Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

A Polish author who wrote in English. Granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself
a Pole. Regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, tho he did not speak the language fluently
until he was in his 20s. When he was quite young, his father was exiled to Siberia, suspected of plotting
against the Russian government. After the death of his mother, his father sent him to his mothers brother in
Krakw to be educated, and Conrad never again saw his father. He traveled to Marseilles when he was 17 and
spent the next 20 years as a sailor. He signed on to an English ship in 1878. In 1889, he began his first
novel, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo. Took
command of a steamship in the Belgian Congo in 1890, and his experiences in the Congo provided the outline
for Heart of Darkness. Conrads time in Africa wreaked havoc on his health, however, and he returned to
England to recover. Conrad died in 1924.

Work: Almayers Folly, Heart of Darkness. Youth: A Narrative, Lord Jim, which also features
Marlow; Nostromo;The Secret Agent

Style and themes - A master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English
literature. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism. He is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature.
His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors. Created short stories and novels
that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while searching the depths of the human soul.

D.H.Lawrence 1885 - 1930

LIFE: Born in Nottingham in 1885. Best known for being a novelist. Father, Arthur John Lawrence, was a coal
miner. Mother Lydia Lawrence worked in the lace-making industry. His mother was from a middle-class family
that had fallen into financial ruin, but not before she had become well-educated and a great lover of literature.
She instilled in young D.H. Lawrence a love of books and a strong desire to rise above his blue-collar
beginnings.

Themes: Lawrence wrote poetry that had profound and elusive themes - The most famous of his works deal
with the physical and inner life of living things such as animals and plants. Some of them have a bitter and
satirical tone, which show his fury at the pretence and Puritanism of the typical Anglo-Saxon society. He was
also a rebellious writer, with radical perceptions, considered sex to be the most rudimentary subconscious and
regarded nature to cure the evils of the advanced industrialized society. Work was extremely creative, although
the quality would be a little irregular and he was also very controversial, continuously engaged in censorship
cases, which received a great amount of publicity, particularly for his novel, Lady Chatterleys Lover, published
in 1928.

Style: His writing is notable for its intensity and its erotic sensuality. All his novels are written in a lyrical,
sensuous, often rhapsodic prose style. He had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of specific time and
place, and his writings often reflected his complex personality.
Work: Lawrence is perhaps best known for his novels: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and
Lady Chatterley's Lover.
James Joyce (1882-1941)

LIFE: Born in Dublin, as the son of an impoverished gentleman. His mother was an accomplished pianist; her
life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In spite of their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a
solid middle-class facade. After graduation in 1902 the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked
as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. Spent a year in France,
returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying. Not long after her death, Joyce was traveling
again. He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid who he married in 1931. At the outset of the
First World War, Joyce moved with his family to Zrich. After the fall of France in WWII, he returned to
Zrich, where he died on January 13, 1941, still disappointed with the reception of Finnegans Wake.

STYLE: Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue
(stream of consciousness); he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history,
and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
THEMES: Central themes of his work the life stages from youth through maturity and how each stage affects
ones identity.
WORK: Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918
and Ulysses in 1922. In 1907 Joyce had published a collection of poems, Chamber Music.

Virginia Woolf - (1882 1941)

Born in January 1882 in London, England. She was an essayist, novelist, publisher, critique, especially famous
for her novels and feminist writings. Born Virginia Stephen, she was the child of ideal Victorian parents. Her
father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary figure. Her mother, Julia Jackson, possessed great beauty and a
reputation for saintly self-sacrifice; she also had prominent social and artistic connections. She was an active
figure in the London literary society in the interwar period and was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.

On March 28, 1941, fearing that she now lacked the resilience to battle the demons of self-doubt that she had
kept at bay for so long and that now returned to haunt her, she walked behind Monks House and down to the
River Ouse, put stones in her pockets, and drowned herself at the age of 59.

Themes: the horrors of war, the threat of fascism, the oppression of women, her own childhood.

WORK: Her most notable works are the novels Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and the
feminist essay A Room of One's own.

Style: Admired for technical innovations in the novel, most notably her development of narrative subjectivity.
She was known for the use of stream of consciousness technique. She created complex, daring fiction while
fighting mania and depression.
Stream of consciousness technique

A literary technique that presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur. It is the conscious
experience of an individual regarded as a continuous, flowing series of images and ideas running through the
mind. Another phrase for it is 'interior monologue'. The term was coined
by philosopher and psychologist William James in 1890. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were famous for
using this technique.

