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Victorian Age

Victorian literature refers to English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to
1901. Victoria‘s long reign of 63 years saw a growth in literature, especially in fiction,
practiced notably by Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and
Thomas Hardy. Poetry too was popular, especially that of Tennyson, Browning and Hopkins,
then unknown. Thinkers, too were eagerly read. Matthew Arnold, poet, critic, and social critic,
was the last to earn the respectful hearing given earlier to such sages as Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin
and Newman.
Many Victorians allowed their understanding to be led by thinkers, poets and even novelists. It
was an age both exhilarated and bewildered by growing wealth and power, the pace of
industrial and social change, and by scientific discovery.
Queen Victoria‘s reign was a period of industrial, political, scientific and military change within
the United Kingdom and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, the
British Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India. Under Victoria, a
Britain transformed by the Industrial Revolution became the world‘s leading imperial
power and its most interesting country.

Victorian sages
Victorian thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, John Henry
Newman, Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold are known as Victorian sages.
These thinkers were the first to see and to seek to understand the effects of industrial capitalism
on social and personal life. The society and conditions shaped by the Industrial Revolution met
their first response in these thinkers.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

His voice was heard soon after the Romantic poets fell silent.
He was on one of the first to diagnose the ills that industrial capitalism brought to society.
He saw the plight of the factory hand whose labor was the source of wealth with no stake or
pride in the processes to which he was enslaved, exploited, underpaid, discarded
(unemployment was high in the 1840s) and condemned to the workhouse.

Carlyle‘s notable works:

1. History of French Revolution (1837) – it gives an expression of his political legacy
which was a mistrust of revolution and fear of the mob. It is the source of Dickens‘ A
Tale of Two Cities.

John Stuart Mill (1806- 1873)

He founded the Utilitarian Society to study Jeremy Bentham‘s ideas.

Utilitarianism- stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and
economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action (or type of
action) is right if it tends to promote happiness or pleasure and wrong if it tends to produce
unhappiness or pain—not just for the performer of the action but also for everyone else affected
by it. Utilitarianism is a species of consequentialism, the general doctrine in ethics that actions
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(or types of action) should be evaluated on the basis of their consequences.

Mill‘s notable works:

1. Autobiography (1873)
2. Of Liberty (1859)
3. Principles of Political Economy (1848)
4. Utilitarianism (1863)

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

The most Romantic prose in Victorian sages is found in Ruskin.
Ruskin’s notable works:
1. Modern Painters (5 volumes 1843-60)
Pathetic fallacy, poetic practice of attributing human emotion or responses to nature, inanimate
objects, or animals. The practice is a form of personification that is as old as poetry, in which it
has always been common to find smiling or dancing flowers, angry or cruel winds, brooding
mountains, moping owls, or happy larks. The term was coined by John Ruskin in Modern
Painters (1843–60). Ruskin considered the excessive use of the fallacy the mark of an inferior
poet.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

Known as the master of Victorian non-fictional prose.
Newman‘s notable works:
1. Tracts for the Times (1833-41) – it is an initiative against the departure of rationalists
from Christian belief, and the first moves to separate Church and State in England,
which was a prospect of an atheist England. This began the Oxford or Tractarian
Movement.
Oxford movement, 19th-century movement centred at the University of Oxford that sought
a renewal of ―catholic,‖ or Roman Catholic, thought and practice within the Church of
England in opposition to the Protestant tendencies of the church. The argument was that the
Anglican church was by history and identity a truly ―catholic‖ church. An immediate cause
of the movement was the change that took place in the relationship between the state and
the Church of England from 1828 to 1832.
Leaders of the movement were John Henry Newman (1801–90), a clergyman and
subsequently a convert to Roman Catholicism and a cardinal; Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–
36), a clergyman; John Keble (1792–1866), a clergyman and poet; and Edward Pusey (1800–
82), a clergyman and professor at Oxford.
The ideas of the movement were published in 90 Tracts for the Times (1833–41), 24 of which
were written by Newman, who edited the entire series. Those who supported the Tracts were
known as Tractarians who asserted the doctrinal authority of the catholic church to be absolute,
and by ―catholic‖ they understood that which was faithful to the teaching of the early and
undivided church. They believed the Church of England to be such a catholic church.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

His theory of Evolution challenged Christian ideas of the origin and end of mankind.
Darwin was not a social critic but his work had much influence, clearly seen in the novels of
George Eliot.
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1. The Origin of Species (1859) – it is systematically demonstrated that species evolve by
retaining the characteristics of their most successful members.
2. The Descent of Man (1871)- he wrote it cautiously but had a great effect on people. He
put up new evidence that humans descend from apes. Geology, evolution and scientific
history combined to show that the Bible was not scientific history.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

The last central Victorian thinker, Arnold‘s prose is among the most persuasive Victorian
writing.
He writes as a man of the world rather than a prophet, a critic, not as a sage. He saw a new
ruling class obsessed with profit, use and morality, unnoticing of ugliness, untouched by large
ideas or fine ideals.
Arnold‘s notable works:
1. Culture and Anarchy (1869) -dismisses the aristocracy as Barbarians, and ridicules the
middle class as Philistines.

Culture and Anarchy, major work of criticism by Matthew Arnold, published in 1869. In it
Arnold contrasts culture, which he defines as ―the study of perfection,‖ with anarchy, the
prevalent mood of England‘s then new democracy, which lacks standards and a sense of
direction. Arnold classified English society into the Barbarians (with their lofty spirit, serenity,
and distinguished manners and their inaccessibility to ideas), the Philistines (the stronghold of
religious nonconformity, with plenty of energy and morality but insufficient ―sweetness and
light‖), and the Populace (still raw and blind). He saw in the Philistines the key to culture;
they were the most influential segment of society; their strength was the nation‘s strength, their
crudeness its crudeness; it therefore was necessary to educate and humanize the Philistines.
Victorian Poetry
Continuation of the previous era‘s main themes of Romanticism can be traced, such as religious
skepticism and valorization of the artist as genius; but Victorian poets also developed a distinct
sensibility. Victorian poets used imagery and the senses to convey the conflict between religion
and science, and ideas about nature and romance. Victorian verse is expressive and plangent,
descriptive of nature and of domestic and urban life. The reclaiming of the past was a major part
of the Victorian literature, focusing on both classical and medieval literature of England. Often
it half-dramatizes figures from history, legend and literature.
Victorian poetry is divided into two main groups- Victorian Romantic poetry or the high
Victorian poetry and Pre-Raphaelite poetry.
Pre-Raphaelite Movement
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1848, is a group of young
artists, sworn to an anti-academic realism, a simple directness remodified by classical norms
and therefore ‗medieval.‘ Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted five years and included artists such
as John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt in its inception. They were later joined by
William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Thomas Woolner and Frederic George
Stephens.
Pre-Raphaelites rejected the dramatic, artificial mechanistic approach first adopted by
Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical
poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the
academic teaching of art, hence the name ―Pre-Raphaelite.‖ They aimed to create more genuine,
humble representation of their subjects. Their name, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, honoured
the simple depiction of nature in Italian art before Raphael; the symbolism, imagery, and
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mannered style of their paintings often suggest a faux-medieval world.
The following are the principles of the Brotherhood-
1. To have genuine ideas to express
2. To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express them
3. To sympathize with what is direct and serious and to exclude what is conventional, self-
parading and learned by rote
4. To produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

Characteristics of Victorian poetry

Realism- Victorian poetry was quite realistic in nature and less idealized as compared to the
Romantic poets.
Focus on masses- Victorian poets used language as well as themes common to the city life and
thus wrote about the masses and for the masses.
Pessimism- Due to industrial revolution and advancement in science and technology, there was
a drastic increase in population, pollution, poverty, corruption and diseases, therefore Victorian
poetry which focused on the pains and sufferings of the commoners had an undertone of
pessimism.
Questioning to God- It was an important feature of Victorian poetry. The development in
science and technology, increase in rationalism and radicalism and moreover corruption in the
Church and defining the morality of Priests led people to question religious thoughts and beliefs
and its institutions, and made them more sceptic of the system.

Major poets of Victorian poetry are Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert
Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti,
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
If Wordsworth clothed Nature with piety and philosophy, the things described by his successor
are more actually present to imagined sight and touch than those in his own recollections.
Natural detail comes to have an authenticating role in many poems of Alfred Tennyson, Robert
Browning, Gerard Hopkins and Thomas Hardy.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
Born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England, he was the sixth of twelve children of the Rector of
Somersby. Tennyson‘s father had a family history of melancholia, drunkenness, violence,
opium and madness. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a friend of
Arthur Hallam. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850.
Major works:
1. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) – Tennyson‘s first collection of poems.
2. Poems (1832)

3. ‘Ulysses‘ (1842) – the poem is about Odysseus‘ plans of a last voyage into the western
ocean. Tennyson in the poem expresses his own need of going forward and braving life
after the death of Hallam. Ulysses, blank-verse poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, written
in 1833 and published in the two-volume collection Poems (1842). In a stirring dramatic
monologue, the aged title character outlines his plans to abandon his dreary kingdom
of Ithaca to reclaim lost glory in a final adventure on the seas.
Restless and bored with Ithaca, Ulysses turns his throne over to his prudent
son Telemachus and rallies his men with inspiring words of heroism. The ironic distance of
the narrative voice intensifies the ambiguity as to whether Ulysses is proving his noble
courage or shirking his responsibilities in Ithaca for a journey that may prove to be futile,
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fatal, or both. Tennyson based his two-sided view of Ulysses on Book XI
of Homer‘s Odyssey and Canto XXVI of Dante‘s Inferno.
4. In Memoriam (1850) – it is an elegy of 132 lyrics, written for his friend Arthur Henry
Hallam, who died of brain haemorrhage at the very young age of twenty-two. This
tragic event had a massive impact on Tennyson‘s life, he did not publish anything for
ten years since Hallam‘s death. In Memoriam dramatizes the struggle of Faith and
Doubt. It expresses agonized doubts about Christianity and human destiny.
5. ‗Maud‘ (1855)
6. Enoch Arden (1864)
Enoch Arden, poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1864. In the poem, Enoch
Arden is a happily married fisherman who suffers financial problems and becomes
a merchant seaman. He is shipwrecked, and, after 10 years on a desert island, he returns home
to discover that his beloved wife, believing him dead, has remarried and has a new child. Not
wishing to spoil his wife‘s happiness, he never lets her know that he is alive.

