216- ] English Literature

216- ] English Literature

D. H . Lawrence

Exile

After the wartime years, Lawrence began what he termed his "savage pilgrimage", a time of voluntary exile from his native country. He escaped from Britain at the earliest practical opportunity and returned only twice for brief visits, spending the remainder of his life travelling with Frieda. This wanderlust took him to Australia, Italy, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the United States, Mexico and the south of France. Abandoning Britain in November 1919, they headed south, first to the Abruzzo region in central Italy and then onwards to Capri and the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, Sicily. From Sicily they made brief excursions to Sardinia, Monte Cassino, Malta, Northern Italy, Austria and Southern Germany.

Many of these places appear in Lawrence's writings, including The Lost Girl (for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction), Aaron's Rod and the fragment titled Mr Noon (the first part of which was published in the Phoenix anthology of his works, and the entirety in 1984). He wrote novellas such as The Captain's Doll, The Fox and The Ladybird. In addition, some of his short stories were issued in the collection England, My England and Other Stories. During these years Lawrence also wrote poems about the natural world in Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

Lawrence is often considered one of the finest travel writers in English. His travel books include Twilight in Italy, Etruscan Places, Mornings in Mexico, and Sea and Sardinia, which describes a brief journey he undertook in January 1921 and focuses on the life of Sardinia's people. Less well known is his eighty-four page introduction to Maurice Magnus's 1924 Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, in which Lawrence recalls his visit to the monastery of Monte Cassino. Lawrence told his friend Catherine Carswell that his introduction to Magnus's Memoirs was "the best single piece of writing, as writing, that he had ever done".

His other nonfiction books include two responses to Freudian psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious; Apocalypse and Other Writings on Revelation; and Movements in European History, a school textbook published under a pseudonym, is a reflection of Lawrence's blighted reputation in Britain.

Later life and career

In late February 1922, the Lawrences left Europe intending to migrate to the United States. They sailed in an easterly direction, however, first to Ceylon and then on to Australia. During a short residence in Darlington, Western Australia, Lawrence met local writer Mollie Skinner, with whom he coauthored the novel The Boy in the Bush. This stay was followed by a brief stop in the small coastal town of Thirroul, New South Wales, during which Lawrence completed Kangaroo, a novel about local fringe politics that also explored his wartime experiences in Cornwall.

The Lawrences finally arrived in the United States in September 1922. Lawrence had several times discussed the idea of setting up a utopian community with several of his friends, having written in 1915 to Willie Hopkin, his old socialist friend from Eastwood:

"I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go, and some real decency … a place where one can live simply, apart from this civilisation … [with] a few other people who are also at peace and happy and live, and understand and be free.…"

It was with this in mind that they made for Taos, New Mexico, a Pueblo town where many white "bohemians" had settled, including Mabel Dodge Luhan, a prominent socialite. Here they eventually acquired the 160-acre (0.65 km2) Kiowa Ranch, now called the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, in 1924 from Dodge Luhan in exchange for the manuscript of The Plumed Serpent. The couple stayed in New Mexico for two years, with extended visits to Lake Chapala and Oaxaca in Mexico. While Lawrence was in New Mexico, he was visited by Aldous Huxley.

Editor and book designer Merle Armitage wrote a book about D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico. Taos Quartet in Three Movements was originally to appear in Flair Magazine, but the magazine folded before its publication. This short work describes the tumultuous relationship of D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, artist Dorothy Brett, and Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan. Armitage took it upon himself to print 16 hardcover copies of this work for his friends. Richard Pousette-Dart executed the drawings for Taos Quartet, published in 1950.

While in the U.S., Lawrence rewrote and published Studies in Classic American Literature, a set of critical essays begun in 1917 and described by Edmund Wilson as "one of the few first-rate books that have ever been written on the subject".These interpretations, with their insights into symbolism, New England Transcendentalism and the Puritan sensibility, were a significant factor in the revival of the reputation of Herman Melville during the early 1920s. In addition, Lawrence completed new fictional works, including The Boy in the Bush, The Plumed Serpent, St Mawr, The Woman who Rode Away, The Princess and other short stories. He also produced the collection of linked travel essays that became Mornings in Mexico.

A brief voyage to England at the end of 1923 was a failure and Lawrence soon returned to Taos, convinced his life as an author now lay in the United States. However, in March 1925 he suffered a near fatal attack of malaria and tuberculosis while on a third visit to Mexico. Although he eventually recovered, the diagnosis of his condition obliged him to return once again to Europe. He was dangerously ill and poor health limited his ability to travel for the remainder of his life. The Lawrences made their home in a villa in Northern Italy near Florence, where he wrote The Virgin and the Gipsy and the various versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The latter book, his last major novel, was initially published in private editions in Florence and Paris and reinforced his notoriety. A story set once more in Nottinghamshire about a cross-class relationship between a Lady and her gamekeeper, it broke new ground in describing their sexual relationship in explicit yet literary language. Lawrence hoped to challenge the British taboos around sex: to enable men and women "to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly."Lawrence responded robustly to those who took offense, even publishing satirical poems (Pansies and Nettles) as well as a tract on Pornography and Obscenity.

The return to Italy allowed him to renew old friendships; during these years he was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, who was to edit the first collection of Lawrence's letters after his death, along with a memoir.After Lawrence visited local archaeological sites (particularly old tombs) with artist Earl Brewster in April 1927, his collected essays inspired by the excursions were published as Sketches of Etruscan Places, a book that contrasts the lively past with Benito Mussolini's fascism. Lawrence continued to produce short stories and other works of fiction such as The Escaped Cock (also published as The Man Who Died), an unorthodox reworking of the story of Jesus Christ's Resurrection.

