Unit 16

DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

DETERMINERS

FUNCTION AND CLASSES OF DETERMINERS

Function
Determiners are words placed in front of a noun to make it clear what the noun refers to. The word 'people' by itself is a general reference to some group of human beings. If someone says 'these people', we know which group they are talking about, and if they say 'a lot of people' we know how big the group is.

Classes of Determiners
There are several classes of determiners:
(*=presented in Unit 15)

The following words are pre-determiners. They go before determiners, such as articles: such and what, half, rather, quite

1. THE DEMONSTRATIVES

THIS, THAT, THESE, THOSE

  1. Function

    The demonstratives this, that, these, those, show where an object or person is in relation to the speaker.
    This (singular) and these (plural) refer to an object or person near the speaker.
    That (singular) and those (plural) refer to an object or person further away. It can be a physical closeness or distance as in:

    Who owns that house? (distant)
    Is this John's house? (near)

    Or it can be a psychological distance as in:

    That's nothing to do with me.. (distant)
    This is a nice surprise! (near)

  2. Position

    1. Before the noun.
    2. Before the word 'one'.
    3. Before an adjective + noun.
    4. Alone when the noun is 'understood'.

    Examples:

    This car looks cleaner than that one.
    This old world keeps turning round
    Do you remember that wonderful day in June?
    I'll never forget this.

2. THE POSSESSIVES

Possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives show who the thing belongs to.

PERSON ADJECTIVES PRONOUNS
1st (I) my mine
2nd (you) your yours
3rd (he) his his
  (she) her hers
  (it) it its
Plural
1st (we) our ours
2nd (you) your yours
3rd (they) their theirs

NOTE: In English, possessive adjectives and pronouns refer to the possessor, not the object or person that is possessed.

Example:

Jane's brother is married to John's sister.
Her brother is married to his sister.

Examples:

  1. Peter and his sister.
  2. Jane and her father.
  3. Do you know where your books are?
  4. Is this their picnic? No, it is ours.
  5. I think this is your passport. Yes, it is mine.

3. THE QUANTIFIERS

Quantifiers are adjectives and adjectival phrases that give approximate answers to the questions "How much?" and "How many?"

Example:

I've got a little money.
I've got a lot of friends.

(*=presented in Unit 15)

3.1 A few and few, a little and little

These expressions show the speaker's attitude towards the quantity he/she is referring to.

A few (for countable nouns) and a little (for uncountable nouns) describe the quantity in a positive way:

Few and little describe the quantity in a negative way:

3.2 Some and Any

Some and any are used with countable and uncountable nouns, to describe an indefinite or incomplete quantity.

Some is used in positive statements:

It is also used in questions where we are sure about the answer:

Some is used in situations where the question is not a request for information, but a method of making a request, encouraging or giving an invitation:

Any is used in questions and with not in negative statements:

More examples:

SOME in positive sentences:

  1. I will have some news next week.
  2. She has some valuable books in her house.
  3. Philip wants some help with his exams.
  4. There is some butter in the fridge.
  5. We need some cheese if we want to make a fondue.

SOME in questions:

  1. Would you like some help?
  2. Will you have some more roast beef?

ANY in negative sentences:

  1. She doesn't want any kitchen appliances for Christmas.
  2. They don't want any help moving to their new house.
  3. No, thank you. I don't want any more cake.
  4. There isn't any reason to complain.

ANY in interrogative sentences

  1. Do you have any friends in London?
  2. Have they got any children?
  3. Do you want any groceries from the shop?
  4. Are there any problems with your work?

4. THE DISTRIBUTIVES

These words refer to a group of people or things, and to individual members of the group. They show different ways of looking at the individuals within a group, and they express how something is distributed, shared or divided.

4.1 ALL, BOTH, HALF

These words can be used in the following ways:

ALL + 1 - Uncountable noun
2 the or
3 my, your, etc. Countable noun in the plural
4a this, that Uncountable noun
4b these, those Countable noun in the plural

Example:

  1. All cheese contains protein
    All children need affection
  2. All the people in the room were silent.
    Have you eaten all the bread?
  3. I've invited all my friends to the party.
    I've been waiting all my life for this opportunity.

