Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Cavone, libro consigliato The Short Oxford English Literature, Sanders

Post-war literature

When the Second World War ended in Europe in the summer of 1945, much of Britain was in ruins. British cities had been torn apart by bombs, London in particular. This landscape of ruins must also be recognized as forming an integral part of much of the literature of the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It was a landscape which provided a metaphor for broken lives and spirits, and, in some sense, for the ruin of Great Britain itself. Amongst writers whose reputation had been established well before 1945, Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth Bowen.

Rose Macaulay

She ended her Pleasure of Ruins with a note which briefly balanced a fascination with the ‘catastrophic tipsy chaos’ of a British bomb-site against her earlier explorations of the historic wrecks of Greek and Roman cities. Three years before the appearance of Pleasure of Ruins, Macaulay’s novel The World my Wilderness had focused on outsiders and exiles, all of them ‘displaced’ persons, finding the ruins of London a solace and a refuge. Her London, as her choice of words indicates, is both distinctly post-war and post-Eliotic. In the novel, she quotes The Wasteland, in order to reinforce the view commonly held by artists and writers of the period that the strange juxtapositions of flowers and dust, of unexpected, wild gardens and shattered, empty houses had somehow been prepared for by Modernist experiments with fragmentation. Amongst writers whose reputation had been established well before 1945, Macaulay was far from alone in seeing the immediately post-war period as one which required the reassembling of fragments of meaning (she was herself to return to a landscape of classical ruins and to jarring private experience in her novel The Towers of Trebizond in 1956).

Elizabeth Bowen

She was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Throughout her earlier work, most notably in her novel The Last September (1929) and her memoir Bowen’s Court (1942), she had explored the tensions implicit in the history of her family and the divided loyalties of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. When she wrote of England in the 1930s, as she did with supreme assurance in The Death of the Heart (1938), she took as her theme the loss of innocence in the face of sophistication and the flashy glamour of metropolitan values. In all her fiction Bowen displays a finely tuned stylistic tact in deploying and using detail, a tact evident in her evocations of London and Londoners changing, adjusting, and adapting under the impact of the Blitz. The Heat of the Day revolves around the relationship between Stella Rodney and her lover Robert Kelway, with the interfering presence of Harrison in the tense years following the Blitz in London. Harrison, a British intelligence agent who is convinced that Robert is a German spy, uses this knowledge to get between the two lovers and ultimately neutralize Robert. Stella finds herself caught between spy and counterspy.

Rebecca West

English journalist, novelist, and critic, Rebecca West started her career as a columnist for the weekly The Freewoman. West's first novel was The Return of the Soldier. It was a story about three women who labor to cure a soldier, Chris Baldry, of shell-shock-induced amnesia. Chris cannot remember the last 15 years of his life, including his marriage. The novel looks at the problem of the human ruins left by the First World War from the point of view of the women who are obliged to pick up, and come to terms with, the pieces. The Fountain Overflows, which is generally considered West's finest work of fiction, is partly autobiographical. The protagonist is Rose Aubrey, who tells the story of her childhood in South London. The family is run by her artistic, serious mother, concert pianist, but Rose worships her father, a misunderstood writer. West also began two sequels, which she never completed. It is, however, through the non-fiction and the journalism of the 1930s and 1940s that West’s intelligence shines most radiantly. The two-volume study Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is far more than a pre-war travel book, it’s a polemic pro-Serbian travel diary. During the war West was a talks supervisor at the BBC in London. Her writings on the Nuremberg trials, commissioned by the New Yorker, were collected in A Train of Powder, and in her broad political analysis of the implications of the trial of the British traitor, William Joyce, in The Meaning of Treason. The Birds Fall Down, West's final novel, was about the Russian Revolution. World politics was not for West a battle between good and evil; her characters could also express great optimistic hopes.