During his final years, Lawrence renewed his serious interest in oil painting. Official harassment persisted and an exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery in London was raided by the police in mid 1929 and several works were confiscated.

Later life and works

After World War I Lawrence and his wife went to Italy (1919), and he never again lived in England. He soon embarked on a group of novels consisting of The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922), and the uncompleted Mr. Noon (published in its entirety only in 1984). All three novels are in two parts: one set in Eastwood and sardonic about local mores, especially the tribal ritual of finding a mate, the other set in Europe, where the central figure breaks out of the tribal setting and finds what may be a true partnership. All three novels also end with an open future; in Mr. Noon, however, Lawrence gives his protagonist Lawrence’s own experience of 1912 with Frieda Weekley in Germany, thus continuing in a lighthearted manner the quasi-autobiographical treatment he had begun in Sons and Lovers. In 1921 the Lawrences decided to leave Europe and go to the United States, but eastward, via Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Australia.

Since 1917 Lawrence had been working on Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which grew out of his sense that the American West was an uncorrupted natural home. His other nonfiction works at this time include Movements in European History (1921) and two treatises on his psychological theories, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).

Lawrence wrote Kangaroo in six weeks while visiting Australia in 1922. This novel is a serious summary of his own position at the time. The main character and his wife move to Australia after World War I and face in the new country a range of political action: his literary talents are courted alike by socialists and by a nationalist quasi-fascist party. He cannot embrace either political movement, however, and an autobiographical chapter on his experiences in England during World War I reveals that the persecution he endured for his antiwar sentiments killed his desire to participate actively in society. In the end he leaves Australia for America.

Finally reaching Taos, New Mexico, where he settled for a time, Lawrence visited Mexico in 1923 and 1924 and embarked on the ambitious novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). In this novel Lawrence maintains that the regeneration of Europe’s crumbling postwar society must come from a religious root, and if Christianity is dead, each region must return to its own indigenous religious tradition. The Plumed Serpent’s prophet-hero, a Mexican general, revives Aztec rites as the basis of a new theocratic state in Mexico whose authoritarian leaders are worshiped as gods. The Lawrence-representative in the story, a European woman, in the end marries one of the leader-gods but remains half-repelled by his violence and irrationality. After pursuing this theme to its logical conclusion in The Plumed Serpent, however, Lawrence abandoned it, and he was reduced to his old ideal of a community where he could begin a new life with a few like-minded people. Taos was the most suitable place he had found, but he was now beginning to die; a bout of illness in 1925 produced bronchial hemorrhage, and tuberculosis was diagnosed.

Lawrence returned to Italy in 1925, and in 1926 he embarked on the first versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and wrote Sketches of Etruscan Places, a “travel” book that projects Lawrence’s ideal personal and social life upon the Etruscans. Privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley’s Lover led an underground life until legal decisions in New York (1959) and London (1960) made it freely available—and a model for countless literary descriptions of sexual acts. The London verdict allowing publication capped a trial at which the book was defended by many eminent English writers. In the novel Lawrence returns for the last time to Eastwood and portrays the tender sexual love, across barriers of class and marriage, of two damaged moderns. Lawrence had always seen the need to relate sexuality to feeling, and his fiction had always extended the borders of the permissible—and had been censored in detail. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover he now fully described sexual acts as expressing aspects or moods of love, and he also used the colloquial four-letter words that naturally occur in free speech.

The dying Lawrence moved to the south of France, where in 1929 he wrote Apocalypse (published 1931), a commentary on the biblical Book of Revelation that is his final religious statement. He was buried in Vence, and his ashes were removed to Taos in 1935.

Death

Lawrence continued to write despite his failing health. In his last months he wrote numerous poems, reviews and essays, as well as a robust defence of his last novel against those who sought to suppress it. His last significant work was a reflection on the Book of Revelation, Apocalypse. After being discharged from a sanatorium, he died on 2 March 1930 at the Villa Robermond in Vence, France, from complications of tuberculosis. Frieda commissioned an elaborate headstone for his grave bearing a mosaic of his adopted emblem of the phoenix. After Lawrence's death, Frieda lived with the couple's friend Angelo Ravagli on their Taos ranch and eventually married him in 1950. In 1935, Ravagli arranged, on Frieda's behalf, to have Lawrence's body exhumed and cremated. However, upon boarding the ship he learned he would have to pay taxes on the ashes, so he instead spread them in the Mediterranean, a more preferable resting place, in his opinion, than a concrete block in a chapel. The ashes brought back were dust and earth and remain interred on the Taos ranch in a small chapel amid the mountains of New Mexico.

  

215- ] English Literature

215- ] English Literature

D.H. Lawrence 

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, travel writer, essayist, and painter. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four of his most famous novels — Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)— were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of romance, sexuality and use of explicit language.

D.H. Lawrence (born September 11, 1885, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England—died March 2, 1930, Vence, France) was an English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. His novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) made him one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century.

Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him a controversial reputation; he endured contemporary persecution and public misrepresentation of his creative work throughout his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile that he described as a "savage enough pilgrimage". At the time of his death, he had been variously scorned as tasteless, avant-garde, and a pornographer who had only garnered success for erotica; however, English novelist and critic E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". Later, English literary critic F. R. Leavis also championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness.

Youth and early career

Lawrence was the fourth child of a north Midlands coal miner who had worked from the age of 10 and was a dialect speaker, a drinker, and virtually illiterate. Lawrence’s mother, who came from the south of England, was educated, refined, and pious. Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School (1898–1901) and left at age 16 to earn a living as a clerk in a factory, but he had to give up work after a first attack of pneumonia. While convalescing, he began visiting Haggs Farm nearby, where the Chambers family—friends of the Lawrences—were living. Lawrence began an intense relationship with one of the family’s daughters, Jessie, in 1902, the same year that he became a pupil-teacher in Eastwood and performed brilliantly in the national examination. Lawrence and Chambers, who were about the same age, were reading widely and discussing what they read—an experience that Chambers would later recall as “a kind of orgy of reading. I think we were hardly aware of the outside world.” It was a formative experience for both of them. Encouraged by Chambers, Lawrence began to write in 1905; his first story was published in a local newspaper in 1907. He studied at University College, Nottingham, from 1906 to 1908, earning a teacher’s certificate, and went on writing poems and stories and drafting his first novel, The White Peacock. In 1908 Lawrence went to teach in Croydon, a London suburb.