    1. Who's left all this paper on my desk?
    2. Look at all those balloons!
BOTH + 1 -  
2 the Countable noun in the plural
3 my, your, etc.  
4 these, those  

Example:

  1. Both children were born in Italy.
  2. He has crashed both (of) the cars.
  3. Both (of) my parents have fair hair.
  4. You can take both (of) these books back to the library.
HALF + 1 a Uncountable
2 the or
3 my, your, etc. countable noun
4 this, that, these, those  

Example:

  1. I bought half a kilo of apples yesterday.
  2. You can have half (of) the cake.
    She gave me half (of) the apples.
  3. I've already given you half (of) my money.
    Half (of) his books were in French.
  4. Half (of) these snakes are harmless.
    You can take half (of) this sugar.

NOTE: All, both, half + OF: 'OF' must be added when followed by a pronoun:

All of you; both of us; half of them
It is also quite common to add it in most of the above situations except when there is no article (No.1 in all the tables above.)

4.2 EACH, EVERY, EITHER, NEITHER

These distributive words are normally used with singular nouns, and are placed before the noun.

Each, either and neither can be used with plural nouns but must be followed by 'of':

Each is a way of seeing the members of a group as individuals:

Every is a way of seeing a group as a series of members:

It can also express different points in a series, especially with time expressions:

Either and Neither are concerned with distribution between two things - either is positive, neither is negative:

5. DIFFERENCE WORDS

OTHER, ANOTHER

These words refer to something different, remaining, or additional.

They are placed before the noun.

Another is used with singular nouns, other with singular or plural.

6. DEFINING WORDS

WHICH AND WHOSE

In a statement, these words define or explain which thing or person is referred to:
Example:

More examples:

 

STUDY GUIDE

Reference: EG: 84-90; PEG: 46-53, PEGE: 101-107.

  1. Write in any, enough, few, hardly any, many, no, plenty of, some or very little in the following text.
    EXCUSES! EXCUSES!

    You may be trying to buy a pair of shoes and there are too (1) in your size and you can't choose, or there are too (2). Shop assistants are good at inventing excuses. A few days ago I was trying to buy (3) birthday cards for three five-year-old children. There were (4) cards for children, but (5) for five-year-olds. "Five is a very popular age this year," the assistant said. "We can't get (6) cards for this age-group." Then I went to a Do It Yourself shop and tried to buy some orange paint. There was (7) paint in the shop, but in the end I found (8). Then I asked for two small paint brushes. "We don't have (9)," the shop assistant explained. "There's (10) demand for them. No one ever asks for (11)". "Yes, they do!" I exclaimed. "I'm asking for (12) now!"

  2. Read the following sentences and choose the phrase that best fits each case.
    1. How much did we make yesterday? £200?- No, (much less/a few less) than that.
    2. You've had enough food already and you can't have (any more/some more).
    3. There are (much more/many more) people giving up smoking these days.
    4. Newspapers have (many less/much less) freedom than you think.
    5. (Lots more/Much more) young people are passing their driving test first time.
    6. I'll help myself to (some more/any more) of these vegetables.
    7. Have what you like. There are (plenty more/much more) where these came from.
    8. There's been (a lot less/many less) interest in this idea than we expected.
    9. We've had (no less/no fewer) than forty applicants for this job.
    10. We need (many more/much more) of this material, but it's hard to get.

  3. Put in some or any in the following sentences.
    1. Are there any more potatoes?- Yes, there are ... potatoes in the dish.
    2. Have we got any sugar?- I expect we have. Yes, there's ... sugar in this bowl.
    3. May I have ... more tea?- Yes, of course.
    4. ... people just don't know how to mind their own business.
    5. I didn't get ... shoes at the sales. They were too expensive.
    6. I think we've run out of sugar. Is there ... sugar in that bowl?- No, there isn't.
    7. There are never ... taxis when you want one.
    8. There isn't ... point at all in getting upset about it.

  4. Put in much, many or a lot of in these sentences.
    1. I know old Mr Higgins has a ... money.
    2. Is there ... demand for silk stockings.
    3. There isn't ... space in this flat.
    4. There aren't ... portraits of Shakespeare.
    5. I must say, you have ... books.
    6. Will there be ... guests at your party?

  5. Write in few, a few, little or a little in these sentences.
    1. There are very ... scholarships for students in this university.
    2. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you for ... more time to pay this bill.
    3. If you don't hurry we'll miss our train. There's ... time to spare.
    4. It's a difficult text. I've had to look up quite ... words in the dictionary.
    5. I can't spare any of these catalogues. There are only ... left.
    6. I can't let you use much of this perfume. There's only ... in the bottle.
    7. There are ... who know about this, so keep it to yourself.
    8. If what you say is true, there is ... we can do about it.

  6. Fill in the gaps using either or neither in the following sentences.
    1. When shall we meet: at 7 or at 7.30?- I don't mind. ... time is convenient for me.
    2. You can't use those screwdrivers. ... of them is suitable for the job.
    3. I don't know who's on the phone. It's ... your mother or your aunt.
    4. I met John a year ago, but I've ... seen him nor heard from him since.
    5. Say what you like about those two applicants. I didn't like ... of them!
    6. I know you sent us two letters, but we have received ... of them.

 

READING COMPREHENSION

Read the following passage and answer the questions.

CARROTS COOKED IN BUTTER

This is one of the most tasty ways of cooking carrots, and
also the most sensible. Root vegetables easily absorb fat. By
cooking not in water but in butter, you help to conserve
nourishment.

You need a thick saucepan with a really tightfitting lid.
5 (This is essential because the carrots cook in the steam from
their own moisture, and they produce so little steam that none of
it must escape.)

COOKING TIME

Sliced old carrots--10-20 minutes; whole new carrots--up to 45
10 minutes

INGREDIENTS

carrots, about 1 tablespoon of buttter, seasoning, a very small
amout of sugar, chopped parsley

METHOD

15 1) "Scrub" and peel the carrots and cut older carrots into even
slices, not too thick. New carrots can be left whole.

2) Heat enough butter to cover the bottom of the pan well. When
it is hot but not smoking, add the carrots.

3) Add salt and pepper, but not too much because, in this way of
20 cooking, none of the seasoning's flavour will be lost.

4) Cover with lid and cook over a gentle heat, shaking the pan
occasionally so that the carrots do not stick or burn. Sliced
carrots will take 10-20 minutes to become tender according to
thickness. Whole new carrots may take up to 45 minutes.

25 5) Sprinkle lightly with the sugar--this helps to bring out the
natural flavour of the carrots. Also sprinkle with coarsely
chopped parsley if you like the extra color and flavor.

6) Serve with any buttery juice still remaining.

  1. What kind of vegetables are carrots?
    1. green vegetables
    2. root vegetables
    3. fat vegetables
    4. tasty vegetables

  2. How long should whole new carrots be cooked?
    1. for about 45 minutes
    2. for at most 45 minutes
    3. for more than 45 minutes
    4. for 55 to 65 minutes

  3. How many ingredients are suggested for this dish?
    1. 2
    2. 3
    3. 4
    4. 5

  4. The carrots should be cooked in butter to ______.
    1. save time
    2. produce steam
    3. absorb water
    4. conserve nourishment

  5. A tightfitting lid is needed to ______.
    1. prevent steam from escaping
    2. prevent the carrots from escaping
    3. conserve sauce
    4. let moisture escape

  6. "Scrub" in line 15 means:
    1. wash with a brush
    2. scrape with a knife
    3. remove the skin of the carrots
    4. cut with knife

  7. In the pan, the butter should ______.
    1. be deep
    2. cover the carrots
    3. be shallow
    4. be smoking

  8. Not too much seasoning should be added because ______ will not be lost.
    1. a lot of salt and pepper
    2. steam
    3. its taste
    4. not too much salt and pepper

  9. Which is NOT correct?
    1. The carrots should be cooked over a low fire.
    2. The carrots should be shaken over a gentle fire
    3. The carrots should be burned over a gentle fire.
    4. The carrots should be cooked over gentle heat.

  10. ______ carrots will take ______ minutes to become tender.
    1. Thickly sliced, 20
    2. Very thinly sliced, 19
    3. Old, 45
    4. Whole new, over 45

- key to Unit 16 -

 

Literature

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 20th CENTURY:
INTRODUCTION

Two world wars, an intervening economic depression of great severity, and the austerity of life in Britain following the second of these wars help to explain the quality and direction of English literature in the 20th century. The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways.

A. Post-World War I Fiction

Among novelists and short-story writers, Aldous Huxley best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness in the period after World War I (1914-1918) in his Point Counter Point (1928). This novel is composed in such a way that the events of the plot form a contrapuntal pattern that is a departure from the straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel.

