British Modernism (1901-1939)

Question 1

Salome

Answer 1

Oscar Wilde- (British) historical tragedy tells story of John the Baptist and the Dance of the Seven Viels.

Question 2

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Answer 2

E.M. Forster (British) Allusion to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” “Let her go to Italy!” he cried. “Let her meddle with what she doesn’t understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He’s a bounder, but he’s not an English bounder. He’s mysterious and terrible. He’s got a country behind him that’s upset people from the beginning of the world.” When a young English widow takes off on the grand tour and along the way marries a penniless Italian, her in-laws are not amused. That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby – and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! – are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

Question 3

Major Barbara

Answer 3

George Bernard Shaw- (British) depicted an officer of the Salvation Army, who learns from her father, a manufacturer of armaments, that money and power can be better weapons against evil than love.

Question 4

“Among School Children”

Answer 4

Yeats (British) Deals with Plato and Aristotle. Image of stick covered with clothes.

Question 5

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Answer 5

(British) Joyce This is a buildinsroman. Stephen Dedalus (an allusion to the Icarus story) goes through a period of religousity but finally gets a calling as an artist. Stephen Dedalus reappears in Ulysses.

Question 6

Man and Superman

Answer 6

George Bernard Shaw- (British) Alludes to Nietzche. concerns a descendant of Don Juan Tenorio, who is pursued by a woman he loves but doesn’t like. The story is explicated in a dream–a conversation in hell between Juan, a very charming Satan and two other characters. Sir Peter Hall has directed a distinguished cast in the whole magilla which features witty musical bridges based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni. concerns a descendant of Don Juan Tenorio, who is pursued by a woman he loves but doesn’t like. The story is explicated in a dream–a conversation in hell between Juan, a very charming Satan and two other characters. Sir Peter Hall has directed a distinguished cast in the whole magilla which features witty musical bridges based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Question 7

George Bernard Shaw

Answer 7

Irish dramatist. Wrote for the abolition of private property. Henrick Ibsen (Norweighian writer of A Doll’s House) had great influence on him. (British)

Question 8

Mrs. Dalloway

Answer 8

Virginia Woolf (British) is probably the most accessible of her greatest novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess (Clarissa Dalloway, wife of Septimus Dalloway) is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity, memory and consciousness, the passage of time, and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ The novel also features her rich expression of the ‘interior monologue’ and offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. There’s quite a bit of lesbian imagery in this.

Question 9

James Joyce

Answer 9

(British) Innovated the “stream of consciousness.” His novels became increasingly complex and inscrutable. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, but lived most of his life abroad—in Paris and Italy. This was his notion of “exile” at work—he needed to be away from Dublin to comment on it.

Question 10

Heart of Darkness

Answer 10

Joseph Conrad (British) story of narrator Marlow going up the Congo in Africa to find Kurtz, a formerly successful yet now maverick trader for the company. Kurtz, when he is dying, says, “Oh, the horror, the horror!” The phrase “MISTAH KURTZ—HE DEAD. A penny for the old guy” was used by T. S. Elliot for the epigraph of his poem “Hollow Men.” “We live, as we dream - alone.” (from Heart of Darkness)

Question 11

“The Odor of Chrysanthemyns”

Answer 11

D.H. Lawrence (British)

Question 12

To the Lighthouse

Answer 12

Virginia Woolf (British) s the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes - during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies - literally within a parenthesis.

Question 13

The Apes of God

Answer 13

Wyndham Lewis (British) The period of the late 1920s, described later by Lewis as ‘‘the insanitary trough between the two great wars.’’ Lewis’s mock-picaresque hero is Dan Boleyn, a 20-year-old Irish innocent. Tutored by a 60-year-old albino dilettante named Horace Zagreus, Dan travels reluctantly through the London art world. He is horrified (and confused, and bored half to death) by the false, contrived ‘‘broadcasts’’ of the ‘‘Apes’’ — a series of pseudo-artists who resemble, on the one hand, absurd mechanical dolls, and on the other, very specific personages of the era (like Sir Osbert Sitwell).

Question 14

“A Prayer for My Daughter”

Answer 14

Yeats (British)

Question 15

Youth

Answer 15

(British) autobiographical short story by Joseph Conrad. Depicts a young man’s first journey to the East. It is narrated by Charles Marlow who is also the narrator of Lord Jim, Chance, and Heart of Darkness.