The Eastwood setting, especially the contrast between mining town and unspoiled countryside, the life and culture of the miners, the strife between his parents, and its effect on his relationship with Chambers all became themes of Lawrence’s early short stories and novels. He kept on returning to Eastwood in imagination long after he had left it in fact.

In 1909 Chambers became responsible for Lawrence’s first major success as a writer: she sent some of his poems to Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford), editor of the influential English Review. Hueffer was impressed, and the Review began to publish his work, which enabled Lawrence to meet such rising young writers as Ezra Pound. Hueffer also recommended The White Peacock to the publisher William Heinemann, who published it in 1911, just after the death of Lawrence’s mother and his engagement to Louie Burrows. Lawrence had also broken off his relationship with Chambers: their friendship had turned romantic near the end of 1909, but he ended it several months later.

His second novel, The Trespasser (1912), gained the interest of the influential editor Edward Garnett, who secured the third novel, Sons and Lovers, for his own firm, Duckworth. In the crucial year of 1911–12 Lawrence had another attack of pneumonia. He broke his engagement to Burrows and decided to give up teaching and live by writing, preferably abroad. Most importantly, he fell in love and eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), the aristocratic German wife of a professor at Nottingham. The couple went first to Germany and then to Italy, where Lawrence completed Sons and Lovers. They were married in England in 1914 after Weekley’s divorce.

Life and career

Early life

Lawrence was the fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner at Brinsley Colliery, and Lydia Lawrence (née Beardsall), a former pupil-teacher who had been obliged to perform manual work in a lace factory due to her family's financial difficulties. He spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. The house in which he was born, 8a Victoria Street, is now the D. H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum. His working-class background and the tensions between his parents provided the raw material for some of his early works. Lawrence roamed out from an early age in the patches of open, hilly country and remaining fragments of Sherwood Forest in Felley woods to the north of Eastwood, beginning a lifelong appreciation of the natural world, and he often wrote about "the country of my heart" as a setting for much of his fiction.

The young Lawrence attended Beauvale Board School (now renamed Greasley Beauvale D. H. Lawrence Primary School in his honour) from 1891 until 1898, becoming the first local pupil to win a county council scholarship to Nottingham High School in nearby Nottingham. He left in 1901, working for three months as a junior clerk at Haywood's surgical appliances factory, but a severe bout of pneumonia ended this career. During his convalescence he often visited Hagg's Farm, the home of the Chambers family, and began a friendship with one of the daughters, Jessie Chambers, who would inspire characters he created in his writing. An important aspect of his relationship with Chambers and other adolescent acquaintances was a shared love of books, an interest that lasted throughout Lawrence's life.

In a private letter written in 1908, Lawrence voiced support for eugenics by the method of a "lethal chamber" to dispose of "all the sick, the halt, the maimed".

In the years 1902 to 1906, Lawrence served as a pupil-teacher at the British School, Eastwood. He went on to become a full-time student and received a teaching certificate from University College, Nottingham (then an external college of University of London), in 1908. During these early years he was working on his first poems, some short stories, and a draft of a novel, Laetitia, which was eventually to become The White Peacock. At the end of 1907, he won a short story competition in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, the first time that he had gained any wider recognition for his literary talents.

Early career

In the autumn of 1908, the newly qualified Lawrence left his childhood home for London. While teaching in Davidson Road School, Croydon, he continued writing. Jessie Chambers submitted some of Lawrence's early poetry to Ford Madox Ford (then known as Ford Hermann Hueffer), editor of the influential The English Review. Hueffer then commissioned the story Odour of Chrysanthemums which, when published in that magazine, encouraged Heinemann, a London publisher, to ask Lawrence for more work. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for another year.

Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel, The White Peacock, appeared in 1910, Lawrence's mother died of cancer. The young man was devastated, and he was to describe the next few months as his "sick year". Due to Lawrence's close relationship with his mother, his grief became a major turning point in his life, just as the death of his character, Mrs. Morel, is a major turning point in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, a work that draws upon much of the writer's provincial upbringing. Essentially concerned with the emotional battle for Lawrence's love between his mother and "Miriam" (in reality Jessie Chambers), the novel also documents Lawrence's (through his protagonist, Paul) brief intimate relationship with Chambers that Lawrence had finally initiated in the Christmas of 1909, ending it in August 1910. The hurt this caused Chambers and, finally, her portrayal in the novel, ended their friendship; after it was published, they never spoke again.

In 1911, Lawrence was introduced to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader, who acted as a mentor and became a valued friend, as did his son David. Throughout these months, the young author revised Paul Morel, the first draft of what became Sons and Lovers. In addition, a teaching colleague, Helen Corke, gave him access to her intimate diaries about an unhappy love affair, which formed the basis of The Trespasser, his second novel. In November 1911, Lawrence came down with a pneumonia again; once recovered, he abandoned teaching in order to become a full-time writer. In February 1912, he broke off an engagement to Louie Burrows, an old friend from his days in Nottingham and Eastwood.

