Contemporary English Literature

Tomislav Pavlović

Lecture 1 – English Literature after World War Two

The novel. Following the end of the Second World War, the British novel found itself at
a crossroads of sorts. The war itself was a horrible experience, one in which many of the
nightmarish fantasies that appeared in the course of the 1930’s, a veritable “Age of Anxiety”, to
quote the title of a well-known poem by W. H. Auden published in 1947, came true. It is not
surprising at all that the unprecedented barbarism and the sheer scale of devastation, which was
felt in Britain for years after the end of the war, contributed to a widespread atmosphere of
unease and demoralisation, a growing sense of the absurdity of modern existence. It was only
natural that the most influential expression of Western thought in the early post-war years was
the philosophy of existentialism, manifested in the works of thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard and
Martin Heidegger, but most of all the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose vision of
anguish and despair, expressed most eloquently in his major work Being and Nothingness
(1943), appeared to sum up the contemporary historical situation as the collapse of the
Enlightenment ideals of humanism and reason. In a similar spirit, and equally influentially, his
fellow countryman Albert Camus explored the sense of absurdity that tended to overwhelm man
in an age of inhumanity and futility, most notably in his wartime study The Myth of Sisyphus
(1942).
On top of everything else, the war had effectively brought to an end the role of Britain as
the great imperial power: in 1947, the British Raj (rule) in the Indian subcontinent came to a
close as the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act. The particularly harsh winter
that same year made Britons even more aware of their economic and political hardships: Britain
sat in victorious poverty, in a time of slender means, in the words of the writer and critic
Malcolm Bradbury.1 In an era of general pessimism, it was by no means unusual that the future
of the novel as a literary form appeared to be in doubt. Cyril Connolly, one of the most
influential critics of the era, complained in his book The Unquiet Grave (1944) that great
experimental writers like Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce and Virginia Woolf had “finished
off the novel”.2 A couple of years later, he voiced the sombre warning that “There is an intimate
connection between the Twilight of the Arts and the twilight of a civilization”. 3 This sense that
the post-war era was, in effect, one of “the Twilight of the Arts” persisted well into the 1950’s.
One thing was true, though: the pre-war avant-garde spirit, that had flourished in the Bloomsbury
circle in particular, showed no immediate signs of returning.
Post-war fiction – and this was not a situation restricted to Britain – appeared drab and
regressive by comparison: novels were marked by a return to realism, reportage, materialism,
character, linear plot development and narrative order – just about everything that Modernism
had called into question. It was felt that the novel in Britain was no longer an enterprise in
radical experiment. The writer Evelyn Waugh believed that this was the result of the drabness of

1
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001, Penguin, London, 2001, p. 270.
2
Quoted in Bradbury, op. cit., p. 271.
3
Ibid.
1
the age.4 From the point of view of writers inclined to more radical viewpoints, the problem lay
in the failure to change, in the conservative traditionalism of British life, which, somewhat
paradoxically, Waugh embodied himself.
Meanwhile, this line of argumentation often claimed, real experimentation was occurring
in fiction elsewhere, the USA, Latin America, anywhere but Britain. This view persisted for
quite a long time, resulting in the notion of British literature as realistic, provincial even, and
resolutely opposed to experimentation. This, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, was largely due to
the most influential early studies of post-war British fiction – all written by American critics.
However sympathetic they were towards British literature, they were inclined to see it as
focusing on the past rather than the present, traditional and opposed to Modernism. Thus
Frederick R. Karl maintained, in his A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel
(1959), that “… the English novel of the last thirty years [i.e. 1929-59] has diminished in scale”
and that the contemporary novel was “clearly no longer ‘modern’ ”. 5 James Gindin, in his
Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes (1962), saw the dominant subject-matter of
the post-war British novel as class and social conduct, even though he did point out the influence
of French Existentialism on British writers.6 And Rubin Rabinowitz, in his study The Reaction
Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960 (1967), pointed out a general withdrawal
from Modernism in the British fiction of the 1950’s and its emphasis on the importance of the
older, Victorian tradition of the English novel.7 This line of argument was reflected by the British
critic Bernard Bergonzi in The Situation of the Novel (1970), wherein he maintained that British
novelists had opted for “the ideology of being English”, accepted “the nineteenth century as a
going concern”, as a result of which they were failing to write the “fiction of the Human
Condition” that had developed in France and the USA.8
The picture of the British fiction of the 1940’s and 1950’s that emerged from these
accounts was that it rejected all formal experiment, was predominantly provincial in tone and
was dedicated to social realism, following the tradition of Victorian fiction. The technique that it
most often employed was that of documentary social reportage, while its characteristic story was
that of a working-class or lower-middle-class young man wandering in a state of alienation along
a canal bank in Wakefield or Nottingham, as Malcolm Bradbury humorously observes. 9 This
view of post-war British literature, as Bradbury pertinently points out, was quite simply not true,
for it thoroughly neglected not only its variety, already apparent even in the early post-war years,
but also the actual rewriting of tradition and the modernist experiment that had actually taken
place. This was generally due to the fact that the post-war atmosphere in Britain was not exactly
encouraging to contemporary literature, a situation that continued well into the 1960’s.
