7. English Language Literature Since 1900

The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy. The author of the classic novels Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd , Hardy concentrated on poetry after the harsh response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure .

The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems that were often based on his experiences in British India. To date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kipling’s novels include The Jungle Book , The Man Who Would Be King and Kim , while his inspirational poem If— is a national favourite. Like William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus it has inspired such people as Nelson Mandela when he was incarcerated, If— is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, regarded as a traditional British virtue. Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands 1903, defined the spy novel. The Scarlet Pimpernel 1905, by Emma Orczy, is a precursor to the “disguised superhero”. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows and the Scouts founder Robert Baden Powell’s first book Scouting for Boys was published. John Buchan penned the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. The medieval scholar M. R. James wrote highly regarded ghost stories in contemporary settings. Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output.

From around 1910, the Modernist Movement began to influence English literature. While their Victorian predecessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20th century writers such as James Joyce often felt alienated from it, so responded by writing more intellectually challenging works or by pushing the boundaries of acceptable content.

Major poets of this period in Britain included the American-born T. S. Eliot and Irishman W. B. Yeats. Free verse and other stylistic innovations came to the forefront in this era.

The experiences of the First World War were reflected in the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon. Following the Arab Revolt, T. E. Lawrence “ Lawrence of Arabia ” wrote his autobiographical account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom .

Important novelists between the two world wars include Irish writer James Joyce, alongside English authors D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, C. S. Forester and P. G. Wodehouse.

Joyce’s complex works included Ulysses , arguably the most important work of Modernist literature, referred to as “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”. It is amongst other things an interpretation of the Odyssey, its events taking place over one day in Dublin in June 1904. From the year of its publication in 1922 until 1939, Joyce worked on his final and probably least accessible work, Finnegans Wake .

D. H. Lawrence wrote with understanding about the social life of the lower and middle classes, and the personal life of those who could not adapt to the social norms of his time. Sons and Lovers 1913, is widely regarded as his earliest masterpiece. There followed The Rainbow 1915, and its sequel Women in Love 1920. Lawrence attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the acceptable treatment of sexual issues, most notably in Lady Chatterley’s Lover 1928.

Virginia Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway 1925, To the Lighthouse 1927, Orlando 1928, The Waves 1931, and A Room of One’s Own 1929, which contains her famous dictum: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India 1924, reflected challenges to imperialism, while his earlier works such as A Room with a View and Howards End , examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society in England. Robert Graves is best known for his 1934 novel I Claudius .

The popularity of novelists who wrote in a more traditional style, such as Nobel Prize laureate John Galsworthy, whose novels include The Forsyte Saga , and Arnold Bennett, author of The Old Wives’ Tale , continued in the interwar period. At the same time the Georgian poets maintained a more conservative approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism, sandwiched between the Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and modernism, with its strident rejection of pure aestheticism.

Novels featuring a gentleman adventurer were popular between the wars, exemplified by the series of H. C. McNeile with Bulldog Drummond 1920, and Leslie Charteris, whose many books chronicled the adventures of Simon Templar, alias The Saint.

Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World 1932, anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism. James Hilton’s Lost Horizon 1933, is best remembered as the origin of Shangri-La, the mythical utopian monastery in the mountains of Tibet. His other notable book is Goodbye Mr. Chips . Author and playwright Daphne Du Maurier wrote the mystery novel Rebecca in 1938, followed by short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now . W. Somerset Maugham’s most notable work is Of Human Bondage , which is strongly autobiographical and is generally agreed to be his masterpiece. Novelist A. J. Cronin often drew on his experiences practising medicine. The Citadel 1937, was groundbreaking in its treatment of the contentious theme of medical ethics, and is credited with laying a foundation for the introduction of the NHS in the U.K. a decade later.

Evelyn Waugh satirised the “bright young things” of the 1920s and 1930s, notably in A Handful of Dust , and Decline and Fall , while his magnum opus Brideshead Revisited 1945, has a theological basis, aiming to examine the effect of divine grace on its main characters.

