Modern Era Edwardian.ppt

History of English Literature
Modern Era (1900
– 1945)
Part 1

Modern Era Division (1900-1945)
• Edwardian Era (1900-1910) – Early Modern
Era
• Georgian Era (1911-1936) – Mid Modern
Era
WWI period – (1914-1918)
Interwar period - (1918-1938)
• WWII Period – (1939 – 1945)

Edwardian Era (1900-1910)/Early Modern
Era
Major Incidents
• Reign of King Edward VII (1901-10)
• Britain and France sign the Entente Cordiale (1904)
• The Anglo-Russian Entente is formed (1907)
• The Olympic Games are held in London. (1908)
• Parliament approves the introduction old age pensions for people over
70 years old (1908)

Literary Features of the Time
• Opened with a sense of hope, apprehension, optimistic mood
& gave expression to a common conviction that science &
technology would transform the world
• Writers drew widely upon the realistic & naturalistic
conventions
• Influence of Ibsen, Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola &
Dickens
• Anti-aesthetic
• They questioned the political organizations, the morality of
armaments and war, the function of class and professional
strata, the validity of family and marriage, and the issue of

Importance of literature grew during this
period: Reasons
Spread of Education
• Many acts and laws related to education strengthened the spread
of education, especially the Education Act of 1870 and the Act of
1902.
• Education was available to the poorest and thus literacy became
normal.
• Due to this spread of education and significance of literacy and
literary values there was a large market for literary classics and for
all types of fiction.
• There were demands for new works in educational fields such as
science, history and travel.

Enormous Output of Books
• As the literary field was enhanced by commercial
there was a rapid arrival of books.
• But this made way for pot-boilers (books by inferior
intended for financial success). Thus, art was sometimes
sacrificed to business.
The Literature of Social Purpose
• The rise of literacy and literary values ensured the
of a national conscience to the evils resulting from
revolution.
• Reformers of various causes believed in the printed
• Literature’s scope of producing works which
social issues became its major attribute since this
• Problem play or Discussion play, and the Novel of
purpose are two of the literary products of the period.

The Dominance of the Novel
• For the semi-educated people of the period, fiction
palatable than the much-sophisticated verse genres.
• Novel was more accessible at an affordable cost than
and it was considered as a well-suited medium for
studies which attracted great artists of the period.
• Thus, novel became the dominant literary form in
The Rebirth of Drama
• Drama started being an important form as
chiefly concerned with social scenes and issues.
• There was a revival of poetic drama both in British
drama.

Experiments in Literary Form
• At this age due to the reforms, and material
impact, old traditional forms started being
experiments in all three literary genres were
• Literature started appearing in new forms to
new demands.
• Progression is mostly seen in drama, but novel
underwent revolutionary changes.
• Poetry held the ground on its traditional
the experiments in it were less sensational.
became less significant.

How did novels became the preferred and
popular creative choice?
• The novelists of this period were eager to explore the shortcomings of
English social life, frustrations of lower and middleclass existence, the
self, the world of commerce and materialism and believed that
constructive changes are a necessary evil.
• They made use of the traditional forms such as ballads, narrative
poems, satire, fantasy, topographical patterns, and essay for composing
novels.

Features of the novel (1890-1918)
The Dominance of the Novel
• One of the most striking features of the history of the novel is the speed
with which it has developed. Its growing importance has been accompanied by
serious study of the art of the novelist, and, from a technical point of view, the
progress of the last sixty years is unequalled in all its previous history.
The Conception of the Novel as an Art Form
• The problem of the aim and scope of the novelist is now seriously posed in
England for the first time.
• Hardy, Wells, Conrad, James, Galsworthy, and Moore devoted themselves to
this question.
• They abandoned the direct loose biographical method in favour of an
indirect or oblique narrative, with great concern for pattern and composition,
and characterization built on the study of the inner consciousness.
• It is in this manner that much modern fiction has been written.

The Novel of Ideas and Social Purpose
• To Thomas Hardy the aim of the novel was to interpret
life through a picture of human existence so presented as to
the author's philosophy, whereas Conrad interprets life
sacrifice of art.
• Allied to this view of the novel is that of Butler, Wells,
Galsworthy, who saw it as a means of social propaganda, a
for disseminating their ideas on religion, shifting social
family life.
Realism
• Many short-story writers were influenced by the realist
of fiction, which also makes itself felt in the works of the
social purpose and they aimed to present life with detached,
photographic accuracy, regardless of moral or ideological
considerations, judging his work by aesthetic canons alone.

