20th Century Literature

Two world wars, an intervening economic depression of great severity, and the austerity of life in Britain following the second of these wars help to explain the quality and direction of English literature in the 20th century.

The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways.

Among novelists and short-story writers, Aldous Huxley best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in the period after World War I (1914-1918) in his Point Counter Point (1928). This novel is composed in such a way that the events of the plot form a contrapuntal pattern that is a departure from the straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel.

Before Huxley, and indeed before the war, the sensitively written novels of E. M. Forster (A Room with a View, 1908; Howards End, 1910) had exposed the hollowness and deadness of both abstract intellectuality and upper-class social life. Forster had called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses and for a satisfaction of the needs of ones physical being. His most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), combines these themes with an examination of the social distance separating the English ruling classes from the native inhabitants of India and shows the impossibility of continued British rule there.

D. H. Lawrence similarly related his sense of the need for a return from the complexities, over-intellectualism, and cold materialism of modern life to the primitive; unconscious springs of vitality of the race. His numerous novels and short stories, among which some of the best known are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928), are for the most part more clearly experimental than Forsters. The obvious symbolism of Lawrences plots and the forceful, straightforward preaching of his message broke the bonds of realism and replaced them with the direct projection of the authors own dynamically creative spirit. His distinguished but uneven poetry similarly deserted the fixed forms of the past to achieve a freer, more natural, and more direct expression of the perceptions of the writer.

Even more experimental and unorthodox than Lawrences novels were those of the Irish writer James Joyce. In his novel Ulysses (1922) he focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce went beyond this to create a whole new vocabulary of puns and portmanteau (merged) words from the elements of many languages and to devise a simple domestic narrative from ...