POST MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE

                                                 POST MODERN LITERATURE

Modernism	Postmodernism
Adheres to Western hegemonic values	Contests Western hegemonic values
Focus on the writer	Focus on the reader
Focus on interiority	Focus on exteriority
Alienation	Collective voices
Unreliable narrator	Ironic narrator
Rejection of realism	Ambivalence towards realism
Literature is self-contained	Literature is open and intertextual
High-brow genres	Mixing of high- and low-brow genres
Rejection of literary conventions	Parody of literary conventions
Metafictional	Metafictional
Idiosyncratic language	Simple language

 

Post modernism generally refers to works after W W-II. Postmodernism in English literature is a literary movement and critical theory that emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century. It represents a departure from the modernist literary movement that preceded it. Postmodernism is characterized by a sense of skepticism toward grand narratives, an emphasis on self-reflexivity and metafiction, and a blurring of traditional boundaries between high and low culture.

It's important to note that postmodernism is a complex and multifaceted movement, and there is no single, universally accepted definition or set of characteristics. It encompasses a wide range of styles and approaches, making it a challenging but rich field of study in literature and literary theory.

Here are some key characteristics and themes associated with postmodern literature in English:

Ø Metafiction: Postmodern literature often calls attention to its own fictional nature. Authors may break the fourth wall, acknowledge the reader, or play with narrative conventions. This self-awareness is a hallmark of postmodern storytelling.

Ø Fragmentation: Postmodern texts frequently use fragmented narratives, nonlinear storytelling, and disjointed structures. These techniques reflect a sense of dislocation and uncertainty in the modern world.

Ø Intertextuality: Postmodern authors draw on a wide range of literary and cultural references. They may incorporate elements from other texts, genres, or media, blurring the lines between high and low culture.

Ø Parody and Pastiche: Postmodern literature often parodies or pastiches established genres, styles, or literary traditions. It may playfully imitate or mock the conventions of earlier literature.

Ø Irony and Ambiguity: Irony and ambiguity are common features in postmodern writing. Authors may use irony to comment on the absurdity or contradictions of contemporary society.

Ø Deconstruction: Postmodernism owes some of its philosophical underpinnings to the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his concept of deconstruction. Deconstruction involves analyzing texts to uncover hidden meanings and contradictions, challenging the stability of language and meaning.

Ø Cultural and Social Critique: Postmodern literature often engages with cultural and social issues, critiquing dominant ideologies, power structures, and norms. It may explore themes of identity, gender, race, and sexuality.

Ø Rejection of Grand Narratives: Postmodernism rejects the idea of overarching, universal narratives that explain the world. Instead, it embraces a plurality of perspectives and resists totalizing explanations.

BRITISH LITERATURE

Christopher Fry: poet and playwright, contributed to poetic revival in dramas (as T S Eliot), best known for verse dramas.

1.   The Lady’s Not for burning (1948)- well known play in 3 acts. Set in Middle Ages, about a soildier who wants to die and a witch who wants to live.

 

John Arden- Marxist playwright- impressed by Brecht

1.   Live like Pigs (1958)- explores antisocial behaviour deals with the resettlement of gypsies. (gypsies = A Romani people)

2.   Seargent Musgrave’s Dance- most celebrated short play. Deals with very real people. based on anti materialistic theme -described it as “a Realistic, but not a naturalistic play.”

 

Tom Stoppard- Czech born British Playwright. The term ‘stoppardian’ describes works using wit and comedy while addressing philosophical concepts.

Wrote screen plays for 1) Shakespeare in Love (by Lee Hall) 2) Brazil, The Russia House.

1.   Rosencranz and Guildernsten are dead (1966)- play, absurd, tragicomedy, inspired from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Best example of intertextuality. The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters(courtiers) from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the main setting is Denmark. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carries a letter from king of Denmark, a command to kill Hamlet, but Hamlet changes it as ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead", causing the death of them in the hands of English. The action of Stoppard's play takes place mainly "in the wings" of Shakespeare's Hamlet, with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who enact fragments of the original's scenes. Between these episodes, the two protagonists voice their confusion at the progress of events occurring onstage without them in Hamlet, of which they have no direct knowledge.

2.   Arcadia (1994)- It is a play-concerns between order, disorder, certainty, uncertainity.

3.   Indian Ink (1995): The play is a reworking of E. M. Forster's "A passage to India'

4.   The coast of Utopia (2002)

5.   Trilogy of plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage -focus on philosophical debates in pre-solution Russia 1833-66.

 

Sir John Clifford Mortimer (1923-2009) – English dramatist and barrister.

Best known for creating a barrister named ‘Horace Rumpole” who defends the crime in city of Baiely, inspired from his father. "Bailey' of the title is a reference to the central criminal court, "the Old Bailey"

1.   Charade:  first Novel.

2.   Rumpole of the Bailey- series of plays, he is best remembered

3.     A Voyage round my father (1970): a tender biography

 

C P Snow- known as Lord Snow, Married to Lady Snow.

1.   The Masters (1951)- best known campus novel. About internal politics of Cambridge college. Dedicated to G H Hardy (friend of Ramanujan, mathematician). This novel is part of ‘Strangers and Brothers”- series of 11 novels.

 

Pamela Hansford Johnson- Known as Lady Snow- wife of C P Snow-

-Theme of her novels are moral responsibility.

