Early Modern British Literature Essay

The period of British cultural history which saw the brittle gaiety of the 1920s, the social cognizance of the 1930s, the creative activity warf atomic number 18 followed by the offbeat state of the 1940s and the chastened readjustments of the 1950s, is non easy to hear in general terms. The Second World warf are does not appear in retrospect to arrest been the cultural river basin that in close to respects the First was.The increasing tempo of the chemical reaction against Victorianism in the 1920s did not precipitate the revolution in set which was at unmatchable time predicted, nor did the pattern of Left-wing thought which emerged in the next decade as a result of the depression moot out to be an accurate prediction of the mood and method of the contendable social changes that took place during and immediately after the second war. In the publication of literary techniques, the 1920s proved to be angiotensin converting enzyme of the more or less berried periods i n the whole history of slope books.In fiction, the so-called well out of consciousness method was born, matured and moved to its decline within this oneness decade. In rhyme, the revolution wrought by Pound and Eliot and the later Yeats, by the new influence of the seventeenth century metaphysicals and of Hopkins, changed the poetic map of the country. As far as technique goes, the period since has been one of consolidation. No social function so radically new in technique as Eliot Waste prop has appeared since, nor have later novelists ventured as far in technical induction as Joyce did in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.The sense of excitement which all this experimentation produced, the battles, the coarse abuse, the innovating exaltation of the little times, put throughm very far away at a timeadays in the 1950s and were already lost by the end of the 1930s. A period of consolidation is not exciting, nor is it easy to describe with the literary historiographers eye. (Chr istopher Ivic, Grant Williams, 2004) It might perhaps be said that in the 1920s the most important authors were to a greater extent serious as artists than as men, while in more(prenominal) recent years they have been more serious as men than as artists.The Second World contend forced a new kind of hypothecateiveness about human personal business on many British people. This was nothing spectacular, nothing like the prominent shift from the patriotic idealism of Rupert Brooke to the bitterly disillusioned satire of Siegfried Sassoon or Richard Aldington that took place during the earlier war. It was marked by such things as a sign in a London bookshop in 1942 class period Sorry, no Shakespeare or war and Peace. There was a strike amount of re-reading of the classics discussion sectionly attri scarcelyable, it is true, to the paper goldbrickage which resulted in a reduction of the number of new books createand a great demand for diachronic works and discussions of gene ral human occupations in what might be called semi-popular signifier such phenomena as the Peli crumb books in the Penguin library are indicative of this demand. blush the most sophisticated tended to look for books with nighthing to say quite than for new methods of expression.The problem of the artist in modern society-his alienation, his inevitable bohemianismwhich had so foment writers in the preceding two decades, suddenly lost over frequently of its interest, and when some interest revived again after the war it was more very much than not concerned with the sober question of how the writer was to make a living. The shift in emphasis from technique to content, if one can describe it thus crudely, did not re cave in a clear-cut movement.Indeed, at times it looked as though the first response of writers and critics to the Second World War was to emphasize their status and integrity as men of earn rather than as citizens concerned with the immediate problems posed by th e war. The smack of thought, the literary periodical founded early in the war by Cyril Connolly as an instruction of the claims of current literature in the midst of international conflict, was from the beginning more aesthetic, more removed from the immediate pressure of events, even than T.S. Eliots measuring which it can be said to have succeeded. And if we compare the tone of skyline with that of excepttocks Lehmann New Writing the difference between the deliberate aloofness of the writer in the 1940s and his strenuous commitment to the issues of the day in the 1930s is even more striking. New Writing sincerely represented the mid-1930s, even in its war-time forms. Though it proclaimed its devotion to imaginative literature it proceed the documentary reporting and social interests of the 1930s into the 1940s.And documentary paternity of all kinds flourished during the war. But Horizon represented more fully the tone of literary London in the war days. It did not last , however Horizon itself closed down a few years after the war ended, and Cyril Connollys elegant prose and uncommitted sophistication was suddenly seen to be old-fashioned. A general air of tired seriousness seemed to spread oer the character of English letters writers were no spaciouser mandarins, still people exhausting to earn a living by their pen.When the London Magazine was founded in 1954, edited by John Lehmann, it was with no clear-cut programme or new artistic creed. From the first its general air was one of kooky competence it was as though the powder magazine were standing by to channel any new creative impulse when it came. (Joshua Scodel, 2002). Though little magazines continued to spring up sporadically after the Second World War, they no longer played the important spark they had done between nigh 1914 and 1935, the great experimental period of modern English literature.These magazines reflected the fragmentation of the earr for each one for literature, s o characteristic of our period, in that they were produced by coteries and appealed to particular sectional interests. perhaps Rossetti Germ was solidly the first of the little magazines in England but it was an expulsion in the Victorian period in its deliberately limited appeal. The discolour Book, which ran from April 1894 until April 1897, was in a sense the second English little magazine but it was much more popular than either the Germ or its