The Setting of 20th Century Literature

Hello, I am Emisha Ravani, writing this blog for the thinking activity given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. Here I will discuss the things like Highlights of 'The Setting' by A.C.Ward's views about Twentieth Century English Literature. And another is Representation of India in 20th Century European Literature. 

This image is showing the different ages of the history of english literature.
Now we will ses the highlights of 'The Setting' by A. C. Ward. 

Highlights of 'The Setting'

Firstly, whenever we look to the different ages we can find that when time Or era is near to us   we can't look towards it by proper perspective. But as it old then we can by proper perspective. 
It was the time of human race. Man's growing mastery of the physical world and it's material resources. 

' Progression'
' Regression'
' Scientific Revolution'
' Home institution'
' Victorianism '
' Started having materiality'
' Mental Sickness'
' Advancement of Science and Technology'
' Spirit of Questioning'
' Interrogative Habit of Mind'
' Death of Craftsmanship'
' Anti- Art Movement'
' Religion and Politics'
' Untutored Young People'
' Bloomsbury Group and Fabian Society'
' Dictatorial Intellectualism to Escapism'
' Anti Hero'

' Personality Cult'

Now we will see these all above highlights of the particular time. 
In Victorian age there was home institution. Which was imposed upon them by somebody so it has broken very soon. 
In victorianism there was more control of experts voice , authorities, at that time people were not questioning and people were taking everything as granted. They were very religious people and religion was hypocrite. Young men and young women during the twentieth century looked back upon the Victorian age as dull and hypocritical. Victorian ideals appeared mean and superficial and stupid. From 1901 to 1925, English literature was directed by mental attitudes, moral ideals and spiritual values at almost the opposite extreme to the attitudes, ideals and values governing Victorian literature.
Then people started having materiality at outside world at the cost of spirituality. Whenever the materiality come in this way it bring also the mental sickness. So easily at that time it occurred there also. 
Man's need for redemption, so to fulfill it religious literature comes like T. S. Eliot's 'The wast land' and many others. 
Among early twentieth century writers, the Victorian idea of the permanence of institutions was displaced by the sense of a universal mutability. H G Wells spoke of 'the flow of things', and elsewhere described a company of people as 'haunted by the idea that embodies itself in the word "Meanwhile" '. He goes on: 'in the measure in which one saw life plainly the world ceased to be a home and became the mere sight of a home. On which we camped. Unable as yet to live fully and completely. Later, he speaks of 'all this world of ours being no more than the prelude to a real civilisation'.
It was the time when advancement of science and technology happened a lot. From that people get advantage and disadvantage both. Then there spirit of questioning was growing a lot. The change of outlook that came with the twentieth century was due to the growth of a restless desire to probe and question. Bernard Shaw, foremost among the heralds of change, attacked with vigour the 'old superstition' of religion and the 'new superstition' of science, not because he was antagonistic to either religion or science as such, but because, in his view, every dogma is a superstition until it has been personally examined and consciously accepted by the individual believer. Question! Examine! Test! These were the watchwords of his creed. He let slip no opportunity to challenge the Voice of Authority and the Reign of the expert.

 
Then there was development of interrogative habit of mind. And people started to think Interrogativly. Because of technology there happened one thing that's death of craftsmanship. 
Victorians were more religious and modern men were politics from the environment. In the Victorian time people were spreading Christianity rapidly. And then modern men came and they are proved as untutored Young people and emotionally susptible. So in how first there was driven force was religion and then nation. 
There was the groups of people who were known as Bloomsbury Group and Fabian Society. Bloomsbury group was working for freedom in life. Fabian society was working in welfare for the people. In the different ways they were working. 
Also there was a notable movement that is Anti hero movement and it known as 'Angry Young Men '. Works are like ' lucky jim' and ' look back in anger' as examples. 
In conclusion part A. C. Ward says about personality cult, it means that when somebody get obsessively admiration which is accessible by those personalities. And at that time such strong personalities were there. 

India in the Twentieth Century European Literature

1. Rudyard Kipling: Kim (1901)

2. E M Forster: A Passage to India (1924)

3. T S Eliot: The Waste Land (1918-22)

4. Herman Hesse: Siddhartha (1922)

5. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)

6. H.G. Wells: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872-73)

Indian literature in English evolved alongside the consolidation of British imperialism in India. There is a variety of opinion about the first definitive Indian text in English, although critics agree that Indian literature in English dates back to at least the early nineteenth century. Its beginnings receive their impetus from three sources: the British government’s educational reforms, the work of missionaries, and the reception of English language and literature by upper-class Indians. First, there are the educational reforms called for by both the 1813 Charter Act and the 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck. In an effort to redress some of the avaricious, hence compromising, practices of the East India Company servants, the English Parliament approved the Charter Act, which made England responsible for the educational improvement of the natives. The subsequent English Education Act, prompted by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s (in)famous minute on Indian education, made English the medium of Indian education and English literature a disciplinary subject in Indian educational institutions.

The decades of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s witnessed cataclysmic changes, as discourses of nationalism and colonialism collided, even as India was thrust into modern conditions of living and thinking. These years produced three Indian novelists, often referred to as the three “greats” of Indian literature in English: Mulk Raj Anand (1905), R. K. Narayan (1906), and Raja Rao (1909). At the crossroads where discourses of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity intersected and began to mutually inform one another, Anand, Narayan, and Rao tackled the issues of the time in strikingly different ways: Anand through the social idealist’s vision of Marx; Narayan through the comic-satirist’s recording of everyday life in the fictitious town, Malgudi; and Rao through the Brahmin philosopher’s caste-inflected ruminations on Indian culture.

Kim is the orphaned son of an Irish soldier (Kimball O'Hara Sr., a former colour sergeant and later an employee of an Indian railway company) and a poor Irish mother (a former nanny in a colonel's household) who have both died in poverty. Living a vagabond existence in India under British rule in the late 19th century, Kim earns his living by begging and running small errands on the streets of Lahore. He occasionally works for Mahbub Ali, a pashtun horse trader who is one of the native operatives of the British secret service. Kim is so immersed in the local culture that few realise he is a white child, although he carries a packet of documents from his father entrusted to him by an Indian woman who cared for him.

‘When someone seeks,’ said Siddhartha, ‘then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.’” — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Siddhartha is not the conventional story of the Buddha that we all know and adore. It’s not a story about the Buddha at all. The book chronicles the spiritual evolution of a man living in India at the same time as the Buddha. It’s an interesting take on an age-old tale, and we are invited along quite an extraordinary journey, experiencing Siddhartha’s highs, lows, loves, and disappointments along the way. Drawing parallels with Buddha, Hesse shows us the life of a privileged Brahmin’s son who grows increasingly dissatisfied with the life expected of him. As with the Buddha, Siddhartha too sets out on a journey that takes him finally to the path of enlightenment, and along the way we get to see the beauty and intricacies of the mind, nature, and experiences. The book does show, in astonishing detail, the inner struggles that all of us can relate to, the suffering we all share, and the fleeting strands of joy and happiness for which we all strive.