7. Idylls of the King (1859-88) – it is a cycle of twelve narrative poems which retells the
legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of
him, and the rise and fall of Arthur‘s kingdom.

‗Tithonus‘, ‗Tireseas‘, ‗The Lotos Eaters‘ and other poems drafted after 1833, longs for
death. Its speaker was loved by the goddess Aurora (Dawn), who gave him eternal life but
not eternal youth.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Six years senior to Robert Browning, they married in 1846 which was kept secret from her
father. She was far better known as a poet than him. Only after her death in 1861, when
Robert Browning returned to England from Italy, did his reputation eclipse hers.
Major works:
1. The Battle of Marathon (1820) – was her first narrative poem.
2. The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838) – is her first major collection of poems.
3. Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) – were written during their courtship and
expressed her love for Browning. ‗How do I love thee? Let me count the ways‘
4. Aurora Leigh (1857) – most known work for her, it is a long blank verse-novel and
tells the story of the young poet, Aurora Leigh, who lives with her unsympathetic
aunt after the death of her Italian mother and English father.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Browning is considered as the master of dramatic monologue which he perfected in ‗My
Last Duchess,‘ and develops the form further in Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae
(1864) and others.
Dramatic Monologue
It as a poetic form achieved its first distinction in the works of Robert Browning. It is a lyric
poem, effectively created by Browning and Tennyson, in which there is one imaginary speaker
addressing an imaginary audience. In the poem, a single person, who is patently not the poet,
utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical
moment, and the presence of the listener is realized in the discourse of the speaker. The main
principle controlling the poet‘s choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to
reveal to the reader the speaker‘s temperament and character, a self-revelation.
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This form went on to influence 20th century poets, from TS Eliot‘s 1817 poem, ‗The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘, to Sylvia Plath‘s 1965 ‗Lady Lazarus‘ and many more.
Major works:

1. Sordello (1840)
2. Bells and Pomegranates Number III: Dramatic Lyrics (1842)- the poem ‗My Last
Duchess‘ is from this collection. ‗My Last Duchess‘ is based on historical events
involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century, the duke is the
speaker of the poem. In the poem, the Italian Renaissance Duke is conducting a tour of
his magnificent home with a Count‘s agent who has come to discuss the terms of the
duke‘s next marriage. The duke feels compelled to explain to him how he came to lose
his first wife, the Duchess of the poem‘s title. When the pair encounter a painting with a
curtain drawn over it, the duke draws the drapes to reveal a portrait of his former wife.
He explains to the agent that his last Duchess never learned that she was to have showed
him respect and adoration above all things in her world. The duke gives away on her
disgraceful behaviour, he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his
―gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name.‖ He then reveals that he had the Duchess killed
for what he perceived was her insolence. Although the agent never speaks or judges the
duke, the audience, that is the readers are allowed to see the duke‘s control of his wife.
He confesses to the murder of his wife and this sort of self-revelation is the
hallmark of the Browning monologue.
3. Men and Women (1855) – ‗Andrea del Sarto‘ (The Faultless Painter) and ‗Fra Lippo
Lippi‘ are from this collection.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Matthew Arnold‘s poetry represented its age in a far profounder way. He is the true voice of the
sensitive Victorian intellectual brooding over inevitable loss of faith and the meaning of life.
Some of his major poems:
―Dover Beach‖ (1867) – it is one of the most famous poems of Arnold. In the poem the
Victorian problem of loss of faith is given its most memorable utterances: public values have
disappeared, and all that is left are the private affections of love and friendship. The poem was
written shortly after a visit to Dover region of South-eastern England, he and his wife made in
1851. The poem begins by describing a calm and quiet sea out in the English Channel. The
speaker of the poem stands on the Dover coast and looks across France, where a small light can
be seen briefly and then vanishes. This light represents the diminishing faith of the English
people and the world around them. He calls the music of the world an ―eternal note of sadness.‖
The speaker then flashes back to ancient Greece, where Sophocles have heard the same sound
on the Aegean Sea and was inspired by it to write his plays about human misery. The island
once girdled by ―The Sea of Faith‖, Arnold can ―only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar.‖ This suggest that the faith is fading from society like the tide is from the shore. The
poem ends in a pessimistic tone as the speaker makes clear to the reader that all the beauty and
happiness that one may believe is only an illusion. The world is, in fact, without peace or joy.
People around the world is suffering and they are confused and are fighting for things they
don‘t understand, and that real suffering is going on and faith is slipping away.
―The Scholar Gypsy‖ (1853) – it is about a seventeenth-century Oxford student who
disappeared among the gypsies; it is really about the poet himself and his generation, the
scholar gypsy becomes a symbol in the light Arnold can develop his own position and state his
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own problems. It is a meditative pastoral poem, drawing his knowledge of rustic scenes around
Oxford, and his language owes something to the classical poet, Theocritus.
―Thyrsis‖ (1866) – it is an elegy on the death of Arnold‘s friend Arthur Hugh Clough.
Clough in the poem is portrayed as Thyrsis, a shepherd poet.

Pre-Raphaelite Poets – these poets drew inspiration from visual art and literature, their works
privileged atmosphere and mood over narrative, focusing on medieval subjects, female beauty
etc. they helped to popularize the notion of ‗art for art‘s sake.‘ They are much devoid of the
political edge that characterized the Victorian art and literature, but they nevertheless
incorporated elements of 19th century realism in its attention to detail and its close observation
of the natural world.
*Art for art‘s sake -it is a phrase that expresses the philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and
the only 'true' art, is divorced from any didactic, moral, political, or utilitarian function. Art for
the sake of art affirmed that art was valuable as art in itself; that artistic pursuits were their own
justification; and that art did not need moral justification, and indeed, was allowed to be morally
neutral or subversive.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Rossetti was a poet and a painter; He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.
Major works:
1. ―The Blessed Damozel‖ (1850) – it narrates the story of a young woman who dies
unexpectedly at a very young age. Even after attaining heavenly bliss, she longs for her
Earthly companion. The jumbles with sensual and spiritual imagery. The poem unites
the physical and the spiritual and illustrates Rossetti‘s belief in human love being one of
life‘s greatest values.
2. The Early Italian Poets (1861)
3. Poems (1869)

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

She is an important English poet of the Victorian age. Under the pseudonym of Ellen Alleyne,
she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ in 1850.
Major works:
1. Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
2. A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
3. The Face of the Deep (1892)

Goblin Market, poem by Christina Rossetti, published in 1862 in the collection Goblin Market
and Other Poems. Comprising 567 irregularly rhyming lines, the poem recounts the plight of
Laura, who succumbs to the enticement of the goblins and eats the fruit they sell. Her sister,
Lizzie, resists the ―fruit-call‖ as she watches Laura grow sick from her indulgence. At last,
Lizzie revisits the goblins‘ glen to buy more fruit for Laura and withstands an assault by the
malevolent beings without tasting a drop of the ―goblin pulp and goblin dew.‖ Her victory
redeems Laura and drives the goblins from the glen.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

His poetry was first published posthumously by his friend, Robert Bridges in 1918. Hopkins
avoided smooth movement and harmony of language in order to make the reader see and think.
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Major works:
1. The Wreck of Duetschland (1877)
2. ―The Windhover‖ written in 1877

Sprung rhythm, an irregular system of prosody developed by the 19th-century English

poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and
permits an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, a foot may be
composed of from one to four syllables. (In regular English metres, a foot consists of two or
three syllables.) Because stressed syllables often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than
in alternation with unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be ―sprung.‖

curtal sonnet, a curtailed or contracted sonnet. It refers specifically to a sonnet of 11 lines

rhyming abcabc dcbdc or abcabc dbcdc with the last line a tail, or half a line. The term was
used by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe the form that he used in such poems as ―Pied
Beauty‖ and ―Peace.‖ Curtal is now an obsolete word meaning ―shortened.‖

Victorian Fiction
The Nineteenth-century was the great age of the English novel. This was partly because of this
middle-class form of literary art which was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle classes
rose in power and importance, and partly because the novel was the vehicle best equipped to
present a picture of life lived in a given society against a stable background of social and moral
values by people who were recognizably like people encountered by readers, and this was the
kind of picture of life the middle-class reader wanted to read about.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