University courses scarcely dealt with modern writing. Indeed, as Malcolm Bradbury ironically
points out, the attitude of academic critics towards writers was very much that of the US cavalry
towards American Indians – namely, “The only good one is a dead one” – as a result of which
they dedicated little attention to current fiction, even though, strangely enough, quite a few of
those who wrote it were at universities at the time.10

4
Idem, p. 274.
5
Idem, p. 275.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Idem, pp. 275-276.
10
Idem, p. 274.
2
 Subsequent critical studies were to expose the incompleteness and narrowness of such
accounts. As Neil McEwan remarked in The Survival of the Novel (1981), the post-war
relationship with Victorian fiction was complex, critical and deconstructive, and realism was far
from being the dominant spirit of British fiction.11
With the benefit of hindsight, as Malcolm Bradbury observes in what is probably the
most comprehensive survey of the British novel after World War Two, it turns out that, contrary
to what many critics were claiming at the time, the British fiction of the late 1940’s and the early
1950’s was enjoying a significant revival, as evidenced by the fact that many of the most
important post-war novelistic careers began in the course of this period. And far from moving in
one single – and backward – direction, the British novel was actually moving in a number of
directions more or less at once: while it did veer towards realism, it also moved towards fresh
experimentation; while it is true that it moved towards regionalism, with occasional touches of
provincialism, it moved towards cosmopolitanism in equal measure; while works tending
towards social documentarism did proliferate, there was no lack of those dealing with allegory,
fantasy, the Gothic mode and metafiction.12 In fact, in Britain, as elsewhere, this was a period
when no single movement, style or aesthetic manner could be seen as predominant.
It was in this atmosphere of the plurality of voices, styles and viewpoints that the British
novel developed in the early post-war period, with many writers who became prominent decades
earlier still active, and new names gradually emerging on the scene. On account of the scope of
this course, it is physically impossible to do justice to all of them. That is why we shall be
focusing on writers whose careers started after the war, while mentioning briefly the major post-
war contributions of their colleagues who had already established themselves as leading British
writers.
The very first British post-war novel was published in August 1945, while the fighting in
the Pacific theatre of war was still going on. George Orwell’s “fairy story” Animal Farm had
been completed in 1944, but its publication had been delayed because a number of publishers
were reluctant to put out a book so obviously critical of the regime in the Soviet Union, Britain’s
wartime ally. It is a cautionary tale of how revolution can be corrupted by power-hungry,
unprincipled leaders, servile apparatchiks and by exploiting the deluded masses. Rightly
considered a classic, it was followed by the even more influential Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
published a short while before Orwell’s death from tuberculosis. Written at a time when Cold
War had begun in earnest, China went Communist and the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear
bomb identical to the American one, it is a classic dystopian tale of a totalitarian regime bent on
destroying the fundamental human values for the sake of perpetuating its grip on power.
Orwell’s profound understanding of the mechanisms of terror and brainwashing, and his
insistence on moral realism, were a major influence on the post-war mood, providing inspiration
to a multitude of writers affected by the same dystopian anxieties, from William Golding to J. G.
Ballard.
Another very popular book written in wartime but published in 1945, very different from
Orwell’s in terms of atmosphere, was Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a nostalgic look at
the already distant inter-war years and the decline of British aristocracy. It expressed longing for
a lost way of life, an Edwardian England, its protagonist eventually finding solace and meaning
in Catholicism As often tends to happen, when it was turned into a TV series in the early 1980’s,

11
Idem, p. 276.
12
Idem, p. 277.
