Social and Historical Background

During the 1930s, the international tension grew more and mroe acute. In 1935, Italy of Mussolini invaded and subjugated Abyssinia. Hitlerite Germany tore up the Versailles Peace Treaty, contracted after World War I, and adopted a scheme for the revision of the map of Europe by seizing its neighbouring states one by one. In 1937, Japanese militarists launched a large-scale invasion of China, and Chinese people started the heroic War Against Japanese Aggression which latsed for eight years (1937-1945). In reality, a second world war had already begun in various parts of Europe and Asia. But the Conservative rulers of Britain, together with the governments of France and America, still pursued a policy of connivance and non-intervention with the aggressive actions of the fascist countries. Britain and France declared war on Germany only when Hitler invaded Pland in September 1939, threatening their interests in Europe. And this marked the formal beginning of the Second World War. 

From 1939 to 1940, Germany sweeped through Norway, Denmark, the Netherland, and Belgium successively with a lightning attack, and then occupied a gerat part of France including Paris, leaving the rest of the country to be ruled by a puppet government  in Vichy. Meantime German Luftwaffe (Air Force) launched massive bombimgs on London and other cities. But Winston Churchill became Britain's prime minister in 1941, and the British Royal Air Force frustrated Hitler's attempt at a cross-Channel invasion of Britain. 

In June 1941, Hitler abandoned his Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union and assailed the latter country with tanks and aircrafts. In the Far East, Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, and the United States joined the war. Thus formed the two sides of belligerents in the Second World War: the Allied Powers (Britain, the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and China) and the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). 

The Second World War protracted for six years (1939-1945F). To make a long story short, the encouragingly crucial moments were the Allied victories in North Africa in 1942, the surrender of a Germany army to the Soviet Union at Stalingrad in 1943, the Anglo-American landings in Normandy in 1944, and the U. S. seizure of Okinawa after a series of "island hopping" battles in the Pacific war with Japan, right to the fall of Mussolini (1943), the suicide of Hitler (1945) and the surrender of Japan (1945). The great war ended with the victory of the Allied Powers and the defeat of the Axis Powers, at the cost of about 60,000, 000 lives including those of combatants and those of civilians. The peoples of the world, while sustaining such great losses, heightened their consciousness of freedom, democracy and emancipation in the common struggle against fascism, with the result that many former colonies under imperialsit rule in Asia and Africa became independent countries following the wake of World War II. Chinese people, tempered in the eight years of life-and-death battle against Japanese aggressors, grew stronger and finally established a New China a few years after the ending of World War II. 

Meantime, history has its twists and turns. In the late 1930s, Stalin's gerat purge in the Soviet Union and his signing the Non-aggression Pact with Hitler had shocked the left-wing intellectuals in West Europe and driven a number of well-known writers and poets away from their revolutionalry positon of early 1930s. 

Ths British people suffered much during the wartime. They first lived a life of "air battle by day and bombings by night," relying only on Churchill's "stirring phrases" from broadcasts to sustain their public morale, and then endured several years of difficulites like shortage of food, rationing and separation with their youngsters on service far away. Roughly speaking, there were not very important works appearing in those years with the exception of the publication of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in 1944. "Literary periodicals like John Lehmann's 'New Writing' were widely read, and  many people whose habitual way of life had been uprooted by the war tried to express themselves in documentary prose or romantic peotry. But when the war ended this real if tentative interest in literature declined, and literary magazines which had managed to flourish in the privaitons of wartime finally collapsed when peace came." (Ifor Evans)

However, it is worthwhile to record the achievements of some major poets and novelists whose wrting careers bridged the two periods befoer and after World War II. They are: the Auden Group, Dylan Thomas, Hugh Macdiarmid, the poets, and Aldous Huxley, Evelyn waugh, Graham Greene and George Orwell, Doris Lessing, the novelsits.