William Makepeace Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India. After his father‘s death, he was sent
to England.
Major works:
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero – it was published serially in London in 1847 and 1848.
It is a satirical novel of manners. The title is derived from John Bunyan‘s allegorical story
The Pilgrim’s Progress where Vanity Fair is the name of a stop in a town called Vanity.
The novel follows the fortunes of Rebecca Sharp, also known as Becky, a fearless social
mountaineer, who was obsessed with status and wealth. These are contrasted throughout with
those of Amelia Sedley, the daughter of a stockbroker. Amelia‘s goodness and sweetness is
contrasted with Becky‘s wit and physical charm. Thackeray examines the position of women in
an intensely exploitative male world.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, United Kingdom on 7th February 1812.
He was second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father, a clerk in the
Navy pay office, was imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea prison in 1824, leading to which
Charles was taken out of school, aged 12, to work in a blacking warehouse, where he pasted
labels on bottles for six shillings a week. He returned to school, and was a legal office boy at
15, and then a shorthand reporter of Parliamentary debates for the newspaper, Morning
Chronicle, where he was asked to write a series of sketches about London life which gave rise
to his first literary experiment called, Sketches by ‘Boz’.
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Journalism and melodrama are gathered into the novel to give it new life and a new
important place in middle-class entertainment. Dickens learned a great deal from his own
circumstances and observation, combining an extraordinary relish for the odd, the colourful,
and the dramatic in urban life and in human character with a keen eye for the changes which the
Industrial Revolution brought into England in his lifetime, with an acute consciousness of his
own lower-middle class origin and the unhappy circumstances of his own childhood, which
included his father‘s imprisonment and his own much resented employment at the blacking
warehouse as a youngster; these brought to him a sentimentally humanitarian attitude toward
human problems.
During the 1850s, Dickens suffered two devastating losses, the deaths of his daughter
and father, and also in 1858, he separated from his wife, Catherine Hogarth, whom he married
in 1836. His writings became more serious and expressed dark world view after these events in
his life. He died of a stroke in 1870 and left his work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished.
Works of Dickens:
1. Sketches by ‘Boz’ (1836) – a journalistic work for the newspaper, Morning Chronicle,
for which he travelled through England and reported on London‘s streets, inns and
courts, by keeping ‗a sharp look-out enough.‘
2. The Pickwick Papers – issued in monthly parts in 1836 and 1837
3. The Adventures of Oliver Twist: The Parish Boy’s Progress – published serially, 1837-9
4. Nicholas Nickleby – issued in monthly parts, 1838-9
5. The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1)
6. Barnaby Rudge (1841)
7. American Notes (1842)
8. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4)
9. Pictures from Italy (1844)
10. Dombey and Son (1847- 8)
11. David Copperfield (1848-50)
12. Bleak House (1852-3)
13. A Child’s History of England (1851-3)
14. Hard Times: For These Times (1854)
15. Little Dorrit (1855-7)
16. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
17. Great Expectations (1860-1)
18. Our Mutual Friend (1864-5)
19. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

Hard Times: For These Times (1854) – the novel is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial
Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though
smaller.
The novel portrays the exploitation and dehumanisation of honest hard-working factory
workers. It surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era.
Through the characters of Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby, Dickens critiques the
lifeless utilitarian philosophies of the time.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) – it is an intense historical novel centred on the French Revolution.
It is set in London and Paris before and during the time of the French Revolution. It depicts the
plight of the French peasants demoralised by the aristocratic class. The novel is sympathetic to
the overthrow of the French aristocracy, but highly critical of the reign of terror that followed.
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The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the
Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never
met. The novel is divided into three books – 1) Book the First: Recalled to Life, 2) Book the
Second: The Golden Thread, and 3) Book the Third: The Track of a Storm.
Dickens opens the novel with a sentence that has become famous – ―It was the best of times, it
was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season
of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything
before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative
degree of comparison only.‖

Great Expectations (1860-1) – the novel explores, with more subtlety and more control, aspects
of the relation between gentility and morality, though it has its melodramatic moments. The
novel is a bildungsroman, narrating the story of Pip, an orphan.

Some of the notable Dickensian characters

CHARACTERS NOVELS
Martha Bardell The Pickwick Papers
Artful Dodger Oliver Twist
Mr. Bumble -do-
Mr. Sowerberry -do-
Mr. Brownlow -do-
Fagin -do-
Charles Bates -do-
Bill Sikes -do-
Newman Noggs Nicholas Nickleby
Lord Frederick Verisopht -do-
Peg Sliderskew -do-
Cheeryble brothers -do-
Smike -do-
Little Nell The Old Curiosity Shop
Kit Nubbles -do-
Daniel Quilp -do-
Seth Pecksniff Martin Chuzzlewit
Sarah Gamp -do-
Thomas ―Tom‖ Pinch -do-
Clara Peggotty David Copperfield
Betsey Trotwood -do-
Edward Murdstone -do-
Little Em‘ly -do-
Uriah Heep -do-
Dora Spenlow -do-
Esther Summerson Bleak House
Harold Skimpole -do-
John Jarndyce -do-
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Lady Dedlock -do-
Cecelia Jupe Hard Times
Thomas Gradgrind -do-
Josiah Bounderby -do-
Stephen Blackpool -do-
Sydney Carton A Tale of Two Cities
Lucie Manette -do-
Madame ―Therese‖ Defarge -do-
Charles Darney -do-
Mr. Stryver -do-
Philip Pirip Great Expectations
Estella -do-
Joe Gargery -do-
Mr. Pumblechook -do-
Abel Magwitch -do-
The Barnacle family Little Dorrit
Noddy Boffin Our Mutual Friend
Bella Wilfer -do-
Lizzie Hexam -do-
John Podsnap -do-
Rosa Bud The Mystery of Edwin Drood
John Jasper -do-
Neville Landless -do-

The Bronte Sisters – they are Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte. The three sisters had
started off by publishing their poetry in a joint volume called Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell (1846), in which the authors gave their names as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. This
anonymity, which was never officially broken in their lifetime, was not only the disguise which
female writers of the period so often thought fit to assume in presenting themselves to the world
as novelists; it was also a part of their inwardness their intense living to themselves.
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
Eldest of the three sisters, Charlotte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire to Rev. Patrick Bronte
and Maria Branwell.
Major works –
1) Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) – it is her first published novel under her penname
Currer Bell, and brought her contemporary fame. The novel is a Bildungsroman which
follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, an orphan, her growth to adulthood, her
employment first as a teacher and then as a governess, and her romantic involvement with
her employer, the mysterious and moody master of Thornfield Hall, Edward Rochester.

The novel has also been the subject of a number of significant rewritings and related
interpretations, notably Jean Rhys's seminal 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. And also, The
Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination (1979) of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, draw their title from the novel in
which the ―apparently‖ madwoman, Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester‘s first wife is kept secretly
locked in an attic apartment by her husband.
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Emily Bronte (1818-1848)

Emily was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, she is perhaps the best of the three sisters. Her single,
but splendid novel, Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, under her penname, Ellis Bell.
There is nothing quite like Wuthering Heights anywhere else in English literature. It is the work
of a woman, who cuts off herself deliberately from normal human associations and lived
throughout her short life in a private world of imaginary passion.

Gothic elements in Jane Eyre – the nightmarish red room, where Jane encounters with the
ghost of her late Uncle Reed, the locations such as Lowood, Moor House, and Thornfield, the
moment of supernatural communication between Jane and Rochester when she hears his voice
calling her across the misty heath from miles and miles away, the mad Creole wife locked in the
attic, the foiled bigamy, the blazing hall, and the exposure of Bertha, and the mystery
surrounding her is the main source of the novel‘s suspense.
Gothic elements in Wuthering Heights – the villain-hero, Heathcliff, himself depicts a lot of
Gothic elements, the Yorkshire moors, where Heathcliff and Catherine played, the spirit of
Catherine, the nightmares of Lockwood when he stayed at Withering Heights, graveyard scenes
where Heathcliff dugs up Catherine‘s room and his longing to be buried with her.

Anne Bronte (1820-1849)

She is the youngest of the Bronte sisters.
Major works –
1. Agnes Grey (1847) – it is her first novel, published under her pseudonym, Acton Bell.
The novel follows Agnes Grey, a governess, as she works within families of the English
gentry. The choice of central character allows Anne to deal with issues of oppression
and abuse of women and governesses, isolation and ideas of empathy. An additional
theme is the fair treatment of animals. The novel also mimics some of the stylistic
approaches of Bildungsromans, employing ideas of personal growth and coming to age.
2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

George Eliot (1819-1880)

George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans, at Warwickshire, England.
Major works –
1. Adam Bede (1859) – it is Eliot‘s first nove
2. The Mill on the Floss (1860)
3. Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-2) – it was published as a serial novel
in eight parts. It is set in a Midlands manufacturing town towards 1832, it shows the weakening
of ideals by experience. The several storylines of the multiple plots are traced from their
beginnings, gradually combining into a drama which gathers intense human and moral interest.
The novel represents the spirit of 19th century England through the common people, and their
perspective on change. Dorothea Brooke, against the advice of her uncle, sister and gentry
connections, accepts the Reverend Dr Isaac Casaubon, a dry middle-aged scholar, who cannot
satisfy her emotionally or mentally. His real meanness is revealed in his will, when he dies
suddenly.
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Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Major works –
1. Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865) –. In the book, Alice‘s adventures occur when in a
dream she falls down a rabbit-hole. In a series of odd and threatening situations, creatures
engage her in ‗curiouser and curiouser‘ conversations and sing non-sensical songs. Alice‘s
unintimidated common sense saves her.
2. Through the Looking-Glass (1871) – it is a sequel to Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, England. He is considered as one
of the greatest English novelists in the whole range of English literature.
Wessex is a fictional literary landscape created by Thomas Hardy as the setting for his
major novels, it is located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area
"Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior
to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels
actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. It is largely agricultural region
steeped in history and slow emerge from the older rhythm of rural life and labour into the
modern industrial world.

