Modern age literature(1910-1945)/anger after world war 1

Annotations:

• Development of science n technology Rise of industrialism Capitalism Suffrage the movement Feminist movement Characteristics .... Avant grade Focus from external reality to inner reality of human mind There is greater stress on the psycological detailing of literary character through narrative devices like stream of consciousness and interior monologue

1. WB yeats
   1. He was a Irish poet n playwriter
   2. Celtic revival /Irish literary renaissance
   3. Founded abbey theatre in December 1904
   4. First Irishman to win a Nobel prize in 1923
   5. Poetry: The wandering so of Oisin and other poems The lake isle of innisfree The Celtic twilight The rose The land of hearts desire

1. Imagism

   Annotations:

   • Imagism was a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even more vig orously in America, between the years 1912 and 1917. It was planned and ex emplified by a group of English and American writers in London, partly under the influence of the poetic theory of T. E. Hulme, as a revolt against what Ezra Pound called the "rather blurry, messy. . . sentimentalistic mannerish" po etry at the turn of the century. Pound, the first leader of the movement, was soon succeeded by Amy Lowell; after that Pound sometimes referred to the movement, slightingly, as "Amygism." Other leading participants, for a time, were H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, John Gould Fletcher, and Richard Aldington. The Imagist proposals, as voiced by Amy Lowell in her preface to the first of three anthologies called Some Imagist Poets (1915-17), were for a poetry which, abandoning conventional poetic materials and versification, is free to choose any subject and to create its own rhythms, uses common speech, and presents an image or vivid sensory de scription that is hard, clear, and concentrated. (See imagery.) The typical Imagist poem is written in free verse and undertakes to render as precisely and tersely as possible, and without comment or generalization, the writer's impression of a visual object or scene; often the impression is ren dered by means of metaphor, or by juxtaposing, without indicating a relation, the description of one object with that of a second and diverse object. This famed example by Ezra Pound exceeds other Imagist poems in the degree of its concentration :The apparition of these faces in the crowd, Petals on a wet, black bough. In this poem Pound, like a number of other Imagists, was influenced by the Japanese haiku. Imagism was too restrictive to endure long as a concerted movement, but it served to inaugurate a distinctive feature of modernist poetry. Almost every major poet from the 1920s through the middle of the present century, including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, manifests some influence by the Imagist experiments with the representation of precise, clear images that are juxtaposed without specifying their interrelations.
2. Dadaism

   Annotations:

   • The adjective "didactic," which means "intended to give instruction," is applied to works of literature that are designed to expound a branch of knowledge, or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine or theme. Such works are commonly distinguished from essentially imaginative works (sometimes called "mimetic" or "representational") in which the materials are organized and rendered, not in order to enhance the appeal of the doctrine they embody, but in order to enhance their intrinsic interest and their capacity to move and give artistic pleasure to an audience.the first century B.C. the Roman Lucretius wrote his didactic poem De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things") to expound and make persuasive and appealing his naturalistic philosophy and ethics, and in the same era Virgil wrote his Georgics, in which the poetic elements serve to add aesthetic appeal to a laudation of rural life and information about the practical management of a farm. Most medieval and much Renaissance literature was didactic in intention. In the eighteenth century, a number of poets wrote georgics (on the model of Virgil) describing in verse such utilitarian arts as sheepherding, running a sugar plantation, and making cider. Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism and his Essay on Man are eighteenth-century didactic poems on the subjects of literary criticism and of moral philosophy. Such works for the most part directly expound the principles and procedures of a branch of knowledge or a craft, or else argue an explicit doctrine by proofs and examples. Didactic literature, however, may also take on the attributes of imaginative works, by embodying the doctrine in a fictional narrative or dramatic form that is intended to enhance its human interest and persuasive force, as well as to add a dimension of pleasure in the artistry of the representation. In the various forms of allegory, for example, including Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the purpose of enhancing and adding force to the incorporated doctrine is a primary determinant of the choice and presentation of characters, the evolution of the plot, and the invention of fictional details. The diverse types of satire are didactic in that they are designed, by various devices of ridicule, to alter the reader's attitudes toward certain types of people, institutions, products, and modes of conduct. Dante's Letter to Can Grande tells us that he planned his fourteenth-century Divine Comedy to represent, in the mode of a visionary narrative, the major Christian truths and the way to avoid damnation and achieve salvation. And John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) can also be called didactic to the extent that the narrative is in fact organized, as Milton claimed in his opening invocation, around his "great argument" to "assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men." It will be seen from these examples that "didactic literature," as here defined, is an analytical distinction and not a derogatory term; also that the distinction is not absolute but a matter of relative emphasis on instructing and persuading an audience, as against rendering a subject so as to maximize its power to move and give artistic delight in its own right. The plays of Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brechtmanifest a fine balance of didactic intention, imaginative invention, and artistic enhancement. And some literary masterpieces are primarily didactic, while others (Shakespeare's King Lear, Jane Austen's Emma, James Joyce's Ulysses)—even though their plots involve moral concerns and imply criteria for moral judgments—are primarily, to adopt a phrase by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, works "of pure imagination." The term propagandist literature is sometimes used as the equivalent of didactic literature, but it is more useful to reserve the term for that species of didactic work which patently is organized and rendered to induce the reader to assume a specific attitude toward, or to take direct action on, a pressing social, political, or religious issue of the time at which the work is written. Prominent and effective examples of such works are Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852, attacking slavery in the South), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906, on the horrors of the unregulated slaughtering and meatpacking industry in Chicago), and Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty (1935, a play directed against the strong-arm tactics used to suppress a taxicab drivers' union). The socialist realism that was the official doctrine of the former Soviet Union was essentially a propagandist mode of literature.
3. Surrealism