3
its reputation was cemented, both the novel and the TV adaptation being voted among the best
100 British post-war creations.
The writer who most convincingly captured the moral anxiety of the post-war years and
the sensibility of conspiracy and betrayal was Waugh’s fellow Catholic Graham Greene. By
1960 he was widely acknowledged as the best novelist Britain had. Another screen adaptation, as
in the case of Waugh, is probably what he will be most remembered for. The Third Man (1949),
for which Greene provided the script, later turned into a book, tells the story of a penicillin
smuggler being chased through the sewers of Vienna, a divided city occupied by the four
winning powers, and was a perfect encapsulation of the Cold War ideological divide, the chaos
of lives caught up in one way or another in the great undercover superpower game. When he died
in Switzerland in 1991, after a writing career lasting several decades, Greene was praised by
William Golding as “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and
anxiety”.13
And contrary to the claim that no major new experimental works were forthcoming, the
spirit of Modernism was alive and well and – living in exile. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who
had spent the war years in Paris, being allowed residence as an Irish neutral, produced, towards
the end of the 1940’s, his great fictional trilogy (originally written in French and subsequently
translated by the author into English) – Molloy (New York, 1955), Malone Dies (New York,
1956) and The Unnameable (New York, 1958) – in all likelihood, the most radically innovative
fictional statement of the 1950’s. Beckett’s experiments with narrative form – and its
disintegration – had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950’s. 14 The one
British writer who responded keenly to the idea of creating “Modernist” fiction, and whose
experiments, as opposed Beckett’s, were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990). Posted to Alexandria during World War II as Press Officer of the
British Information Office, he responded to the challenge of this city of “five races, five
languages, a dozen creeds” by producing a sequence of four novels – Justine (1957), Balthazar,
Mount Olive (both 1958) and Clea (1960) – known as “The Alexandria Quartet”. Set in a
phantasmagoric, Eliotic place, it is a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected,
unfulfilling love affairs. But where Beckett was scrupulously economical, Durrell was prodigal,
indulging in a passion for words.15
Possibly the greatest British novel to appear in the immediate post-war years was
produced by another expatriate writer. Like Beckett, Malcolm Lowry spent some time in Paris in
the 1930’s, then moved on to the United States, Mexico and Canada, where, over the course of
several years, he wrote and many times re-drafted his novel Under the Volcano, eventually
published in Britain in 1947. It is an epic story about the Faustian damnation of an alcoholic
British hero, taking place in the small Mexican town of Cuernavaca. The action unfolds over
twelve hours on the Day of the Dead in 1938, after the signing of the Munich Agreement. The
book’s tragic hero, Geoffrey Firmin, spirals down to death at the hands of a local fascist gang in
an atmosphere of historical crisis, political corruption, betrayal and marital infidelity, all
experienced through a haze of beer, tequila and mescal. As Lowry himself explained to his
publisher, the book was a parable about “the universal drunkenness of mankind during the war,
or during the years immediately preceding it, which is almost the same thing”. 16 His ambitious
13
Idem, p. 289.
14
Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New
York, 2004, p. 602.
15
Idem, p. 603.
16
Bradbury, op. cit., p. 309.
4
plans to produce a multi-novel sequence about the human condition under the common title of
“The Voyage That Never Ends” came to nothing when he died in 1957, having returned to live in
England, of an overdose of alcohol and drugs. None of his posthumously published works come
anywhere near his magnum opus, but Under the Volcano always remains as a testimony that
Britain did have a major late modern post-war novel after all.
The major novelistic talents that surfaced in the 1950’s were those of Kingsley Amis
(1922-1995), one of the so-called “angry young men”, with whose opus we shall deal in more
detail later, William Golding (1911-1993) and Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). Golding’s major,
career-defining contribution to English literature is his most enduringly popular novel Lord of
the Flies (1954), a bleak look at the gradual slide into barbarism of a group of boys from an
English cathedral choir-school marooned on a desert island. No distinct thread unites his novels
and the subject matter and technique vary, but what ultimately gives his opus coherence is a
continuing concern with moral allegory17 and a fundamental pessimism about humanity.
Murdoch, one of the earliest readers to respond positively to Beckett’s fiction (paying homage to
his novel Murphy, which she read as an undergraduate, in her first novel Under the Net, 1954),
remains best known for her novels about sexual relationships, morality and the power of the
unconscious.
