Historical Background

The Diamond Jubille Year(1897) testified the prosperity of British Empire when Britain seemed to be at the summit of its  power and security, while the dealth of the Queen Victoria in 1901 signified the end of the Victorian Age in English history as well as the literature. At the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century,the British Empire fell into a decline for the following factors. 

The Boer War of 1899-1902, between the British colonialists in South Africa and two independent republics of Dutch settlers, marked the precipitant decline in Britain's perstige and prosperity. The bankruptcy of British rural economy beginning from the 1870s grew more acute in the early years of the 20th century, and England was no longer the most important workshop of the world by 1900, being surpassed by her rival powers the U.S.A and Germany. The capitalism came into its monopoly stage, the sharpened contradictions between socialized production and the private ownership caused frequent economic depressions and mass unemployment. The gap between the rich and the poor was further deepened. Three large-scale strikes in the years 1911-1914 respectively by railwaymen, coalminers and transport workers came with the formation of the Labor Party and the spreed of the theories of socialism. 

For grabbing the world market and more colonies, the conlficts between the triple alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy with the triple entente of England, France and Russia became more and more intense, which finally caused the braking out of the first World War (1914-1918). Though emreged as a victor, England was impoverished and weakended greatly, replaced by the United States economically, politically and militarily. 

In 1917，the October Revolution broke out in Russia and the U.S. S. R emerged, which had a great effect on the world. National liberation movemtns rose all over the world. India, Egypt,Ireland and many other British colonies demanded independence, which marked the decline of the British Empire. 

In 1929, a devastating economic crisis broke out in America and quickly spread to the whole capitalist countries, which lasted for four years. In Britain, the mass unemployment deepened the social contradictions. 

The Second World War (1939-1945) marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire. The once Sun-never-set Empire finally collapsed. 

The great political, economic and military upheavals in the first four decades had their strong impact upon the culture and the literature in Britain. 

                               Cultural Background

The influcen of the theory of evolution advanced by Charles Darwin in the mid-19th century  spread far and wide, which not only shook people's religious faith, but further exerted profound influence onthe society. The late Victorian period also saws the rise of determinism. People thought that their life and future were controlled either by the environment, hereditary traits or by one's own character. Pessimism became widespread. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a pessimistic philosopher, started a rebellion against rationalism, stressing the importance of will and intuition. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines of power and superman and by completely rejecting the Christian morality. Such irrational philosophers exerted immense influence upon the major 20th century writers in Britain. 

In the field of psychology, the influence of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian physician with his theory of subconscious mind and dreams, changed the way we look at mental trouble. His theory of psychoanalysis had greatly altered our conception of human nature, which had a tremendous impact on the modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf with their stream-of-consciousness method. Karl Marx (1818-1955) thought that the pursuit of profits was responsible for various social problems and showed us another aspect of human nature. Einstein's (1879-1955) special theory of relativity changed the way people look at time and space. 

The spepticism and disillusion of capitalism after the two World Wars also destroyed people's faith in the Victorian values, and the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science made writers explore human natures and human relationships from new perspectives. Thus arose the Modernism, which took the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. 

All these social, cultural, philosophical and ideological ideas left their effect on the English literature. 

                       Literary Trends and Writers

The 20th century literature strongly refelcted the political, social, cultural and scientific events of the age. The writers of 20th century divided themselves into various trends and schools, while at the same time expreessed themselves in different genres as novel, poetry and drama. 

The transition from the 19th century to the 20th century witnessed the continue development of the critical realism. The representative realists are Thomas Hardy, John Galswrothy, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They had a great deal of sympathy for the laboring masses and uttered strong criticisms on the social evils under capitalism and imperialism. They sought for new ways of revealing the truth of life, whose works criticized the bourgeois world deeply and poignantly. The pessimism and fatalism were seen in Thomas Hardy. Oscar Wilde advocated the theory of "art for art's sake". Galswrothy's Forsyte novels reveaved the corrupted capitalist world. Shaw succeeded in making use of the drama as an effective weapon to attack the various social evils in the bourgeois world as well as the very foundations of monopoly capitalism. 

Realism was, to a certain degree, eclipsed by the rapid rise of modernism in the 1920s. Modernism took the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are th distortd, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man,  man and himself. The modernist writers concentrated 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, and they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual. The representative mondernists  are D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc.