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James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. His family was middle-class and very large. He was educated at a Catholic School, then at a Jesuit college, and finally at University College, Dublin. His school interests were languages, poetry, Latin and philosophy.
James Joyce first published work was a volume of poems called Chamber Music (music played with a small group of instruments) (1907). He wrote in many genres. In 1914 Joyce wrote Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories set in Dublin. “It is a chapter of the moral history of my country,” Joyce commented. It has become one of the best-known books of its time. The short story form, dating back to the middle years of the 19th century, is used by Joyce in this collection of tales to show the lives and experiences of people in Dublin.
Joyce analyzes Dublin as a city which cannot change, and whose people are dying. The collection starts with Eveline, a story of adolescnece, and finishes with the story The Dead, the title of which signifies the conclusion both of life and of the book. Each story represents a moment of self-realization in the life of one person from Dublin. Joyce took inspiration for his short stories from Anton Chekhov.
The same theme is found in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1914-1915. This is almost an autobiography, although the hero is called Stephen Dedalus.
He wants to become a writer, like Joyce himself, and finally has to leave Ireland to find his true voice as an artist.
He says, near the end of the novel: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church, and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning”.
| 8.3. Ulysses |
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In 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was published. It was published in Paris, and immediately caused great controversy – some people saw it as the most important novel of the country, but for others, including the British authorities, it was obscene, and was banned until 1936.
The novel concerns the experiences of two men during one day, 16th of June, 1904, in Dublin, and one of the main characters is Stephen Dedalus again. Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom are the other main figures in the novel, which follows the two men through a day, and ends with a stream-of-consciousness monologue by Molly: “What shall I wear shall I wear a white rose those cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich big shop at 7 1/2 d a pound or the other ones with cherries in them of course a nice plant for the middle of the table I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses.”
Molly’s thoughts and feelings here flow in a stream of consciousness. There is no punctuation as thoughts, memories and reflections move into one another.
Joyce also uses a wide range of references as well as using the styles of many works of literature from The Odyssey of Homer, on which the structure of Ulysses is based, through Chaucer to the moderns. Joyce wanted to write the novel that was the climax of the traditions of English literature.
And after Ulysses he went further. He wrote Finnegan’s Wake, which was finally published in 1939. Joyce took the novel and language to new limits. It is a highly experimental novel and very surprising to read. The main theme is Fall and Resurrection told about Dublin settings. The novel uses dreams, play on words, invented words and jokes to make a unique text.
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| 8.6. Agatha Christie (1890-1976) |
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Agatha Christie is known all over the world as the detective novelist and playwright whose books have been translated into 103 foreign languages.
She is one of the best-selling authors in the workd whose books were sold more than 100 000 000 copies.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie was born on September 15, 1890 in Torquay, Devonshire. She was the third child of Clarissa and Frederick Miller, and grew into a beautiful girl with waist-length golden hair. She didn’t go to school. She was educated at home by her mother and took singing lessons in Paris. Her father died when she was 11 and both she abd her mother were grief-stricken. She began writing detective fiction while working as a nurse during World War I. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920. That was the first appearance of Hercule Poirot, who became one of the most popular private detectives. This little Belgian amazes everyone by his powerful intellect and his brilliant solutions to the most complicated crimes.
He reappeared in about 25 novels and many short stories before returning to Styles, where in Curtain (1975) he died. The elderly Miss Jane Marple, Christie’s other principal detective figure, first appeared in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which is considered Christie’s masterpiece. It was followed by some 75 novels taht usually made best-seller lists. Her plays include The Mousetrap (1952), whichset a world record for the longest continuous run at one theatre (8862 performances – more than 21 years – at the Ambassadors Theatre, London); and Witness for the Prosecution (1953) which, like many of her works, was adapted into a very successful film (1958).
Agatha Christie’s first marriage, to Col. Archibald Christie, ended in divorce in 1928. After her marriage in 1930 to the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, she spent several months each year on expeditions in Iraq and Syria.
Agatha Christie’s success with millions of readers lies in her entertaining plots, excellent character drawing, a great sense of humor. The reader cannot guess who the criminal is up to the end of the novel. Fortunately, evil is always punished in her novels.