Major works:
1. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
2. The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character (1886)
3. Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories)
4. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891)
5. Jude the Obscure (1895)

-Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) – it is Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary
success. The novel is set in Thomas Hardy's Wessex in rural southwest England. It deals in
themes of love, honour and betrayal, against a backdrop of the seemingly idyllic, but often
harsh, realities of a farming community in Victorian England.
Hardy took the title from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard" (1751):
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

- The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character (1886) – it is one of
Hardy's Wessex novels, it is set in a fictional rural England with Casterbridge standing in for
Dorchester in Dorset.
-Jude the Obscure (1896) – it is his last and his most extraordinary novel. Jude, is a poor
country boy, with visions of academic glory, he escapes from his native village after some
dogged self-education in the classics, but he never achieves entry to the university and remains
trapped between passion and intellect until his death.
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Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Major works –
1. Erewhon (1873) – a dystopian novel
2. The Way of All Flesh (1903) – it is based on his own upbringing in a clerical family.

George Gissing (1857-1903) - New Grub Street (1891)

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Rudyard Kipling was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born
in British India, which inspired much of his work. A journalist back in India, his prose
reputation began with Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), and the The Jungle Book (1894).
Kipling became the favourite writers for millions in the Empire, with poems like
‗Gungadin‘, ‗Ladies‘, ‗If‘, ‗Tommy‘, ‗Danny Deever‘ and ‗The Road to Mandalay‘. In
Kipling‘s Kim (1901) a wide world is seen through the eyes of a street-wise unprejudiced child.
Many were delighted with this novel of adventure, with glimpses of India‘s human and
religious variety.
Major works –
Novels
1. The Light that Failed (1891)
2. The Naulahka: A Story of West and East (1892)
3. Captains Courageous (1896)
4. Kim (1901)

Poetry
1. Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886)
2. Barrack Room Ballads (1889), republished with additions at various times.
3. The Seven Seas and Further Barrack-Room Ballads, in various editions (1891–96).

Short story collections

1. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
2. The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales (1888)
3. Under the Deodars (1888)
4. Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1888)
5. The Jungle Book (1894)
6. The Second Jungle Book (1895)
7. Just So Stories (1902)
8. Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) – children's historical fantasy short stories

Aestheticism
Aestheticism, also the Aesthetic movement, was an art movement in the late 19th century which
privileged the aesthetic value of literature, music and the arts over their socio-political
functions. The period saw a cult of beauty brought to public attention by the opening of the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be
beautiful, rather than to serve a moral, allegorical, or other didactic purpose, a sentiment
exemplified by the slogan "art for art's sake." The movement had its roots in France, but it
gained widespread importance in England with a radical group of artists and designers,
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including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It flourished in the 1870s and 1880s,
gaining prominence and the support of notable writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
Aestheticism challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture, as many Victorians
believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. The statement ―art for art‘s sake‖
expresses a central tenet of the movement.
The Aesthetic phase gave way in the 1890s to a decade called Decadent by the poet
Arthur Symons. It produced a new idea, that literature was an art, and worth living for. This
idea shaped the lives of Yeats, and of Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Virginia Woolf. The decadents
had its beginnings in French aestheticism. It displays a fascination with perverse and morbid
states; a search for novelty and sensation, a preoccupation with mysticism and a belief in the
senselessness of human existence. The movement was characterized by a belief in the
superiority of human creativity and pleasure over logic and the natural world. Major decadents
are Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson and Frank Harris.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Oscar Fingall O‘Flahertie Wills Wilde, was an Irish poet and playwright.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) – it is Wilde's only complete novel. The story
revolves around a portrait of Dorian Gray painted by Basil Hallward, a friend of
Dorian's and an artist infatuated with Dorian's beauty. Through Basil, Dorian meets
Lord Henry Wotton and is soon enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic worldview: that
beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life. Newly
understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to
ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and
Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and
beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and visually records every one of Dorian's sins.
Wilde's only novel, it was subject to much controversy and criticism in its time but has
come to be recognized as a classic of gothic literature.

Modern Age

The early decade of the 20th Century, especially the period after World War I is known as the
Modern Age. The modern period occupied the years shortly after the beginning of 20th Century
through roughly 1945. The period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with
traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Modernism involved a radical and
conscious break with the past, rejection of conventional Victorian morality and inventions of
new form of expression.
The modernist writers felt betrayed by the war. The external world no longer provided them
with any answers or meanings. The changing world necessitated creation of new forms of
writing to meet the complex nature of the age, thus giving rise to modern literature.
Two pieces of writing published in 1922, James Joyce‘s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot‘s The
Waste Land, differed in form from the novels and poems that had preceded them. This was the
crest of a new wave in English literature; from Ezra Pound‘s Lustra and Joyce‘s Dubliners in
1914 to Virginia Woolf‘s To The Lighthouse in 1927, all spoke of modern age.
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Modern poetry
Modern poetry in English started with the appearance of Imagists.
Imagist Movement:
A group of American and English poets whose poetic program was formulated about 1912 by
Ezra Pound—in conjunction with fellow poets Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Richard Aldington,
and F.S. Flint—and was inspired by the critical views of T.E. Hulme, in revolt against the
careless thinking and Romantic optimism he saw prevailing.
The significant, although short-lived as a movement, were the Imagist poets, whose first
anthology, Des Imagistes (1914) was edited by the American exile, Ezra Pound.
Imagist movement is the continuation of Symbolist movement in France started by
Flaubert, Mallarme, Laforgue. In it, symbols make up the structure of a poem. But in Imagism,
instead of symbols, images are used in making up of the structure of a poem. It demanded a
clear and precise image, elimination of every word that did not contribute to the presentation,
and a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity. The French Symbolists
had taken a similar view of metrical regularity, and it was their invention of vers libre that was
adopted by the Imagists. The verse libre, that is the free verse, is the most common form
used in modern poetry. The language and the subject matter are the common ordinary day-to-
day speech and experience, far removed from the add-ons of figure of speech in the previous
poetry. It is much closer to the reality of our everyday life.
Imagist movement was inspired by T. E. Hulme, who wrote the first Imagist-style poems. Some
of the other influential poets of the movement are Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington, William
Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford.
According to Pound, a poem is an image text, that is the text of the poem is made up by
images, and that only the essential should be used in any image without any superfluity. The
image should be a direct representation, direct treatment, direct reflection of the idea or
object. Hence, the image text is often short, precise and concrete.
Some notable imagist poems are Pound‘s ‗In a Station of the Metro‘, ‗Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley‘, Hulme‘s "Autumn" and "A City Sunset".
Modern poetry is not due to its chronology but because of its significant divergent from the
conventional forms. It is the questioning whether the conventional institutions have a place in
the modern world. It is the re-examining of the validity of traditional institutions, the
questioning, the interrogating mindset. The modern poet uses rhetoric to persuade and direct the
readers towards the thoughts and feelings of what the poet wants to convey. Psychology plays
the most important background perspective of modern poetry. It is giving more importance
to the inner being than the outer world. the profound, deep, natural, spontaneous emotions that
makes up a poem is almost dead because in modern poetry, intellectual predominates the
emotions, focusing more on the superficial aspects of the ugly new world.
(Vorticism: literary and artistic movement that flourished in England in 1912–15. Founded
by Wyndham Lewis, it attempted to relate art to industrialization. It opposed 19th-century
sentimentality and extolled the energy of the machine and machine-made products, and it
promoted something of a cult of sheer violence).
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the
early modernist poetry movement. Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th
century with his role in developing Imagism. Pound became one of the most significant poets of
the twentieth century, co-founding both Imagism and Vorticism, and issuing the modernist
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directive to ‗Make it new‘.
Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped
discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and
James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the
serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses.
Major works –
1. The Egoist – Pound became the literary editor of this journal in 1913 which was
founded by the suffragette Dora Marsden.
2. Des Imagistes, An Anthology (1914) – it was edited by Pound and was published in the
American magazine The Glebe, it was the first of five Imagist anthologies and the only
one to contain work by Pound. It included ten poems by Richard Aldington, seven by
H. D., followed by F. S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos
Williams, James Joyce ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), six by
Pound, then Ford Madox Hueffer, Allen Upward and John Cournos.
3. The Cantos ("Canto I" to "Canto CXVI", c. 1917–1962) – it is an 800-page long work,
and became a lifetime literary achievement for Pound. The section he wrote at the end of
World War II, a composition started while he was interned by American occupying
forces in Italy, has become known as The Pisan Cantos (Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV)
published in 1948. It was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in 1948.