 

Evylen Waugh:

1.   A Handful of Dust (1934)- A Handful of Dust—taken from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." about painful rural feudalism, Tony Last is a country gentleman, living with his wife Brenda and his eight-year-old son John Andrew in his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey. The house is a Victorian pseudo-Gothic pastiche described as architecturally "devoid of interest" by a local guide book and "ugly" by his wife, but is Tony's pride and joy. Entirely content with country life, he is seemingly unaware of Brenda's increasing boredom and dissatisfaction, and of his son's developing waywardness.

 

Early in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, while Tony and his young son, John Andrew, walk to the church, John tells his father a story he has heard from the stable manager, Ben about a mule "who had drunk his company's rum ration" in the First World War and subsequently died. What is the mule named? (UGC NET_NOV-2017) (1) Peppermint        (2) Dopey        (3) Dynamo       (4) Pookey   Answer: 1. Peppermint

 

Kingsly Amis: Related to Angry Youngman Movement, Friend of Philip Larkin

1.   Lucky Jim (1954)- first novel, most famous, campus novel. Set in an unnamed university, satires the highbrow academics, seen through the eyes of its protagonist Jim Dixon, who is an antihero (lecturer). 

 

Frank Kermode: British Literary Critic.

1.   “The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967)” - Best known work

 

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy -known professionally by her former married name as A. S. Byatt

1.   Pocession: A Romance (1990)- Booker in 1990- postmodern novel, often categorized as historiographic metafiction. (Histiriographic metafiction term is coined by Lind Hucheon)

 

William Golding:  Nobel in 1983, Booker for “Rites of Passage” in 1980

1.   Lord of the Flies 1954- rejected by many publishers, written in response to Savegery in J M Ballyantyne’s the Coral Isaland (Ralph and Jack are common characters in these two works). The story of school biys whose aeroplane was crashed in a wartime in a deserted island. Ralph attempts tp setup a democratic society but fails and savagery takes over under the dictator Jack. Two boys Simon (compared to Christ) and Piggy (pudgy asthamatic boy) were killed by Jack’s Camp. All the boys were saved by a Naval Officer at the end. (Dues Ex Machina).

2.   The Inheritors (1955)- an autobiographic prehistory. Explains the innocence, good, happiness were destroyed by Homosepiens.

3.   Pincher Martin (1956)- Third Novel- personal life of a sailor Pincher Martin and his death.

4.   Darkness Visible (1979)- Narrates the struggle of good and evil. Title from a famous line in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “No light, but rather darkness visible”.

5.   The Brass Butterfly (1958)- only play by Golding

 

John Fowles: well known for his work The French Lieutent’s Woman

1.   The French Lieutent’s Woman (1969)- Historical fiction, his 3^rd novel. About the relationship of Charles Smithson, amateur naturalist and Sara woodruff, a former governess.

 

 

Anthony Burges: - composed 250 musical works, he considers himself as much as composer as an author

1.   The Malayan triology also known as “The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy”. Three works in it are: Time for a Tiger (1956); The Enemy in the Blanket (1958); Beds in the East (1959)

2.   The Clock Work Orange (1962): best known dystopian satire comedy. Set in near future. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him

 

Iris Murdoch: Irish British Author.

1.     Under the Net (1954) first novel

2.     Black Prince (1973)- alludes to Hamlet.

 

Doris May Lessing: Nobel in 2007

1.   The Grass is singing (1950)- first novel, Deals with racial politics, The title from a phrase in “The Wasteland”

2.   The Children of violence- series of 5 semi-auto bio novels. Novels in the series are: Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969).[1]

3.   The Golden Notebook (1962)- is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she records her life, and her attempt to tie them together in a fifth, gold-coloured notebook. Anna's four notebooks, coloured black (of Anna's experience in Southern Rhodesia, before and during World War II, which inspired her own best-selling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life).

 

Ted Hughes: He used Yorkshire Moors- the land scape of England in his poetry. Married to Sylvia Plath (of Bloomsbury Group) who committed sucide in 1963.

1.   The Hawk in the rain (1957)- First collection of 40 poems. Influenced by Anglo Saxon. Many of the poems imagine the real and symbolic lives of animals, including a fox, a jaguar, and a hawk.

2.   Thought Fox- is a famous poem in The Hawk in the rain. The paw prints of the fox in the snow becomes the words on the page.

3.   Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) is most important work. The crow symbolizes the victim, the out cast and a witness of life and destruction.

4.   Lupercal (1960)- collection of poems

 

Philip Larkin- Known as “England’s other poet laureate”.

His collection of poems:

1.The North Ship (1945)

2.The Less Deceived (1955)-

3.The Whitsun Weddings (1964)- autobiographical elements

4.High Windows (1974)- High windows is a peom which admires D H Lawrnce’s Charterly lover.

His famous poems:

            1.Church Going: First published in The Less Deceived in 1955, opening line: “Once I am sure there's nothing going on. I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”

            2.Aubade

            3.Annus Mirabillies

 

Ian Mc Ewan: booker winner

1.   The Cement Garden (1978)- first novel, father of 4 children does, soon after that the mother dies. Inorder to avoid foster care, the children hide theie mother’s death fron outside world by encasing her corpse in cement in cellar

2.   Nutshell (2016)- Retelling of Hanlet in anutshell, from the point of view of an unborn child.

 

Peter Ackroyd: Biographer, novelist and critic.

1.   The Great fire of London (1982)- reworking of Dicken’s Little Dorrit

2.   Hawksmoor (1985)- Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates a series of murders occurred in and around churches.