Question 16

J.M. Singe

Answer 16

Met Yeats in Paris and was persuaded to live a year or so on the Aran Islands and then return to Dublin to devote himself to the project of the Irish Renaisance. His plays were performed in the famous Abbey Theatre. (British)

Question 17

The Secret Sharer

Answer 17

Joseph Conrad (British) narrator identifies particularly well with person on boat.

Question 18

Arms and the Man

Answer 18

George Bernard Shaw- (British) Arms and the Man” starts with gunfire on a dark street in a small provincial town. The romantic and willful Raina is about to begin her true-life adventure by sheltering the handsome fugitive Bluntschli, enemy of her equally handsome fiance Sergius. The men may all be heroes - or fools since this is Shaw’s comic view of Balkan chivalry - but the women are definitely more than their match.

Question 19

Shropshire Lad

Answer 19

A.E. Housman’s first book. “To an Athlete Dying Young” “Terrance, this is stupid stuff” “When I was One and Twenty”, Others (British)

Question 20

“Lake Isle of Innisfree”

Answer 20

Yeats (British)

Question 21

D.H. Lawrence

Answer 21

(British) Hailed as a genius by some, labelled an out-of-fashion misogynist by others. He was Gay. Explored an extraordinary range of emotions and subject matter and was a prolific short story writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator, painter and man of letters.

Question 22

Wyndham Lewis

Answer 22

(British) Friend of Pound, together the founded Vorticism, Lewis in painting, Pound in literature after imagism.

Question 23

“A Room of One’s Own”

Answer 23

(British) Woolf’s lecture to a girl’s school on the state of women and writing. She says it’s bad and suggests a legendary sister of Shakespeare who we don’t know about because she never got famous because she never had a room of her own.

Question 24

Countless Cathleen

Answer 24

Yeats- (British) people sell souls for food during famine.

Question 25

Picture of Dorian Grey

Answer 25

Wilde- (British) In the story Dorian, a Victorian gentleman, sells his soul to keep his youth and beauty. The tempter is Lord Henry Wotton, who lives selfishly for amoral pleasure. ‘If only the picture could change and I could be always what I am now. For that, I would give anything. Yes, there’s nothing in the whole world I wouldn’t give. I’d give my soul for that.’ (from the film adaptation of 1945). Dorian starts his wicked acts, ruins lives, causes a young woman’s suicide and murders Basil Hallward, his portrait painter, his conscience. However, although Dorian retains his youth, his painting ages and catalogues every evil deed, showing his monstrous image, a sign of his moral leprosy. The book highlights the tension between the polished surface of high life and the life of secret vice. In the end sin is punished. When Dorian destroys the painting, his face turns into a human replica of the portrait and he dies. ‘Ugliness is the only reality,’ summarizes Wilde.

Question 26

Mrs. Warren’s Profession

Answer 26

George Bernard Shaw (British) Mrs. Warren is a prostitute

Question 27

Time and Western Man

Answer 27

Wyndham Lewis (British) He turns against his fellow modernists, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce to show how they have unconsciously turned their supposedly ‘‘revolutionary’’ writing into a vehicle for ideologies that undermine real human creativity and progress. The heart of this critique is a devastating assault on metaphysical doctrines that, Lewis believed, robbed the human mind of its creative power and handed that power over to ‘‘time’’ as a vital principle animating matter.

Question 28

T.E. Lawrence

Answer 28

(British) Known as “Lawrence of Arabia” for his exploits in the Middle East during the Arab Revolt during WWI. Friend and associate of Winston Churchill.

Question 29

Pygmalion

Answer 29

GBS- (British) This is the story of the musical My Fair Lady. Professor Higgins, Colonel Pickering, Eliza Dolittle.

Question 30

Room with a View

Answer 30

E.M. Forster (British) The first part of the novel is set in Florence, where the young Lucy Honeychurch is visitng with her older cousin Charlotte Bartless. Lucy witnesses a murder and becomes caught between two man, shallow, conventional Cecil Vyse and George Emerson, who kisses Lucy during a picnic. The second half of the novel takes place at Windy Corner, Lucy’s home on Summer Street. She accepts a marriage proposal from Cecil. The Emerson become friends of the Honeychurches after George, Mr. Beebe, who is a clergyman, and Freddie, Lucy’s brother, are discovered bathing nude in the woods. Finally Lucy overcomes prejudices and marries George.