In March 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), with whom he was to share the rest of his life. Six years his senior, she was married to Ernest Weekley, his former modern languages professor at University College, Nottingham, and had three young children. However, she and Lawrence eloped and left England for Frieda's parents' home in Metz, a garrison town (then in Germany) near the disputed border with France. Lawrence experienced his first encounter with tensions between Germany and France when he was arrested and accused of being a British spy, before being released following an intervention from Frieda's father. After this incident, Lawrence left for a small hamlet to the south of Munich where he was joined by Frieda for their "honeymoon", later memorialised in the series of love poems titled Look! We Have Come Through (1917).

During 1912 Lawrence wrote the first of his so-called "mining plays", The Daughter-in-Law, written in Nottingham dialect. The play was not performed or even published in Lawrence's lifetime.

From Germany, they walked southwards across the Alps to Italy, a journey that was recorded in the first of his travel books, a collection of linked essays titled Twilight in Italy and the unfinished novel, Mr Noon.

During his stay in Italy, Lawrence completed the final version of Sons and Lovers. Having become tired of the manuscript, he allowed Edward Garnett to cut roughly 100 pages from the text. The novel was published in 1913 and hailed as a vivid portrait of the realities of working class provincial life.

Lawrence and Frieda returned to Britain in 1913 for a short visit, during which they encountered and befriended critic John Middleton Murry and New Zealand-born short story writer Katherine Mansfield.

Also during that year, on 28 July, Lawrence met the Welsh tramp poet W. H. Davies, whose nature poetry he initially admired. Davies collected autographs, and was keen to have Lawrence's. Georgian poetry publisher Edward Marsh secured this for Davies, probably as part of a signed poem, and also arranged a meeting between the poet and Lawrence and his wife. Despite his early enthusiasm for Davies' work, Lawrence's view cooled after reading Foliage; whilst in Italy, he also disparaged Nature Poems, calling them "so thin, one can hardly feel them".

After the couple returned to Italy, staying in a cottage in Fiascherino on the Gulf of Spezia Lawrence wrote the first draft of what would later be transformed into two of his best-known novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, in which unconventional female characters take centre stage. Both novels were highly controversial and were banned on publication in the UK for obscenity, although Women in Love was banned only temporarily.

The Rainbow follows three generations of a Nottinghamshire farming family from the pre-industrial to the industrial age, focusing particularly on a daughter, Ursula, and her aspiration for a more fulfilling life than that of becoming a housebound wife.Women in Love delves into the complex relationships between four major characters, including Ursula of The Rainbow and her sister Gudrun. Both novels explore grand themes and ideas that challenged conventional thought on the arts, politics, economic growth, gender, sexual experience, friendship, and marriage. Lawrence's views as expressed in the novels are now thought to be far ahead of his time. The frank and relatively straightforward manner in which he wrote about sexual attraction was ostensibly why the books were initially banned, in particular the mention of same-sex attraction; Ursula has an affair with a woman in The Rainbow, and there is an undercurrent of attraction between the two principal male characters in Women in Love.

While working on Women in Love in Cornwall during 1916–17, Lawrence developed a strong relationship with a Cornish farmer named William Henry Hocking, which some scholars believe was possibly romantic, especially considering Lawrence's fascination with the theme of homosexuality in Women in Love. Although Lawrence never made it clear whether their relationship was sexual, Frieda believed it was.[18] In a 1913 letter, he writes, "I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not...."[19] He is also quoted as saying, "I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16." However, given his enduring and robust relationship with Frieda, it is likely that he was primarily what might be termed today bi-curious, and whether he actually ever had homosexual relations remains an open question.

Eventually, Frieda obtained her divorce from Ernest Weekley. Lawrence and Frieda returned to Britain shortly before the outbreak of World War I and were married on 13 July 1914. During this time, Lawrence worked with London intellectuals and writers such as Dora Marsden, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others connected with The Egoist, an important Modernist literary magazine that published some of his work. Lawrence also worked on adapting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism into English. He also met the young Jewish artist Mark Gertler, with whom he became good friends for a time; Lawrence would later express his admiration for Gertler's 1916 anti-war painting, Merry-Go-Round as "the best modern picture I have seen ... it is great and true." Gertler would inspire the character Loerke (a sculptor) in Women in Love.

Frieda's German parentage and Lawrence's open contempt for militarism caused them to be viewed with suspicion and live in near-destitution during wartime Britain; this may have contributed to The Rainbow being suppressed and investigated for its alleged obscenity in 1915.Later, the couple were accused of spying and signaling to German submarines off the coast of Cornwall, where they lived at Zennor. During this period, Lawrence finished his final draft of Women in Love. Not published until 1920, it is now widely recognized as a novel of great dramatic force and intellectual subtlety.

In late 1917, after constant harassment by the armed forces and other authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall on three days' notice under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act. He described this persecution in an autobiographical chapter of his novel Kangaroo (1923). Lawrence spent a few months of early 1918 in the small, rural village of Hermitage near Newbury, Berkshire. Subsequently, he lived for just under a year (mid-1918 to early 1919) at Mountain Cottage, Middleton-by-Wirksworth, Derbyshire, where he wrote one of his most poetic short stories, Wintry Peacock. Until 1919, poverty compelled him to shift from address to address.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, he barely survived a severe attack of influenza.

  

214- ] English Literature

214- ] English Literature

D. H. Lawrence

Summary

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)  is best known for his infamous novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' which was banned in the United States until 1959.

Who Was D.H. Lawrence?

D.H. Lawrence is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He published many novels and poetry volumes during his lifetime, including Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, but is best known for his infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover. The graphic and highly sexual novel was published in Italy in 1928, but was banned in the United States until 1959, and in England until 1960. Garnering fame for his novels and short stories early on in his career, Lawrence later received acclaim for his personal letters, in which he detailed a range of emotions, from exhilaration to depression to prophetic brooding.

