A History of English Literature

Overview

Two pieces of writing published in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulyssesand T. S. Eliot’s

The Waste Land, differed in form from the novels and poems that had

preceded them. This was the crest of a new wave in English literature, from

Ezra Pound’s Lustraand Joyce’s Dubliners in 1914 to Virginia Woolf’s To the

Lighthousein 1927. The modernist writing of Joyce, Pound, Eliot and D. H.

Lawrence came when Hardy, Conrad, Shaw, Kipling and Ford were still writing,

and Yeats was becoming a powerful poet. This writing, new and old, makes the

period 1914–27 the richest in 20th-century English literature. It may be the

richest since the Romantics, and certainly since the years about 1850, when

many novelists and poets flourished.

n‘Modernism’: 1914–27

These modern writers are often called modernists. The word ‘modernism’ is a
convenience term, for the ‘-ism’ of the new is hard to define; it therefore appears in
this text without a capital letter. Although the present had begun – before 1914 – to
feel more than usually different from the past, there were no agreed principles for an
artistic pro gramme. Rather, the old ways would not do any more. Behind this sense
of a cultural ‘break’ were changes in society, politics and technology, and slackening
family, local and religious ties. As the value for the human person fostered by
Christianity and continuing in liberal humanism weakened, Marx, Freud and
Nietzsche, the fathers of modern atheism, were read. But these general factors do not
point to an obvious formulation which fits these writers as a group. Ambitious, they
br oke with prevailing formal conventions, though still possessed by older traditions,
and they invited a smaller public. ‘Modern Art’, by which was meant the painting of
Picasso, the music of Stravinsky and the poetry of Eliot, was soon an historical label.
It is now called modernist.
After a war won at a dire cost in blood, spirit and money, London was no longer
the centre to which Pound and Eliot had come, in the steps of Henry James. Young
Americans went to Paris. Pound left for Paris and Italy, Ford for Paris and the USA,
Lawrence for wilder shores, leaving Virginia Woolf as the sole remaining figure in

Contents

‘Modernism’: 1914–27 341

D. H. Lawrence 342

The Rainbow 344

James Joyce 345

Portrait of the Artist as

a Young Man 345

Ulysses 347

Ezra Pound: the London

years 349

T. S. Eliot 350

The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock 351

The Waste Land 351

Four Quartets 353

Eliot’s criticism 354

W. B. Yeats 355

Hugh MacDiarmid and

David Jones 357

Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse 359

Katherine Mansfield and

Jean Rhys 361

1928 362

Non-modernism: the

Twenties and Thirties 362

Modernism fails to

catch on 365

The poetry of the Thirties 366

Political camps 366

W. H. Auden

The novel 369

Evelyn Waugh

Grahame Greene 371

Anthony Powell 371

George Orwell 372

Elizabeth Bowen 374

Fantasy Fiction 374

C. S. Lewis 374

J. R. R. Tolkien 375

Poetr y 376

The Second World War 376

Dylan Thomas 377

Drama 377

Sean O’Casey 378

Further reading 378

341

From Post-War to

Post-War: 1920–55

13

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