Abstract
1900 is not an important literary date. The publication in 1880 of Dostoievski’s The Brothers Karamazov was a much more important event in the early development of a specifically twentieth-century literature, as was also the first performance in 1879 of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Although no woman playwright has so far equalled the achievements of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer or Kate Millet in using the long essay to set out the case for what Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 essay called he Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), Ibsen’s play is at one and the same time a forerunner of the revival of the theatre which is so marked a feature of twentieth-century literature, and the first major attempt since the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, in 411 BC, to use literature to call into question the authority of men over women. When, in 1988, Angela Holdsworth prepared a major documentary for the BBC subtitled ‘The Story of Women in the Twentieth Century’, it was a fitting tribute to Ibsen that the main title should be Out of the Doll’s House. There is, in this respect, some irony in the fact that apart from Joan Littlewood, whose 1963 musical Oh What A Lovely War! made so many of the attitudes of the English poets of the 1914–18 war popular with a wider public, no other woman has made her mark in the twentieth-century theatre as an author or a director.
The nature of disbelief: comparisons and contrasts between Camus, Salman Rushdie, Kingsley Amis and David Hare; and Martin du Gard, Bertrand Russell, and Somerset Maugham. Huxley and Sartre on pregnancy and biology. A glance at humanism in Anthony Burgess and Auden; a parallel with Matthew Arnold; a mention of ‘Catch 22’.
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Notes
Under its French title, Le Zéro et l’Infini, this became a best-seller in France in 1945. This may have been because the French Communist party, having failed to have the book banned, told its members to buy as many copies as possible so that it could burn them. It was also praised by F. R. Leavis on p. 22 of The Great Tradition (Secker & Warburg, London, 1955)
For Steinbeck, see Chapter 18 of his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, analysed in more detail in Chapter 6. For Huxley, see Part III, chapter ii of After Many a Summer. Like a number of other English writers working in Hollywood and living in Southern California, including P. G. Wodehouse, Huxley had been a guest at Hearst Castle, also known as Saint Simeon and ‘La Cuesta Encantada’ (The enchanted hill) in the late 1930s. Like Xanadu in Orsen Welles’s 1939 film, Citizen Kane, Jo Stoyte’s castle is clearly based upon San Simeon, though the similarities between Stoyte and Hearst — as between Hearst and Charles Foster Kane — are not very close. As Welles observed in his Foreword to Marion Davies’s The Times We Had (Ballantine Books, New York, 1975)
Barthes made no secret of his debt to the Swiss linguistician Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and to his posthumously published Cours de Linguistique générate (translated by Baskin, Course in General Linguistics, 1959). For Saussure, it was important to distinguish between ‘le signifié’, the thing signified, and the signifier, or the sign, as well as to recognise that the relationship between the two was arbitrary: ‘cow’ and ‘vache’ are both linguistic signs, but it is only through the conventions governing the linguistic codes of English and French that they both mean the same thing. For Barthes, literary language differs from other types of discourse by having no’ signifie’, nothing to which it refers. There are a number of books on Barthes, of which the most widely admired are Jonathan Culler’s 1983 Roland Barthes (OUP) and Michel Moriarty’s Roland Barthes (Polity Press, Cambridge 1991).
The Great Tradition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1955), p. 3. The Leavises were unenthusiastic about a number of other authors who have given pleasure to many readers. Q. D. Leavis did not mean it as a compliment when she remarked of Dorothy Sayers, in Scrutiny 1937, that she had’ stepped out of the ranks of detective writers into that of best-selling novelists’, and her husband commented in 1955 in D.H. Lawrence, Novelist on ‘how promptly the tiny talent of Katherine Mansfield was acclaimed, and to what an inflationary tone’. Mrs Leavis nevertheless kept her severest strictures for P. G. Wodehouse. When the creator of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Lord Emsworth, Psmith, the Oldest Member and Mr Mulliner was awarded a D. Litt., Honoris Causa by Oxford in 1939, she commented in the Cambridge based Scrutiny that ‘His humour is a cross of prep-school and Punch, his invention puerile, the brightness of his style the inane, mechanical and monotonous brightness of the worst schoolboy slang’. A more sympathetic view of Leavis can be found in William Walsh’s essay ‘A Sharp, Unaccommodating Voice: the Criticism of F. R. Leavis’ in his The Human Idiom (Chatto & Windus, London, 1966).
Published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1928. Bulldog Drummond’s Four Rounds with Carl Petersen (Bulldog Drummond, 1920; The Black Gang, 1923; The Third Round, 1924 and The Final Count, 1926; all by’ sapper’ = H. C. MacNeile) are very well analysed by Richard Usborne in his 1953 essay, Clubland Heroes (Constable, London). The extent to which novels of this type helped to shape the political attitudes and expectations of a whole generation is visible in John Weightman’s only half-ironic remark in his review of Usborne’s essay that he was surprised when the Communist double agents Burgess and MacLean escaped to the Soviet Union in 1955 since this went against all his expectations that Bulldog Drummond would always catch such villains in time. Richard Usborne’s essay is one of the best examples of a genre first practised by Q. D. Leavis in 1932 in her Fiction and the Reading Public and by George Orwell in essays such as ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, ‘The Art of Donald Magill’ and ‘Boys’ Weeklies’. The object of books and essays of this kind, of which another well known example is Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (Chatto & Windus, London, 1957), is to analyse popular culture with a view to what it can tell us about modern society. Some of the conclusions reached are more convincing than others, and Orwell was famously taken to task by Frank Richards for a number of mistakes in ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (cf. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. I, pp. 485–93). It could also be argued that the traditional description of Sapper’s novels as ‘the literature of British Fascism’ neglects the fact that the historical discoveries of the 1970s, like the changes brought about by the collapse of Communism in the 1990s, made some of the political attitudes inspiring the activities of Drummond and his friends less outlandish than they seemed to critical observers at the time. The German historian Fritz Fischer’s long and detailed German War Aims in in the First World War (London/New York, 1967) suggests, for example, that Drummond’s antipathy to ‘the Huns’ was fully justified in the light of what they were trying to do: annex Belgium and Luxembourg; reduce France to a satellite state from which all British goods were excluded, and which had no army to defend itself; transfer control of France’s and Belgium’s African colonies to Germany. Like the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, Sapper’s work also had a hostility towards the Bolshevik Revolution which seems less unreasonable now that the study of Soviet archives has shown what the KGB was up to. The long essays putting the case for the women’s movement are less vulnerable to criticism. After Simone de Beauvoir had shown the way in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex, Gallimard, Paris, 1949; translated by H.M. Parshley, Cape, London, 1953; Four Square Paperback, 1960), Bettie Friedan applied the same technique of analysis to English-speaking society in The Feminine Mystique (W. H. Norton, New York, 1963).
The publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1970) coincided with the general rebellion against established society which characterised the 1960s, as did Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (Rupert Hart-Davies, London, 1971).
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© 1996 Philip Thody
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Thody, P. (1996). Themes, Variations and Constants. In: Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24399-0_1
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