Before Huxley, and indeed before the war, the sensitively written novels of E. M. Forster (A Room with a View, 1908; Howards End, 1910) had exposed the hollowness and deadness of both abstract intellectuality and upper-class social life. Forster had called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses and for a satisfaction of the needs of one's physical being. His most famous novel, A Passage to India (1924), combines these themes with an examination of the social distance separating the English ruling classes from the native inhabitants of India and shows the impossibility of continued British rule there.

D. H. Lawrence similarly related his sense of the need for a return from the complexities, overintellectualism, and cold materialism of modern life to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the race. His numerous novels and short stories, among which some of the best known are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), are for the most part more clearly experimental than Forster's. The obvious symbolism of Lawrence's plots and the forceful, straightforward preaching of his message broke the bonds of realism and replaced them with the direct projection of the author's own dynamically creative spirit. His distinguished but uneven poetry similarly deserted the fixed forms of the past to achieve a freer, more natural, and more direct expression of the perceptions of the writer.

Even more experimental and unorthodox than Lawrence's novels were those of the Irish writer James Joyce. In his novel Ulysses (1922) he focused on the events of a single day and related them to one another in thematic patterns based on Greek mythology. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce went beyond this to create a whole new vocabulary of puns and portmanteau (merged) words from the elements of many languages and to devise a simple domestic narrative from the interwoven parts of many myths and traditions. In some of these experiments his novels were paralleled by those of Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) skillfully imitated, by the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique, the complexity of immediate, evanescent life experienced from moment to moment. Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett appeals to a small but discerning readership with her idiosyncratic dissections of family relationships, told almost entirely in sparse dialogue; her novels include Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives (1931), and Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

Among young novelists, Evelyn Waugh, like Aldous Huxley, satirized the foibles of society in the 1920s in Decline and Fall (1928). His later novels, similarly satirical and extravagant, showed a deepening moral tone, as in The Loved One (1948) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). Graham Greene, like Waugh a convert to Roman Catholicism, investigated in his more serious novels the problem of evil in human life (The Heart of the Matter, 1948; A Burnt-Out Case, 1961; The Comedians, 1966). Much of the reputation of George Orwell rests on two works of fiction, one an allegory (Animal Farm, 1945), the other a mordant satire (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)-both directed against the dangers of totalitarianism. The same anguished concern about the fate of society is at the heart of his nonfiction, especially in such vivid reporting as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), an account of life in the coal-mining regions of northern England during the Great Depression, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), about the Spanish Civil War.

B. Fiction after World War II

No clearly definable trends have appeared in English fiction since the time of the post-World War II school of writers, the so-called angry young men of the 1950s and 1960s. This group, which included the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, attacked outmoded social values left over from the prewar world. Although Amis continued to write into the 1990s, his satirical novel Lucky Jim (1954) remains his most popular work. The working-class or lower-middle class realism in the work of the angry young men gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to a less provincial emphasis in English fiction.

Anthony Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, also wrote wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the title A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), is a highly readable account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics from before World War II to many years afterward. His four-volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalized details that form the basis of his novels.

In the 1970s interest focused on writers as disparate in their concerns and styles as V. S. Pritchett and Doris Lessing. Pritchett, considered a master of the short story (Complete Stories, 1990), is also noted as a literary critic of remarkable erudition. His easy but elegant, supple style illuminated both forms of writing. Lessing moved from the early short stories collected as African Stories (1965) to novels increasingly experimental in form and concerned with the role of women in contemporary society. Notable among these is The Golden Notebook (1962), about a woman writer coming to grips with life through her art. In 1983 she completed a series of five science-fiction novels under the collective title Canopus in Argus: Archives.

Iris Murdoch, who was a teacher of philosophy as well as a writer, is esteemed for slyly comic analyses of contemporary lives in her many novels beginning with Under the Net (1954) and continuing with A Severed Head (1961), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), and The Good Apprentice (1986). Her effects are made by the contrast between her eccentric characters and the underlying seriousness of her ideas. Other writers noted for novels of ideas are Margaret Drabble and her sister, A. S. Byatt. Drabble has explored the predicament of contemporary educated women in such novels as The Realms of Gold (1975) and The Gates of Ivory (1991). Byatt won the Booker Prize, England's highest literary award, for Possession (1990), about a romantic involvement between two academics. Art historian Anita Brookner writes of women in search of human connection and established her reputation with Hotel du Lac (1984), which won the Booker Prize.