Agatha Christie also wrote romantic, non-detective novels such as Absent in the Spring (1944) under the pseudonym May Westmacott.
| 8.7. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) |
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in the town of Bloemfontein, South Africa on January 3rd, 1892, to English parents. In 1895 Ronald, his mother, and brother Hilary returned to England. Ronald’s memories of Africa were slight but vivid, and influenced his later writing to some extent.
His father died in 1896. In the autumn of 1899 Ronald took the entrance exam at King Edward School, but failed to obtain a place.
He retook the exam a year later, and was accepted. In 1904 his mother died, and Ronald and his brother were left to the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest. In 1908 Ronald began his first term at Oxford.
In 1915 Ronald graduated from Oxford with a First in English Language and Literature. In 1916 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien married Edith Bratt, and in 1917 his first son John was born. Tolkien worked as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. A year after that, his second son Michael was born. In 1921, Tolkien began teaching at the University of Leeds. Three years later, he becane Professor of English Literature at Leeds.
Also that year, his third son Christopher was born.
In 1925 Tolkien moved to Oxford, where he served as Professor of Anglo-Saxon. In 1929 his fourth child, Priscilla, was born.
Over the past few years, Tolkien had already started to write a great cycle of the myths and legends of Middle-earth, which was to become The Silmarillion. Around 1933, Tolkien first began telling his children of a funny little creature named Bilbo. Tolkien got the idea for The Hobbit from these stories, and in 1936, he completed the book. A year later The Hobbit was published and proved to be very successful.
In 1945, Tolkien became Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford; a position he held until his retirement in 1959. He completed the sequel to The Hobbit in 1948.
The first two parts were published in 1954, under the titles The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. A year later the third part, The Return of the King was published.
In 1954-1955 Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, which is set in pre-historic era in an invented version of the world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth.
In 1965 The Lord of the Rings was published.
The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews. Tolkien received different honorary degrees and C.B.E. (Commander of (the Order of) the British Empire) from the Queen.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien died on September 2, 1973 at the age of eighty-one.
The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien’s death.
Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters.
The long-awaited Silmarillion edited by his son Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977.
| 8.8. Post-war and modern English literature |
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The remarkable political and social changes in Great Britain within the years following World War II had a great influence on intellectual life and on literature in particular.
During the 1950s a new kind of drama began to reach the theatres of Europe – absurd drama.
Absurd drama began in France in the 1940s and reached Britain with Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket in 1955. The term “absurd” means unreasonable, illogical. It shows a general sense of this new literature. This kind of drama explains how meaningless life is.
The playwrights Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Samuel Becket and others are known today as contributors to the theatre of the absurd. They describe the absurd elements of the human condition. “Cut off from religious roots, man is lost: all his actons have become senseless, absurd, useless”.
To underline the spiritual and physical immobility of man pauses and silences are repeated in Absurd Drama. The most memorable literary form which told the stories of the Second World War was the novel.
The novel with a philosophical tendency was born and the traditional satirical novel flourished to the full.
The essence of all these literary phenomena was the earnest search of the writers for their place in life, for a better future.
| 8.9. George Orwell (1903-1950) |
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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903. His family lived in British India where his father worked for the colonial Civil Service. In 1907, the Blair family returned to England where Orwell was educated, first at a private preparatory school, and then at famous boys’ school, Eton.
After leaving school in 1921, Orwell returned to India and became a policemen. His first commission, in 1922, was in Burmah.
He remained in the Police Force until 1928, when he resigned.
Orwell then began a most unusual literary career. In 1928, while living in Paris and working in a restaurant washing dishes, he started writing articled for the French newspaper Le Monde.
In 1929 he returned to London, where he lived the life of a poor person, collecting information for his book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). It was for this book that he first adopted the pseudonym George Orwell. He then published further three novels. The first, Burmese Days (1934), decribed his experiences in the Police Force in Burmah and demonstrates his developing anti-English politics. This was followed by A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) (aspidistra = common English house-plant).
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