Echoes of Change in Early Twentieth-Century British Literature

Author

Waqar Yonus Butt, Pakeeza Jaan

Abstract

 In the beginning of the twentieth century, a profound transformation in British Literature was conspicuous as the writers vehemently responded to the diverse social, political, cultural, and psychological changes of the modern age. With the gradual decline of the Victorian conventions, the expansion of the industrial and urban society, the ordeals of the First World War, spiralling upsurge of totalitarianism, and the steady dwindling of the British Empire amply altered the existing literary expression. The paper analyses the major developments and trends embraced by the British Literature from the inception of the twentieth century onward, underscoring the trends in modernism, psychological enquiry, contours of the literary form, criticism, political allegory, literature involving war, and the quest for spiritual and individual identity. The paper construes the works of writers comprising George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Wilfred Owen, and Dylan Thomas. Shaw’s Pygmalion confronts the conventional class categories and Victorian traditions, whereas Woolf and Eliot unveil the modernist impulse on fragmented consciousness and commencement of new literary techniques. Orwell’s satirical novella Animal Farm makes ostensible the increasing political and social engagement of literature through its denigration of totalitarian regime, propaganda and hypocrisy of the revolutionary leaders. The twentieth century poets such as Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Owen, and Thomas reflect ideas of escapism, divine transformation, trauma, transience of human lives, and debilitating impact of the war. Overall, early twentieth-century British Literature avers a movement away from conventional Victorian forms and its proclivity towards experimentation, psychological exploration, political upheaval, and more complex representations of modern human life. 

Keywords

Modernism, Social Criticism, Fragmentation, Political Allegory, Poetry

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References

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Eliot, T. S. “Journey of the Magi.” Ariel Poems, Faber and Gwyer, 1927.

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Boni and Liveright, 1922.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Penguin Books, 1945.

Owen, Wilfred. “Strange Meeting.” The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy, Chatto & Windus, 1985.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Project Gutenberg, 2005.

Thomas, Dylan. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Directions, 1952.

 Woolf, Virginia. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Hogarth Press, 1924.

Yeats, W. B. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan, 1989.

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