French and Russian Influences
• From Flaubert (1821-80), the brothers de Goncourt (Jules
1830-70, Edmond 1822-96), Zola (i840-1902), Maupassant (1850-
Balzac (1799-1850), English writers learned the minutely
of everyday life, and the new conception of the novel as an art
which structure, pattern, style, and finish were of fundamental
• In Dostoevsky (1821-81), Turgenev (1818-83), and Tolstoy
they found a new interest in the darker, hidden sides of human
different form and structure.
The Growing Popularity of the Short Story
• Foreign influences were equally strong in the short story, which
widely practised.
• Hardy, Bennett, Conrad, Gissing, Kipling, Wells, and Moore all
medium with success, and Henry James is perhaps the greatest
writer in English.
• A writer who greatly influenced future generations was 'Saki'

Novelists of the Time
• Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
• Henry James (1843 – 1916)
• Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
• H G Wells (1866- 1946)
• Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
• Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)
• Saki (Hector Hugh Munroe [1870-1916])
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 – 1930)

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
• born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset (Son of a stonemason, and
trained as an architect)
• the fictitious Wessex where he sets most of his novels is clearly
inspired by south-west England (or Dorset)
• Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867,
failed to find a publisher.
• After he abandoned his first novel, Hardy wrote two new ones that
he hoped would have more commercial appeal, Desperate
Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), both of
which were published anonymously.
• Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the
contemporary “sensation” fiction of Wilkie Collins.
• Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), introduced Wessex for the
first time and made Hardy famous by its agricultural settings and its
distinctive blend of humorous, melodramatic, pastoral, and tragic
elements.

• Most of his novels are set in rural areas, later collectively came to be known
as Wessex.
• The Return of the Native (1878), on the other hand, was increasingly
admired for its powerfully evoked setting of Egdon Heath, which was based
on the sombre countryside Hardy had known as a child. It is a study of
man’s helplessness before the malignancy of an all powerful fate.
• Hardy’s next works were The Trumpet-Major (1880), set in the Napoleonic
period and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)which incorporates
recognizable details of Dorchester’s history and topography. It talks about
the inexorable destiny which hounds man to his downfall.
• Wessex Tales (1888) was the first collection of the short stories that Hardy
had long been publishing in magazines.
• The closing phase of Hardy’s career in fiction was marked by the publication
of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), which are
generally considered his finest novels.
• Though Tess is the most richly “poetic” of Hardy’s novels, and Jude the most
bleakly written, both books offer deeply sympathetic representations of

• Though technically belonging to the 19th century, these novels
anticipate the 20th century in regard to the nature and
treatment of their subject matter.
• Tess profoundly questions society’s sexual mores by its
compassionate portrayal and even advocacy of a heroine who is
seduced, and perhaps raped, by the son of her employer. She has
an illegitimate child, suffers rejection by the man she loves and
marries, and is finally hanged for murdering her original
seducer.
• In Jude the Obscure the class-ridden educational system of the
day is challenged by the defeat of Jude’s earnest aspirations to
knowledge, while conventional morality is affronted by the way
in which the sympathetically presented Jude and Sue change
partners, live together, and have children with little regard for
the institution of marriage.
• Both books encountered some brutally hostile reviews, and

• His subjects and mere human beings struggling
against the invincible fate. He presented both man
and woman and no gender bias can be seen in his
works.
• he always portrayed man as a puppet in the hands of
fate.
• His novels feature an frequent use of coincidence
and sometimes there is a fondness for grotesque,
unusual and melodrama.
• Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the
social constraints on the lives of those living
in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs,

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) - His Poems
• Hardy seems always to have rated poetry above fiction, and Wessex
Poems (1898), his first significant public appearance as a poet, included
verse written during his years as a novelist as well as revised versions of
poems dating from the 1860s.
• Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) contained nearly twice as many
poems as its predecessor, most of them newly written.
• In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the three volumes
of The Dynasts, a huge poetic drama that is written mostly in blank
verse and subtitled “an epic-drama of the War with Napoleon”—though it
was not intended for actual performance.
• The Dynasts as a whole served to project his central vision of a universe
governed by the purposeless movements of a blind, unconscious force that
he called the Immanent Will.
• His poems are intentionally angular in rhythm, short, pithily condensed
lyrics adorned with great technical care and a love for experimentation.
Like his novels, it reveals man’s unequal struggle against an overwhelming

HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)
• Henry James came of a wealthy and cultured American family,
was born in New York, and was educated in America and Europe
before going to Harvard to read law (1862).
• after spending much time in Europe he settled there in 1875,
adopting London as his new home.
• James was a prolific writer. Novels, short stories, travel
sketches, literary criticism, autobiography flowed from his pen
with a regularity that is surprising in one who was, above all
things, a consummate artist.
• His chief novels fall broadly into three groups.
• To his credit he has almost a hundred tales, which began with
his earliest contributions to American magazines and continued

• Beginning with Roderick Hudson (1875) we have four novels, all of
them simpler and more straightforward in technique than his mature
work, and these deal with the contrast between the young American
civilization and the older European culture. The. other three of this
group are The American (1876-77), The Europeans (1878), and The
Portrait of a Lady (1881). This last is much the best of his early novels,
and in its subtle character analysis and careful craftsmanship it looks
forward to the James of the later periods.
• Then come three novels mainly devoted to the study of the English
character, The Tragic Muse (1890), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), and
The Awkward Age (1899), of which The Spoils of Poynton, a relatively
short novel, shows most clearly the development of his methods.
• The highwater mark of his career was reached in the three novels,
The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The
Golden Bowl (1904), in which, turning again to the theme of the
contrast between European and American cultures, he achieves a
subtlety of character-study, a delicacy of perception, and an elaboration

He was one of the first to view it as an artistic form. He was little
concerned with external events and almost entirely with the
detailed and elaborate study of the subtlest shades of human
reactions to the situation which he conceived
The key to James's choice of subject is to be found in his own life -
An American fascinated by the charm of an older civilization, he
finds a great many of his themes in the impact of one type of
society upon the product of another, in the study of the processes of
adjustment and their effect upon the development of the individual
character.
He is concerned with man as a social being, not with the deeper
relations of man and his God.
James is primarily interested in a, character developing as part of
a social group.
He has no interest in the poor or in the unintelligent.

JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-19240)
• Conrad, whose name was jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Konreniowski. (was
the son of an exiled Polish patriot and was born at Berdiczew in the
Ukraine, where he spent the first thirteen years of his life.
• he was determined to go to sea, he went to Marseilles in 1874 and there
joined the French Mercantile Marina.
• Four years later he landed at Lowestoft and joined the British merchant
service.
• By 1885 he had his master mariner's, certificate, and, before Ill-health
caused him to leave the sea in 1894,, he had spent twenty years roaming the
world in sail and steam ships.
• Conrad's first two works were based on his experiences of Malaya
• Alrnayer'Folly and An Outcast of the Islands (1896) if not among his best
gave a foretaste of his later works in their use of a vivid tropical background
and in their study of a white man whose moral stamina was sapped by the
insidious influence of the tropics.
• Then came one of his best novels, The Nigger of the “Narcissus" (1897), a
moving story of life on board ship, remarkable for its powerful atmosphere, its

• Lord Jim: a Tale (1900), is the greatest of his early works.
• It is one of the best of Conrad's studies of men whose strength fails them in a
moment of-crisis, and is again a story of the sea. ln it Conrad introduces for the
first time his technique of oblique narrative, the story being told through the
ironical Marlow, who reappears so frequently in later novels.
• Youth -- A Narrative; and two_other Stories (1902) and Typhoon, and other
Stories ( 1903) contain seven tales which include some of Conrad's most powerful
work.
• "Heart of Darkness" in the former collection is remarkable for an overwhelming
sense of evil and corruption and for its excellent tropical backgrounds.
• Typhoon is unsurpassed as a book about the sea even by this supreme master of
sea description.
• The stories in both collections were based on his own experiences.
• (Nostromo--A Tale of the Seaboard (1904) shifts the scene to the coastline of

