Content area
Full text
Abstract
The present paper displays a few aspects characteristic for the major literary trends, topics and authors in post-war British literature. Designed to provide a brief outline of the period, it is focused on modernist and postmodernist writers, emphasizing the authors' interest for aesthetic and social matters, or for the modern novel regarded as a process of communication. The literary trends approached in this paper dwell upon some major themes such as the alienation of the individual, who tries to find comfort in a world that has lost its moral values and traditions or the destruction caused by technology. Modernist and postmodernist characteristics also mixed non-fiction with fantasy, blurring the lines of reality. If the writers of the 1950s were more concerned with older storytelling methods, the following decades brought about a change in the narrative climate of the epoch and the new writers revived the novel and employed different literary styles.
Keywords: criticism, literature, trends, realism, fiction.
The history of the twentieth-century literature is analyzed from two major perspectives: Modernism and Postmodernism. In this context, British critics proved to be more concerned with social class and conduct, trying to convey one main idea: to tell a meaningful story about an individual, placing him in his social environment. In the fifties, British fiction was moving towards several directions, without dwelling upon one in particular: realism, experimentalism, fantasy or metafiction. It was also reflecting a desire to reconstruct the novel and to face a dimension of anxiety and evil. A few representative names of the epoch were James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner. They focused on the human intellect and on man's behaviour in isolation.
Experimentalism underlined the importance of individual psychology and freed the novel from the bondage of the socio-historical context. It meant to create an illusion of wholeness moving away from reality. The fiction writers began to oscillate between the realistic attitude towards the material world and the experimental self-questioning. There were also many writers who, in the attempt of renewing the novel and adjusting it to the political climate of post-war Britain set forth a new trend - that of realism. The books belonging to this period tried to make other modes of thought possible and shifted the reader's interest...