms of literature and history. The basis for these assumptions is to be
found in an attempt, through the use of historical events, to develop understanding of students
shared but diverse social and physical environment.
Learning involves a process of transformation of participation itself which has far reaching
implications on the role of the teacher in the teaching-learning relationship. This means that
literary productions are an analytic tool and that teachers need to identify the potential
contributions and potential limitations of them before we can make good use of genre
techniques: the stream of consciousness, the kaleidoscopic point of view, and the presentation of
different scenes, among others. We must bear in mind that most students will continue their
studies at university and there, they will have to handle successfully all kind of genres,
especially poetry, drama and fiction ones within our current framework.
Moreover, nowadays new technologies (the Internet, DVD, videocamera) and the media (TV,
radio, cinema) may provide a new direction to language teaching as they set more appropriate
context for students to experience the target culture. Present-day approaches deal with a
communicative competence model in which first, there is an emphasis on significance over
form, and secondly, motivation and involvement are enhanced by means of new technologies
and the media. Hence literary productions and the history of the period may be approched in
terms of films and drama representations in class, among others, and in this case, by means of
books (novels: historical, terror, descriptive) and drama (opera, comedies, plays), among others.
But how do twentieth-century British literature tie in with the new curriculum? Spanish students
are expected to know about the British culture and its influence on Europe since students are
required to know about the world culture and history. The success partly lies in the way literary
works become real to the users. Some of this motivational force is brought about by intervening
in authentic communicative events. Otherwise, we have to recreate as much as possible the
whole cultural environment in the classroom by means of novels, short stories, documentaries,
history books, or their familys stories.
Hence it makes sense to examine relevant figures in and out Great Britain so as to understand
how their relevant works are known not only in their countries, but also in Europe and the rest
of the world through the media: TV, films, radio, books, and magazines, among others. Who has
not read or seen at the cinema Lawrences Lady Shatterleys Lover (1928); Woolfs Mrs

53/ 57

Dalloway (1925), Huxleys Brave New World (1932), Forsters A Room with a View (1908),
Howards End (1910), and much later, A Passage to India (1924); Orwells Animal Farm
(1945); Greenes Brighton Rock (1938), The Third Man (1950), or The Quiet American (1955)?
This is to be achieved within the framework of the European Council (1998) and, in particular,
the Spanish Educational System which establishes a common reference framework for the
teaching of foreign languages where students are intended to carry out several communication
tasks with specific communic ative goals, for instance, how to locate a literary work within a
particular historical period. Analytic interpretation of texts in all genres should become part of
every literary students basic competence (B.O.E., 2004).

In addition, one of the objectives of teaching the English language is to provide good models of
almost any kind of literary productions for future studies. Following van Ek & Trim (2001), the
learners can perform, within the limits of the resources available to them, those writing (and
oral) tasks which adult citizens in general may wish, or be called upon, to carry out in their
private capacity or as members of the general public when dealing with their future regarding
personal and professional life.
In short, the knowledge about British culture (history and literature) should become part of
every literary students basic competence (B.O.E., 2004). There are hidden influences at work
beneath the textual surface: these may be sociocultural, inter and intratextual. The literary
student has to discover these, and wherever necessary apply them in further examination. The
main aims that our currently educational system focuses on are mostly sociocultural, to facilitate
the study of cultural themes, as our students must be aware of their current social reality within
the European framework.

5. CONCLUSION.
On reviewing the issue of Great Britain in the inter-War years and during the World War II, we
have examined the life, works and style of the most representative authors in this period, but
before we have offered a historical background for this period in Great Britain regarding social,
economic and political changes so as to provide an overall view of the context in which the
most representative authors lived and produced their works. So, we have analysed the situation
before the First World War, during the First World War (1914-1918) in terms of home and

54/ 57

international affairs; during the inter-War years (1918-1939), and finally, the period during the
World War II (1941-1945).
In Chapter 3 we have provided a literary background of the period which ranges from the interWar years to the end of the World War II with the aim of going further into the most
representative authors and their masterpieces within the three main literary forms: poetry,
drama and prose. First, Therefore, we have approached the main features of the inter-war years
and World War II; and second, the main literary forms and their most reprentative authors.
Then, within poetry, we have presented the life, works and style of Wystan Hugh Auden (19071973) in England, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) in Wales, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) in Ireland,
and also, out of Britain, the relevant American poets T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound
(1885-1972).
Secondly, within drama we have included Sean OCasey (1884-1964) in Ireland, Sir Nol
Coward (1899-1973) and J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) in England, and the first American
dramatist of international significance, Eugene ONeill (1888-1953); and, finally, within prose,
we have reviewed the following authors: David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), Evelyn
Waugh (1903-1966), George Orwell (1903-1950), and Graham Greene (1904-) in England, and
James Joyce (1882-1941) in Ireland.
In Chapter 4 have analysed the main educational implications in language teaching regarding
the introduction of this issue in the classroom setting. At the moment we are offering a brief
conclusion to broadly overview our present study, and Chapter 6 will present all the
bibliographical references used to develop this account of Great Britain literature in the
twentieth century.
Having lived in the same period, all these authors transmitted their vision of reality. The impact
of the war made them change their way of writing and expression, and paved the way for
subsequent generations of writers. Then, on escaping from reality, these authors provided a new
direction to British literature and began to lose their fear to the Victorian puritanical morality.
So, they introduced new techniques in fiction which were drawn from psychological analysis
(stream of consciousness, verse music, satirical language) with more emphasis on the form than
on the story, special use of time in which past, present and future were mixed together as in a
dream. The World War II brought about a new period of anger and disillusionment as the first
one.

55/ 57

So far, we have attempted to provide the reader in this presentation with a historical, literary and
cultural background on the vast amount of literature productions in the twentieth century
literature in Great Britain. This information is relevant for language learners, even ESO and
Bachillerato students, who do not automatically establish similiarities between British and
Spanish literary works. So, learners need to have these associations brought to their attention in
cross-curricular settings through the media . As we have seen, understanding how literature
reflects the main historical events of a country is important to students, who are expected to be
aware of the richness of English literature in all English-speaking countries.

56/ 57

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Albert, Edward. 1990. A History of English Literature. Walton-on-Thames. Nelson. 5th edition (Revised
by J.A. Stone).

B.O.E. 2004. Consejera de Educacin y Cultura. Decreto N. 116/2004, de 23 de enero. Currculo de la

Educacin Secundaria Obligatoria en la Comunidad Autnoma de la Regin de Murcia.

B.O.E. 2004. Consejera de Educacin y Cultura. Decreto N. 117/2004, de 23 de enero. Currculo de

Bachillerato en la Comunidad Autnoma de la Regin de Murcia.

Council of Europe (1998) Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European
Framework of reference.

Magnusson, M., and Goring, R. (eds.). 1990. Cambridge Biographical Dictionary. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Palmer, R. 1980. Historia Contempornea, Akal ed., Madrid.

Sanders, A. 1996. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford University Press.

Rogers, P. 1987. The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Speck, W.A. 1998. Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology Politics and Culture
1680-1820. Book Reviews.
Thoorens, Lon. 1969. Panorama de las literaturas Daimon: Inglaterra y Amrica del Norte. Gran
Bretaa y Estados Unidos de Amrica. Ediciones Daimon.
van Ek, J.A., and J.L.M. Trim, 2001. Vantage. Council of Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Other sources:

Enciclopedia Larousse 2000. Editorial Planeta.

57/ 57