• Conrad, the greatest modern romantic, sought his subjects wherever he could expect to
find adventure in an unusual or exotic setting.
• His own experience of the sea-find, in particular, of Malayan waters, was of immense
value to him as a writer, and most of his best work is in one or both of these settings.
• While he is an excellent story-teller who gives deep thought to his technique of
presentation, his prime interest is in character, in the tracing of the life of a man in such
a way as to illuminate the inmost recesses of his soul.
• Conrad preserves an objective detachment and presents his people in series of brief
illuminating flashes
• His characters, both men and women, are drawn from a wide range.
• Conrad had profound sense of the tragedy of life, but it did not lead him to a spirit of
resentment or accusation in man's struggle against hostile forces.
• His aim was to present life as the senses perceived it, and his novels are free from
didacticism.
• Presenting his material in an easy, conversational manner through the medium of a
spectator such as Marlow, he gradually builds up a picture through a series of brief sense
impressions, which only reveal their full significance when they finally come together
into a complete whole.
• Conrad's prose style is one of the most individual and readily recognizable in English
not as might be expected in a Pole, for its eccentricities, but for its fill use of the musical

HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866-1946)
• Wells was born and educated at Bromley in Kent.
• He became a teacher, and in 1884 entered the Normal School of
Science, South Kensington, where he spent three years and gained
much of the scientific knowledge which he was to turn to such good
use.
• On leaving the College he again took up teaching, but in 1893 ill-
health compelled him to leave the profession and turn to literature
for a livelihood.
• He began as a journalist and contributed to such periodicals as The
Fortnightly Review, Pall Mail Gazette, and Saturday Review.
• The year 1895 saw the publication of The Time Machine, first of
the scientific romances which established him as a popular writer by
1900.
• The most prolific of major modern writers, Wells poured out
scientific romances, novels, pamphlets, popular educational works,

• Among them we may mention The Stolen Bacillus and Other
Stories (1895), The. Wonderful Visit (1895), The Invisible Man
(1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the
Moon (1901).
• Wells exploited the contemporary interest in science, packing
them with a wealth of accurate scientific detail which gave them
a strong appearance of actuality.
• Kipps (1905) marks the next turning-point in his career and
was to be followed by the sociological novels in which his true
greatness is seen. They include Tono-Bungay (1909), Ann
Veronica (1909), The History of Mr Polly (1910).
• These novels, like his romances, are full of interesting
incidents and dramatic scenes, and the good-humoured
naturalness of their style makes them easy and attractive
reading. They present a vivid picture of the contemporary social

• Wells was concerned above all things with contemporary social problems, and he ranks with
Shaw as a leader of advanced political thought of his day.
• Educational opportunities and political equality for women were among the causes he
supported. In pursuit of this ideal of self-development he opposed many of the conventional
restrictions of his day.
• He was a novelist presenting a serious view of life.
• His great novels have a spontaneous vitality and unfailing good humour, a warmth of human
understanding and a naturalness of style which entitle them to a high place in twentieth-century
fiction.
• They present real life with great accuracy and breadth, and Wells shows himself a master of
technique.
• But his technique is that of an older generation, of the traditional English novel.
• In his major novels Wells presents a large gallery of portraits, of which the best are studies of
simple, lovable souls like Mr Polly or Kipps, ordinary men of no particular importance who are
pitiful in their attempts to order their lives.
• For the most part his finest characters are drawn from the lower middle class which he studied
with sympathy and humour.

Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
• Arnold Bennett was born at Hanley in the Potteries and was the son of a local
solicitor.
• He studied law, and worked for some time as a clerk in his father's office before
going to a similar job in London in 1893.
• He began to contribute articles to periodicals and became sub-editor, then editor,
of the magazine Woman.
• This post he left in 1900 in order to devote all his energies to writing, and three
years later he settled in France where he married a Frenchwoman in 1907.
• He was the author of some eighty volumes of novels, short stories, essays,
articles, and plays.
• In many ways he is the victim of his own literary facility, and his reputation as a
novelist rests on some half-dozen of his many works.
• He is to the Black Country what Hardy is to Wessex, and his masterpiece The Old
Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain
(1916) are all set in this district.
• The Old Wives' Tale ranks with the greatest novels of modern English literature.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
• Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, but soon moved to Lahore, when his father, a
professor of archaeological sculpture, was appointed curator of the Government Museum
there.
• At the age of six/tie was sent to England to school.
• On his return to India he was a reporter for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and the
Allahabad Pioneer (1882-87) before beginning a two years' voyage to England which took
him through China, Japan, and the United States, and led to the articles which were
collected as From Sea to Sea (1900).
• Kipling was a prolific very versatile writer, and had from the outset all the qualities
necessary for popularity.
• He has an inventive faculty, a romantic taste for the adventurous and the supernatural, and
an apparently careless, very colloquial style, which ensured for his work a popular
reception.
• His insistent proclamation of the superiority of the white races, of Britain's undoubted
mission to extend through her imperial policy the benefits of civilization to the rest of the
world, his belief in progress and the value of the machine, found an echo in the hearts of
many of his readers.