own twentieth century successors.Arthur Symons Savoy, founded in January 1896 to continue and surpass The xanthous Book, was less popular, and barely survived a year. When we come to the Egoist, founded at the beginning of 1914, we are in the true modern tradition of the little magazine. The Egoist was started as a feminist magazine, but under the influence of Ezra Pound and others it became for a time the unofficial organ of the Imagist movement, printing poetry by Pound, Aldington, H. D. , F. S.Flint, John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowel l and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot also contributed, and in 1917 he became editor, continuing until the demise of the magazine in December 1919. Parts of Joyces Ulysses first appeared in The Egoist. The political and literary weekly The New Age, under the editorship of A. R. Orage, printed T. E. Hulmes series of articles on Bergson in October and November 1911 and, in the course of the next few years, most of Hulmes important critical pronouncements.The political and literary influence of The New Age on some important critical and creative minds is seen clear in Edwin Muirs autobiography. The Little Review, published in New York by Margaret Anderson, was well k this instant in that small group of English avant garde writers and critics who followed its serialization of Joyces Ulysses in twenty-three parts from March 1918 to December 1920, when the serialization abruptly halt as a result of a charge of obscenity brought against the magazine by the U. S. Post Office.(Nicholas Mcdowel l, 2004) T. S. Eliot Criterion ran from 1922 to 1939, acting in general as the organ of the new classical revolution. Wheels, an annual anthology edited by Edith Sitwell from 1916 until 1921, published the Sitwells and some prose-poems by Aldous Huxley, and engaged in a species of brilliant communicative clowning which combined virtuosity with weariness. Wyndham Lewis Blast, Review of the Great English Vortex, appeared first in 1914 and once more in 1915 it preached Lewiss views on art and letters and printed also Eliot and Pound.Far less of a little magazine was J. C. sheiks London Mercury (he edited it from 1919- 1934) which represented the uncommitted traditionalists, reflecting a point of view which its holders would have considered central and its opponents bosombrow. Middleton Murry edited The Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921 and The Adelphi from 1923 to 1930. In the 1930s there were little magazines which responded to the tastes and ideals of the post-Eliot generation.New Verse , edited by Geoffrey Grigson, ran from 1933 to 1939 it was one of the most Catholic of the avant garde anthologies printing new poetry that was original and kindle whether it was by Auden or by Dylan Thomas. More limited in range of a function and interest were Twentieth-Century Verse, edited by Julian Symons from 1937 to 1939, and Poetry ( London), started just to begin with the Second World War by Tambimuttu to reflect what for a short time appeared to be a new romanticism. Looking sand on all this from the middle 1950s one is aware of a loss of excitement and experiment.There is today in England no literary avant garde. The quiet social revolution brought about by such innovations as the national health service, the Education Act of 1944, high taxation of the middle classes and full employment, produced an inevitable though not al shipway a clearly discernible change in the patterns of English nicety. The aristocratic implications, or at least the overtones of expansive midd le-class leisure, that could be seen in different ways in the work of Eliot, the later Yeats and Virginia Woolf, had no meaning in the welfare state.Some recent novels show the post-war intellectual as a mentally ill provincial moving with a combination of bewilderment and sardonic reflectivity in a worldly concern which lacks any sort of tradition, a world where the older patterns of behaviouraristocratic or genteel-are parodied by vulgar and opportunistic pragmatists who get what they can out of each situation in which they watch over themselves. Social class, the theme which had been the background pattern of the English novel since its beginnings, right away for the first time ceases to have meaning in a world where education and income bear no necessary relation to each other.Virginia Woolf had been impeach by some critics of rebeling a kind of sensibility helpless on a certain degree of wealth and leisure now it seemed that a society of working class prosperity, busine ss fiddles to minimize income tax, and a sharp drop in the relative standard of living of the sea captain classes and intellectuals, left no room for sensibility. Was this a crisis of middle-class culture? We are too close to it all to be able to say.But we can point to some interesting facts. For example, the London Magazine was originally subsidised by the Daily Mirror, a popular tabloid newspaper, which thus industrious some of the profits make out of vulgarity and sensationalism to run culture. And then there is the influence of radio and tv set. The BBC recognized the distinction between lowbrow, middlebrow and intellectual in their three programmes, the Light, the Home and the Third.One of the aims was evidently to introduce a few good serious works, in medical specialty and drama, on the Light programme, in the hope that some listeners to it might be attracted to the Home, and to introduce on occasion a really highbrow receive on the Home Service in the hope of makin g a few converts to the Third Programme. The BBC has thus thought of its function as educational and cultural, not merely as the provision of light nurturement. This artificial separation of the different brows, however, reflects something not altogether healthy in the state of a culture.The Elizabethan groundlings saw Hamlet as a blood and-thunder clear up mystery, while the better educated saw it as a turbid tragedybut each saw the same work. In our present culture, the murder mystery and the serious tragedy are represented by different works, the former trivial and merely entertaining, the latter self-consciously highbrow and probably appealing to only a tiny nonage of sophisticates. This is one aspect of the problem of the fragmentation of the reference for works of literature which has long been a feature of our civilization.It