After Modernism Weighed

The idea

Writing in Britain and Ireland after nineteen thirty answered Modernism in several ways while history pressed on it: depression, a second world war, the end of empire and a welfare state at home. In the thirties Auden, the leading poet, wrote of Icarus ignored and of war's outbreak, among poets whom journalists grouped as his circle, while Dylan Thomas brought Welsh rhetoric to the villanelle and the radio play, and Stevie Smith hid despair beneath a comic surface. Orwell turned plain prose against tyranny in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and against imperial pressure in "Shooting an Elephant," while Huxley imagined rule by pleasure. Waugh and Greene wrote Catholic novels, and Golding stranded boys on an island to test human nature. On the stage Beckett's Godot, written first in French, defined Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd; Osborne's Look Back in Anger launched kitchen-sink realism; Pinter's menace and Stoppard's Hamlet games sat between the two, and Churchill brought feminist experiment. In poetry Larkin and the Movement chose plainness and form against Dylan Thomas's rhetoric, Hughes chose violent nature, Plath confession, and Heaney Irish soil and the bog bodies of the Troubles. In fiction Lessing split the self into notebooks, Spark used flash-forwards, Burgess invented slang, Carter rewrote fairy tales, and Ishiguro, McEwan and Barnes carried the novel into the Booker era of postmodern self-consciousness. To answer a question on this period, use the description's distinctive details, separate realist from absurd, check nationality and original language, and remember that these works are described here, not quoted.