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) (1870-1916)
• Saki is famous for his use of epigrammatic style.
• Saki's witticism and sense of humour have something in common with
present-day black comedy. His best work is found in Reginald (1904), The
Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and Beasts and Super- Beasts (1914).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
• The short story was found to be particularly suited to tales of detection and the
supernatural.
• His portrayal of detective genius Sherlock Holmes gave way for more
mysteries.

The Decadents
• The Decadent movement was a late-19th
century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that
followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality.
• The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world,
general skepticism, delight in perversion, and employment of crude humor
and a belief in the superiority of human creativity over logic and the
natural world.
• Central to the decadent movement was the view that art is totally opposed
to nature in the sense both of biological nature and of the standard, or
“natural”, norms of morality and sexual behaviour.
• Ernest Dowson, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons with a few other
poets, formed The Rhymers' Club of which Yeats was, for a time a

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939)
• Born near Dublin of a cultured Irish family, Yeats was educated in London
but returned to Ireland in 1880 and soon afterwards embarked on a literary
career.
• Recognition came quickly, and in 1891 he became a member of the
Rhymers' Club.
• Soon after 1890 Yeats began writing plays, and, as a strong adherent of the
Irish Nationalist Movement, he did much to assist in the creation of a
national theatre.
• The efforts of Yeats and his friends finally bore fruit when, in 1902, the
Abbey Theatre Dublin, came under the management of the Irish National
Theatre Company. Yeats was made a director, along with J. M. Synge and.
Lady Gregory.
• In later years his interest in the cause of Irish freedom led him first to an
active participation in the disturbances of 1916 and then to a public career

• Like so many of his contemporaries, Yeats was acutely conscious of the spiritual barrenness
of his age, and his whole artistic career is best seen as an attempt, at first to escape from the
sordid materialism, but later formulated a new positive ideal which would supply his
spiritual needs
• A believer in magic and kindred arts, Yeats sought to escape into the land of, 'faery,' and
looked for his themes in Irish legend and the simple, elemental impulses of man's primitive
nature.
• The best remedy for the emptiness of the present seemed to lie in a return to the simplicity of
the past.
• To this period belong his narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), which first
established his reputation.
• His mystical and philosophical studies and his excursions into spiritualism led to the
promulgation of a new philosophical system, and much of the poetry of this period was
devoted to the expounding of his theories, which are most fully stated in his prose work A
Vision (1925).
• In 1919 he published The Wild Swans at Coole, a collection of poems similar to those in
Responsibilities, but with the added force of a new maturity which is most clearly to be seen
in the poems dealing with his own experiences. The peak of his achievement is reached in
The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and other Poems (1933), in which he handles

• Though Yeats wrote some twenty plays, and was so intimately concerned with the
foundation of the Irish National Theatre, it is clear that, he lacked the essential
qualifications of the dramatist.
• The virtues of his plays are in their poetry.
• For him his themes were always of primary importance, and there is a close parallel
between the subjects of his lyrics and those of his plays.
• His characters, too, were drawn from Irish legends.
• Yeats's philosophy is often expressed through a carefully devised system of symbols.
• The reader's difficulties arise mainly from Yeats's use of the same symbol to
represent a variety of things
• he uses the traditional verse forms, modified sometimes to suit his own needs, but
now his rhythms approach more closely to those of ordinary speech; yet the subtlety
of his patterns is such that the music of his verse is of the highest quality. His
compact, closely woven style, each word used with calculated effect, lends itself
readily to a wide variety of subjects. The deceptive simplicity that is Yeats's at his
most subtle is to be seen in the strikingly effective Crazy Jane poems.

