1881: Came to England to study medicine but instead published The Story of an African Farm (1883).
Quickly became a voice of the "New Woman" movement, which advocated for:
Expanded educational and professional opportunities for women.
Condemnation of the sexual double standard.
Developed relationships with intellectuals and reformers in London, including:
Havelock Ellis
Edward Carpenter
Karl Pearson
Eleanor Marx
Active member of the Men and Women’s Club, which discussed gender and sex.
Wrote allegories collected as Dreams (1890) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893).
1889: Returned to South Africa and focused on political problems.
Authored articles collected as Thoughts on South Africa (1923).
Opposed Cecil Rhodes’ expansionist violence in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897).
Joined a small interracial group of South African anti-imperialists and married Samuel Cronwright.
Women and Labour (1911): Critique of the idea that marriage and child-rearing should be the only vocations for women from middle and upper classes.
Argued that decreased infant mortality and the industrialization of labor made child-bearing less necessary and more costly.
Demanded equal opportunities for women in the workforce.
Advocated for “our full half of the labour of the Children of Woman.”
South Africa and South African politics are central contexts for Schreiner’s writings.
1814: Cape Colony became a British colony, encouraging British citizens to immigrate and become farmers.
Displaced Dutch farmers (Boers).
Heightened tensions between the Boers, the Xhosa, and the Zulu.
Schreiner held some racist views, but deplored the divisions weakening her country.
The Woman’s Rose
Symbolic story about a rose kept in an old box, representing faith in woman.
The narrator reflects on a past experience when she was 15, visiting a small up-country town with mostly men.
There was only one young girl, about seventeen, fair, and rather fully- fleshed with large dreamy blue eyes, and wavy light hair.
The girl was worshipped by all the men in the town, who brought her flowers, offered her horses, and begged her to marry them.
The narrator arrived and the men forsook the fair-haired girl to worship her, causing tension between the two young women.
The narrator felt guilty and disliked that the men had deserted the fair-haired girl for her.
The narrator was leaving and someone gave a party in her honor, to which the fair-haired girl wore the last white rose.
The fair-haired girl took the white rose from her breast, and was fastening it in the narrator's hair, explaining dark hair sets off flowers so nicely.
The narrator never saw the fair-haired girl again, but she kept the rose.
The rose symbolizes the narrator’s faith in woman.
When that faith grows dim, she recalls the rose, reminding her there will be spring and better times, and that spring cannot fail us.
Toru Dutt (1856–1877)
Indian poet, translator, novelist, and essayist who died at 21.
Known for her cosmopolitanism and synthesis of European and Indian cultures.
1875 letter: Expressed interest in studying Sanskrit to read the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in the original.
Posthumously published translations of Hindu legends in Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) established her reputation.
Drew inspiration from Hindu hymns that her mother sang to her as a child.
Received an extraordinary education in European literature and culture due to her family's conversion to Christianity.
Family's conversion allowed her to travel to Europe (ocean travel was forbidden to many high-caste Hindus).
Father resigned from his government position due to limited opportunities for Indian men.
First major publication: A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), translations of French poetry.
Other posthumously published works:
Novel in French: Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers (1879)
Unfinished novel in English: The Young Spanish Maiden (published serially in Bengal Magazine in 1878)
Legends of Hindustan
Work is noted for its blending of European poetic forms with Indian themes and narratives.
Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dutt's poetry reflects her political commitments and a nationalist attachment to Indian culture.
Our Casuarina Tree
Poem reflecting on the significance of a Casuarina tree for the poet.
The tree is described as being like a huge Python with a creeper climbing it.
The tree is home to birds and bees, and is filled with sweet songs at night.
The poet delights in seeing the tree at dawn, with a baboon sitting on its crest.
The tree is dear to the poet because of memories of playing beneath it with loved companions.
The poet hears a dirge-like murmur from the tree.
The poet associates the tree with her native clime, and wants to consecrate a lay unto its honour.
Wishes for the tree to be numbered with deathless trees, and that Love defend it from Oblivion’s curse.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
Born in Edinburgh on May 22, 1859, to Irish parents.
Father suffered from depression and alcoholism and was committed to an asylum.
Mother supported his reading and sent him to Stonyhurst College.
Rejected Christianity and became agnostic by sixteen.
Studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh where Joseph Bell, who inspired Sherlock Holmes, was one of his teachers.
Published his first story at twenty in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.
Established a medical practice in Southsea in 1882 after serving as a ship’s doctor.
Began writing detective stories due to having lots of free time.