Bloomsbury group
The Bloomsbury Group was an influential group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, the
best known members of which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton
Strachey. They frequently met between about 1907 and 1930 at the houses of Clive and Vanessa Bell and of
Vanessas brother and sister Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) in the Bloomsbury district
of London, the area around the British Museum. They discussed aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit
of agnosticism and were strongly influenced by G.E. Moores Principia Ethica (1903) and by A.N. Whiteheads
and Bertrand Russells Principia Mathematica (191013), in the light of which they searched for definitions of
the good, the true, and the beautiful and questioned accepted ideas with a comprehensive irreverence for all
kinds of sham.

Aldous Huxley 1894-1963

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Surrey, England, into an upper-middle-class family.
Huxley was born into a long line of scientists and intellectuals. Educated at Eton, he was forced to leave the
school at the age of seventeen due to an affliction of the eyes. He was partially blind for two or three years and
therefore was unable to complete the rigorous scientific training he had undertaken. Though problems with his
eyes would remain with him for the rest of his life, Huxley was able to attend Oxford where he received a
degree in English literature.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such
as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular Vivekanda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism. He
is also well known for his advocacy and consumption of psychodelic drugs. A controversial figure for most of
his life, Huxley died from cancer on November 22, 1963.
STYLE: Huxley's style, a combination of brilliant dialogue, cynicism, and social criticism, made him one of
the most fashionable literary figures of the decade.
Themes: his deep distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology; negative and positive impacts
of science and technology on 20th century life.

WORK: Crome Yellow, Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, Eyeless in Gaza, The Devils of Loudun.

George Orwell 1903-1950

Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, he was the son of a minor colonial official. Orwell was educated at Eton, in
England where he began to develop an independent-minded personality, indifference to accepted values, and
professed atheism and socialism. On leaving college, he started to work for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma
(1922-1927). He hated working in Burma and returned to England on sick-leave. Once back in England he
devoted himself to writing full time, publishing his works with the pseudonym of George Orwell.

Work: Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian descriptive
of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices has entered the language together with several of his
neologisms, including Cold War, Big Brother, thought police, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.His first major
work, Down and Out in Paris and London, (1933). Orwell is best known for two novels, Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Homage to Catalonia (1938) based on his experience during the Spanish Civil War.
Themes : Criticism of totalitarianism and its dangers, the violation of liberty and tyranny in all its forms,
Psychological Manipulation, Physical Control, Importance of memory and trust, Abolishment of individuality
and reality, Satire against hierarchical societies.

Style - His style is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to
totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.

Distopia
Dystopian literature is a fiction that presents a negative view of the future of society and humankind. Utopia
shows a future in which technology improves the everyday life of human beings and advances civilization,
while dystopian works offer an opposite view. Some common themes found in dystopian fiction include
mastery of natureto the point that it becomes barren, or turns against humankind; technological advances that
enslave humans or regiment their lives; the mandatory division of people in society into castes or groups with
specialized functions; and a collective loss of memory and history making mankind easier to manipulate
psychologically and ultimately leading to dehumanization. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are known for
their dystopian genre.

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism refers to totalitarian regime, under which the state controls nearly every aspect of the
individual's life. Totalitarian regimes maintain themselves in power through secret police, propaganda through
the media, the elimination of open criticism of the regime, and use of terror tactics. Internal and external threats
are created to foster unity through fear. George Orwell says that totalitarianism is a basic evil.

William Golding 1911-1993

Born on September 19, 1911 in Cornwall, England. His father was a schoolmaster who had a strong belief in
science, and was passionate about politics. He started writing at age 7, but following the wishes of his parents
he attended Brasenose College in Oxford where he originally intended to obtain a degree in natural science. He
later decided to study his true passion: English Literature. In January of 1938, Golding started teaching at
Bishop Wordsworth's School and met Ann Brookfield. The two fell in love and married, and shortly after, had
their first child, David.

In 1940, he joined the Royal Navy and fought in World War. He is most recognized for his involvement in the
sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and participating in the Normandy invasion. In 1983, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

On June 19, 1993, he died in Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England. Works - In 1954, after 21 rejections,
Golding published his first and most acclaimed novel, Lord of the Flies. Rites of Passage, Pincher Martin, Free
Fall and The Pyramid. While Golding was mainly a novelist, his body of work also includes poetry, plays,
essays and short stories.