He also wrote oems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as ―In a Station of the
Metro‖ (1913):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In the poem, Pound describes a moment in the underground metro station in
Paris in 1912; he suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro
were best put into a poem not with a description but with an "equation". It
is sometimes considered to be the first haiku published in English, though it
lacks the traditional 3-line, 17-syllable structure of haiku.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Yeats is an Irish poet and playwright. He was an important figure behind the Celtic Revival or
the Irish Literary Renaissance. He was the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in
1923.
Major works –
1. ―Easter 1916‖ (1916)
2. The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse (1917)
3. "The Second Coming" (1920)
4. A Vision, A (1925)
5. The Resurrection (1927) – it is a short play first performed in 1934.
6. The Tower (1928) – it is was Yeats's first major collection as Nobel Laureate. It is
considered to be one of the poet's most influential volumes and was well received by the
public. Includes poems such as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and
"Among School Children."
7. The Ten Principal Upanishads (1938)
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―Easter 1916‖
The poem describes the poet's torn emotions regarding the events of the Easter Rising staged in
Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. The uprising was unsuccessful,
and most of the Irish republican leaders involved were executed for treason.
―The Second Coming‖
The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to
allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of
modernist poetry.
"Sailing to Byzantium"
It was first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. It uses a journey to Byzantium
(Constantinople) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings
on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic
techniques, Yeats in the poem describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own
vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

Eliot was a famous modern poet, playwright and literary critic. He was born in America and he
moved to Britain at the age of 25 and attained British citizenship in 1927. Eliot was awarded
the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit in 1948. He met Pound in 1914, and became his
literary mentor who got his poems published and aided him in receiving critical acclaim. Apart
from writing poetry, he served as a literary editor of the feminist magazine, the Egoist,
and also The Criterion.
T.S. Eliot as a playwright wrote seven plays:
i. Sweeny Agonistes(1926)
ii. The Rock(1934)
iii. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) a verse drama by T. S. Eliot, first performed in
1935, that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury
Cathedral during the reign of Henry II in 1170. Eliot drew heavily on the writing of Edward
Grim, a clerk who was an eyewitness to the event
iv. The Family Reunion(1939)
v. The Cocktail Party(1949)
vi. The Confidential Clerk (1953)
vii. The Elder Statesman (1959)
As an editor T.S. Eliot was also the founder and editor of literary Journal Criterion
(1922-1939)
Poetry:
i. Prufrock and Other Observations(1917). It contains 12 poems, two important
poems out of this collection are Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a
Lady.
―The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‖ (1915): The famous beginning of Eliot‘s
―Prufrock‖ invites the reader into tawdry alleys that, like modern life, offer no answers to
the questions life poses:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.…

ii. Portrait of a Lady

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Title derived from the novel ―Portrait of a Lady‖ by Henry James (a novel). It
shows the hollowness, emptiness of the upper class society. The epigraph is
from quotation of Christopher Marlowe play ―The Jew of Malta‖.
Thou hast committed —
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.
–The Jew of Malta
iii. Poems (1920). Important poems of the collection are: Gerontion and
Whispers of Immorality.
Gerontion: Greek title meaning „little old man‟. Dramatic monologue. Opinions
and impressions of an elderly man, which describes Europe after World War I.
“Here I am, an old man in a dry month being read to by a boy, waiting for rain”.
Its epigraph is taken from Shakespeare “Measure for Measure”.
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
iv. The Waste Land (1922)
The manuscript draft of The Waste Land features the poem's original title, 'He Do
the Police in Different Voices'. T S Eliot drew the quotation from Charles
Dickens's novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864).
It has 434 lines. 5 sections: The Burial of the Death
The Game of Chess
The Fire Sermon
Death by Water
What the Thunder Said
Dedicated to Ezra Pound, ( il miglior fabbro), which means The Better
Craftsman. Seven languages are used in the poem. The poem opens with the famous
lines:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Ending Lines:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and
disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by
the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and
barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The
poem’s style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and
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references to explain the work’s many quotations and allusions.
The Waste Land consists of five sections and proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical
discontinuity” that reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of
the great modern cities of the West. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of
purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”).
This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem’s
constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles. But The Waste
Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is, rather,
a timeless simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil.

v. The Hollow Men (1925)

Famous concluding lines: This is the way the world ends. This is the way the
world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. The title is taken from The Hollow
Land by William Morris and The Broken Men by Rudyard Kipling.
vi. Ariel Poems (1927-1954).
vii. Ash Wednesday(1930)
In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism. The first long poem after his conversion
was Ash Wednesday (1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from
that of any of the earlier poems.
viii. Four Quartets (1943)
Set of four poems: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding.
Written during WWII.

This work led to the award to Eliot, in 1948, of the Nobel Prize for
Literature.

An outstanding example of Eliot’s verse in Four Quartets is the passage in “Little

Gidding” in which the poet meets a “compound ghost,” a figure composite
of two of his masters: William Butler Yeats and Stéphane Mallarmé. The
scene takes place at dawn in London after a night on duty at an air-raid post during an
air attack.

Essays:
i. Tradition & Individual Talent(1919)
In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” appearing in his first critical
volume, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the
poet, is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past (“novelty is
better than repetition,” he said); rather, it comprises the whole of European
literature, from Homer to the present. The poet writing in English may therefore
make his own tradition by using materials from any past period, in any language.
This point of view is “programmatic” in the sense that it disposes the reader to
accept the revolutionary novelty of Eliot’s polyglot quotations and serious parodies
of other poets’ styles in The Waste Land.

ii. Hamlet & His Problem

Also in The Sacred Wood, “Hamlet and His Problems” sets forth Eliot’s theory of
the objective correlative:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective
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correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external
facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked.
Eliot used the phrase “objective correlative” in the context of his own impersonal
theory of poetry; it thus had an immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of
late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence of word and object. T. S. Eliot
calls that Hamlet is an artistic failure. It means the writer is unable to objectify the
emotions. There are two reasons for it.
Shakespeare drew the material for his Hamlet from the plays of Thomas Kyd, but failed
to make his play correspond to the original material. The second reason for
calling Hamlet an artistic failure has to do with the lack of objective correlative.
Shakespeare creates the character possessing emotion in excess because the emotion
has no equivalence to the action of the character and the other facts and details in the
play.
iii. The Metaphysical Poets
In this essay he propounded a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English
poetry, putting at the top Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and
lowering poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. Eliot’s second famous phrase appears
here—“dissociation of sensibility,” invented to explain the change that came over
English poetry after Donne and Andrew Marvell. This change seems to him to consist
in a loss of the union of thought and feeling (Union of Sensibility). It had a
strong influence in reviving interest in certain 17th-century poets.
iv. The Function of Criticism

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in England, but attained American citizenship in 1946. Auden
and his fellow undergraduates, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louise MacNeice, and
Christopher Isherwood at Oxford University formed a group known as the Oxford Group or
the Auden Group. They became famous as the Pylon Poets in the 1930s, who first translated
England‘s industrial landscape into poetry.
Major works –
1. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) – it is a long poem in six parts, deals
with man‘s quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly
industrialized world. It is set in a wartime bar in New York City. It won the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry in 1948.

Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

Stephen Spender was an English poet, essayist and a novelist. His poem ―The Pylon‖,
popularized the term Pylon Poets, which were a group of left-wing poets during the 1930s. His
works concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet
Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the United States Library of Congress in 1965.
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Novels or fictions in Modern Age

The modern fiction is characterized by its immense variety and complexity. Modernism
introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that would fundamentally change the
entire essence of novel writing. They were written on all possible themes and subject-matter.
They were realistic in nature, and deals with all the aspects of life, the pleasant and the
unpleasant, the beautiful and the ugly. The novels have a pessimistic tone and presents the
conflicts of life. The modern novel is predominantly psychological and its influence on plot
and characterization had a far-reaching impact on themes of novels. Irony, satires are often used
as techniques to illustrate the reality of the modern society.

Characteristics of Modern fiction

Avant-garde – avant-garde means new and experimental ideas and methods in art. It
represents challenging the normative, pushing the boundaries of the status quo and creating new
artistic forms. It is considered to be the hallmark of modern literature.
The modern literature focuses on the inner reality of the human mind rather than the external,
materialistic world. There is greater stress on psychological detailing of the literary character
through narrative devices such as stream of consciousness and interior monologue.
Language and diction are condensed and plots are non-chronological.
Major novelists were D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson,
Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Katherine Mansfield,
Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell.

Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957)

Dorothy Miller Richardson was a British author and essayist. She is considered to be the first
writer to use the stream of consciousness narrative technique. She also published varieties
of short stories in many periodicals and also many poems.
Although she was an influential modernist and feminist writer, her work has remained
forgotten in literary circles; she died penniless and alone in the London suburb of Beckenham,
Kent in 1957.
Major works -
1. The Quakers Past and Present (1914)
2. Gleanings from the Work of George Fox (1915)
3. Pilgrimage (1915-1967) – it is volume of 13 novels. The narrative technique of stream
of consciousness is considered to be used here for the first time, to illuminate the viewpoint of
her protagonist, Miriam. It has been viewed as early Modernism‘s great documentary novel, as
daring experimental fiction, as spiritual autobiography and pioneer of cinematographic
technique.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

In Maugham‘s novels, the main concerns are the problem of renunciation and craze for
materialistic possession, the problem of love and human predicament, the problem of
futility and meaninglessness of human life.
Major works –
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1. Liza of Lambeth (1897) – it is his first published novel. The story of the novel is drawn
from his own experiences as a medical student. It depicts the life and death of Lizen
Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker living with her ageing mother.
2. The Razor’s Edge (1944) – it is a story of an American pilot, Larry Darrell who is
traumatised by his experiences in World War I.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf, born as Adeline Virginia Stephen, was the daughter of the eminent literary
figure Sir Leslie Stephen. She lived her siblings in Bloomsbury Square, London, near to the
British Museum, which gave its name to the Bloomsbury Group, a group of intellectuals,
critics and artists: Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, E.M.
Forster, Vanessa Stephen, and Virginia Woolf. After she married Leonard Woolf, in 1912,
he also became a central figure of the group. Bloomsbury memoirs, diaries, and letters show wit
and intelligence, snobbery and gossipy delights in many things. But these had nothing to do
with the Group‘s intellectual, critical and artistic achievements. In art, Bloomsbury critics
introduced Post-Impressionism and a new formalist criticism. In literature, Strachey
pioneered a new kind of biography in Eminent Victorians (1918).
Woolf‘s novels ignore external social reality and explores a world of finely registered
impressions – an interior, domestic, feminine world – impressions often worked into patterns.
She, somehow reformed the techniques and expressions of novel writing with stream of
consciousness techniques, feminisation of English novels, artistic sincerity and integrity, with
reason and clarity and certain refined sensitivity.
Virginia Woolf with her husband, Leonard Woolf, collaborated to form the Hogarth
Press, which the published her works and other contemporary writers and artists. After Woolf
finished writing the manuscript of her last novel, she was hit by severe depression again. She
committed suicide by drowning into River Ouse on 25th, March, 1941.
Major works –
1. Mrs Dalloway (1925) – centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged
society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus
Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War
bearing deep psychological scars.
2. To the Lighthouse (1927) – is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the
Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the
connected familial tensions. The novel is a meditation upon the lives of a nation's
inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the
passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional
strength from them.
3. Orlando (1928) – a parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three
centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman).

