1 The catastrophic First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great suffering to its people as well. The postwar economic dislocation and spiritual disllusion produced a profound impact upon the British people.
2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles put forward a guiding principle for the working people, but also inspired them to make dauntless fights for their own emancipation.
Darwinism: “survival of fittest”
Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher. Started a rebellion against rationalism
Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy
3 Rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships
4 The French symbolism, appearing in the late 19th century, herald modernism: expressionism, surrealism. Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
5 Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and man, and man and himself . The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective, they are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual. Modernism rejects rationalism, major concern the external, objective, material world.
6. The 1930s witnessed great economic depression, mass unemployment, and the rise of the Nazis.
The red thirties.
7.In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background, who were known as “the Angry Young Men.”
8 Stream-of consciousness novels: Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses by Joyce, Mrs Dalloway by Woolf.
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