ROBERT BRIDGES (1844-1930)
• He was born at Walmer, in Kent, of a well-to-do country family, and both the county of his
birth and the good fortune which made it unnecessary for him to earn a living have left
indelible marks on his work.
• In 1854 he went to Eton, and from there to Oxford in 1863.
• He was made Poet Laureate in 1913, and in the same year helped to found the Society for
Pure English.
• His subjects, mainly love and nature, are handled with flawless taste and restraint, and with
the delicate artistry of an accomplished technician.
• His is the art which conceals art, and his mastery of rhythms, sure ear for verbal music, and
lightness of touch give to these lyrics something of the quality of the best Elizabethan songs.
• Prometheus the Firegiver (1883) and Eros and Psyche (1885) are elaborate but over lengthy
poems.
• In 1929 Bridges published his long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty, an attempt
to show beauty as the supreme force.
• The use of metre was, for Bridges, the most important aspect of poetic technique.
• From his earliest publications he experimented ceaselessly in an attempt to throw off what he
felt to be the shackles of conventional patterns and approach more closely to the rhythms of

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)
• Born at Bromsgrove and educated at Bromsgrove School and Oxford.
• After ten years in the Patent Office he became (1892) Professor of Latin at
University College, London, a post which he held until offered the chair of
Latin at Cambridge in 1911, which he held until his death.
• The poetry of A. E. Housman has close affinities of mood with that of the poets
of the end of the nineteenth century, and even more markedly with the writings
of Hardy.
• His poetical output was small, consisting entirely of three slender volumes, A
Shropshire Lad (1896), on which his reputation mainly rests, Last Poems
(1922), and the posthumously published More Poems (1936).
• Yet his popularity and influence have been out of all proportion to the slender
bulk of his verse.
• A Shropshire Lad is a series of sixty-three poems set for the most part in the
country of the Welsh border, of which Housman is the prophet, as Hardy is of

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950)
• George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin of Irish Protestant stock
and there received a somewhat scanty education at a number of
local schools.
• In 1876, he came to London. There he became an active member of
the Fabian Society soon after it was founded in 1884
• In the meantime, after an abortive attempt to become a novelist (he
wrote four unsuccessful novels) Shaw commenced as a dramatist
with Widowers' Houses (1892).
• By the end of the First World War Shaw had become a cult
• In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature, and four
years later Sir Barry Jackson founded the Shaw Festival at
Malvern, for which Shaw wrote new plays until 1949, when his last
full-length play, Buoyant Billions was performed there

• Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) contained seven works, three "unpleasant,"
four "pleasant."
• The "unpleasant" were Widowers' Houses (1892), Mrs Warren's Profession
(1894: banned by the censor, privately produced 1902: publicly produced 1925),
and The Philanderer (1893:1905).
• The first two are unflinching and deep examinations of slum landlordism and
organized prostitution respectively.
• They are well constructed and contain flashes of Shavian wit, but their serious
realism proved unpalatable for the times and merely brought their author
notoriety.
• Having failed to put over his ideas directly and seriously, Shaw adopted a
humorous, witty approach in the first of the "pleasant" plays--Arms and the
Man (1894)--an excellent and amusing stage piece which pokes fun at the
romantic conception of the soldier, and which has since achieved great
popularity.
• It was the first of the truly Shavian plays. Candida (1895), which presents a
parson, his wife, and a poet involved in 'the eternal triangle,' has more human
warmth than many of his works, and the main interest is focused on the

• Man and Superman (1903: 1905), one of Shaw's most important
plays, deals half seriously, half comically, with woman's pursuit of
her mate.
• The play is Shaw's first statement of his idea of the Life Force
working through human beings toward perfection, and this, he feels
here, can be reached only by the selective breeding which will
eventually produce the superman.
• The play is unconventional in its construction, especially in the
third act, entitled "Don Juan in Hell”.
• Social conventions and social weaknesses were treated again in
Pygmalion (1912: 1913), a witty and highly entertaining study of
class distinction, and in Heartbreak House (1913: 1921), which,
though set in the War period, really treats of upper-class
disillusionment during the pre-War years.
• Shaw believed that the ideas of his plays were their most

• Shaw's fundamental aim in his drama was the bettering of the lot of humanity.
• Scoffing at the romantic view of life, be examined man and his social
institutions with intellectual courage and shrewd, irreverent insight.
• His Prefaces are very striking, In them he expounds views more or less closely
connected with those which underlie the plays which follow. Often they reveal
truly deep thought
• Shaw's wit sparkles through his plays: with Arms and the Man it began to
have great prominence. Wit is the very essence of Shavian comedy, in which the
dramatist, standing outside the world he creates, sees it with an impish
detachment.
• The characters of Shaw are largely seen as the products, good or bad, of social
forces, or as the representatives of ideas. Some are mere mouthpieces for his
theories, while others are really project-cms of his own personality. His
dialogue was from the beginning of the highest order.
• He excels in brief, witty exchanges and, above all, in the handling of extremely
long speeches

Modern Era Edwardian.ppt

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