Question 31

Nostromo

Answer 31

Joseph Conrad (British) was an imaginative novel which again explored man’s vulnerability and corruptibility. It includes one of Conrad’s most suggestive symbols, the silver mine. In the story the Italian Nostromo (‘our man’) is destroyed for his appetite for adventure and glory but with his death the secret of the silver is lost forever.

Question 32

Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Answer 32

(British) D.H. Lawrence’s best known work. Constance Chatterley is married to Sir Clifford, a mine owner in Derbyshire. A war wound has left him impotent and paralyzed. Constance has a brief affair with a young playwright and then enters into a passionate relationship with Sir Cliffords gamekeeper, Oliver Melloers. Connie becomes pregnant. Sir Clifford refuses to give a divorce and the lovers wait for better time when they could be united. - One of the models for the cuckolder-gamekeeper was Angelino Ravagli, who received half the Lawrence estate after Frieda’s death. “Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.”

Question 33

Playboy of the Western World

Answer 33

J.M. Singe (British) Christopher Mahon—“Christy”—seems as though he’s killed his father by hitting him over the head. He runs away to another town, where they herald him as a hero. He lives there for a while, then his father shows up (apparently dad had only been knocked out). Christy, in front of the townsfolk, hits his father again and seems like he kills him. This time, the townsfolk realize he’s no hero. But his father wakes up and they go home. This play was disturbing to many Irish folk because it was an unflattering portrayal of the working class.

Question 34

Finnigan’s Wake

Answer 34

Joyce (British) crazy. ETS likes to ask about a book that begins with an incomplete sentence and ends with an incomplete sentence that’s to be read into the beginning. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”

Question 35

British Modernism

Answer 35

1901-1939 Developed out of a sense that the art forms of the late nineteenth-century were inadequate to describe the condition of Europe after World War I. Lawrence(s), Joyce, Conrad, Woolf, Forster, Bernard Shaw, Yeats, Wilde, Singe, Housman, Auden, Lewis

Question 36

William Butler Yeats

Answer 36

Ring-leader of the “Irish or Celtic Rennaisance,” an Irish independence movement staking out a literary past. One of the big achievements of this group was the establishment of Abbey Theatre. He had a hopeless passion for a woman named Maud Gonne. He was both a deeply myth- and symbol-oriented poet and a dramatist. (British)

Question 37

Howards End

Answer 37

E.M. Forster (British) was a story that centered on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. The book brought together the themes of money, business and culture. “To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.” (from Howards End) It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can’t be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of “telegrams and anger” that foster “such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization.” Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman’s death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

Question 38

“Byzantium”

Answer 38

Yeats (British)

Question 39

Heartbreak House

Answer 39

George Bernard Shaw- (British) Set during a house party at the eccentric household of Captain Shotover and his daughter Hesione, this comedy of manners takes a probing look at the conflict between old-fashioned idealism and the realities of the modern age. Heartbreak House was Shaw’s favorite play.

Question 40

A.E. Housman

Answer 40

(British) a world class latin scholar. He also wrote some comparatively slim volumes of poetry using surprisingly simple diction. Themes typically deal with fleeting youth or tragic youth.

Question 41

The Revenge for Love

Answer 41

(British) Wyndham Lewis’ best novel. Set in Spain and in Britain just before the Spanish Civil War, the book grabs you from the first page and never lets go. It is both a sophisticated thriller about the political struggle in Spain and a meditation on the ethical value of political parties and action. The novel begins and closes with the protagonist, the Communist Percy Hardcaster, in a Spanish prison. The world outside of prison, which Percy inhabits between arrests, is dominated by art forgery in London, atrocity propaganda, arms smuggling, and the manipulation of appearances in every respect. Percy is in some ways an autobiographical character, though also an object of satire, and he grows in stature as he begins to see through the veil of appearances created by the forgers and fakers.

Question 42

Sons and Lovers

Answer 42

D.H. Lawrence (British) The story of an Oedipal love triangle. Paul loves his mother, Mrs. Morel. Eventually, he meets a woman named Miriam; they fall in love and maintain an intimate, yet platonic, relationship. Eventually, Paul is confused because his mother doesn’t approve, but eventually Paul and Miriam consummate their love and agree to be married. Paul, though, realizes he loves his mother best and breaks off the engagement. His mother gets sick, Paul cares for her, she dies, and Paul goes off alone.