The increasing diversification of British prose from the 1960’s onwards was marked, first
of all, by the broadening of women’s perspectives and opportunities, the most substantial of the
social changes occurring in the 1960’s. Its most accurate reflection is probably to be found in the
literary careers of Doris Lessing (1919- ) and Margaret Drabble (1939- ), of whom more will
be said later. On the other hand, writers like Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), and David Lodge
(1935- ), of whom more later, explored the possibilities of language and distilled the literary
heritage of great predecessors like Shakespeare and Joyce, among others. J. G. Ballard (1930-
2009), another major experimental writer, was instrumental in making the so-called “genre”
fiction, namely – science fiction, academically respectable and eventually part of the
mainstream. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, a new generation of writers would appear,
subsequently to leave its mark on British literature, continuing the trend towards experimentation
and metafictional concerns. The most prominent among them, Martin Amis (1949- ), Julian
Barnes (1946- ) and Ian McEwan (1948- ), formerly “the young lions of British literature”,
are all well-established literary figures now and deserve a closer look.
In the 1990’s and the “noughties” (the first decade of the 21st century), the novel remains
the most accessible and the most discussed literary form. Broadly speaking, recent British fiction
can be seen to have explored four areas of interest in particular: the well-established Anglo-
Scottish Gothic tradition, which has evolved into a new kind of urban fiction; issues pertaining to
gender and sexuality; new varieties of historical writing; subjects stemming from the former
British Empire. All these areas of interest have constantly overlapped and influenced one
another.18
Drama. It was assumed at the time that the play Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
(1929-1994), which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 8th 1956, marked a
“revolution” or a “watershed” in the history of the modern British theatre. The play certainly
shocked its first audiences, as well as some of its critics, into responsive attention. It is also
claimed that this play single-handedly provoked theatre managers and companies out of their
complacent faith in middle-class values and into a response to a new kind of drama that grappled

17
Sanders, op. cit., p. 603.
18
Idem, p. 654.
5
with “the issues of the day”. Osborne’s play was certainly not revolutionary in terms of form.
What was remarkable, even alarming about it, by the standards of its time, was its rancour,
language and setting. After Look Back in Anger, out went the country drawing-room with its
platitudes and its sherry; in came the provincial bed-sitter with its noisy abuse and its ironing
board. The accepted theatrical illusion of a neatly stratified, deferential society was superseded
by dramatic representations of untidy, antagonistic and disenchanted groups of characters grating
on one another’s, and society’s, nerves.19
Osborne’s play introduced the noisiest of what contemporary journalists dubbed the
“angry young men” to theatre audiences. Its hero, Jimmy Porter, is a disconcerting mixture of
sincerity and cheerful malice, tenderness and freebooting; restless, importunate, full of pride, a
combination that easily alienates both the sensitive and the insensitive. He is a revolutionary
without a revolution, or to put it in the jargon of the 1950’s – a rebel without a cause. 20 The play
(turned into a movie in 1958) is about a love triangle involving Jimmy, his upper-middle-class,
impassive wife Alison, and her haughty best friend Helena, its most characteristic feature being
Jimmy’s railing against the iniquities of modern life and the values of middle-class bourgeois
life. In a typical early reaction, a BBC reviewer described the play’s setting – a one-room flat in
the Midlands—as “unspeakably dirty and squalid. It is difficult to believe that a colonel’s
daughter, brought up with some standards, would have stayed in this sty for a day”. 21 Legend has
it that audiences gasped at the sight of an ironing board on a London stage. 22 After being praised
by Kenneth Tynan, one of the most influential critics at the time, Look Back in Anger became a
reference point in popular culture. Tynan described the play as a minor miracle: “All the qualities
are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage – the drift towards anarchy, the
instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of ‘official’ attitudes, the surrealist sense of
humour (Jimmy describes an effeminate male friend as ‘a female Emily Brontë’), the casual
promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for.” 23 Its influence was perhaps most
wittily summed up by Alan Sillitoe, the author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, who wrote that Osborne “didn’t contribute to British
theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up”.24
With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is arguable that by far the most significant
novelty to be played on a London stage in the 1950’s was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The play opened to largely dismayed reviews at the small Arts Theatre in August 1955, having
been premiered in Paris two years earlier. This story of two tramps on a bare stage awaiting the
arrival of a figure who never comes, soon came to epitomise the so-called literature/theatre of the
absurd. In his use of drama, Beckett was consistent in his exploration of the gaps and lurches that
characterise the functioning – and malfunctioning – of the human mind.25
Although Beckett gradually came to be recognised as the most important dramatist
writing in English in the second half of the 20th century, his work initially struck many as
emerging from a largely foreign tradition of symbolic and philosophically based drama. The
purely British shock waves radiating from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger caught on more

19
Idem, pp. 596-7.