Sherlock Holmes debuted in A Study in Scarlet (1887), illustrated by his father.
“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” series ran in Strand Magazine from July 1891.
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” appeared in February 1892 and was Doyle's favorite.
Considered a paradigmatic example of the "locked room" mystery.
Doyle grew to resent the Sherlock Holmes series because it took time away from his more serious writing.
Killed off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem” (1893), in which Holmes and Professor Moriarty fall over the Reichenbach Falls.
Due to public pressure, he brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) (set before Holmes’s death) and then “The Empty House” (1903).
The Sherlock Holmes canon includes fifty-six stories and four novellas.
The Professor Challenger series, which includes The Lost World (1912), was another success.
Married in 1885; his wife died from tuberculosis in 1906. Married Jean Leckie in 1907.
Became interested in Christian Spiritualism after the deaths of his wife, son, brother, brothers-in-law, and nephews.
Advocated for the authenticity of the “Cottingley Fairies” photographs (later exposed as a hoax).
Justified British military actions in pamphlets on the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) and was knighted in 1902.
Involved in the George Edalji case, which led to the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
Died on July 7, 1930, and is buried in Hampshire.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)
Famous and beloved writer.
First Indian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Author of the national anthems for India and Sri Lanka.
Outspoken proponent of anticolonialist policies and international peace.
Gained recognition as a member of a prominent family and talented writer.
His works came to the attention of modernist authors such as W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound.
Became an important political voice during decolonization.
Wrote poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and songs.
Founded his own school as an innovative educator.
Was a painter and traveled to at least 24 countries between 1912 and 1932.
Grew up without much formal education but was supplemented with tutors.
Published his first poem at thirteen and his first major work at sixteen.
Family was central to the Bengali Renaissance, a movement in anticolonialist and nationalist thought in India.
Went to England to study law but left to immerse himself in British literary culture.
Returned to India committed to reconciling European and Bengali literary traditions.
Married ten-year-old Bhabataraini in 1883, who took the name Mrinalini.
Had five children, two of whom died in childhood. Mrinalini died in 1902.
The included works are among the first to be translated into English by the author and read by European and American audiences.
Gitanjali, from which song 35 is taken, was central to his being awarded the Nobel Prize.
The short stories take up themes having to do with the ordinary lives of ordinary people, particularly those living in the countryside.
Committed to unity between Muslims and Hindus as well as between nations.
Initially supported Mohandas Gandhi’s “Swadeshi” movement but later withdrew his support.
Renounced his knighthood after the 1919 Massacre of Amritsar.
Gitanjali 35
A poem expressing a desire for a country where:
The mind is without fear and the head is held high.
Knowledge is free.
The world is not divided by narrow domestic walls.
Words come from the depth of truth.
Tireless striving reaches towards perfection.
Reason is not lost in habit.
The mind is led into ever-widening thought and action.
The speaker asks that his country awaken into that heaven of freedom.
The Cabuliwallah
Story about a five-year-old girl, Mini, and her friendship with a Cabuliwallah (a seller from Kabul), Rahmun.
Mini is very talkative.
Mini is initially afraid of the Cabuliwallah because she believes he carries children in his bag.
The narrator buys items from Rahmun when he calls at the house.
Mini and Rahmun become friends, sharing jokes and conversations.
Mini's mother is fearful of the Cabuliwallah.
Rahmun is arrested for assault after a dispute over money.
Years later, Rahmun is released from prison on the day of Mini's wedding.
Rahmun is no longer remembered, as Mini has new friends and is getting married.
The narrator is uncomfortable to see Rahmun, because he has hurt another.
Rahmun brings Mini almonds and raisins, remembering their friendship.
Rahmun shows the narrator a piece of paper with an impression of his daughter's hand.
The narrator realizes that Rahmun is also a father.
The narrator gives Rahmun money to return to his own daughter.
The narrator curtails some of the wedding festivities to provide the money.
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Roots of modern literature in the late 19th century.
Aesthetic movement emphasized “art for art’s sake,” rejecting Victorian moral and educational duties.
Led to alienation of the modern artist from society.
Public education growth led to a mass literate population and mass-produced popular literature.
Segmentation of the reading public into “highbrows,” “middlebrows,” and “lowbrows.”
Gap widened between popular art and art esteemed by the sophisticated.
Modernist iconoclasm and avant-garde experiments emerged in literature, music, and visual arts.
Late 1800s: Reaction against Victorian attitudes began.
Samuel Butler criticized Victorian family, education, and religion in The Way of All Flesh.
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) marked the high tide of anti-Victorianism.
