二十世纪英国文 kejian.pptVIP

The Social Background The natural and social sciences development led to great gains in material wealth. Frequent economic depressions and mass unemployment sharpened the contradictions between the rich and poor. (3) The two catastrophic world wars weakened the British Empire and brought about great sufferings to its people as well. 1. The appalling shock of the First World severely destroyed peoples faith in the Victorian values; The postwar economic dislocation and spiritual disillusion produced a profound impact upon the British people, who came to see the prevalent wretchedness in capitalism. 2. The Second World War marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire. Britain suffered heavy losses in the war: thousands of people were killed; the economy was ruined; and almost all its former colonies were lost. People were in economic, cultural, and belief crises. Realism in the 20th Century English Literature 二十世纪英国现实主义文学改变了维多利亚时代那种高雅温和的倾向，加强了对英国社会的保守性和虚伪性的批判，具有一种冷峻地直面人生的特点。 Modernism 1. A reaction against realism 2. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. 3. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, man and himself. 4. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. In their writings, the past, the present, and the future are mingled to gather and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual. English Novel of Early 20th Century The Realists: The English realists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th continued and developed the traditions of the brilliant school of critical realism. They sought for new ways and means of revealing the truth of life. In their works criticism of the bourgeois world reaches considerable