Graham Greene

English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist, whose novels treat moral issues in the context of political settings. Graham Greene was one of the most widely read novelists of the 20th century, a superb storyteller. Adventure and suspense are constant elements in his novels and many of his books have been made into successful films. As a writer Greene was very prolific and versatile. The Third Man is among Greene's most popular books. The story about corruption and betrayal gave basis for the film classic under the same title. Holly Martin arrives in Vienna to discover that his friend Harry Lime has died in a car accident. It turns out that Lime was involved in criminal activities, and Lime's girlfriend Anna Schmidt suspects that his death may not have been accidental. A porter recalls a mysterious third man at the scene of the death. One evening Martins sees a man obscured by the shadows, who suddenly disappears – he is Lime. Major Calloway threatens to deport Anna and Martins betrays Lime to secure her freedom. In a chase through the sewers, Martins kills Lime, and Anna leaves him after the funeral. The Confidential Agent is a novel about a patriot from a country suffering a civil war, named “D”, who is in England to secure a contract with a magnate that will assist his cause. His country is nameless and the details remain vague. However, it is evident that the country is inspired by Spain and its civil war. Later he wrote The Heart of the Matter, detailing a life-changing moral crisis of a man, Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime African state. He is distrusted, being too honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls in love, and in doing so he is forced to betray everything he believes in, with tragic consequences. Scobie, the suicidal protagonist, accuses God of “forcing decisions on people” and blames the Church for having all the answers. This novel was part of a series of novels concerned with religious themes, such as Brighton Rock, a murder thriller set in Brighton, and The Power and the Glory, a novel about a Catholic priest in a Mexican State in a period when the government was trying to suppress the Catholic Roman Church.

The new novelists of the 50s

Lawrence Durrell

He was born in India, but he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then in Egypt. Durrell's first novel of interest, The Black Book: An Agon, was published in Paris in 1938. The mildly pornographic fantasia did not appear in Britain until 1973. In the story, Lawrence Lucifer struggles to escape the spiritual sterility of dying England, and finds Greece's warmth and fertility. Later, as Press Officer of British Information Office in Egypt, he was posted to Alexandria, the city which inspired the four novels of Alexandria Quartet. All four parts in the work climax in death. The metropolis serves as the basis in the exploration of human existence. Set in Alexandria during the period just before World War II, the first three novels cover roughly the same period of time and the events, while the last one advances the action in time. Principal characters include the narrator L.G. Darley, his Greek mistress Melissa, the British ambassador Mountolive, the British intelligence agent Pursewarden, the artist Clea, and Justine and her wealthy Coptic husband Nessim. All are bound together in a web of political and sexual intrigue: each novel reveals different aspects of the truth. Numerous characters disappear, then re-emerge in altered form. It has been said that in Alexandria Quartet Durrell reinvented the modern novel. Durrell tried to replicate his success with The Avignon Quintet. Although the works had much in common, The Avignon Quintet did not commercially outdo its predecessor.

William Golding

His first popular novel was Lord of the Flies, an allegorical story set in the near future during wartime: a plane crashes on a remote island and the only survivors are a group of students aged between 6 and 12. At first, they set up a society based on a “grown-up” model, but this soon disintegrates. The boys go back to a savage existence based on hunting and fear. Outside the island, the world is fighting WWII. The novel ends with the survived boys rescued by a naval ship, and the image of the end of innocence. Lord of the Flies was followed by The Inheritors, which depicted the extermination of Neanderthal man by Homo Sapiens. Pincher Martin was the story of a naval officer, Christopher Hadley Martin, who faces death after his ship is torpedoed. The protagonist imagines his survival and struggle against the sea and cold-Christopher believes he is on a rock island in Mid-Atlantic. Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structure in The Free Fall, set in contemporary society. Sammy Mountjoy, the narrator, is an artist, who looks back over his past to find the crossroads of his life, and the moment he lost his freedom. The Spire concerned the construction of a cathedral spire. Jocelin, a medieval dean, has decided to erect a 400-foot spire to the top of the cathedral before his death. But its construction causes sacrifice of others, treachery, and murder; the Dean's own faith is tested. Darkness Visible narrates a struggle between good and evil, using naïveté, sexuality and spirituality throughout. It marked Golding's re-emergence as a novelist, eight years after the publication of his previous book. A dark and complex novel, it centres on Matty - introduced in chapter one as a naked child emerging horribly disfigured from a bomb explosion during the London Blitz in World War II. The second part of the book is centered on two twins, Toni and Sophy, from the point of view of Sophy. Their story starts from their childhood, when they are around 10 years old, and follows their growth as they become young adults. The recurring theme in these two stories is madness. His later works include the sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. The first book of this sequence, Rites of Passages, focuses on a trip to Australia and takes the form of a journal written by a young aristocratic passenger. He begins with the description of the various passengers and crewmembers, and he quickly becomes concerned with the downfall of a passenger. Like many of his books, it looks at man’s reversion to savagery when he is left alone.