Thomas Hardy, a pivotal figure, marked the end of the Victorian period with “The Darkling Thrush.”
Poem expresses pessimism and a bleak sense of the modern world.
Stoicism characterized literature in the transitional period.
Early 20th century: Traditional stabilities of society, religion, and culture weakened.
Modernity challenged traditional ways of structuring human experience.
Rapid social and technological change, war, empire, economic migration, and urbanization disrupted the old order.
Powerful concepts and vocabularies emerged in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and the visual arts that reimagined human identity.
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) changed views of rationality, the self, and personal development.
Lawrence adapted Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex.
Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890–1915) altered basic conceptions of culture, religion, and myth.
Western religion was decentered by being placed in a comparative context.
Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God, repudiated Christianity, and offered a tragic conception of life.
Rapid transformation also occurred in everyday life with the spread of electricity, cinema, radio, and new pharmaceuticals.
Modern writers sought forms to register profound alterations in human experience.
Scientific revolution: Max Planck’s quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (1905).
Technological advances: Wireless communication (1901), the Wright brothers’ airplane (1903), and Henry Ford’s Model T (1908).
Many modern writers paradoxically repulsed by aspects of modernization.
Scientific materialism weakened organized religion, leading writers to look to literature as an alternative.
Modern writers articulated the effects of modernity’s relentless change, loss, and destabilization.
Women’s suffrage was won in 1918 for women aged thirty and over, and in 1928 for women aged twenty-one and over.
These shifts in attitudes toward women, in the roles women played in the national life, and in the relations between the sexes, are reflected in a variety of ways in the literature of the period.
Edwardian period: vulgar wealth and conspicuous enjoyment dominated.
Georgian period: Temporary equilibrium between Victorian earnestness and Edwardian flashiness before World War I.
World War I shifted attitudes toward Western myths of progress and civilization.
Postwar disillusion of the 1920s resulted from the sense of social and political collapse during the war.
By the beginning of World War I, a quarter of the Earth’s surface and population were under British dominion.
Some colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand earned dominion status.
Other colonies had indigenous populations stripped of political power.
Nationalist movements gained strength, as in India’s demand for swaraj (“self-rule”).
Irish nationalism resulted in violent protests against British rule.
Easter Rising of 1916 led to Irish independence in 1921–22 (except for Northern Ireland).
Depression and rise of fascism and Nazism affected emerging poets and novelists.
Feminism, pacifism, and liberal attitudes emerged; some literary figures turned to the political right.
Younger intellectuals turned to the political left in the 1930s due to the impotence of capitalist governments in the face of fascism.
Outbreak of World War II in September 1939 marked the end of the red decade.
Diminution of British political power led to a reappraisal of Britain’s place in the world.
India won its independence in 1947, but was partitioned. Postwar decolonization spread to Africa and the Caribbean.
Postwar decolonization coincided with and encouraged postcolonial writing.
Nobel Prize winners included Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, and Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Citizens of postcolonial nations immigrated to postwar England, transforming Britain into a multiracial society.
Large-scale, ongoing rethinking of national identity in Britain was prompted by Anglo-Saxon conception of Englishness and multiracial reality.
Black and Asian British writers emerged, including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Grace Nichols, and Caryl Phillips.
From the 1960s, London ceased to be the sole cultural stage of the United Kingdom.
Regional dialects and multicultural accents were admitted to BBC airwaves.
Arts Council delegated much of its grant-giving responsibility to regional arts councils.
Regional literature experienced a renaissance.
Margaret Thatcher led the Conservatives to power in 1979, becoming the country’s first woman to hold the office of prime minister.
Irish Republican Army waged bloody campaign for united Ireland, which was met by British Army and Protestant Unionists.
1998: Good Friday Agreement led to elections for Northern Ireland Assembly.
Tony Blair moved to restore the National Health Service and system of state education.
United Kingdom officially withdrew from the European Union on January 31, 2020.
Poetry
Years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution.
The imagist movement insisted on hard, clear, precise images, arose in reaction to Romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry.
Imagists insisted on “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective,” on the avoidance of all words “that did not contribute to the presentation,” and on a freer metrical movement than a strict adherence to the “sequence of a metronome” could allow.
The imagists wrote short, sharply etched, descriptive lyrics, but they lacked a technique for the production of longer and more complex poems.
Sir Herbert Grierson’s 1912 edition of John Donne’s poems both reflected and encouraged a new enthusiasm for seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry.
The revived interest in Metaphysical “wit” brought with it a desire on the part of pioneering poets to introduce into their work a much higher degree of intellectual complexity.
