The Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century in Prose, Poetry and Drama

1. The Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century in Prose, Poetry and Drama

2. Overview of Significant Events – 20th C. • Following Victorian era of great technological progress • Decline of religious belief • Yet interest in Greek/Roman mythology • World War One – upheaval of values • Decline of colonies (post-colonialism) & rise of multiculturalism • Modernism, psychoanalysis • Genres: autobiography, science fiction • The Internet, interactivity and digitisation

3. Modernism • Interest in myth • Focus on identity • The subconscious mind • Traditional narrative structure subverted • Stream of consciousness

4. Post-modernism • Fragmentary form • Cross-genre • Stories within stories • Unreliable narrators • Allusive • Open endings • Making the reader work (‘writerly’)

5. Themes/Genres • Modernism & Post-modernism • Post-colonialism • Socialism • Psychoanalysis • Feminism

6. Prose • Key texts: Modernism: Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Sons and Lovers, A Passage to IndiaPost-modernism: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Enduring Love, • Genres: science fiction, post-modern novel

7. Poetry • Key texts: The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot), W.H. Auden’s poetry, E.E. Cummings, the Beat poets • Experiments with form & diction

8. Drama • Genres: Kitchen sink drama, Theatre of the Absurd, Naturalism, Brechtian drama • Key texts: John Osbourne’s ‘Look Back in Anger’, Brecht ‘Caucasian Chalk Circles’, Pirandello ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’, Pinter ‘The Caretaker’, Brecht ‘’

9. The Twenty-first Century • Genres diversify – hit-lit (tragic life stories), celebrity, the post-modern novel • The digitisation and accessibility of otherwise obscure books • Renewed interest in existing genres: horror and children’s literature • The world of the common reader much wider: American literature prominent from 1st half of 20th C, and books from Japanese (Murakami) and Afghan (Hosseini) authors can be bestsellers