Early Life

Author D.H. Lawrence, regarded today as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born David Herbert Lawrence on September 11, 1885, in the small mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, was a coal miner, and his mother, Lydia Lawrence, worked in the lace-making industry to supplement the family income. Lawrence's mother was from a middle-class family that had fallen into financial ruin, but not before she had become well-educated and a great lover of literature. She instilled in young D.H. a love of books and a strong desire to rise above his blue-collar beginnings.

Lawrence's hardscrabble, working-class upbringing made a strong impression on him, and he later wrote extensively about the experience of growing up in a poor mining town. "Whatever I forget," he later said, "I shall not forget the Haggs, a tiny red brick farm on the edge of the wood, where I got my first incentive to write."

As a child, Lawrence often struggled to fit in with other boys. He was physically frail and frequently susceptible to illness, a condition exacerbated by the dirty air of a town surrounded by coal pits. He was poor at sports and, unlike nearly every other boy in town, had no desire to follow in his father's footsteps and become a miner. However, he was an excellent student, and in 1897, at the age of 12, he became the first boy in Eastwood's history to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. But at Nottingham, Lawrence once again struggled to make friends. He often fell ill and grew depressed and lethargic in his studies, graduating in 1901 having made little academic impression. Reflecting back on his childhood, Lawrence said, "If I think of my childhood it is always as if there was a sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal in which we moved and had our being."

In the summer of 1901, Lawrence took a job as a factory clerk for a Nottingham surgical appliances manufacturer called Haywoods. However, that autumn, his older brother William suddenly fell ill and died, and in his grief, Lawrence also came down with a bad case of pneumonia. After recovering, he began working as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood, where he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers, who became his close friend and intellectual companion. At her encouragement, he began writing poetry and also started drafting his first novel, which would eventually become The White Peacock.

Books: 'The White Peacock' & 'The Trespasser'

In the fall of 1906, Lawrence left Eastwood to attend the University College of Nottingham to obtain his teacher's certificate. While there, he won a short-story competition for "An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude," which was published in the Nottingham Guardian in 1907. In order to enter multiple stories in the competition, he entered "An Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude" under Jessie Chambers's name, and although it was published as such, people soon discovered that Lawrence was its true author.

In 1908, having received his teaching certificate, Lawrence took a teaching post at an elementary school in the London suburb of Croydon. He also continued to write, and in 1909 he received his big break when Jessie Chambers managed to get some of his poems published in the English Review. The publishers at the English Review took a great interest in Lawrence's work, recommending his draft of The White Peacock to another publisher, William Heinemann, who printed it in 1911. Set in his childhood hometown of Eastwood, the novel foreshadowed many of the themes that would pervade his later work, such as mismatched marriages and class divides.

A year later, Lawrence published his second novel, The Trespasser, a story based on the experiences of a fellow teacher who had an affair with a married man who then committed suicide. Around the same time, Lawrence became engaged to an old friend from college named Louie Burrows.

'Sons and Lovers'

However, in the spring of 1912, Lawrence's life changed suddenly and irrevocably when he went to visit an old Nottingham professor, Ernest Weekley, to solicit advice about his future and his writing. During his visit, Lawrence fell desperately in love with Weekley's wife, Frieda von Richthofen. Lawrence immediately resolved to break off his engagement, quit teaching, and try to make a living as a writer, and, by May of that year, he had persuaded Frieda to leave her family. The couple ran off to Germany, later traveling to Italy. While traveling with his new love, Lawrence continued to write at a furious pace. He published his first play, The Daughter-in-Law, in 1912. A year later, he published his first volume of poetry: Love Poems and Others.

Later in 1913, Lawrence published his third novel, Sons and Lovers, a highly autobiographical story of a young man and aspiring artist named Paul Morel, who struggles to transcend his upbringing in a poor mining town. The novel is widely considered Lawrence's first masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest English novels of the 20th century.

'The Rainbow' & 'Women in Love'

Lawrence and Frieda von Richtofen soon returned to England, where they married on July 13, 1914. That same year, Lawrence published a highly regarded short-story collection, The Prussian Officer, and in 1915 he published another novel, The Rainbow, which was quite sexually explicit for the time. Critics harshly condemned The Rainbow for its sexual content, and the book was soon banned for obscenity.

Feeling betrayed by his country but unable to travel abroad because of World War I, Lawrence retreated to Cornwall at the far southwestern edge of Great Britain. However, the local government considered the presence of a controversial writer and his German wife so near the coast to be a wartime security threat, and it banished him from Cornwall in 1917. Lawrence spent the next two years moving among friends' apartments. However, despite the tumult of the period, Lawrence managed to publish four volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1919: Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through! (1919), New Poems (1918) and Bay: A Book of Poems (1919).

In 1919, with the First World War finally ended, Lawrence once again departed England for Italy. There, he spent two highly enjoyable years traveling and writing. In 1920, he revised and published Women in Love, which he considered the second half of The Rainbow. He also edited a series of short stories that he had written during the war, which were published under the title My England and Other Stories in 1922.

Determined to fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling to America, in February 1922, Lawrence left Europe and traveled east. By the end of the year—after stays in both Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) and Australia—he landed in the United States, settling in Taos, New Mexico. While in New Mexico, Lawrence completed Studies in Classic American Literature, a book of highly regarded and influential literary criticism of great American authors such as Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

Over the next several years, Lawrence split his time between a ranch in New Mexico and travels to New York, Mexico and England. His works during this period includes a novel, Boy in the Bush (1924); a story collection about the American continent, St. Mawr (1925); and another novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926).

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' & Final Works

Having fallen ill with tuberculosis, Lawrence returned to Italy in 1927. There, in his last great creative burst, he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, his best-known and most infamous novel. Published in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover explores in graphic detail the sexual relationship between an aristocratic lady and a working-class man. Due to its graphic content, the book was banned in the United States until 1959, and in England until 1960, when a jury found Penguin Books not guilty of violating Britain's Obscene Publications Act and allowed the company to publish the book.

