20th century literature
Robert Conquest (1917-2015)
" Stalinism is one way of attaining industrialization, just as cannibalism is one way of attaining a high protein diet." Author of non fiction like The great terror: Stalin's purges
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" and "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower", "under milk wood"
Hanif Kureishi (1954-present)
"The Rainbow Sign" and "My son the fanatic" (about a man of Pakistani descent whose son becomes influenced by Islamic extremists and who has an affair because of that), the rainbow sign is about a kid born in london and who is neither a part of london or pakistan, the Buddha of suburbia (about a man who has an Indian father and English mother and whose father becomes the Buddha of suburbia and gives him lots of sexual opportunities)
A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
"To an Athlete Dying Young" "When I Was One-and-Twenty" Shropshire sonnet cycle on love and youth in the country
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
-Welshman who was a legendary public figure and was well known for the theatrical readings of his poetry. -Had issues with excessive drinking and roaring public disputes with his audiences. Do not go gentle into that good night Fern Hill Poem in October
The Movement
1950's reaction to wars and placid literature- led by a group known as the angry young men who were aggressive and satiric
Modernism
A cultural movement embracing human empowerment and rejecting traditionalism as outdated. Rationality, industry, and technology were cornerstones of progress and human achievement.
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)
A social activist who traveled the United States and wrote about social changes. Translated Comte's work into English. Largely discounted because she was a woman.
Wole Soyinka (1934-present)
Africa's most famous playwright, Death and the King's Horseman
George Meredith 1828-1909
Author and poet who won the Nobel prize for literature 7 times. The egoist (about sir willoughby patterns who is so conceited that he repulses 2 women he wants to marry before finally humbling himself and convincing the one girl who really loves him to marry him, laetitia dale), Diana of the crossways (a beautiful socialite in an unhappy marriage tries to do things to better her status in politics and only alienates herself from her husband), the tale of chloe, the shaving of shagpat, modern love (a poem about his experience of being abandoned by his wife for another man), the Lark ascending (a poem that inspired a musical number by Vaughan Williams), Lucifer in starlight
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Author of Heart of Darkness (strongly criticizes imperialism through the cruel Kurtz) which inspires Chinua Achebe to write Thing's Fall Apart. Lord Jim (a captain (title) abandons his ship but it doesn't sink, so he is disgraced and moved to a distant outpost where he becomes the spiritual leader/justice but still can't escape his past and dies) nostromo, the secret agent, under western eyes
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
Author of Things Fall Apart (most widely read novel in modern African literature-about colonialism and its effect on African culture)
J.K. Rowling (1965- )
Author of the Harry Potter book series
Richmal Crompton (1890-1969)
Best known for her just William series of books for kids, as well as for adult fiction
Derek Walcott (1930-)
Born in st Lucia. A Far Cry from Africa, ruins of a great house, omeros,
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Brave New World (a dystopian novel about a man named John who has lived away from the world of suppressing thinking and only living for desires and has to deal with it, including Lenina a woman he is attracted to but who has too liberal of ideas for him)
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
Break of Day in the Trenches, Dead Man's Dump, lousy hunting
Evelyn Waugh (1892-1973)
Brideshead Revisited, a handful of dust
Rev. W Awdry
Creator of Thomas the tank engine book series
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Dulce et Decorum Est (how sweet it is to die for one's country)
Enid Blyton (1897-1968)
English children's book writer; best remembered today for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, and Adventure series
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
English novelist whose explicit novels were often declared indecent and censored Lady Chatterley's Lover The Rainbow (about a young woman's (Ursula bangwen's) quest for sexual fulfillment after an affair with a bisexual teacher) Sons and lovers (about a mother who turns form her husband to her sons and loves them with a possessive love) Aaron's rod (a man's search for fulfillment after leaving his marriage and life in England) The plumed serpent Kangaroo
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)
English painter and author. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST (a British offshoot of Cubism that invoked drawing energy from culture like the engage from a fixed point in a vortex). His novels include his pre-World War I-era novel Tarr (set in Paris), and The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the afterworld. Time and Western Man (1927) is a cultural and philosophical discussion that includes penetrating critiques of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound that are still read.
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
English poet and critic who wrote his most famous poetry from 1914-1917. "This is no case of petty right and wrong"
Stephen Spender (1909-1995)
English poet and critic, wrote mostly about social injustice/struggles what I expected The pylons (about not liking modern tech, represented by pylons of cement)
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
English poet and novelist. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), but he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). Larkin's early work shows the influence of Yeats, but his later poetic identity was influenced mainly by Thomas Hardy. He is well-known for his use of slang and coarse language in his poetry, partly balanced by a similarly antique word choice. With fine use of enjambement and rhyme, his poetry is highly structured, but never rigid. Death was a recurring theme and subject of his poetry, Aubade being an example of this. The Less Deceived, published in 1955, marked Larkin as an up-and-coming poet. He was for a time associated with The Movement.
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
English poet known for his good looks and for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". The voice The old vicarage grantchester The great lover Tiare tahiti
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a vainglorious war. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston Trilogy".
Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001)
English poet, part of The Movement in the 50's. A way of looking Song for a birth or death
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Books that taught people to long for truth and goodnes
Anita Desai (1937-)
Games at Twilight, a devoted son, studies in the park, in custody, clear light of day
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Irish modernist novelist/short story author; distinctive and all-encompassing prose style that ranges from babytalk to multiple languages to refined, clear prose. Major works: Dubliners, the dead, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses (talks about the daily lives of citizens in dublin, follows Leopold bloom as a modern Ulysses from the odyssey), Finnegans Wake (about a drunken man who apparently dies but revives during his wake when someone spills whiskey on him and has multiple levels of people and personalities), Araby
F.R. Leavis (1895-1967)
Literary critic. We should see ourselves in Angelo, Drew attention to Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery"
Walter greenwood (1903-1974)
Love on the dole (a Great Depression story in hanky park England about the unemployment and it affects a family there, the Hardcastles-one (Harry) is fired and has to marry someone he impregnates, his father is unemployed, and his sister sally has to marry a book dealer Sam Grundy, after her other love (Mead) is killed in a march)
D. J. Enright (1920-2002)
Member of The Movement, author of Academic Year, Memoirs Of A Mendicant Professor (about his years teaching abroad), and many poems and children's books. Man is an onion Joke shop (for kids)
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)
Member of the unconventional and innovative Bloomsbury group; an openly homosexual man that was friends with Virginia Woolf until his death in 1932. This British author incorporated psychological insight into his literary works, something developed on by fellow Bloomsbury group member Virginia Woolf with her "stream of consciousness" writing. Father of modern biographies
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Metaphysical poet whose book A Vision explains most of his poetry A stolen child (fairies telling a child to come with them because the world is aged and their lives are carefree) Sailing to Byzantium After a long silence The second coming ("things fall apart, the center cannot hold", about his idea of Christ's return as a terrible thing because of the chaos of the world, written in 1919) Revelries over childhood and youth
Salman Rushdie 1947-
Midnight's Children, the satanic verses, the prophet's hair
Henry Vincent York (Henry Green-1905-1973)
Novelist best known for his works living (satire on a Birmingham iron factory life, about patriarchal oppression and the eventual realization of even those who believe that (Craigan) that they need to allow women (Lily) break out of it), loving (upstairs and downstairs in an Irish country house) and party going (wealth people on a train are forced to stay in the same hotel after the train breaks down in a fog)
Thom Gunn (1929-2004)
Part of The Movement, gay poet and author map of the city, moly, to move, the man with night sweats (about his grief from losing friends to the AIDS epidemic)
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Playwright whose plays don't have much happening in them. Waiting for Godot, Endgame (characters talk about dying and leaving etc.)5, Happy Days
John Skelton (1460-1529)
Poet ca. 1460-1529, drawing on tradition of anticlerical satire and carnivalesque parody, with an eccentric voice. Short rhymed lines. The Bowge of Court; "Elinour Rumming."
W. H. Auden
Poet who wrote distinctive and new poetry. Musee des Beaux Arts (about the apathy people felt toward icarus when he fell), as I walked out one evening, city without walls
Nadine Gordimer 1923-
South African novelist, The Moment Before the Gun Went Off, the lying days
Oxford poets
Spender, Auden, MacNeice, and Ishterwood
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)
Suffered from manic depressive disorder, Severn and Somme, wars embers, stars in a dark night.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
The Garden Party (a party is interrupted by a neighbor's accident- autobiographical), The Doll's House (some girls receive a doll house and show it to their friends)
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
The Way of All Flesh (semi autobiographical bildrungsman as well as a satire in Victorian life while following 4 generations in a family, especially theobald and son Ernest) erewhon (about a utopian society (nowhere backwards) where crime is a disease so criminals are sent to hospitals and disease is a crime so sick people go to prison, critiques Victorian society)
V S Naipaul 1932-
Trinidad English post-colonial novelist Enigma of Arrival House for Mr. Biswas
J. M. Coetzee (1940-)
Waiting for the Barbarians, the life and times of Michael K
1984 (Orwell)
Winston, Julia, O'Brien, Mr. Charrington, Aaronson, Johnson, Rutherford, Ampleton, Charrington, Katherine Smith, Tom Parsons, Mrs. Parsons, Syme, Emmanuel Goldstein, big brother
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Woolf was an author who comes up in quiz bowl most often because of her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She makes this list, however, because of her essay A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she argued that a woman must have money and space in order to write and express herself. In the essay, Woolf famously created the character of Judith Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's imagined sister, who could not achieve the status of her brother because she did not have the same access to education. Woolf also addressed these themes in Three Guineas (1938). Also was a critic and wrote the common reader and the second one. Also wrote professions for women.
George Orwell (1903-1950)
Wrote controversial political works like "Animal Farm" and "1984".
Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
Wrote over 60 detective novels including Murder on the Orient Express, the mysterious affair at styles, and then there were none. Most famous for her characters miss marple and hercule poirot
eclogue
a poem about the country/pastoral, in dialogue form
Modernist Poetry
a school of poetry that moved away from the emotions, the focus on coherent notions of the self of the romantics, broke away from tradition
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
digging, mid term breaks, punishment, north (bog poems)
E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
room with a view
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)
was an Irish-born British[1] novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist. He is also known for his fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.
