1. 20 th CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE

2. THE BACKGROUND Decline of a world power. 3 phase Lost confidence after War I New ways in literature Rhymers’ Club (renewing poetry) (Yeats) Bloomsbury group (renewing of novel) (Woolf) ‘Angry young man’ generation (renewing drama) (Osborne)

3. CONTENTS William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) The Second Coming David Herbert Lawrence (1888-1930) Lady Chatterley’s Lover Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) Murder in the Cathedral George Orwell (1903- 1950) Nineteen Eighty-Four Seamus Heaney (1939 -) Clearances-3 (1984) Harold Pinter (1930—) The Homecoming

4. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Born in Dublin middle class family Rhymers’ Club (1890) Irish Theatre After 1910 turns to poetry

5. The Second Coming (1920) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

6. David Herbert Lawrence (1888-1930) Parents: miner and teacher Teaching job Married professor’s wife Frieda Richthofen Novels banned in England Emigrating 1919 Travelling, New Mexico ranch

7. Lady Chatterley’s Lover Passionate relationship of a lady and their gamekeeper Society refuses the relationship Explicit language of love Privately published in 1928, in Florence Full version first published in USA, in 1959 UK obscenity trial in 1960

8. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) Old American family Harvard, Sorbonne, Oxford Left career in philosophy Settled in UK 1922 Waste Land (poem 433 lines) Nobel Prize 1948 1935 Murder in the Cathedral (drama)

9. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) Written for the Canterbury festival In blank verse About Thomas Beckett (1118-70) Drama about humility and devotion

10. George Orwell (1903-1950) Orwell, pen-name from 1933 Born: Eric Arthur Blair in India No university degree Served in Burma, fought in Madrid, correspondent, sergeant in World War II Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four

11. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Satirical political novel totalitarian society Led by Big Brother People are watched No privacy, no individuals

12. Seamus Heaney (1939- ) Irish Catholic farmer family Scholarship to university Lecturer at Dublin, California universities and Harvard Nobel Prize 1995 Translation of Beowulf 1999

13. Clearances-3 (1984) Series of sonnets After his mother’s death Memory to protect

14. Harold Pinter (1930- ) Jewish immigrant family Left studies of drama after 2 years First long play 1957 Plot in a single room, characters threatened From the 70s active in politics

15. Thursday December 8, 2005 Harold Pinter delivering his Nobel lecture via video to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

16. The Homecoming (1965)