Post-War and Post-Modern Literature

1. POST WAR AND POST-MODERN LITERATURE:Graham Greene

2. ENGLISH POETRY IN THE PERIOD SINCE 1945 TILL NOWDAYS: ROBERT GRAVES; PHILIP LARKIN; TED HUGHES; GEOFFREY HILL; MICHAEL LONGLEY;

3. ENGLISH POST WAR AND MODERN DRAMA: JOHN OSBORNE; TOM STOPPARD; PETER NICHOLS; DAVID STOREY; HUGH LEONARD.

POST WAR AND MODERN LITERATURE (The 3-d period)

After World War II there appear young writers like James Aldridge, who are ready to keep up the standard of wholesome optimism, and mature writers, who have passed through a certain, creative crisis, but who are now arduously working to discover a humanism with a positive set of values. Such a writer is Graham Greene.

In the fifties there appears a very interesting trend in literature, the followers of which were called "The Angry Young Men". The post-war changes had given a chance to a large number of young people from the more democratic layers of society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life. Unemployment had increased after the war and besides that, English society continued to follow the old conservative rules of life and apparently did not need them. No one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. They felt deceived and became angry. There appeared works dealing with such characters, angry young men, who were angry with everything and everybody. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain, Kingsley Amis and the dramatist John Osborne. Modern literature that began in the sixties saw a new type of anti-bourgeois criticism in the cultural life of Britain. This criticism was revealed in the 'working-class novel', as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class, but they have a petty-bourgeois psychol­ogy. The best known writer of this trend is Alan Sillitoe. So, in this period one can differ the Post War Literature itself and the Modern Literature that began in the sixties with the new type of cultural life of Britain. Since sixties the literary life in Great Britain has developed greatly. The new time brings new heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works. The specific feature of nowdays' literature is the variety of genres and styles, which inrich the world's literature. Alongside with the realistic method the symbolic one takes place and develops further. On the one hand, the themes in the modern literary works concern more global problems: the Peace and War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and the Universe. But on the other hand, the duties and obligations of the individual man, the psychology and complicity of the human nature, the life's situations and the ways' of solving the problems, the power and money have always been in the centre of public attention, that found its reflection in the newest English literature, too.