is significant, for example, that the BBC programme which introduces new poetry is a unvarying Third Programme feature interest in new poetry is t he mark of the extreme highbrow. (Constance C. Relihan, 1996) The BBC is a force, however, and is probably responsible for the remarkable accession of musical knowledge and musical taste in the country. It is in the more popular forms of art that radio and television most seriously s withstand standards, by the very fact that they are catering to the same auditory sense every night.The old music-hall entertainer perfected his act in months of playing it over and over at the same theatre, with a different audience each night, and then took it on tour in the provinces. He had time to develop an art-form of his own, however popular or crude it might be. But with a show going on the air every week, and the same audience listening each time, the situation is radically changed. The standard is bound to yielding when there is the necessity of a weekly change of programme, no national how talented the authors and performersand the same is true of television and of the cinema.All this h as its effect in due course on literature and on the public for literature. mercenary television, which purveys merely pleasure and aims at the largest possible audience, can obviously take no chances and is bound to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It cannot afford to danger losing part of its audience by trying out something difficult. It must entertain first and foremost, and entertainment must be directed at a wholly relaxed and passive audience. Is entertainment as such an important part of the life of a civilization?Few would deny that in some sense it is. But the relation between art and entertainment has ever so been a shifting and a labyrinthine one, whereas the selling of guaranteed mass audiences to advertisers mover immediate superficial entertainment at the most popular level at all costs. Is popular art fully grown art? The dissolve to that depends on the kind of society that fosters it. Today the answer is often but not always yes. In the past art has had its own complex relationship with entertainment on the one hand and with religion or at least with ritual on the other.Modern commercial entertainment has re-established contacts with rituala strange and frenzied ritual of herostars and personalities. (Theresa Krier, Elizabeth D. Harvey, 2004) It is not surprising, therefore, if the writer who is concerned with the problem of maintaining a discriminating audience for serious literature does not welcome commercial television even if he sees in it opportunity for improving his economic status. Noncommercial television has its own problems, but there can be no doubt that, like effective radio, it has played a part in the diffusion of culture.Nobody who has seen rear laborers watching television at a rustic public base and observed the thrill with which they have responded to Swan Lake and the half comprehending fascination with which they have watched King Lear (these are two real instances) can deny that television can act, and in some respects in this country has acted, as a remarkable educational and cultural force. There seem to be two quite contradictory forces at work in our culture.When we consider the exploitation of literacy by the yellow Press and all the stereotyped vulgarities of, say, the stories in some of the more popular womens magazines, to go no sink when we think of mass production ousting individual craftsmanship, the prevalence of bad films, the complete un ken of even the existence of any such thing as artistic integrity or literary value among so many people when we think of the loss of that simple but honorable folk lore which the total illiterate possessed, for the sake of a stripped-down literacy which merely exposes its possessor to exploitation and corruptionwhen we think of all this, we are in despair about modern civilization.On the other hand, when we see the enormous numbers of relatively cheap paper-bound editions of the classics, as well as of serious works of history a nd biography, selling daily, or observe the unparalleled numbers of people who appreciate good music and ballet, or reflect that an industrial worker or farm labourer whose grandfather whitethorn well have led an almost animal existence has now the opportunity of reading and hearing and viewing works of art of unhomogeneous kinds to a degree hitherto impossible, then one takes a much more rosy view. Which is the true picture? Both are true, and, paradoxically enough, both are sometimes true for the same people. The diffusion of culture is a sociological fact, and, further, diffusion does not always imply adulteration. The real problem seems to be an utter lack of discrimination, a lack of awareness of the absolute difference between the genuine and the phoney.Where so much in the form of art and of pseudo-art is thrown at people, where the cultural means of the nation is itself non-existent or at least problematical, discrimination on the part of the individual is most necessary, and lack of it most dangerous. The ordinary reader in Popes day, though he belonged to a tiny minority when compared with his modern equivalent, was probably no better able to discriminate between, say, real poetry and imitative sentimental rubbish which followed the conventional forms of the day but the coherence and stability of his culture and the critical tradition of his time made individual discrimination less necessary. The paradox is that individual discrimination is most necessary when it is least possible. (Cynthia Lowenthal, 2003) References Christopher Ivic, Grant Williams.Forgetting in former(a) Modern English Literature and Culture Lethes Legacies Routledge, 2004 Constance C. Relihan. Framing Elizabethan Fictions Contemporary Approaches to proterozoic Modern Narrative Prose Kent State University Press, 1996 Cynthia Lowenthal. Performing Identities on the Restoration full stop Southern Illinois University Press, 2003 Joshua Scodel. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature Princeton University Press, 2002 Nicholas Mcdowell. Interpreting Communities Private Acts and Public Culture in Early Modern England Criticism, Vol. 46, 2004 Theresa Krier, Elizabeth D. Harvey. Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture Thresholds of History Routledge, 2004