4. A Room of One’s Own (1929) - considered a key work of feminist literary criticism, it
was written following two lectures she delivered on "Women and Fiction" at Cambridge
University the previous year. In it, she examines the historical disempowerment women
have faced in many spheres, including social, educational and financial.

James Joyce (1882-1942)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed
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to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and
important writers of the 20th century. Joyce‘s novels are known for their experimental use of
language and modernist forms. He uses the stream of consciousness technique and epiphany,
that is a moment of sudden realisation that causes change in a character‘s perception or
worldview.

Major works –

1. Dubliners (1914) – it is a short-story collection with 15 stories in total, he draws on his

Irish experiences and analysed the stagnation of Dublin society.
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – it is a semi-autobiographical novel
that describes the formative years of the life of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus.
3. Exiles (1918)
4. Ulysses (1922) – it is his most known and celebrated novel. The novel chronicles the
passage of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom on a single day, i.e., 16th June 1904. The
structure of the novel symbolically parallels with the structure of Homer‘s epic, The
Odyssey. Joyce uses interior monologue extensively; he shifts the narrative style with
each new episode of the novel.
5. Finnegans Wake (1939) – it is noted as his most incomprehensible work, and also for
its complicated usage of language, as it uses words from many different languages.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, essayist and a short-story writer. He
belonged to a working-class background, and his experiences of this upbringing was
reflected in his works. All of his novels have a lyrical, sensuous tone, and 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.

Major works –

1. Sons and Lovers (1913) – it is an autobiographical novel, drawing on his experiences

after the death of his own mother and examined the influence of his mother on his
sexual and psychological development. It was initially titled, Paul Morel, after its
protagonist.
2. The Rainbow (1915)
3. Women in Love (1920)
4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) – it is his most controversial novel for its explicit
sexual contents. It deals with the sexual frustration of a young married woman whose
husband had been paralysed due to war injury.

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963)

Aldous Huxley was an English novelist and essayist. He was the editor of the magazine, Oxford
Poetry.

Major works –
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1. Crome Fellow (1921)
2. Antic Hay Crome Yellon (1923)
3. Those Barren Leaves (1925)
4. Point Counter Point (1928)

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

She is an Anglo-Irish novelist.

Major works –

1. The Hotel (1927)

2. The Last September (1929)
3. The Death of the Heart (1938)
4. The Heat of the Day (1949)
5. Eva Trout or Changing Scenes (1968) – it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in
1969.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, Bihar, India. Orwell‘s father worked for the Opium
Department of the Civil Services in Motihari. His mother took him to England when he was
only one year old. He received his education at Eton College, England. After his studies, he
began to work as an imperial policeman in Burma. However, his tryst with British
imperialism and his disgust for it, prompted him to resign from the post and return to
England in 1928.

Orwell was a socialist and his works reflect his beliefs against totalitarianism.

Major works –

1. Burmese Days (1934)

2. Animal Farm (1945) – it is an allegorical fable that reflects on the events leading up to
and during the Stalin era. It is a cautionary tale to expose the seriousness of the dangers
posed by Stalinism and totalitarianism.
3. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – it is a dystopian novel that depicts a society tyrannised
by a totalitarian government. It is a satire on Russian Revolution and the indictment of
communism.

Anthony Powell (1905-2000)

He wrote five drily satirical pre-war novels, notably Afternoon Men and Venusberg. He is
known for his work, A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-novel sequence, after a
painting by Nicolas Poussin.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

He was a scholar of late medieval and Renaissance literature. He is the author of such highly
popular works, such as The Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image (1964). He developed an
other-worldly fiction in The Screwtape Letters (1942). But his The Lion, the Witch and the
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Wardrobe (1950) and other ‗Narnia‘ books for children have since proved extremely popular.
Narnia is full of parable and folklore Lewis had harvested.

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

There were no better scholars of Old English than Tolkien, who wrote the single most
influential essay on Beowulf. The Lord of the Rings (1954), a heroic romance of grand
mythological scope drawing of Beowulf and northern legend. The Hobbit was written in 1937,
for his children.

Tolkien‘s work has a kind of dreamlike moral innocence, a contrast to Lewis‘s logic, ingenuity
and cleverness. Lewis is fantastic, or futuristic, and his characters are children, whereas Tolkien
has men, boys, ladies, elves, trolls, Orcs and hobbits.

Drama in the Modern Age

The drama in the Victorian age suffered a steep decline, but it was revived with new forms of
expression in the beginning of the 20th century. Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and
Eugene O'Neill were the major dramatists that helped revived the form. Though these writers
were very different, their work shared characteristics that were representative of a new form of
drama known as modern drama. Unlike the earlier drama of Shakespeare and Sophocles,
modern drama tended to focus not on kings and heroes, but instead on ordinary people dealing
with everyday problems. And like much of the literature of this period, which expressed
reactions to rapid social change and cataclysmic events like World War I, it often dealt with the
sense of alienation and disconnectedness that average people felt in this period.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Henrik Johan Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the
founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as "the father of realism" and one of
the most influential playwrights of his time. He dealt with the problems of real life in a realistic
manner in his plays. Ibsen's dramas had a strong influence upon contemporary culture.
Major works –

1. A Doll's House (1879)

A Doll’s House (1879) – it is a three-act play.
The play concerns the fate of a married woman, who at the time in Norway lacked
reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world. It questions the
traditional roles of men and women in 19th-century marriage. To many 19th-century
Europeans, this was scandalous. The covenant of marriage was considered holy, and to portray
it as Ibsen did was controversial. Nora Helmer, who takes the role of the married woman,
defies the convention of the society and leaves her husband and children at the end of the
drama. The reasons Nora leaves her husband are complex, and various details are hinted at
throughout the play. In the last scene, she tells her husband she has been "greatly wronged" by
his disparaging and condescending treatment of her, and his attitude towards her in their
marriage – as though she were his "doll wife" — and the children in turn have become her
"dolls," leading her to doubt her own qualifications to raise her children. She is troubled by her
husband's behavior in regard to the scandal of the loaned money. She does not love her
husband, she feels they are strangers, she feels completely confused, and suggests that her
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issues are shared by many women.
Ibsen was inspired by the belief that a woman cannot be herself in modern society, since it is an
exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess
feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint.

G. B. Shaw (1856-1950)
George Bernard Shaw known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish
playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture
and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. Shaw became the leading
dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1. Man and Superman (1902-03)

Post-Modern Period or The Contemporary Period

Post-war, World War II (1939-1945)

The period after World War II was that of devastation, hopelessness and problems of
displacement. There were millions of people who were displaced, some had fled willingly
and others were deported as undesirable minorities. Most of the countries were in ruin,
Britain had largely bankrupted itself fighting the war and other Europeans countries had
precious little to spare. USA became the superpower.
The end of World War II did not bring any stability, ―the sense of fragmentation developed
into a sense of absurdity, of existential futility‖. It was an Atomic age- Hiroshima Nagasaki-
1945. And there was a general consensus that ‗the world might end any moment.

Literature in the Contemporary age

To talk about contemporary literature, we have to acknowledge World War II and its
surrounding events. The horrors of the war, including atomic bombs, genocide, holocaust and
corruption are the leading reasons which paves the way for this kind of literature. It is from
these real-life themes that is marked as the beginning of a new period of writing.
Working of contemporary literature reflects a society‗s political and social
viewpoints, shown through realistic characters, connections to current events and socio-
economic messages. The writers are looking for ways that illuminate societal strengths and
weaknesses to remind society of lessons they should learn and questions they should ask.
The idea of utopian existence and ideals of modernism are far left behind. The literature of
this age is not escapist in nature. People accepted the fragmented and disoriented world,
unlike the modernist who rejected and lamented its tragedy. There arises multiple meanings:
endless interpretations of a literary work (post structuralist). Also, there is Post Colonialism:
study of the cultural legacy of colonialism. It focuses on the consequences of the control and
exploitation of colonized people and their lands.
The literature of post-war cannot be generalized under any specific genre, it celebrated
diversity. No more heroes- individual is responsible for his or her own destiny.
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Drama in the Contemporary period

The drama of this period began with rejection of 19th century realist model in the later-half of
the 20th century. Epic theatre, theatre of cruelty and the theatre of absurd were the major
movements of the period.
Major dramatists of the period are Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, John
Osborne, Eugene Ionesco, Tom Stoppard.