Themes - The main theme in William Goldings novels is that men turn back to their evil and primitive nature
when something goes wrong. He often compares man with characters from the Bible to give a better picture of
his descent.

Style - William Goldings writing style mostly used classical literature, Christian symbolism and mythology
and all his novels are distinct from each other. There is no common plot or story however all of them are set on
villages and islands, courts and monasteries; mostly closed settings.

Vision - The idea of darkness within man expresses Golding's vision.

John Fowles 1926 - 2005

John Fowles was an award-winning post - World War II novelist of major importance. John Robert Fowles was
born on March 31, 1926, to middle-class parents living in a small London suburb. He attended a London
preparatory school, the Bedford School, between the ages of 14 and 18. He then served as a lieutenant in the
Royal Marines for two years, but World War II ended before he saw actual combat. Fowles then spent four
years at Oxford. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer. John Fowles
was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. Fowles, with his second wife Sarah by his side, died in
Axminster Hospital, 5 miles from Lyme Regis on November 5, 2005. While Fowles' reputation was based
mainly on his novels and their film versions, he demonstrated expertise in the fields of nature, art, science, and
natural history as reflected in a body of non-fictional writings.

Works - John Fowles published his first novel, The Collector, in 1963. His books include The Magus (1966),
The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower, A Maggot (1985),and Tessera (1993). Other work includes
the autobiographical Daniel Martin (1977), a book of essays entitled Wormholes (1998), and The Journals:
Volume 1 (2003).

Themes : He explored dark themes of time, power and relationships.

Style: His writing style is often construed as verbose and overly complex.
Metaficiton (French Lieutenants Woman Fowles)

Metafiction is fiction that brings attention directly to the act of writing. Metafiction is a style of writing that uses
the act of writing as subject. A metafiction story might feature the author as a character. A metafiction story
might set as its conflict an attempt to get the story published - the same story that is being read. In metafiction,
the craft, the intricacies, and the sources of writing are put on display. Related to post-modern theater,
metafiction is a literature that punches through the proverbial fourth wall and says to the audience, "Here I am.
I'm a piece of writing. This is what writing looks like. It looks like me. Here I am."

Kazuo Ishiguro 1954 -

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and came to Britain at the age of five. Kazuo Ishiguro's
work has been translated into over forty languages. He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking
County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school he took a 'gap year' and travelled through America
and Canada, whilst writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.

Works: He is the author of six novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the
Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995),
When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005).

Themes: One of the central themes of Kazuo Ishiguros novels is the effect of historical change on the lives of
ordinary individuals.

Style: Ishiguro's novels are preoccupied by memories, their potential to digress and distort, to forget and to
silence, and above all to haunt. Many writers compare Ishiguro's unique style to Japanese painting, for it
conveys "taciturnity, the subtle brush strokes, the aim to evoke form rather than to create it".

British fascism and appeasement

British Fascism was promoted by political parties and movements in Britain. British Fascism is based upon British
nationalism. Fascism is the attitude of giving full interest in economic, social, and military power to a dominant race or
state lead by a single dominant leader. Fascism basically rejected the idea of Socialism, Capitalism, and Democracy. The
major, official British Fascist movements in Britain included the British Fascists, British Union of Fascists, and the Imperial
Fascist League. One of the writers who wrote about fascism was George Orwell.

Appeasement in a political context, is a diplomatic policy of making political or material compromises to a

dictatorial power (or powers) in order to avoid a threatened conflict. Appeasement was used by European
democracies in the 1930s who wished to avoid war with the dictatorships of Germany and Italy- The term is
most often applied to the foreign policy of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi
Germany between 1937 and 1939. His policies of avoiding war with Germany have been the subject of intense
debate for seventy years among academics, politicians and diplomats. Since Chamberlain's essentially
unsuccessful negotiations with Hitler in 1938, the word "appeasement" has often been used as a synonym for
weakness and even cowardice, and the term is still frequently used in reference to these negotiations.

Heritage novel

Heritage style is characterized by a pleasing representation of the past, particularly an English or British past,
selling audiences not only a beautiful aesthetic of grand country houses and costumes, but also an idea of what
England represents. The Remains of the Day is such novel, its protagonist shows nostalgia for the English way
of life before World War II, when Britain still held colonies all over the world.