Question 43

Rainbow

Answer 43

D.H. Lawrence (British) Look for the name Ursula to identify this

Question 44

“Musee des Beaux Arts”

Answer 44

W.H. Auden (British) About Icarus falling from the sky and no one caring.

Question 45

E.M. Forster

Answer 45

(British) Author that traveled extensively: Italy, Greece, Germany, India. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a group that rebelled against the Victorian conventions of England. Friend of Virginia Woolf. Often deals with the contrast between the emotionless British person and the more hotblooded, passionate Italian. He came up the idea of “flat” and “round” characters. Or was that D. H Lawrence? Homosexual.

Question 46

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Answer 46

Oscar Wilde’s most famous poem. (British)

Question 47

Women in Love

Answer 47

D.H. Lawrence (British) Look for the name Ursula to identify this

Question 48

“The Unknown Citizen”

Answer 48

W.H. Auden (British) a dead citizen forgotten, but the government says all is well.

Question 49

Virginia Woolf

Answer 49

(British) Uses “stream of consciousness” style of writing. With Joyce, Pound, Stein, and Eliot, she was at the forefront of modernism. Edward Albee wrote play Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf in allusion to her. She hated WWI so much that she committed suicide when WWII started. She made a somewhat famous analogy dealing with literary conventions as conversational conventions—the author as hostess.

Question 50

The Importance of Being Ernest

Answer 50

Oscar Wilde- just look for the name Ernest (British)

Question 51

An Ideal Husband

Answer 51

Oscar Wilde (British)

Question 52

Ulysses

Answer 52

(British) Joyce The story of just one day in thoughtful Stephen Dedalus’s life. Again, title is allusion to Greek myth.

Question 53

Oscar Wilde

Answer 53

Irish playright who studied under Walter Pater (writer of The Rennaisance) and John Ruskin (writer of Stones of Venice). He became the poster-child of the “art-for-art’s-sake” movement; he dressed like a dandy because he was one. He’s known for his flamboyance and his witty, pithy, epigrammatic statements. When he died, he said, “Either I go, or this wallpaper goes.” He had a homosexual relationship with Alfred Douglas, which led to his imprisonment. The Yellow Book wouldn’t publish his work and he despised that publication. (British)

Question 54

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

Answer 54

W.H. Auden (British) Yeats died in winter, mentions his Irishness.

Question 55

“The Second Coming”

Answer 55

Yeats (British)

Question 56

Joseph Conrad

Answer 56

Was Polish but learned English (at sea) and became a prolific writer of sea faring tales. (British)

Question 57

W.H. Auden

Answer 57

(British) Considered to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and might also be placed in the postmodern section.

Question 58

Saint Joan

Answer 58

George Bernard Shaw- (British) This was known as a masterpiece. The play was based on the life of Joan of Arc. Shaw did not portrait her as a heroine or martyr, but as a stubborn, sexless young woman of great spirit. Uncommonly Shaw portrayed her judges with sympathy. The play was written four years after Joan was declared a saint.

Question 59

Lord Jim

Answer 59

Joseph Conrad (British) narrator again is Marlow. This time, he’s piecing together and telling the story of Jim, who is a seaman that wants to be a hero. But Jim’s ship is struck and he abandons ship (rather than going down with it). For this, he has his sailor’s certificate revoked. Marlow helps Jim get a supervisor job at an isolated trading post, where he falls in love with a have native half white girl named Jewell. He has a run-in with a pirate named Gentleman Brown. He’s a strong, tall guy.

Question 60

The Plumed Serpent

Answer 60

D.H. Lawrence (British) The story of a European woman’s self-annihilating plunge into the intrigues, passions, and pagan rituals of Mexico.

Question 61

Passage to India

Answer 61

E.M. Forster (British) characters, Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz. Moore accuses Aziz, but Aziz’s boss sticks by him.

Question 62

Dubliners

Answer 62

Joyce (British) A book of stories or novellas. The two most famous are: * “The Dead”—Main character is Gabriel. The first part is all one big social party. The end is famous—his wife talks about a man that really loved her. Gabriel sees snow falling all over Ireland—over “the living and the dead.” * “Araby”—

Question 63

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Answer 63

(British) T.E. Lawrence Memoirs of his travels around the world. Especially Arabia.