Other distinctive talents of the second half of the 20th century include Anthony Burgess, novelist and man of letters, most popular for his mordant novel of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a successful motion picture in 1971; and John Le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell), who won popularity for ingeniously complex espionage tales, loosely based on his own experience in the British foreign service. Burgess's prolific output ended with A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), which vividly recreates the life and times of 16th-century playwright Christopher Marlowe. Le Carré's novels include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), A Perfect Spy (1986), The Russia House (1989), and The Night Manager (1993). William Golding displayed a wide inventive range in fiction that explores human evil: the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954); The Inheritors (1955), about Neandertal life; The Spire (1964); and The Paper Men (1984), about an English novelist's cruel behavior to an American scholar. Golding won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983.

John Fowles produced several highly experimental novels, including The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), in which he brings the fictional nature of the novel to the foreground, and A Maggot (1985), a mystery set in the 18th century. Julian Barnes established his reputation with Flaubert's Parrot (1984), which is about scholarship and obsession, and followed it with other experimental and satiric works, including England, England (1999).

Dark humor permeates the novels of Muriel Spark, who is best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), about a schoolteacher who turns out not to be what she seems. Darkness was the dominant mode of much of the fiction of the 1980s and 1990s. Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, produced ferocious satires of modern society in such works as Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and The Information (1995). Short stories and novels by Ian McEwan have dealt with moments of extreme crisis, as when his characters face their own mortality in Amsterdam (1998), which won the Booker Prize.

Other perspectives reinvigorating English fiction in the late 20th century came from novelists born outside England; some of these novels looked at colonialism or its aftereffects. V. S. Naipaul produced the semiautobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), about a writer's migration from the British colony of Trinidad to the English countryside. South African Nadine Gordimer, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize, wrote of conflict in a society divided by race. English-educated Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based many of her comedies of manners on her observations as a European living in India. Indian-born Salman Rushdie satirized society in such novels as Midnight's Children (1981) and drew the condemnation of Islamic fundamentalists for Satanic Verses (1988). British-born Kazuo Ishiguro, of Japanese ancestry, elegantly portrayed upper-class English society of the 1930s through the eyes of a butler in his best-known novel, The Remains of the Day (1989). Anita Desai, who chronicles Indian society, counterpoints Indian and American culture in Fasting, Feasting (1999).

C. Modern Poetry

Two of the most remarkable poets of the modern period combined tradition and experiment in their work. The Irish writer William Butler Yeats was the more traditional. In his romantic poetry, written before the turn of the century, he exploited ancient Irish traditions and then gradually developed a powerfully honest, profound, and rich poetic idiom, at its maturity in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). The younger poet, T. S. Eliot, born in the United States, achieved more immediate acclaim with The Waste Land (1922), the most famous poem of the early part of the century. Through a mass of symbolic associations with legendary and historical events, Eliot expresses his despair over the sterility of modern life. His movement toward religious faith displayed itself in Four Quartets (1943). His surprising combination of colloquial and literary diction, his fusing of antithetical moods, and his startling, complex metaphorical juxtapositions relate him, among English poets, to John Donne. Eliot's style was intimately influenced by his study of such French poets as Jules Laforgue and Saint-John Perse. Eliot's essays, promulgating a style of poetry in which sound and sense are associated, were probably the most influential work in literary criticism in the first half of the century.

Both Yeats and Eliot exercised enormous influence on modern poets. A third influence was that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian poet whose work was not introduced to the world until 1918. The conflict between his Roman Catholicism and his sense of the beauty of this world, and his complicated experiments in metrics and vocabulary have attracted much attention.

Of the many poets stimulated to indignant verse by World War I, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves rank among the most lastingly important. Graves's ability to produce pure and classically perfect poetry kept his reputation strong long after World War II. His historical novels, such as I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934), also helped to maintain his popularity. The verse of Dame Edith Sitwell, who communicated her disdain of commonplace propriety as much by the aristocratic individualism of her personal attitudes as by her poetry, was first published during World War I; her experimentalism had little directly to do, however, with social problems. Extravagantly imaginative metaphors after the manner of the metaphysical poets, and conscious distortion of sense impressions, somewhat as in modern painting, were among her poetic devices. After World War II she wrote more compassionate and moving poetry, as in The Canticle of the Sun (1949) and The Outcasts (1962).