Classics of children’s literature include of A.A. Milne’s collection of books about a fictional bear he named Winnie-the-Pooh , who inhabits Hundred Acre Wood. Prolific children’s author Enid Blyton chronicled the adventures of a group of young children and their dog in The Famous Five . T. H. White wrote the Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King , the first part being The Sword in the Stone 1938. Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers , featuring tiny people who borrow from humans. Inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden , was the Great Maytham Hall Garden in Kent. Hugh Lofting created the character Doctor Dolittle who appears in a series of twelve books, while the novelist Dodie Smith wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians featuring the villainous Cruella de Vil.

Agatha Christie was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Christie’s works, particularly featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the“Queen of Crime” and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Christie’s novels include, Murder on the Orient Express 1934, Death on the Nile 1937 and And Then There Were None 1939. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers. The novelist Georgette Heyercreated the historical romance genre.

The Auden Group, sometimes called simply the Thirties Poets , was a group of British and Irish writers active in the 1930s that included W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and sometimes Edward Upward and Rex Warner.

One of the most significant English writers of this period was George Orwell. An essayist and novelist, Orwell’s works are considered among the most important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. Dealing with issues such as poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London , totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm , and colonialism in Burmese Days . Orwell’s works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case of Homage to Catalonia , wholly. Malcolm Lowry is best known for Under the Volcano.

From the early 1930s to late 1940s, an informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the “Inklings”. Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is known for his fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters 1942, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy , while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit 1937, The Lord of the Rings , and The Silmarillion .

One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war period was William Cooper’s naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life , a conscious rejection of the modernist tradition. Kitchen sink realism （or kitchen sink drama ） is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art （the term itself derives from an expressionist painting by John Bratby）, novels, film and television plays, whose authors were sometimes described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism which often depicted the domestic situations of working class Britons to explore social issues and political controversies. In drama of the post war period, the drawing room plays typical of dramatists like Terence Rattigan or Noel Coward were challenged in the 1950s by the Angry Young Men, exemplified by John Osborne’s iconic play Look Back in Anger . Arnold Wesker and Nell Dunn also brought social concerns to the stage.

Nobel Prize laureate William Golding’s allegorical novel Lord of the Flies 1954, discusses how culture created by man fails, and uses as an example a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results.

Graham Greene’s works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Notable for an ability to combine serious literary acclaim with broad popularity, hisnovels include Brighton Rock , The Power and the Glory , The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair .

Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange 1962, displays the prevention of the main character Alex’s exercise of his free will through the use of a classical conditioning technique. Burgess creates a new speech in his novel that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future.

Comic novelist Kingsley Amis is best known for his academic satire Lucky Jim 1954. Iris Murdoch’s novels dealt with sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious, as displayed in Under the Net 1954. Scottish writer Muriel Spark pushed the boundaries of realism in her novels. Her first, The Comforters （1957） concerns a woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel; The Ballad of Peckham Rye （1960） has a character who, in line with a tradition of Scottish literature, is literally the devil incarnate. The narrator of her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie （1961）, at times takes the reader briefly into the main action’s distant future, to see the various fates that befall its characters.

In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond’s adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale 1953, Live and Let Die 1954, Dr. No 1958, Goldfinger 1959, Thunderball 1961, and nine short story works. In contrast to the larger-than-life spy capers of Bond, John le Carré was an author of spy novels who depicted a shadowy world of espionage and counter-espionage, and his best known novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 1963, is often regarded as one of the greatest in the genre. Frederick Forsyth writes thriller novels, including The Day of the Jackal 1971, The Odessa File 1972, The Dogs of War 1974 and The Fourth Protocol 1984. Ken Follet writes spy thrillers, his first success being Eye of the Needle 1978, followed by The Key to Rebecca 1980, as well as historical novels, notably The Pillars of the Earth 1989, and its sequel World Without End 2007. Elleston Trevor is remembered for his 1964 adventure story The Flight of the Phoenix , while the thriller novelist Philip Nicholson is best known for Man on Fire .