At the highly publicized British obscenity trial, the prosecuting attorney infamously asked the jurors, "Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" The jury's decision to allow publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover is considered a turning point in the history of freedom of expression and the open discussion of sex in popular culture. As British poet Philip Larkin quipped in one of his poems, "Sexual intercourse began/In 1963/Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban/And the Beatles' first LP."

Increasingly hobbled by his tuberculosis, Lawrence wrote very little near the end of his life. His final works were a critique of Western religion titled Apocalypse and Last Poems, both of which were published in 1930.

Death and Legacy

Lawrence died in Vence, France, on March 2, 1930, at the age of 44.

Reviled as a crude and pornographic writer for much of the latter part of his life, Lawrence is now widely considered—alongside James Joyce and Virginia Woolf—as one of the great modernist English-language writers. His linguistic precision, mastery of a wide range of subject matters and genres, psychological complexity and exploration of female sexuality distinguish him as one of the most refined and revolutionary English writers of the early 20th century.

Lawrence himself considered his writings an attempt to challenge and expose what he saw as the constrictive and oppressive cultural norms of modern Western culture. He once said, "If there weren't so many lies in the world . . . I wouldn't write at all."

QUICK FACTS

Name: D.H. Lawrence

Birth Year: 1885

Birth date: September 11, 1885

Birth City: Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England

Birth Country: United Kingdom

Gender: Male

Best Known For: D.H. Lawrence is best known for his infamous novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' which was banned in the United States until 1959.

Industries

Fiction and Poetry

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Schools

University College of Nottingham

Nottingham High School

Death Year: 1930

Death date: March 2, 1930

Death City: Vence

Death Country: France  

213- ] English Literature

213- ] English Literature

Modernism

art

Modernism, in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.

In an era characterized by industrialization, the nearly global adoption of capitalism, rapid social change, and advances in science and the social sciences (e.g., Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.

Modernism in literature

The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although prewar works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The enormity of the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of Western society and culture, and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. A primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.

Eliot’s was not the dominant voice among Modernist poets. In the United States Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived. The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world. During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American Modernist fiction. That sense may be centerd on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change. F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925), Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940), Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. Meanwhile, Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

Across the Atlantic, the publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments of thought in an attempt to capture the flow of characters’ mental processes. Portions of the book were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking countries. Other European Modernist authors whose works rejected chronological and narrative continuity included Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and the American expatriate Gertrude Stein.

The term Modernism is also used to refer to literary movements other than the European and American movement of the early to mid-20th century. In Latin American literature, Modernismo arose in the late 19th century in the works of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and José Martí. The movement, which continued into the early 20th century, reached its peak in the poetry of Rubén Darío.  

212- ] English Literature

212- ] English Literature

 Modern Period in English Literature

The 20th century began with both great optimism and some fear because it was the century closest to the start of a new millennium. A new era for humankind had begun, as believed by many. The literary movement known as the modern period, which existed from the late nineteenth century to around the middle of the twentieth, comprised a number of developing writing styles that had an impact on the development of literature.

Literary modernism gave authors more freedom to experiment with their modes of expression than in the past. The experiences and feelings of the person are frequently highlighted in the free-flowing inner dialogues and non-linear storylines seen in modernist works. Writers of modern literature include W.B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams.

This blog by AllAssignmenthelp will discuss a few fascinating things regarding the modern period. Keep reading the blog till the end to clear all your doubts related to this topic and make yourself aware of literary modernism.

Introduction to the Modern Period

The modern period in English literature begins with the 20th century and continues till 1965. The period saw an abrupt break away from the old ways of interacting with the world. In all the previous periods experimentation and individualism were highly discouraged but With the onset of the modern period, both these things became virtues. There were many cultural shocks with the beginning of modernism. The blow of the modern age was World War 1 and 2. These wars began in the year 1914 and lasted till 1919 and 1939 to 1945 respectively. The aftermath of the world wars was traumatic for everyone. The horror of the World War 1 was evident in the face of every citizen. The feeling of uncertainty was spread and no one knew where the world was heading into.

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There are five traits of modernist literature.

Here are a few elements that modernist literature has in common.

The process of experimentation: Modernist literature used a variety of innovative writing strategies that defied accepted principles of narrative structure. 

1-The use of mixed images and themes, absurdity, nonlinear tales, and stream of consciousness—a free-flowing internal monologue—are a few of these strategies.

2. Individualism: Instead of emphasizing society as a whole, modernist literature frequently concentrates on the individual. Stories follow characters as they adjust to a changing environment, usually coping with challenging situations and issues.

3. Different points of view: To highlight the subjectivity of each character and give the reader a range of points of view that might be taken into consideration, many modernist writers wrote in the first person with several characters.

4. Open verse: In place of the conventional poetic form, many modernist poets chose free verse, which lacks a recurring rhyme scheme, metrical framework, or musical rhythm.

5. Creative techniques: Many modernist authors use literary techniques like symbolism and imagery to make their writing easier to understand and to build a better bond with the reader.

Key Points to Remember About the Modern Period

Advancement of social science and natural science in the latter half of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century. Gains in material wealth with the rapid development and industrialization. The difference between aristocrats and clergy increased more.

English literature of the modern age started with the initiation of the 20th century. The prominent feature of the literature during the modern age was that it opposed the general attitude towards life as shown in Victorian literature. Understanding about modern period can be complex at times. However, as a solution, you can hire someone to take your online class regarding the same. Additional guidance will make your learning experience smooth.