The Theatre of the Absurd

The term ―Theatre of the Absurd‖ was coined by the critic Martin Esslin, who identified
common features of a new style of drama that seemed to ignore the theatrical conventions
and thwart audience expectations.
Characterised by a departure from realistic characters and situations, the play offers no clear
notion of the time or place in which the action occurs. Characters are often nameless and
seem interchangeable. Events are completely outside the realm of rational motivation and
may have a nightmarish quality. Both dialogues and incidents may appear as completely
nonsensical, even farcical. However, beneath the surface the works explore themes of
loneliness and isolation, of the failure of individuals to connect to others in a meaningful
way, and of the senselessness and absurdity of life and death. The plays focus largely on
ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning
or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a
round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Theatre of the
Absurd literary movement in Britain is pioneered by Samuel Becket and Harold Printer.
These playwrights followed the theory that Albert Camus gave in his work ‗The Myth of
Sisyphus(1942).
The writers most commonly associated with the theatre are Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco,
Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter.
This style of writing was first popularized by the Eugène Ionesco‘s play The Bald Soprano
(1950), other important Absurdist plays are Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), The
Homecoming (1965), Ping-Pong (1955) etc.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Samuel Barclay Beckett was a dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary
translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic
experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. He is considered one of
the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre
of the Absurd. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.
He started his literary career by writing short stories and novels.
Major works –
Beckett‗s major novels –

1. Molloy (1951)
2. Malone Dies (1951)
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3. The Unnamable (1953)
These three novels established Beckett‗s reputation as an influential avant-garde
writer.
Beckett‗s major plays –

1. Waiting for Godot (1953)

2. Endgame (1957)
3. Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)
4. Happy Days (1961)

Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (1953)

The play was initially written in French as En Attendant Godot. Waiting for Godot is defined
as a play in which nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, indeed, famously nothing
happens twice. The play established Beckett as the leading figure of the Theatre of the
Absurd, a form of theatre that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence through
meaningless dialogue, purposeless situations, lack of logical development and mindless
repetitions of lines and action.
The two acts are named as ‗Act I. A country road. A tree. Evening‗, and ‗Act II. Next
day. Same time. Same place.‗ To this tree come Vladimir and Estragon, with their music-
hall boots, trousers and bowler hat. These two tramps wait for someone called Godot, who doesn‗t
come. Both the tramps follow the same routine every day; they come and stand under a tree, wait
for Godot, indulge in senseless activities, keep on waiting the whole day, and decide to begin afresh
the next day.

Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994)

He was a painter and a playwright, and a number of his plays are associated with the Theatre
of the Absurd. He used black humour to criticize social and political institutions, insisting
that the only possible response to an absurd world is laughter. His plays have been
characterised as anti-plays which characteristically combine a dream or nightmarish
atmosphere with grotesque, bizarre and whimsical humour. These plays break the
conventions of naturalistic theatre and present parodies of human condition.
Major works –

1. The Bald Soprano (1950)

2. The Lesson (1951)
3. The Chairs (1952)
4. Rhinoceros (1959)
5. The Killing Game (1970)
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The Bald Soprano (1950)

It was written originally in French, La cantatrice chauve, in 1950 and was translated into
English in 1958. It was Ionesco‗s first play. The play satirises the deadliness and idiocy of the
daily life of a bourgeois society frozen in meaningless formalities. It features such absurdist
elements as a clock that strikes seventeen and a married couple who fail to recognise
each other in a social situation. The couple is going to engage in a series of questions and
answers and this will reveal that they actually live in the same house and are in fact, husband
and wife.
Although the dialogue of the play has been described as hilariously funny, the play as
a whole is considered tragedy as Ionesco attacks the stilted, artificial quality of language that
hinders communication between individuals.

The Chairs (1952)

It is a tragic farce that represents the meaninglessness of life. It has the famous metaphors for
absurdity: the multiplication of objects. As an elderly couple sets up chairs for an invisible
audience arriving to hear an important speech, the chairs begin to multiply until they fill the
entire stage. Meanwhile, the orator delivering the speech, which the old man has written to
convey an important message to the world, is unable to produce anything except guttural
sounds. The play makes the point that language and communications are illusions.

Rhinoceros (1959)

It is a response to the upsurge of forces of Fascism, Nazism and Communism.

Arthur Adamov (1908-1970)

Adamov was most famous as a playwright, although he wrote poetry, essays and an
autobiography. In the early part of his writing career, he was associated with Surrealism and
Absurdism. His plays, written in French, focused on the loneliness and isolation of all
humans, on the limited ability of individuals to make meaningful connections with
others, and on the inevitable and meaningless nature of death. Later in his career, after
the mid-1950s, he rejected Absurdism and started writing plays that were more realistic, more
optimistic, and more concerned with individuals in social and political contexts.

Major works –

1. Ping-Pong (1955)

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screen writer, director and actor. He won the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2005, and he is considered as the most influential playwright of the
post-war generation.
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Major works –

Plays

1. The Room (1957)

2. The Birthday Party (1957)

The Birthday Party (1957)

It is Pinter‗s first full-length play. In the setting of a rundown seaside boarding house, a little
birthday party is turned into a nightmare when two sinister strangers arrive unexpectedly. The
play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterised by Pinteresque elements such
as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism.
The play is actually the mingling of comedy with a perception of danger that pervade
the whole play. Stanley, the central protagonist always finds his life beset with danger. Meg
is the owner of the boarding house away from the society where Stanley stays temporarily as
a tenant. Meg arranges a birthday party in Stanley's honour though Stanley denies it being his
birthday. Two gentlemen called Mr. Goldberg and Mr. McCann come to stay in the same
boarding house for a couple of nights. Their appearance fills Stanley's mind with unexplained
fear and tension. Stanley attempts to disturb the strangers so that they will be forced to go
away. The feeling of menace is reinforced when Stanley scares Meg by saying that some
people would be coming that very day in a van.
Eventually no one comes but Mr. Goldberg and Mr. McCann take Stanley with them. In fact,
Goldberg and McCann represents parts of Stanley's own subconscious mind. Nothing is
stated or hinted about Goldberg and McCann and about their attitude towards Stanley. At best
they seem to be agents of some organisation which has sent them to track down Stanley.
*Comedy of menace – it is a play in which the laughter of the audience in some or all
situations is immediately followed by a feeling of some impending disaster. The audience is
made aware of some menace in the very midst of its laughter. The menace is produced
throughout the play from potential or actual violence or from an underline sense of violence
throughout the play. The actual cause of menace is difficult to define: it may be because, the
audience feels an uncertainty and insecurity throughout the play.

The Homecoming (1965)

It is Pinter‗s third full-length drama. The story involves a London working-class family
whose eldest son has lived in the United States for several years where he is a professor of
philosophy at a university. He returns, along with his wife, Ruth, to his father‗s home, but
when later he goes back to the United States, she refuses to accompany him. Instead, she
plans to stay behind and care for her husband‗s father, uncle, and brothers, and to earn her
living as a prostitute. The play features several absurdist elements but is also characterised by
violence, both physical and emotional, between the family members. The play has generated
a great deal of controversy because of the shocking nature of the plot.
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Tom Stoppard (1937-)

Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for
film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes
of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper
philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre
and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Stoppard was
knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Major works –

1. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) – it his first staged play.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

It is an absurdist, existential tragicomedy. The play expands upon the exploits of two minor
characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the
main setting is Denmark.
The action of Stoppard's play takes place mainly "in the wings" of Shakespeare's
Hamlet, with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who enact fragments of the
original's scenes. Between these episodes, the two protagonists voice their confusion at the
progress of events occurring onstage without them in Hamlet, of which they have no direct
knowledge.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German
theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Brecht developed the combined theory and practice
of his "Epic theatre" to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas.
*Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally
with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-
reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage. Brecht thought that the experience of
a climactic catharsis of emotion left an audience complacent. Instead, he wanted his
audiences to adopt a critical perspective in order to recognize social injustice and exploitation
and to be moved to go forth from the theatre and effect change in the world outside. For this
purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a
representation of reality and not reality itself.
Major works –

1. Baal (1922)
2. Drums in the Night (1922)
3. In the Jungle of Cities (1923)
4. Man Equals Man (1926)
5. A Respectable Wedding (1926)
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John Osborne (1929-1994)

John Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter and actor, known for his prose that
criticised established social and political norms. His works transformed British theatre. He
helped to make it artistically respected again, throwing off the formal constraints of the
former generation, theatrical rhetoric, and emotional intensity. He saw theatres as a weapon
with which ordinary people could break down the class barriers; he wanted his plays to
be a reminder of real pleasures and real pain.
Major works –

1. The Devil Inside (1950 – with Stella Linden)

2. Look Back in Anger (1956)

Look Back in Anger (1956)

The play opened on 8th May, 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. This play became a
representative of the Angry Young Men Movement. The protagonist of the play Jimmy
Porter captured the angry and rebellious nature of the post-war generation. The play is set in
a one-room attic apartment in the Midlands of England. This room is the home of Jimmy
Porter and his wife, Alison and his business partner and friend, Cliff Lewis. The cultural
backdrop of the play is set in the rise and fall of British Empire. Jimmy is the
representative of the entire culture that remained nostalgic for the past glory. He is
angry at the social and political structures that believes has kept him from achieving his
dreams and aspirations. He directs his anger towards his friends and towards his wife. The
play is also a first well-known example of ‗Kitchen sink drama‗.

*Angry Young Men Movement – the ―angry young men‖ were a group of mostly working-
and middle-class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s, after
the WWII. These are applied to young writers to describe their disillusionment with the
traditional British society. The leading figures of the movement are John Osborne and
Kingsley Amis.
*Kitchen sink drama (or kitchen sink realism) – it is a term used to describe a British
cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels,
films and television. In this movement, the protagonists are usually ―angry young men‖
disillusioned with modern society. It focuses on social realism and the depiction of
domestic situations of working-class people. Tiny houses, cramped apartments, and dimly
lit pubs are some of the settings of the drama. And these plays also deal with the social and
political issues like abortion, divorce, economic inequality, homelessness, abuse, etc.
Some major examples are It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), Look Back in Anger (1956), A
Taste of Honey (1958) etc.

