20th Cent. Fiction – Norton Anthalogy

1. Novels in Henry James’s Phrase: “Loose Baggy Monsters”.

2. 20the Cent. novels can be divided into 3 subperiods:

  • High Modernism through 1920s: celebrating personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and difficulty.
  • 1930s, 40s, 50s: Reaction against Modernism; A return to social realism, moralism, and assorted documentary.
  • After the collapse of the British empire (esp. 1960s): The fictional claims of various realisms; the enduring legacy of modernism.

3. At the end of the cent.: Postmodernism – Postcolonialism >> Panoramic mix of voices ind styles.

4. 1912 – 1930: The Heroic Age of the Modern Novel.

  • The disappearance of the general background of belief which united the novelists with their public. >> Building up new values.
  • A new view of time: as a continuous flow in the conscious of the individual.
  • The new notions of the nature of consciousness.

5. The stream of consciousness technique was developed in 1920s.

6. The search for communion and inescapable isolation of Leopold Bloom in Ulyssis is symbolic of human condition as seen by modern novelists.

7. The dilemma of human condition is never solved in these novels.

8. Lawrence’s novels themes: Human relationships.

9. The documentary novelists presented the changing social scene. >> Woolfe called these writers materialists.

10. The short story benefited from the techniques of exploration in depth.

20th Cent. Poetry – Norton Anthalogy

1. The Imagist Movement; Influenced by T. S, Hulmes insistence on clear, hard, precise images. Developed initially in London.

2. Dictated by Ezra Pound: “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’, whether subjective or objective, on the avoidance of all words that did not contribute to the presentation and on a freer metrical movement than a strict adherence to the sequence of a movement” could allow.

3. Sir Herbert Gierson’s 1912 ed. of Donne’s poems both reflected and encouraged enthusiasm for 17th Cent. Metaphysical poetry. >> More intellectual complexity.

4. French symbolist poetry was appreciated for its imagistic precision and complexity.

5. Union of thought and passion.

6. *** Wilfred Owen: “I suppose I am doing in poetry what the advanced composers do in music.”

7. Neutral tone, after Ww II, gave way to a direct and human voice. >> New Apocalypse Poets >> they owed their imagistic audacity and rhetorical violence to French Surrealism.

8. 1950s: “The Movement”: Aimed for a neutral tone and a purity of diction. (Philip Larkin)

9. Late 1950s and 1960s: Poems that suggest the violence and irrationality of modern history.

10. Since 1980s: New voices came into Eng. Lit. tradition.

 

20th Cent. Norton Anthalogy

1. 1870: the Education Act
2. Samuel Butler, in his “the Way Of All Flesh” attacked the Victorian conceptions of family, edu., and religion. This work is the bitterest in Eng. Lit. of Victorian way of life.

3. Thomas Hardy marked the end of the Victorian period and the dawn of the new age in his poem “the Darkling Thrush”, originally titled “By The Century’s Deathbed”. It opens with the description of winter, and exemplifies the pessimism of imaginative writing in the last decade of the 19th and first decade of the 20th Cent.

4. Stoicism characterizes the literature written in the transitional period between the Victorian era and modernism.

5. Sir James Frazer’s “Golden Bough” and other works of anthropology, were altering basic conceptions of culture, religion, and myth.

6. Eliot describes in “Four Quarters” his quest for the “still point of all the turning world”.

7. 1882: “The Married Woman’s Property Act”

8. 1899-1902: Anglo-Bower war (the beginning of Britain’s political history)

9. the 1930s: the Red Decad.