Angus Wilson

He seems to have been intent on restoring Victorian narrative styles to English fiction in opposition to what he saw as the errant experimentalism of the Modernists. In contrast to the slim, even anorexic, shapes accepted by his contemporaries, he wanted to bring the physical shape of the novel back to something approaching its nineteenth-century proportions. As a writer Wilson established his reputation with his two collections of short stories, The Wrong Set and Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories. Wilson's novels, from his first, Hemlock and After (1952) to his last, Setting the World on Fire (1980), are essentially comedies of manners. In the first one, he drew upon his homosexual experience. His more traditional Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, was about a man who knows that he has been involved in an archaeological hoax as a young man, but revealing the truth has disadvantages. The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) was a novel about the "near future," not very different from the present. In the story England is at war with an alliance of European powers. Late Call (1965) explored the spiritual desolation of life in the English Midlands, and was narrated from the perspective of a retired hotel manager. Sylvia Calvert, the protagonist, comes to the New Town of Carshall, finding there that people are strangers in their own life. No Laughing Matter (1967) was a long, ambitious work, tracing the fortunes of the Matthews family from 1912 to 1967.

Iris Murdoch

British writer, she wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means. She underpinned her novels with arguments derived from a scrupulous investigation of the problems posed by moral philosophy. This underpinning has been consistently enhanced by a series of independent philosophical studies, such as Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. She had met Sartre in the 1940s, becoming interested in existentialism. Murdoch was amongst the earliest readers to respond positively to Beckett’s fiction, as we can see in her first novel Under the Net. The protagonist, Jake Donaghue, is a penniless writer who seeks out an old girlfriend and his friend Hugo. These meetings involve Jack in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog. Jack wants to learn Hugo’s secret, and hopes at last to become a real writer. The male narrator both resists and creates theoretical patterns with words, which, like nets, entrap and constrain perceptions of a larger and expanding reality. As a range of novels from The Flight from the Enchanter (1955) to The Sea, The Sea (1978) and The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) suggest, those characters who attempt to impose nets, theories, mystical enchantments, ‘artistic’ arrangements, or restrictive myths upon reality must themselves adapt to the world they live in. The Bell is among Murdoch's most successful novels. It depicts an Anglican religious community and the events focus on the replacement of a bell in an abbey tower. However, the bell suddenly falls into the water and sinks without a trace. The novel gradually explores the emotional, sexual, and moral tensions which force the community itself to break up and re-form. In the experimental novel The Black Prince the narrator is a self-conscious writer, Bradley Pearson. He is obsessed by perfection and sees the artistic calling as "a doom," a Last Judgment. He is an unsuccessful writer who abandons his job to find inspiration again. His sister, his ex-wife and his rival friend, a successful writer, torment him. The action includes seduction, suicide, murder and process of law. Often, Murdoch used fantasy and gothic elements, but her characters were realistically portrayed in their attempts to find meaning to their lives in extraordinary situations. Many of her novels have a religious or philosophical theme, but she avoided clear political statements.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark, a Catholic convert of Jewish descent, shares with Murdoch and Golding a pressing commitment to moral issues and to their relation to fictional form. Her first novel, The Comforters, is concerned with a neurotic wo...