A History of English Literature

also believable. Tolkien’s work has a kind of dreamlike moral innocence, a contrast to Lewis’s logic, ingenuity and cleverness. ...

that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ Sh ...

language they use, is rich and living’ (his native Ireland?) to ‘the modern literature of towns’ (Paris or London?), where we fi ...

Overview The change after 1955 is clearest in drama, where Beckett’s impact over- turned conventions. The marked change from Rat ...

380 14 · BEGINNING AGAIN: 1955–80 Events and publications 1955– Events Publications 1955 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot; Bren ...

1960s a storm went through. Its harbingers, Beckett and Golding, were neither young nor consistently grim. nDrama Samuel Beckett ...

1955, following plays by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Camus had put forward t ...

VLADIMIR: Did you ever read the Bible? ESTRAGON: The Bible ... (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it. VLADIMIR: Do you r ...

a stage role they had not had for centuries. Beckett used directors, but liked to gauge every detail of his plays, every word, m ...

Harold Pinter Another actor,Harold Pinter(1930–2008), son of a tailor in the East End of London, learned from Beckett and the Th ...

Already by 1960, the theatre of Beckett and Pinter had triumphed. Yet The Waste Land had already left the themes of the meaningl ...

nNovels galore In 1990 England’s leading secondhand bookseller, Booth of Hay-on-Wye, calculated that the gross number of new tit ...

William Golding William Golding(1911–1993) is a name likely to last, and not only for his immensely popular Lord of the Flies(19 ...

Drawn slowly into their collective and undifferentiated language, we come to know the people and see old Mal succeeded as leader ...

New York, Rome and Tuscany. Her engaging and ingenious novels are often set in largely female institutions – a hospital ward, a ...

as an editor in London publishing is Alice Thomas Ellis (1932–2005). Her work was often compared to that of Muriel Spark, in tha ...

based on Thomas Hardy’s locales and situations but lit by the dark light of Freud and a delight in the improper underside of Vic ...

written for the majority. Though social reportage has produced valuable results, from Zola to some of the work of V. S. Naipaul, ...

Until Victorian times, poetry and poetic drama were the most highly esteemed forms of English literature, but it has now to be r ...

Geoffrey Hill, find few readers. The enthusiasm with which identifiable groups responded to the American ‘Beat’ poets, or to Joh ...