The succeeding generation of poets, identified in the popular consciousness with the depression and social upheaval of the 1930s, made use at first of so much private or esoteric symbolism as to render the poetry barely intelligible to any but a small coterie of readers. The best known of these-W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis-filled their earlier poetry with political and ideological discussion and with expressions of horror at bourgeois society and nascent totalitarianism. After such verse plays as The Ascent of F-6, written in 1936 in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, Auden's poetry became more reflective in The Double Man (1941) and, later, City Without Walls (1969). So, too, Day Lewis moved from The Magnetic Mountain (1935) to a more personal lyricism in World Above All (1943). His Poetic Image (1947) was a prose exposition of the modern poetic ideal. The position of poet laureate, held by Day Lewis from 1968 to 1972, subsequently passed to Sir John Betjeman, popular for his nostalgic humor.

Experimentalism continued in the exuberantly metaphorical poetry of the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas, whose almost mystical love of life and understanding of death were expressed in some of the most beautiful verse of the middle of the century. After Thomas's death in 1953, a new generation of British poets emerged, some influenced by him and some reacting against his influence. Among the leading poets of that generation were D. J. Enright, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Thom Gunn, and Ted Hughes. Although they had different styles, these poets constituted what became known as The Movement and sought to appeal to the common reader with a nonsentimental poetry of the everyday, written in colloquial language. Larkin (Collected Poems, 1988) often wrote of deprivation and absence. Hughes, whose poetry is noted for its depiction of the savagery of life, became one of England's most significant poets and was made poet laureate in 1984 after the death of Betjeman. Poet and critic Andrew Motion was named poet laureate in 1999, following Hughes's death.

Prominent British poets of the late 20th century included Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, and Seamus Heaney. Raine's early collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), brings a fresh viewpoint to many topics. Wendy Cope's witty insights appear in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). Fenton's collection Out of Danger (1994) covers love, war, and the political violence he encountered as a war correspondent in southeast Asia. Heaney, from Northern Ireland, won the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature. Although his poetry appears simple in its language and flow, its structure and references are often complex.

D. Modern Drama

Aside from the later plays of George Bernard Shaw, the most important drama produced in English in the first quarter of the 20th century came from another Irish writer, Sean O'Casey, who continued the movement known as the Irish Renaissance. Other playwrights of the period were James Matthew Barrie, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, and Sir Noel Coward. Beginning in the 1950s the so-called angry young men became a new, salient force in English drama. The dramatists John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, and John Arden focused their attention on the working classes, portraying the drabness, mediocrity, and injustice in the lives of these people.

Although Harold Pinter and the Irish writer Brendan Behan also wrote plays set in a working-class environment, they stand apart from the angry young men. In such works as The Birthday Party (1957) and Betrayal (1979) Pinter seems to offer reasonable interpretations of his characters' behavior, only to withdraw the interpretations or set them slightly askew in an effort to keep the audience intent on every least hint in the action on stage. Outside the literary mainstream was the Irish-born novelist-dramatist Samuel Beckett, recipient in 1969 of the Nobel Prize for literature. Long a resident in France, he wrote his laconic, ambiguously symbolic works in French and translated them himself into English (Waiting for Godot, play, 1952; How It Is, novel, 1964).

Both English and American audiences have enthusiastically received the plays of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969) are farces dealing with the perverseness of modern morality; dazzling verbal ingenuity distinguishes Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), and The Real Thing (1982). Stoppard's inventiveness continued in his later plays that explore such nonliterary ideas as quantum mechanics (Hapgood, 1988) and entropy-nature's tendency toward disorder-(Arcadia, 1993). Michael Frayn, best-known for his comedy Noises Off (1981) about the theater, based the play Copenhagen (1998) on a 1941 meeting between two physicists involved in atom-bomb research on opposite sides during World War II.
Other important British dramatists of the late century included Alan Ayckbourn, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare. Ayckbourn wrote farcical dramas about middle-class anxieties, including Absurd Person Singular (1973) and Communicating Doors (1995). Churchill focused on gender and economics in provocative plays such as Cloud 9 (1979) and Serious Money (1987). Hare's politically engaged plays include Plenty (1978), a satire about postwar Britain, and The Judas Kiss (1998), about the downfall of playwright Oscar Wilde.

 

History

WORLD WAR I

THE GREAT WAR

At 11 p.m. on 4th August, 1914 Britain found herself at war in Europe. Four years and three months later , before dawn on 11th November, 1918, British soldiers recaptured the Belgian town of Mons. On this same day an Armistice was signed at 5 a.m. in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne in Northern France and hostilities ceased six hours later at eleven o'clock.