20
Idem, p. 600.
21
Cf.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Back_in_Anger
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Sanders, op. cit., p. 598.
6
readily because Osborne was responding to, as well as reacting against, an established native
theatrical tradition. His was the rebellion of an insider.26
Among the most original and challenging new dramatists emerging in the late 1950’s
who left their mark on the post-war British drama are Sir Arnold Wesker (1932- ), a prominent
contributor to the so-called “kitchen-sink drama”, 27 and Harold Pinter (1930-2008), a master of
theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, irony, and menace, of whom more later.
Wesker’s career started with the aptly-titled The Kitchen (1957), set in the basement kitchen of a
large restaurant, featuring thirty chefs, waitresses, and kitchen porters, who slowly begin the day
preparing to serve lunch. The central story tells of a frustrated love affair between a high-
spirited, young, German chef, Peter, and a married English waitress, Monique. Many of
Wesker’s plays had underlying political themes, and Wesker himself was open about his
admiration for the working class side of the class struggle. The autobiographical Chips With
Everything (1962) drew heavily on his national service in the RAF. Both kitchen and camp serve
as metaphors for an unfair and hierarchical society in which the disadvantaged are forced to fall
back on their chief resource, their proletarian vitality and their innate capacity for feeling.28
Poetry. British poetry after World War II has been dominated by the towering figures of
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Larkin was the most significant
member of a loose group of writers known in the early 1950’s as “The Movement”. The
Movement, which also included the novelist (and occasional poet) Kingsley Amis and the poet
and critic Donald Davie (1922-1995), was united not so much by its class origins, or by its beer-
drinking, pipe-smoking and jazz-appreciating friendships, but by a shared antipathy towards the
cultural pretensions of Bohemia and Bloomsbury,29 and to what it saw as the elitism and
affectation of much Modernist writing.30 Although critics routinely rank him as one of the best
poets of his generation, Hughes will forever be known to the general public for being married to
the American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. In 2008, The
Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. (He was
preceded by Larkin, occupying the top spot, George Orwell and William Golding.)
The most popular poet by far among the general public was Sir John Betjeman (1906-
1984), whose Collected Poems, first published in 1958, sold phenomenally well by the local
publishing standards – 90,000 copies within two years. 31 His popular success was based not only
on easily comprehensible, generously rhymed verse, but also to his calculated projection of
himself as a celebrity – he adopted an enthusiastic, if somewhat bumbling persona for himself on
television, though he proved to be an intelligent and inventive performer, an adept critic of
architecture and a sensitive apologist for poetry. Although he claimed in his blank-verse
26
Idem, p. 599.
27
Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement which
developed in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose “heroes”
usually could be described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism which often depicted the domestic
situations of working class Britons living in rented accommodation and spending their off-hours in grimy pubs to
explore social issues and political controversies.
28
Sanders, op. cit., p. 628.
29
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals and artists who held informal
discussions in Bloomsbury, an area in central London. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked
or studied near Bloomsbury during the first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply influenced literature,
aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Its best
known members were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey.
30
Sanders, op. cit., pp. 612-13.
31
Idem, p. 615.