The “father of Wicca” Gerald Gardner began propagating his own version of witchcraft in the 1950s. Having claimed to have been initiated into the New Forest coven in 1939, Gardner published his books Witchcraft Today 1954 and The Meaning of Witchcraft 1959, the foundational texts for the religion of Wicca. Ronald Welch’s Carnegie Medal winning novel Knight Crusader is set in the 12th century and gives a depiction of the Third Crusade, featuring the Christian leader and King of England Richard the Lionheart.

The leading poets of the middle and later 20th century included the traditionalist John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and the Northern Irish Catholic Seamus Heaney, who lived in the Republic of Ireland for much of his later life. In the 1960s and 1970s, Martian poetry aimed to break the grip of “the familiar”, by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways, as though, for example, through the eyes of a Martian. This drive to make the familiar strange was carried into fiction by Martin Amis.

The British Poetry Revival was a wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry. Leading poets associated with this movement include J. H. Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Lee Harwood. The Mersey Beat poets were Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war.

In crime fiction, the murder mysteries of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James are popular. Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume cycle of novels A Dance to the Music of Time , is a comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century.

War novels include Alistair MacLean’s thriller The Guns of Navarone 1957, Where Eagles Dare 1968, and Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed 1975. Patrick O’Brian’s nautical historical novels feature the Aubrey-Maturin Series set in the Royal Navy, the first being Master and Commander 1969.

John Wyndham wrote post-apocalyptic science fiction, his most notable works being The

Day of the Triffids 1951, and The Midwich Cuckoos 1957. George Langelaan’s The Fly 1957, is a science fiction short story, while Peter George’s Red Alert 1958, is a Cold War thriller. Mervyn Peake wrote the Gormenghast series, a trilogy based in Gormenghast castle. Michael Moorcock was the prime instigator of the science fiction “New Wave” in 1964. John Fowles’wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman , with its narrator who freely admits the fictive nature of the story he relays, and its famous alternative endings, in 1969.

Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children’s fantasy novels, often inspired from experiences from his childhood, that are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. Dahl was inspired to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964, featuring the eccentric candymaker Willy Wonka, having grown up near two chocolate makers in England who often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies into the other’sfactory. His other works include, James and the Giant Peach 1961, Fantastic Mr. Fox 1971, The Witches 1983, and Matilda 1988.

Nigel Tranter wrote historical novels of celebrated Scottish warriors; Robert the Bruce in The Bruce Trilogy , and William Wallace in The Wallace 1975, works noted by academics for their accuracy.

Angela Carter’s magical realism novels include, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 1972, and Nights at the Circus 1984.

Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , is based on his various short stories, particularly The Sentinel . His other major novels include Rendezvous with Rama 1972, and The Fountains of Paradise 1979. Brian Aldiss is Clarke’s contemporary.

Richard Adams wrote the heroic fantasy Watership Down in 1972. Evoking epic themes, it recounts the Odyssey of a group of rabbits seeking to establish a new home.

Salman Rushdie achieved notability with Midnight’s Children 1981, that was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Booker prize later that year, and was named Booker of Bookers in 1993. His most controversial novel The Satanic Verses 1989, was inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. The Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul wrote A Bend in the River .

Boarding schools in literature are centred on older pre-adolescent and adolescent school life, and are most commonly set in English Boarding schools. Popular school stories from this period include Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s and Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch .

Ruth Manning-Sanders collected and retold fairy tales, and her first work A Book of Giants , contains a number of famous giants, notably Jack and the Beanstalk . Novelist Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising , is a five-volume fantasy saga set in and around England and Wales. Raymond Briggs children’s picture book The Snowman 1978, is shown every Christmas on British television in cartoon form and on the stage as a musical. The Reverend W. Awdry and son Christopher’s The Railway Series features Thomas the Tank Engine . Margery Sharp’s most famous books are The Rescuers series, based on a heroic mouse organisation. The third Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo published War Horse in 1982. The prolific children’s author Dick King-Smith’s novels include The Sheep-Pig 1984, and The Water Horse . Diana Wynne Jones is noted for writing the young adult fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle 1986.

Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld series of comic fantasy novels, that begins with The Colour of Magic 1983, and includes Mort 1987, Hogfather 1996, and Night Watch 2002. Pratchett’s other most notable work is the 1990 novel Good Omens .

Douglas Adams wrote the five-volume science fiction comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , and also wrote the humorous fantasy detective novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency .

Clive Barker horror novels include The Hellbound Heart 1986, and works in fantasy, Weaveworld 1987, Imajica and Abarat 2002.

J. G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun 1984, is based on his boyhood experiences in a Shanghai internment camp.

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote historical novels in the first-person narrative style. His works include, The Remains of the Day 1989, Never Let Me Go 2005. A. S. Byatt is best known for Possession 1990, with Sebastian Faulks Birdsong 1993, and Louis de Bernières Captain Corelli’s Mandolin 1993. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting 1993, gives a brutal depiction of the lives of working class Edinburgh drug users.

Science fiction novelist Iain M. Banks created a fictional anarchist, socialist, and utopian society the Culture, and novels that feature in it include Excession 1996, and Inversions 1998. Nick Hornby’s works include High Fidelity 1995, and About a Boy 1998, with Nicholas Evans The Horse Whisperer 1995.

Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary 1996, and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of

Reason 1999, chronicle the life of Bridget Jones, a thirtysomething single woman in London. Alex Garland’s works include The Beach 1996, Giles Foden wrote the Last King of Scotland 1998, and Joanne Harris’s most notable work is Chocolat 1999. Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series, begins with Stormbreaker 2000.

Philip Pullman is best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials , that comprises Northern Lights 1995, The Subtle Knife 1997, and The Amber Spyglass 2000. It is a coming-of-age story with many epic events. Neil Gaiman is an esteemed writer of science fiction, fantasy short stories and novels, whose notable works include Stardust 1998, Coraline 2002, The Graveyard Book 2009, and The Sandman series. Alan Moore’s works include Watchmen , V for Vendetta set in a dystopian future U.K., The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , and From Hell , speculating on the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement 2001, refers to the process of forgiving or pardoning a transgression, and alludes to the main characters’ search for atonement in interwar England. His 2005 novel Saturday , follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon.

Zadie Smith’s Whitbread Book Award winning novel White Teeth 2000, mixes pathos and humour, focusing on the later lives of two wartime friends in London. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 2003 by Mark Haddon, is written in the first-person perspective of a 15-year-old boy with autism living in Wiltshire. The first novel from Susanna Clarke is the historical fantasy Jonathan Strange ＆ Mr Norrell 2004, that investigates the nature of“Englishness” and the boundary between reason and madness. Notable works of the 2007 Nobel Prize recipient Doris Lessing include, The Grass is Singing , and The Golden Notebook . Hilary Mantel’s Booker prize winning novel Wolf Hall 2009, is set in the Tudor court of King Henry VIII.

J. K. Rowling¹³’s Harry Potter fantasy series, is a collection of seven fantasy novels that chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter, the idea for which Rowling conceived whilst she was on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The series begins with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 1997, and ends with the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2007.

In the 1950s, the bleak absurdist play Waiting for Godot , by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett profoundly affected British drama. The Theatre of the Absurd influenced playwrights of the later decades of the 20th century, including Harold Pinter, whose works are often characterised by menace or claustrophobia, and Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s works are however also notable for their high-spirited wit and the great range of intellectual issues which he tackles in different plays. Michael Frayn is among other playwrights noted for their use of language and ideas.

Formerly an appointment for life, the appointment of the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom is now made for a fixed term of 10 years, starting with Andrew Motion in 1999 as successor to Ted Hughes. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded Motion in the post in May 2009. A position of national laureate, entitled The Scots Makar , was established in 2004 by the Scottish Parliament. The first appointment was made directly by the Parliament in that year when Edwin Morgan received the honour. The post of National Poet of Wales （Welsh: Bardd Cenedlaethol Cymru ） was established in May 2005. The post is an annual appointment with the language of the poet alternating between English and Welsh.