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Chapter X
The Twentieth Century
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1,Modernism,
The twentieth century was marked by the
two World Wars,the direct result of the
conflicts between rival imperialist countries
and their ambition to dominate the world,
Roughly speaking,the development of
English literature in the twentieth century
can be divided into two stages,that is,
literature between WWI and WWII and
literature after WWII,
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1.1 T,S,Eliot (1888-1965),
He was born in the US,He received high
education at Harvard University,
He went to London when the war broke out,
there he met another American poet Ezra
Pound,who encouraged him and helped
him publish his work The Waste Land,
which established his status in literary
history,
Besides poetry and dramatic poetry,Eliot
also wrote many essays and literary
criticism,
,
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T,S,Eliot,
“The Love Song of J,Alfred Prufrock”
a typical example of modernism,
The poem is noted for its irony,and
the allusions to classical literature,
He used the technique of the stream
of consciousness,
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1.2 James Joyce (1882-1941),
An Irish born novelist,known for the
technique of the stream of
consciousness,
His main works,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (1916),a semi-autobiographical
novel;
Ulysses (1922)
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2,Angry Young Men
A phrase loosely applied to a number of
British playwrights and novelists from the
mid-1950s,whose political views were
radical or anarchic,and who described
various forms of social alienation,
It is sometimes said to derive from the title
of a work by the Irish writer Leslie Paul,
Angry Young Man (1951),
John Osborne,Look Back in Anger (1956);
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3,The Theatre of the Absurd,
A term applied to a group a
dramatists who were active in the
1950’s,In the plays the dramatists
express that life has no pattern of
meaning or ultimate significance and
that no activity is more or less
valuable than another,
Samuel Beckett,Waiting for Godot
(1952)