英国文学史及作品选读课件Chapter 10The Twentieth Century.pptVIP

Chapter X The Twentieth Century 1. Modernism: The twentieth century was marked by the two World Wars, the direct result of the conflicts between rival imperialist countries and their ambition to dominate the world. Roughly speaking, the development of English literature in the twentieth century can be divided into two stages, that is , literature between WWI and WWII and literature after WWII. 1.1 T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): He was born in the US. He received high education at Harvard University. He went to London when the war broke out, there he met another American poet Ezra Pound, who encouraged him and helped him publish his work The Waste Land, which established his status in literary history. Besides poetry and dramatic poetry, Eliot also wrote many essays and literary criticism. . T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” a typical example of modernism. The poem is noted for its irony, and the allusions to classical literature. He used the technique of the stream of consciousness. 1.2 James Joyce (1882-1941): An Irish born novelist, known for the technique of the stream of consciousness. His main works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): a semi-autobiographical novel; Ulysses (1922) 2. Angry Young Men A phrase loosely applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s,whose political views were radical or anarchic, and who described various forms of social alienation. It is sometimes said to derive from the title of a work by the Irish writer Leslie Paul, Angry Young Man (1951). John Osborne: Look Back in Anger (1956); 3. The Theatre of the Absurd:  A term applied to a group a dramatists who were active in the 1950’s. In the plays the dramatists express that life has no pattern of meaning or ultimate significance and that no activity is more or less valuable than another. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1952) * *