7
autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960) to have presented a volume of his schoolboy poems to
“the American master, Mr. Eliot”, his own verse never reflected much of a response to Eliot’s
metrical, intellectual and lexical novelty.32
Mention must be made of Seamus Heaney (1939- ) the winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1995. Heaney’s work often deals with the local surroundings: that is, his
surroundings in Ireland, particularly in Northern Ireland, where he was born. Allusions to
sectarian difference, widespread in Northern Ireland, can be found in his poems, but these are
never predominant or strident. His poetry is not often overtly political or militant, and is far more
concerned with profound observations of the small details of the everyday, far beyond contingent
political concerns. He has also written critically well-regarded essays, which, among other
things, have been credited with initiating a critical re-examination of Thomas Hardy. His
anthologies (edited with his friend Ted Hughes), The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, are used
extensively in schools in the U.K. and elsewhere. Despite the inherently Irish flavour of his
language, Heaney is a universal poet. His influence on contemporary poetry is immense. The
American poet Robert Lowell has called him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats”. His
books make up two-thirds of the sales of living poets in the UK. 33 His Irish inheritance is best
reflected in the collections Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969),
reconstructing a childhood landscape peopled by farmers (both Catholic and Protestant),
labourers and fishermen. North (1975) is his most overtly political volume of poetry, extending
the perspective from his father’s farm to include a larger, troubled Ulster, and the relationship of
the distinctive history of that province to the long and contentious history of Ireland as a whole.34
In this predominantly male company, Stevie Smith (1902-1971) somewhat unexpectedly
won herself a wide, predominantly young audience in the 1960’s. A novel and two volumes of
poetry that she published in the 1930’s received relatively little attention, but she became a
belated celebrity in 1957, following the publication of her collection Not Wawing but Drowning,
whose title poem proved to be her most popular one. She cemented her reputation with a series
of distinctive, incantatory public readings and a new volume The Frog Prince (1966). She made
ostensibly simple poetry from the kind of subjects and expressions that other poets might have
rejected as unconsidered trifles. She immersed herself in mortality, greeting Death as a “gentle
friend” and dwelling, almost gaily, on the effects and manifestations of physical and mental
decay.35
Criticism. In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism (a
school of criticism emphasising the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalising
discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author’s
psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects, or reader response) was more or
less dominant until the late 1960’s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature
departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced
by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued
until the mid-1980’s, when interest in “theory” peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly
still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather
than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.
The most influential critics of the early post-war period were F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), I.
A. Richards (1893-1979) and William Empson (1906-1984). Frank Raymond Leavis has been
32
Ibid.
33
Cf.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney
34
Sanders, op. cit., p. 646.
35
Idem, pp. 615-16.
8
frequently (but often erroneously) associated with the American school of New Critics, a group
which advocated close reading and detailed textual analysis of poetry over an interest in the mind
and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications.
Although there are undoubtedly similarities between Leavis’s approach to criticism and that of
the New Critics (most particularly in that both take the work of art itself as the primary focus of
critical discussion), Leavis is ultimately distinguishable from them, since he never adopted (and
was explicitly hostile to) a theory of the poem as a self-contained and self-sufficient aesthetic
and formal artefact, isolated from the society, culture and tradition from which it emerged. He
introduced a high degree of seriousness into English studies, and the modern university subject
has been shaped very much by Leavis’s example. He insisted that evaluation was the principal
concern of criticism, and that it must ensure that English literature should be a living reality
operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism should involve the shaping of
contemporary sensibility. Though his achievements as a critic of poetry were impressive, Leavis
is widely accepted to have been a better critic of fiction and the novel than of poetry, as
evidenced by The Great Tradition (1948), his all-encompassing statement on the English novel.
Ivor Armstrong Richards is often labelled, or mislabelled, as the father of the New
Criticism, largely because of the influence of his first two books of critical theory, The
Principles of Literary Criticism (1926) and Practical Criticism (1929). Richards did not advance
a new hermeneutic. Instead, he did something unprecedented in the field of literary studies: he
examined the interpretive process itself by analysing the interpretive work of students. To that
end, his work necessitated a closer interpretation of the literary text in itself and provided what
seems a historical opening to the work done in English Education and Composition as they
engage empirical studies. Connected with this effort were his seminal theories of metaphor,
value, tone and ambiguity, the latter as expounded by William Empson, his former graduate
student.
Empson is today best known for his literary criticism, and in particular his analysis of the
use of language in poetical works. His best known work is the book Seven Types of Ambiguity
(1930), which mines the great riches of linguistic ambiguity in English poetic literature.
Empson’s studies unearth layer upon layer of irony, suggestion and argumentation in various
literary works – a technique of textual criticism so influential that often Empson’s contributions
to certain domains of literary scholarship remain significant, though they may no longer be
recognized as his.
Terry Eagleton (1943- ) is a British literary theorist widely regarded as Britain’s most
influential living literary critic. Literary Theory: an Introduction (1983, revised 1996), probably
his best-known work, traces the history of the study of texts, from the Romantics of the
nineteenth century to the postmodernists of the later twentieth century. Eagleton’s thought
remains firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition; he has also produced critical work on such more
recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis and deconstruction. When we take a
closer look at his work later on, it will become clearer why he is often considered to be
something of an enfant terrible of modern English criticism.