Shelagh Delaney (1939-2011)

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Shelagh Delaney was an English dramatist and a screenwriter. She was associated with the
theatre of Royal Court. Her most influential work is A Taste of Honey published in 1958. It
is a beautiful combination of solid realism and romantic dream fantasy. One on hand, she
shows the innocence of young love and on the other hand shows the conflict of mother-
daughter relationship and homosexuality.

David Storey (1933-2017)

He is an English playwright, novelist and a rugby player. His major works are The
Restoration of Arnold Middleton (1966), The Contractor (1969), The Changing Room
(1971) and Life Class (1974). In all his plays, the writer sees madness and craziness as the
only defence, but these comedies are written in an unnatural form.

Novels in the Contemporary Age

After 1945, when novelists faced the task of explaining the new historical reality and the
position of individuals in the post-war order, most novelist realised that this entailed making
a choice between traditional literary models and experimental modernist models.
Postmodernism or contemporary was born out of this dilemma.

The two most innovatory novelists to begin their careers soon after World War II
were also religious believers—William Golding and Muriel Spark. In novels of poetic
compactness, they frequently return to the notion of original sin—the idea that, in Golding‗s
words, ―man produces evil as a bee produces honey.‖ Allegory and symbol set wide
resonances quivering, so that short books make large statements.
Major novelists of the contemporary age are William Golding, Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis,
Iris Murdoch, William Cooper, Anthony Powell, Doris Lessing, John Braine, John Barrington
Wain, Malcolm Lowry, Anthony Burgess, Dame Margaret Drabble etc.

William Gerald Golding (1911-1993)

Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his
debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his
lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in
what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel
Prize in Literature. As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in
1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Major works –

1. Lord of the Flies (1954) – it is the debut novel of Golding. The plot concerns a group
of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous
attempts to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and
individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and
immorality. The concept arose after Golding read what he deemed to be an unrealistic
portrayal of stranded children in the youth novel The Coral Island: a Tale of the
Pacific Ocean (1857) by R. M. Ballantyne, which includes themes of the civilising
effect of Christianity and the importance of hierarchy and leadership.
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2. The Inheritors (1955)

3. The Spire (1964)
4. The Scorpion God (1971)
5. Darkness Visible (1979)
6. Rites of Passage (1980)
7. The Paper Man (1984)
Muriel Sarah Spark (1918-2006)

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. She was
twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering
with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for a "Lifetime's
Distinguished Service to Literature".

Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)

Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than
20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and
works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim
(1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils
(1986).
Lucky Jim (1954) - It was Amis's first novel and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for
fiction. The novel follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant lecturer
at an unnamed provincial English university. The novel is dedicated to Larkin, who helped to
inspire the main character and contributed significantly to the structure of the novel.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best
known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the
unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of
Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel
The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II
for services to literature.

William Cooper (1910-2002)

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Harry Summerfield Hoff was an English novelist, writing under the name William Cooper.

Hoff wrote 17 novels in all as well as short stories, two plays and a biography of his friend
Charles Percy Snow. His fictional works were invariably optimistic and often outright comic,
but with an understated sympathy for those dealing with the problemsof ordinary life.
Major works –

1. Scenes from Provincial Life (1950)

2. The Struggles of Albert Woods (1953)
3. Disquiet and Peace (1957)

Anthony Powell (1905-2000)

Anthony Dymoke Powell was an English novelist best known for his 12-volume work A Dance
to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. It is on the list of longest novels in
English.

Doris Lessing (1919-2013)

Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran,
where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe),
where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Lessing was awarded the 2007
Nobel Prize in Literature. Lessing was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in
Literature. In 2001 Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in
British literature.

Major works –

Novels
1. Retreat to Innocence (1956)
2. Children of Violence series (1952–1969)
a. Martha Quest (1952)
b. A Proper Marriage (1954)
c. A Ripple from the Storm (1958)
d. Landlocked (1965)
e. The Four-Gated City (1969)

Poetry in the Contemporary Age

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Characteristics of Contemporary poetry

 Contemporary poetry is often written in free verse, unrhymed with no specificmetrical

rhythm.
 It is written in a language which is easily comprehensible to the readers.
 It only suggests the ideas rather than overtly stating the ideas.
 It allows the readers to form their own ideas and interpret meanings, rather than
adhering to the ideas of the poet.

Major poets of the Contemporary age are Thomas William Gunn, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin,
Hugh MacDiarmid, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Roy Broad Bent Fuller,
Charles Stanley Causley.

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Edward James "Ted" Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics
frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's
greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death.
Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath from 1956 until her death by suicide in
1963 at the age of 30. His last poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their relationship.
Major works –

1. The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

2. Remains of Elmet (with photographs by Fay Godwin) (1979)
3. Flowers and Insects (1986)
4. Wolfwatching (1989)
5. Birthday Letters (1998) — winner of the 1998 Forward Poetry Prize for bestcollection,
the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize, and the 1999 British Book of the Year award.

Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016)

Sir Geoffrey William Hill was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and
religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been
considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation and was called the
"greatest living poet in the English language." From 2010 to 2015 he held the position of
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Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. Following his receiving the Truman Capote
Award for Literary Criticism in 2009 for his Collected Critical Writings, and the publication of
Broken Hierarchies (Poems 1952–2012), Hill is recognised as one of the principal contributors
to poetry and criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Tony Harrison (1937)

Tony Harrison is an English poet, translator and playwright. He is noted for controversial works
such as the poem "V", in 2015, he was honoured with the David Cohen Prize in recognition for
his body of work. In 2016, he was awarded the Premio Feronia in Rome.
Major works –

1. The Loiners (1970)

2. From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978)
3. Continuous (50 Sonnets from the School of Eloquence and Other Poems) (1981)
4. A Kumquat for John Keats (1981)
5. V (1985)

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel
Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first
major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to
poetry in Ireland during his lifetime.

In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award
from the Griffin Trust.
Major works –

1. Death of a Naturalist (1966)

5. Seeing Things (1991)
6. Human Chain (2010)

Seeing Things deals with the death of parents, marital love and the birth of children. It is much
concerned with the validity of the visionary in reaching towards life after death. It opens with
Virgil‘s Golden Bough and ends with Virgil explaining to Dante why Charon will not ferry
him across the Styx.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
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Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.
He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir
John Betjeman.

Larkin's poetry has been characterized as combining "an ordinary, colloquial style",
"clarity", a "quiet, reflective tone", "ironic understatement" and a "direct" engagement with
"commonplace experiences", while Jean Hartley summed his style up as a "piquant mixture of
lyricism and discontent".
Major works –

1. The North Ship (1945)

2. XX Poems. (1951)
3. The Less Deceived. (1955)
a. "Church Going"
b. "Toads"
c. "Maiden Name"
d. "Born Yesterday" (written for the birth of Sally Amis)
e. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album"
4. The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
a. "The Whitsun Weddings"
b. "An Arundel Tomb"
c. "A Study of Reading Habits"
d. "Home is So Sad"
e. "Mr Bleaney"

Carol-Ann Duffy (1955-)

Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary
poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009,
resigning in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly
gay poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council
Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993),
which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), which won the T.
S. Eliot Prize. Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence in accessible
language.
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Duffy's work explores both everyday experience and the rich fantasy life of herself and others. In
dramatizing scenes from childhood, adolescence, and adult life, she discovers moments of
consolation through love, memory, and language. Duffy rose to greater prominence in UK poetry
circles after her poem "Whoever She Was" won the Poetry Society National Poetry
Competition in 1983.

Simon Armitage (1963-)

Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed
Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
He has published over 20 collections of poetry, starting with Zoom! in 1989. Many of his
poems concern his home town in West Yorkshire; these are collected in Magnetic Field: The
Marsden Poems. He has translated classic poems including the Odyssey (won the 2005 Spoken
Word Award), The Death of King Arthur, Pearl (2017 PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize
for Pearl: A New Verse Translation), and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has written
several travel books including Moon Country and Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on
the Pennine Way. He has edited poetry anthologies including one on the work of Ted Hughes.

FICTION

Angela Carter (1940-1992)

Angela Olive Pearce who published under the name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short
story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works.
She is best known for her book The Bloody Chamber, which was published in 1979. In 2012,
Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-)

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is an English novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. Ishiguro
was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when hewas five.
He is one of the most critically-acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in
English, being awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. His first two novels, A Pale View of
Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were noted for their explorations of Japanese identity
and their mournful tone. He thereafter explored other genres, including science fiction and
historical fiction. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, winning the prize
in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was adapted into a film of the same
name in 1993.
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Graham Swift (1949-)

Graham Colin Swift is an English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich
College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. Some of Swift's
books have been filmed, including Waterland (1992), Shuttlecock (1993), Last Orders (1996) and
Mothering Sunday (2021). His novel Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black
Memorial Prize for fiction and a controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the
many similarities in plot and structure to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018)
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and
nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels
of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He published
more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas
was published in 1961. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He
won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and
Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 2001.

Salman Rushdie (1947-)

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often
combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions,
and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian
subcontinent.
Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. After his
fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination
attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini,
the supreme leader of Iran. On 12 August 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the
stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at an event in Chautauqua, New
York.