During the War's early years Britain (supported loyally by troops from her Empire and Commonwealth, such as; Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and her Allies, France and Russia, fought against Germany and Austro-Hungary. At the War's end many more countries were involved, including; the United States, Turkey, Japan, Italy. What had started over the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on 28th June, 1914 only concluded after the deaths of tens of millions of soldiers and civilians.

The empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, and Russia had disappeared, countries had lost land or gained land, new counties were created (for example, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), and new threatening political systems had taken over, or were about to take over in Russia and Germany respectively.

In the past, wars were often of comparatively short duration, with seasonal campaigns, and usually fought between opposing sides each using mercenary or professional armies. The Great War was radically different. Fighting, between volunteer or conscripted soldiers in trenches separated by no-man's-land from their enemy in similar trenches, continued all year; and new, improved methods of killing had evolved such that the scale of injury and death was beyond that which any person had believed possible. With industrialisation in Europe, invention and greatly enhanced mass-production manufacturing techniques gave rise to plentiful supplies of poison gas, tanks, powerful explosives, flame-throwers, hand-grenades, fighter and bomber aircraft, and, above all, machine-guns, and accurate long-range artillery. Killing was on a gargantuan scale, and surprise and inventiveness were forgotten by Generals who developed their new strategy of "attrition". Especially on the Western Front, where all too often only minimal ground was lost or won, battles endured their pitiless course for months, and casualties were reckoned in hundreds of thousands. Names such as The Somme, Passchendaele, and Verdun still evoke awful memories of wanton sacrifice and needless death.

Although also involved in Gallipoli, Salonika, and parts of Africa, much of Britain's war was centred on the Western Front. Simply put, this was an intricate system of trenches which ran from the Belgium coast, through northern France, to the German border. With all its twists, turns, and salients its length is difficult to give exactly; but at it greatest extent, in 1918, the British section probably extended for about 75 miles. Not all this length was involved in battle all the time, though even "quiet" parts suffered not infrequently from shelling, and trench raids. One area, however, did suffer from continuous, unremitting warfare - this was the area which stretched around the Belgium town of Ypres. Overlooked on three sides by the Germans it was shelled day and night for four years. The flat, low-lying clay land was flooded and the millions of shells which fell into it churned it over and over again into an impassable, bloody, choking quagmire. During the Battle of Third Ypres ("Passchendaele") from August to November, 1917 British and Commonwealth soldiers attacked out from this salient and, after suffering about 400,000 casualties, they gained not more than about four miles of ground.

In the early winter, after Passchendaele had drawn to its close, the War still had a year to run, and the Battle of Cambrai, the massive German Spring Offensive of 1918, the American attacks at St. Mihiel and in the Argonne, and the Allies final three months advance still had to be paid for with the lives of a multitude young soldiers.

At the Armistice there was very little celebration by the battle-weary front-line soldiers. That the War had ended and that they, despite fearful odds, were still alive was often difficult to comprehend. Once the fact had been assimilated, however, all they wanted to do was to go back home to a country they knew and to cherished relatives and families.

In the following years many former soldiers suffered many disappointments - for, after the initial euphoria of their return was over, they felt themselves to be unthanked and unappreciated. In Britain living conditions in industrialised towns were poor and work very hard to come-by - especially during the Depression years of the 1930s.

Many never talked to anyone about their experiences in the trenches. Perhaps they just wanted to put from their minds the harrowing memories of those awful times; or maybe they thought that no one who had not been there could possibly to understand the dreadful conditions which they had endured. A few kept diaries of their wartime experiences. In recent years, after the deaths of their writers, some of these have come down to relatives who have been surprised to find that great-grandfathers, for example, fought in the Great War. The recipients have been astounded by what they have read about the conditions which prevailed in the trenches. As a result some of these recollections have been published as books.

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To the British and Allied cause, Ireland contributed three army divisions: 10th (Irish), 16th (Irish), and 36th (Ulster). All fought gallantly, and all suffered fearful casualties. The 10th campaigned mainly in Gallipoli and Salonika. The 16th and 36th fought in various battles on the Western Front - the former will be remembered particularly for it part in attacking Ginchy in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and the latter for its heroic failure at Thiepval in the same battle. Later, in June 1917, both these Divisions fought side-by-side and as comrades-in- arms when they helped to capture the Messines Ridge.

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