英国文学简史-常耀信-Chapters-25-26.pptVIP

A Tentative Conclusion Generally, contemporary English writers tend to back out of the boisterous chaos of the larger world into their smaller, insular serenity. It is true that they focus on the less significant, even trivial and parochial, themes. The dexterously wrought microscopic kinds of art, dealing with the parts rather than the whole of human experience, may be just taking over as the dominant fashion of literary creation. Key Points in Chapter 25 Postwar Fiction Kingsley Amis Lawrence Durrell William Golding Doris Lessing Iris Murdoch John Wain John Fowles Alan Silllitoe Anthony Powell Postwar Fiction Introduction I The war made everything different. Postwar Britain experienced immense changes. Democratization and socialization occurred, values were shifting, and class differences became less acute People tended to value the day-to-day experience and take it easy. The young intellectuals of the 1950s were normally iconoclastic and anti-established standards. Ambitious and disillusioned, they lashed out against contemporary society. Postwar Fiction Introduction II In formal terms they were in revolt against the high literary ideals of modernism and wrote in a deliberately vulgar, comic, and satirical vein. They created characters that represented their radical, parochial attitudes and became known as “the Angry Young Men.” The epithet, “the Angry Young Men,” was originally a journalistic term used to describe a group of playwrights and novelists of the mid-1950s, but it has also come to refer loosely to the major characters that these authors have created. Postwar Fiction Introduction III For instance, Kingsley Amis’ Jim Dixon in his Lucky Jim, William Cooper’s Joe Lunn in his Scenes from Provincial Life, and John Gerals Braine’s Joe Lampton in his Room at the top. Special mentions should be made here of John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger, which, giving manifest expression to the disaffection of the postwar generation, gave it the name of “th