Identity: the foundations of British culture 2.. Living culture: the state of modern Britain In search of the new: Modernism Writers in the early 1900s responded to the changing world..
Trang 11 Identity: the
foundations
of British culture
2 Literature
and philosophy
3 Art, architecture and design
4 Performing arts
5 Cinema, photography and fashion
6 Media and communications
7 Food and drink 8 Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
In search of the new: Modernism Writers in the early 1900s responded to the changing world The old certainties of the universe seemed to
have slipped: Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859)
was questioning the Old Testament, the cast-iron layers
of society appeared suddenly fluid and Freud was poking around in the subconscious It all contributed to the growth of Modernism and, in literature, to tireless innovation British literature continued to flourish but most writers followed their own path, rarely beholden
to any wider movement Increasingly they turned inward, losing that confident, structured sense of the external world and dealing instead with the more personal experiences and emotions of the individual
Five early 20th century novelists that stick in the memory
Rudyard Kipling An Englishman born in Bombay,
Kipling set his books during the Raj Some have condemned his accounts of India under British rule as racist; others suggest he was being satirical Most, however, are agreed on Kipling’s gift for narrative
The Jungle Books (1894 and 95) and Kim (1901) were his
best novels
E.M Forster Forster’s fluid prose framed England’s
failure to create colonial utopia in A Passage to India (1924) His earlier novels, A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), detailed clashes of a different kind,
between protocol and abandon, materialism and spirituality
In praise of Kipling
In 1907 poet, novelist
and short story writer
Rudyard Kipling became
the first English
language writer to win
the Nobel Prize for
Literature He remains
the youngest man to
take the prize – he was
41 Kipling later rejected
a knighthood and the
Poet Laureate job.