People started to regard the Victorian age as a hypocritical age, having superficial and mean ideals. The hypocrisy of the Victorian period generated a rebellious attitude in the writers of modern literature. Things that were considered beautiful and honourable during the Victorian age were considered ugly by the writers of the modern period. Sense of questioning was absent in the minds of the people from the Victorian age.

During Victorian times, people adhered to the voice of the people who were in power, they accepted the rules made by the church. People started to accept the law without questioning them. But the generation came after critical thinking, they raised questions against the decisions produced by supreme authorities. Writers of the modern age refuted the ideas and beliefs of the previous era.

The modern age helped in replacing the simple belief of the Victorians with modern man’s desire to probe. George Bernard Shaw attacked the old superstitious religious beliefs as well as the superstitions of science. He was the one who pioneered the interrogative habits in the middle of modern people. Shaw openly challenged the voice of those who were ruling the country, and religious authority. He provoked the people to come up with questions about morality and religion.

 List of modernist writers

Literary modernism has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and prose. Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new".[1] The modernist literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time.[2] It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen 1910 as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf, who declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910."[3] But modernism was already stirring by 1899, with works such as Joseph Conrad's (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarry's (1873–1907) absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared even earlier, in 1896. Knut Hamsun's (1859–1952) Hunger (1890) is a groundbreaking modernist novel and Mysteries (1892) pioneers modernist stream of consciousness method.

When modernism ends is debatable. Though The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees Modernism ending by c.1939,[4] with regard to British and American literature, "When (if) Modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to Modernism occurred".[5] Clement Greenberg sees Modernism ending in the 1930s, with the exception of the visual and performing arts.[6] In fact many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960s, though generally speaking they were no longer producing major works. The term late modernism is also sometimes applied to modernist works published after 1930.[7] Among modernists (or late modernists) still publishing after 1945 were Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965. In addition Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in 1947. Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, has been described as a "later modernist". Beckett is a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of modernism, who produced works from the 1930s until the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), En attendant Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961), Rockaby (1981). The poets Charles Olson (1910-1970) and J. H. Prynne (1936- ) are, amongst other writing in the second half of the 20th century, who have been described as late modernists.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

The following is a list of significant worldwide modernist writers:

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) , Jorge Amado (1912–2001) , Mário de ndrade (1893–1945) , Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) , Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863–1938) , Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) , W. H. Auden (1907–1973) , Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)*, Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Andrei Bely (1880–1934)

Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Menno ter Braak (1902–40)

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), André Breton (1896–1966), Hermann Broch (1886–1951), Basil Bunting (1900–1985), Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), Karel Čapek (1890–1938), Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933), Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), Inger Christensen (1935-2009), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

Hart Crane (1899–1932), E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), Rubén Darío (1867–1916) , Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) , Leonid Dobychin (1894–1936 [?]) , John Dos Passos (1896-1970) , Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) , Gunnar Ekelöf (1907–1968) , T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) , Ralph W. Ellison (1914–1994) , Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967) , William Faulkner (1897–1962)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) , E. M. Forster (1879–1971) , Robert Frost (1874–1963) , Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893–1973) , André Gide (1869–1951)

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) , Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) (later works)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) , Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) , Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) , Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951) , Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) , Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) , Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929)

Max Jacob (1876–1944) , David Jones (1895–1974) , James Joyce (1882–1941)[10] , Franz Kafka (1883–1924) , Georg Kaiser (1878–1945) , Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) , Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981) , D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) , Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) , Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) , Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) , Robert Lowell (1917–1977) m Mina Loy (1882–1966) , Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) , Artur Lundkvist (1906–1991)

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) , Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908), Antonio Machado Ruiz (1875–1939), Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938)

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) , Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), Harry Martinson (1904–1978) , Eugenio Montale (1896–1981), Marianne Moore (1887–1972) , Robert Musil (1880–1942) , Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) , Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) , George Orwell (1903–1950) , Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974)

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) , Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1880–1962) , Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) , Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) , Andrei Platonov (1899–1951), Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) , Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Anthony Powell (1905-2000) , John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) , Marcel Proust (1871–1922) , Aleksey Remizov (1877–1957), Jean Rhys (1890-1979)

Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957), Klaus Rifbjerg (1931–2015),Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926),Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916),Peter Seeberg (1925–1999),Victor Serge (1890–1947),Gertrude Stein (1874–1946),John Steinbeck (1902–1968),Wallace Stevens (1875–1955),Italo Svevo (1861–1928),Edith Södergran (1892–1923),Villy Sørensen (1929-2001),Dylan Thomas (1914–1953),Ernst Toller (1893–1939) ,Federigo Tozzi (1883–1920),Georg Trakl (1887–1914) ,Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) ,Paul Valéry (1871–1945)

Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) ,Robert Walser (1878–1956),Frank Wedekind (1864–1918),Nathanael West (1903–1940),William Carlos Williams (1883–1963),Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) ,Lu Xun (1881–1936),W. B. Yeats (1865–1939),Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) 

211- ] English Literature

211-] English Literature

 Modern Period

Overview of Modern Age Literature

James Joyce set his novels and short stories in a small city of Dublin. Dubliners published in 1914 is a part of the modernist literature along with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Stephen Daedalus is a central character both in the Portrait and Ulysses. The latter however was banned.

The next important writer was Virginia Woolf who was associated with the Bloomsbury Group which was a group of intellectuals and writers that met at her house which included E.M Forster and Leopold Woolf. Woolf attempted to present the changed world through a changed style of writing. In 1915 came her first novel called The Voyage Out and then came Night and Day in 1919. There was a realistic serious tone to both these books. Modernist strain in her writing began with her next novel call Jacob’s Room which was published in 1922 along with Ulysses. The rest of the novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando had the same modernist tone.

After Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 came the period which saw writers like Joseph Conrad, H.G Wells, D.H Lawrence, E.M Forster and others. The most important event in the early part of the 20th century was the First World War that took place from 1914 to 1918. It was a crucial event that changed the way of the world, impacted the psyche of the people and also the way literature was written. The pessimism and doubts that were a part of the writings of the earlier period may perhaps have anticipated the War. Hence Joseph Conrad, instead of talking of the society and its change now focused on dislocated individuals, a question of where one belongs in a seemingly cruel world. Colonialism are important part of his works wherein he presents a stark reality of exploitation and greed. Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, are some of his major works. H.G Wells was a prolific writer and wrote around a hundred novels. The Time Machine, Ann Veronica, The History of Mr. Polly, The War of the Worlds, are some his important novels and Tono- Bungay is seen as his most brilliant work . Lawrence , was a controversial writer because of the open sexual references in his work. His work was different because of the sensual language and emotional feelings that made them. Therefore the novel then moved from the realism of the world outside more towards a description of the reality of the individual within. Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love are important works by him. E.M Forster, lastly wrote his famous Howard’s End that deals with the Schegel and the Wilcox family and the society in 1910, brilliantly and delicately described which would then be transformed permanently by the First World War.

The Georgian Poets and World War I

During the reign of George V, was published five anthologies of poetry by Edward Marsh in the year 1912 to 1922. Many important writers like of the time like Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, D.H Lawrence, Walter de la Mare contributed to these anthologies. The main concern was to depict the real issues surrounding the world around the World War.

Modernism

Modernism as a movement was a response to the horrors of World War-I and to the rising industrial societies and growth of cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It challenged the harmony and the rationality of the Enlightenment and sought to reinvent art and literature of the age. To do so, it broke away from the works of the past and conventions that were earlier held at a pedestal. The view that traditional conceptions of beauty and on the whole the meaning of art itself did not fit the age lead to another movement called “Dadaism” that consciously set to redefine art itself. The movement was seen as “anti-art” that aimed to upturn its order. Chaos then as the basic antithesis to order was abundantly used by artists. Started by Tristan Tzara (1896- 1963) as a reaction against the senseless violence of the First World War and to reflect the anarchy that it spread in the social system as well as in the lives of ordinary people. What was also opposed was the conception of what was worthy of being the object of art. The classical subjects were replaced by the mundane as the urinal that Marcel Duchamp placed as an object of art in his gallery. Also in his ‘LHOOQ’ Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with a moustache was a direct means to shake the viewer and the age out from his complacency that lead to the war itself. It was the direct expression of disillusionment with the war and that art too had lost its meaning like the literature of the classical time. The breaking down of any previously set rules and a violent portrayal of freedom of expression to shock and awe was the channel of the time that saw the violence of the World War firsthand. The artists and writers of the Dada movement were mostly war veterans and expressed through their work the psychological devastation of the war. The call for re-invention was echoed in the movement and stood for what modernism broadly aimed at.

Thematic and Technical Features of Modern Literature

The conception that reality could be easily be comprehended was replaced by modernism with a more subjective argument. Reality became not what was directly seen but what was behind the apparent surfaces and it took a crude look at the ugly, the stark behind the glossy surfaces. It was to raise these questions that distortion became a crucial trope in the visual arts of the era. Comte’s Positivism could no longer be used to describe reality. The distorted images force the onlooker to step out of his comfort zone and to question his conception of reality. It highlights the dialectical relationship between the object of expression and the language that expresses it. This was echoed in the Literature of the time where sentences are fragmented and deliberately left incomplete as in Waiting for Godot. Dialogues are seldom completed and there is an inability to find the correct words to describe the state of the self. This breakdown of language after the World War calls out for a need to reinvent language to fit the post war world.

Hitler’s use of almost an enigmatic, opera type use of words (he admired Wagner) that achieved his mass appeal, did also lead to the war. It was perhaps then necessary to breakdown language to reinvent it. The distortion and the fragments not only hint at the former but to a unity that needs to be rediscovered. The half-sentence make the reader seek to complete them and participate in the call for a search of a new unity and identity which is Pound’s injunction to “Make it New”. The onlooker/reader is removed from his role as a mere passive observer to an active one who contributes to the meaning of the art he views/reads. Hence the incompleteness was not aimed at a completely pessimistic answer that leads to a loss of hope, but to different source of comfort similar to what T.S Eliot finds in the world of ‘shanti shanti shanti’ at the end of ‘Wasteland’.

Stream of Consciousness

Picasso’s cubism became an important part of modernism’s subjective view of reality and a need to move away from traditional forms of art. It was this subjectivity that lead to the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique of narration, as used by Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. The focus on the interiority of the self and its perception of the objects it conceives was way to grasp the changed notion of reality. The ‘Pre-Speech’ level of consciousness (as Henry James called it) of the character where the narrative deals with what is freely sensed or felt by the characters rather than what is directly uttered changed the way that narratives functioned. The expression of the self was also to highlight the crisis of the self within itself. The existential view of life and its cyclical futile form was what entrapped it rendering it unable to transcend futility of existence. This pessimistic view was a residue of the war which saw man as Sisyphus with his worthless search for meaning, identity and unity in an age that cannot satiate his search. In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ Albert Camus dwells on this futility of the modern experience.

Poetic Drama

The term ‘poetic drama’ was made popular during the middle of the 20th century. The term was made famous due to the works of T.S Eliot who used his work as a reaction to the drama of G. B Shaw and Galsworthy who were immensely influenced by Henrik Ibsen who wrote A Doll’s House and Ghosts. In the ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’ written by G.B Shaw, he accepted the former’s influence on him. T.S Eliot apart from being a poet was also a critic and wrote many important works like ‘Possibility of Poetic Drama’ and ‘Poetry and Drama’ in which he expressed his belief that poetry and drama are linked inseparably. W.B. Yeats, W. H. Auden and other poets also tried writing poetic drama.