   Annotations:

   • Surrealism ("superrealism") was launched as a concerted artistic movement in France by André Breton's Manifesto on Sunealism (1924). It was a successor to the brief movement known as Dadaism, which emerged in 1916 out of disgust with the brutality and destructiveness of the First World War, and set out, according to its manifestos, to engender a negative art and literature that would destroy the false values of modern bourgeois society, including its rationality and the art and literature it had fostered. Among the exponents of Dadaism were, for a time, artists and poets such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. The expressed aim of surrealism was a revolt against all restraints on free creativity, including logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic conventions and norms, and all control over the artistic process by forethought and intention. To ensure the unhampered operation of the "deep mind," which they regarded as the only source of valid knowledge as well as art, surrealists turned to automatic writing (writing delivered over to the promptings of the unconscious mind), and to exploiting the material of dreams, of states of mind between sleep and waking, and of natural or artificially induced hallucinations. Surrealism was a revolutionary movement in painting, sculpture, and the other arts, as well as literature; and it often joined forces, although briefly, with one or another revolutionary movement in the political and social realm. The effects of surrealism extended far beyond the small group of its professed adherents such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and the painter Salvador Dali. The influence, direct or indirect, of surrealist innovations can be found in many modern writers of prose and verse who have broken with conventional modes of artistic organization to experiment with free association,a broken syntax, nonlogical and nonchronological order, dreamlike and nightmarish sequences, and the juxtaposition of bizarre, shocking, or seemingly unrelated images. In England and America such effects can be found in a wide range of writings, from the poetry of Dylan Thomas to the flights of fantasy, hallucinative writing, startling inconsequences, and black humor in the novels of Henry Miller, William Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon. For a precursor of some aspects of surrealism, see decadence; for later developments that continued some of the surrealist innovations, see literature of the absurd, antinovel, magic realism, and postmodernism. Refer to David Gascoyne, A Short Survey ofSunealism (1935); A. E. Balakian, Literary Origins of Surrealism (1947); Maurice Nadeau, History ofSunealism (trans., 1967); Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Sunealism (1970); Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England (1971). In Automatic Woman: The Representation of Women in Surrealism (1996), Katharine Conley analyzes the obsessive and complex concern of male surrealists with the female body, which was often represented in a distorted or dissected form; she also discusses the work of two female surrealists, Unica Zürn and Leonora
4. Georgian poetry

   Annotations:

   • It was produced in England between 1912 to 1922 Named after the reign of King George v It refers to the poets whose work appeared in a series of anthologies tilled Georgian poetry edited by Edward marsh The poets include Rupert Brooke Walter de la mare John Masefield Lascelles Abercrombie Gk Chesterton John drink water Wh Davies Dh Lawrence Harold monro There style was lucid,deft and delicate including classical model and deriving themes from nature and rural objects