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Интернет ресурсы.

Http://englishlit.about.com/arts/englishlit

www.spartacus.schoonet.co.uk/drama.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Http://www.factspider.com/neo-romanticism

Тема 13. The development of New Drama.

Проблемные вопросы лекции. Liberalism in English literature. H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.

Тезисы лекций. Liberalism. A new faith, more compelling than Pater’s hedonism or Kipling’s Imperialism, was still needed, and Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and H.G. Wells (1866-1946) found one in what may be called liberalism – the belief that man’s future lies on earth, not in heaven, and that, with scientific and social progress, an earthly paradise may eventually be built. Wells is one of the great figures of modern lit. He owed a lot to Dickens in such novels as Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly – works which borrow Dickens’s prose – style, his humour, and his love of eccentrics, and which deal affectionately with working people – but he found themes of his own in the scientific novels. The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, The war of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, When the Sleeper Awakes, and The food of the Gods all seem concerned not merely with telling a strange and entertaining story but with showing that, to science, everything is theoretically possible. The glorification of scientific discovery leads, Wells to think that time and space can easily be conquered and so we can travel to the Moon, or Martians can attack us; we can travel forward to the future, and back again to the present. The old Newtonian world, with its fixed dimensions, begins to melt and dissolve in the imaginative stories of Wells: flesh can be made as transparent as glass, human size can be increased indefinitely, a man can sleep for a couple of centuries and wake up in the a strange Wellsian future; a man can work miracles; a newspaper from the future can be delivered by mistake; a man can lose weight without bulk and drift like a balloon.

Wells sometimes described himself as a ‘Utopiographer”. He was always planning worlds in which science had achieved its last victories over religion and superstition, in which reason reigned, in which everybody was healthy, clean, happy, and enlightened. The Wellsian future has been, for many years, one of the furnishings of our minds – sky-scrapers, the heavens full of aircraft, men and women dressed something like ancient Greeks, rational conversation over a rational meal of vitamin-pills. To build Utopia, Wells wanted – like Shaw – to destroy all the vestiges of the past which cluttered the modern world – class – distinction, relics of feudalism. undirectionless education, unenlightened and self-seeking politicians, economic inequality. In other words, both Shaw and Wells wanted a kind of socialism. Rejecting the doctrine of sin, they believed that man’s mistakes and crimes came from stupidity, or from an unfavorable environment, and they set to work to blueprint the devices which would put everything right.

Wells, in book after book, tackles the major social problems, In AnnVeronica we have the theme of woman’s new equal status with men: in Joan and Peter education is examined; in The Soul of a Bishop we hear of the new religion of the rational age; in The New Machiavelli we have Well’s philosophy of politics. But these works remain novels, characterized by a Dickensian richness of character and not lacking in love – interest. Tono-Bungay is about commerce, Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island a satire on our ‘savage’ social conventions, The Dream a story of the middle of 10^th.c.life as seen from the viewpoint of a thousand years ahead. Wells was a prolific writer and, when he kept to a story, always an interesting one. His preaching is now a little out of date, and his very hope for the future, rudely shattered by the Second World War, turned to a kind of wild despair: mankind would have to be superseded by some new species, Homo Sapiens had had his day; ‘You fools’, he said in the preface to a reprint made just before his death, ‘you damned fools’. Optimistic liberalism died with him.

His great friend and coworker-opponent in Literature was Bernard Shaw. "You are, now that Wilde is dead, the one living playwright in my esteem," wrote Wells after receiving Shaw's THREE PLAYS FOR PURITANS (1901). Shaw's early plays, WIDOWER'S HOUSES (1892), which criticized slum landlords, as well as several subsequent ones, were not well received. His 'unpleasant plays', ideological attacks on the evils of capitalism and explorations of moral and social problems, were followed with more entertaining but as principled productions.

Shaw was fascinated by ideas of all kinds, and he used his outstanding dramatic skill to publicize all sorts of notions – from the importance of the science of phonetics (Pygmalion) to the ‘Protestantism’ of Joan of arc (St. Joan). He attacked everything (being a born rebel) but, strangely, he never lays a finger on the Christian religion – the Church, yes, but belief, no. Shaw was a great rationalist, very like the Frenchman Voltaire, but there was a deep core of mysticism in him. At times he sounds like an Old Testament prophet, and his finest speeches (as of Lilith at the end of Back to Methuselah) are in the great tradition of English biblical prose. Finally, his work will endure for its dramatic coherence, its wit, its common sense, and a literary gift which prevented him from ever writing a dull line.

Список литературы. Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Академия», 2007

Аникин Г.В., Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Высшая Школа», 1985

Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002