A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 56

 History of English Literature: A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

• Influences of Modern  Inventions on Literature.
• Consequences brought about the First World War.
• Impact of Psychology on  Modern  Literature.
• Reasons for the Dominance of the Novel.
• Rebirth of the Drama in the Twentieth Century. 

1. Modern inventions and discoveries by universities, government agencies, private industries, or privately endowed foundations have changed the lifestyle of the modern men. 
2. Particularly, Methods in industry and agriculture, methods in business and finance have been revolutionized, and all these innovations and modifications have their influence on the physical environment in which the modern author moves and has his being. 
3. More directly, the modern press, made possible through improvements in machine production, the rapid collection of news, and the speedy distribution of newspapers and magazines has shown its power in formulating the taste and opinions of readers, and in publicizing authors and serializing their works. 
4. Because of this, letters are no more difficult for ordinary readers and the author can reach them by easy plans.   
5. Modern  authors in modern sphere are often planning and developing of the writing material and are usually employing mass media for production and publication. 
6. During The World Wars   many nationalities were abolished for the greater awareness of the universalism. The death of over 10 million men in combat left a gaping chasm in the social and economic life of the postwar world. 
7. Many of those who survived the war returned home with physical disabilities that prevented them from rejoining the work force. 
8. Others suffered the lasting effects of what in those days was called shell shock and what is today labeled post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological affliction that prevents a successful adaptation to civilian life. Many of the dead left widows and orphans who had to cope with severe economic hardship and emotional loss. 
9. The post-war consequences of this most hideous episode in the world’s history are everywhere apparent in Great Britain in widespread unemployment, and demoralizing system of the rise of prohibitive taxes and inheritance does, the impoverishment of the   nobility   and   aristocracy,   the dismemberment of such centers of culture as art collection and libraries of rare books and manuscripts. 
10. The disillusionment characteristic of much post –war literature can be traced directly to the bitter economic conditions that have resulted from the squandering of the nation’s wealth in the Great War.  
11. Two world wars, an intervening economic depression of great severity, and the austerity of life in Britain following the second of these wars help to explain the quality and direction of English literature in the 20th century. 
12. The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them.
13.  Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways.
14. The system of analytical psychology, headed by Freud, Jung, and Adler, seemingly at sword’s points with such a deterministic system as behaviorism, have been equally effective in banishing will and the capacity to control and direct action by finding the foundations of personality and the cause of behavior in unconscious or subconscious forces over with the individual has little or no control. 
15. Psychoanalysis, thought more mystical and less logical than behaviourism, has had a parallel effect in its tendency to relieve the individual of responsibility for his acts and to minimize the power of the will. 
16.  Psychoanalysis has been criticized on various grounds and is not as popular as in the past. However, Freud’s overall influence on the field has been deep and lasting, particularly his ideas about the unconscious. 
17. Today, most psychologists agree that people can be profoundly influenced by unconscious forces, and that people often have a limited awareness of why they think, feel, and behave as they do. 
18. The novel became popular because to a semi-educated Modern  taste prose fiction was more sophisticated taste, while, by its nature, it is more accessible to the masses than Drama .
19.  In addition, the Novel is admirable suited as a vehicle for the sociological studies which attracted most of the great artists of the period. 
20. After a hundred years of insignificance drama again appears as an important literary form, and the thirty years under review some men of genius, who are also practical experienced men of the theatre, creating a live and significant Drama out of the problems of their age.
21.  Like the novelists, most of the important dramatists were chiefly concerned with the contemporary social scene, and though, towards the end of the period, there are signs of a revival of poetic-drama, prose is the normal medium.  
22.  In the United States, Anderson, Hellman, Odets, and Wilder continued to produce important works following World War II, but the most praised older dramatist was O'Neill.
23.  His later works, most notably Long Day's Journey into Night (produced 1956), were brought to the stage at last in the late 1950s. 
24. But the dominant dramatists of the postwar years were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Miller pursued the Ibsenian tradition of social Drama in his most famous play, The Death of a Salesman (1949), and enriched it with some touches of expressionism and symbolism by conveying parts of the story through the main character’s memories. Williams also worked generally in the mode of realism, but in a somewhat more poetic style and stressing individual psychology more than social concerns, as can be seen in his first two major works, The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). 
25. William Inge in such works as Picnic (1953) and Robert Anderson in Tea and Sympathy (1953) echoed the themes and approach of Williams and Miller. 
26. Bloomsbury Group, popular collective designation for a number of English intellectuals prominent in the first quarter of the 20th century, all of whom were individually known for their contributions to the arts or to social science.

   Ardhendu De