Full subtlety of French symbolist poetry also came to be appreciated.
Modernist writers wanted to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to those of conversation.
Irony helped achieve that union of thought and passion that Eliot, in his review of Grierson’s anthology of Metaphysical poetry (1921), saw as characteristic of the Metaphysicals and wished to bring back into poetry.
A new critical movement and a new creative movement in poetry went hand in hand, with Eliot the high priest of both.
Eliot also introduced into modern English and American poetry irony by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial, or by alluding obliquely to objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with the surface meaning of the poem.
Lawrence had begun writing poems freer in form and emotion, wanting to unshackle verse from the constraints of the “gem-like” lyric and to approach even the “insurgent naked throb of the instant moment.”
The self-declared “Anglo-Mongrel” Mina Loy mongrelized the diction of English-language poetry and desentimentalized Anglo-American love poetry.
Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay incorporated patois into his early poetry.
Painters, sculptors, and musicians influenced the modern writers.
Robert Bridges’ posthumous 1918 publication of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry encouraged experimentation in language and rhythms.
Hopkins combined precision of the individual image with a complex ordering of images and a new kind of metrical patterning he named “sprung rhythm,” in which the stresses of a line could be more freely distributed.
Yeats’s work encapsulates a history of English poetry between 1890 and 1939.
Hopkins’s attention to sonorities, Hardy’s experiments in stanzaic patterns, Yeats’s ambivalent meditations on public themes, Eliot’s satiric treatment of a mechanized and urbanized world, and Owen’s slant-rhymed enactments of pity influenced Auden and the other poets in his circle.
As World War II began, the Auden group’s neutral tone gave way to an increasingly direct and humane voice, as in Auden’s own work, and to the vehemence of what came to be known as the New Apocalypse. Poets of this movement, most notably Dylan Thomas, owed something of their imagistic audacity and rhetorical violence to the French surrealists.
A new generation of poets, including Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and Philip Larkin, reacted against what seemed to them the verbal excesses and extravagances of Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell, as well as the arcane myths and knotty allusiveness of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.
“The Movement,” as this new group came to be called, aimed once again for a neutral tone, a purity of diction, in which to render an unpretentious fidelity to mundane experience.
Stevie Smith’s poetry shared the period’s politics, conversational idiom, and ironic tone, as well as an interest in adapting oral forms such as ballads, folk songs, and even nursery rhymes.
From the late 1950s and the 1960s, Ted Hughes began to write poems in which predators and victims in the natural world suggest the violence and irrationality of modern history, particularly the carnage of World War I, in which his father had fought.
Since the 1980s, the spectrum of Britain’s poets has become more diverse.
Born in the northern English district of West Yorkshire, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage brought the local vernacular rhythms into contact with traditional English and classical verse.
Post–World War II Ireland was among the most productive spaces for poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Seamus Heaney, his most celebrated successor, responded to the horrors of sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland with subtlety and acute ethical sensitivity in poems that drew on both Irish genres and sonorities as well as the English literary tradition of Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Ted Hughes.
From postcolonial regions came some of the most important innovations in the language and thematic reach of poetry in English. Derek Walcott drew largely on British, American, and classical European models, though Walcott creolized the rhythms, diction, and sensibility of English-language poetry.
In the late 1960s the Barbadian Kamau (then Edward) Brathwaite revalued the linguistic, musical, and mythic survivals of Africa in the Caribbean.
Also combined these sources with a pronounced emphasis on the technological media of composition, whether it be paper, tape recording, or computer.
Wole Soyinka stretched English syntax and figurative language in poems dense with Yoruba-inspired wordplay and myth.
A. K. Ramanujan’s sharply etched poems interfused Anglo-modernist principles with the south Indian legacies of Tamil and Kannada poetry.
A century that began with a springtime of poetic innovation drew to its close with the full flowering of older poets and the twenty-first century opened with signs of fresh growth.
Fiction
The novel's flexibility has enabled writers to take advantage of modernity's global dislocation and mixture of peoples.
Twentieth century novels fall into three sub-periods:
High modernism through the 1920s, inwardness, complexity, and difficulty.
Reaction against modernism in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, with a return to social realism and moralism.
The period after the collapse of the British Empire in which the fictional claims of various realisms are asserted alongside self-consciousness about language and form.
By the end of the century, modernism had given way to the pluralism of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
High modernists wrote in the wake of the First World War's shattering of confidence in old certainties.
Modernists attempted to construct credible new alternatives to the old belief systems.
Subject would be “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.