Although Virginia Woolf‘s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her second, Night and Day (1919), returned to many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine Mansfield thought that Night and Day contained “a lie in the soul” because it failed to refer to the war or recognize what it had… Continue Reading Night and Day
Tag: Pericles Lewis
Virginia Woolf
Biography by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel.[1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical moment… Continue Reading Virginia Woolf
The Return of the Soldier
by Pericles Lewis Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier was published in the last year of the first world war (1918). In the novel, a young war hero returns to his family estate having lost his memory of the war and the immediate pre-war years. Although he has married a woman of his… Continue Reading The Return of the Soldier
The Time Machine
by Pericles Lewis H.G. Wells’s first novel, The Time Machine (1895), serves almost as an inverted allegory for the way that the artists of his generation imagined the future, as either technological utopia or reversion to barbaraism. Wells’s novel contains both fates. Having traveled over 800,000 years into the future, an inventor discovers that “Man… Continue Reading The Time Machine
H.G. Wells
Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific, popular, and varied writers of the early twentieth century. His numerous works crossed genres, from science fiction to socialist treatises, from Edwardian satire to sweeping histories, from short stories to Utopian novels. He loomed large in the popular and… Continue Reading H.G. Wells
Man and Superman
by Pericles Lewis George Bernard Shaw‘s play Man and Superman revolves around a typical Shavian love plot: the orphaned Ann Whitefield wants to marry her youthful guardian Jack Tanner, despite his reputation as a revolutionist (Shaw published the “revolutionist’s handbook” ostensibly written by Tanner in the printed version of the play). She pursues him to… Continue Reading Man and Superman
Heartbreak House
George Bernard Shaw‘s Heartbreak House (1919), though first produced after the first world war, is set before it, in a vague Edwardian never-land. Subtitled a “fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes,” it (alone among Shaw’s plays) betrays the influence of Anton Chekhov. The guests at Shaw’s country estate, however, have an allegorical character,… Continue Reading Heartbreak House
Pygmalion
by Pericles Lewis George Bernard Shaw’s best-known work, Pygmalion (1913), premiered in Vienna in German translation before shocking the London theater world with Eliza Doolittle’s exclamation “not bloody likely.” It features the Professor of Phonetics Henry Higgins, who transforms the flower-girl Eliza into a duchess by teaching her how to enunciate. Here, the worldly wisdom… Continue Reading Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw
Biography by Pericles Lewis The Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the leading playwright of modern Britain, wrote frankly and satirically on political and social topics such as class, war, feminism, and the Salvation Army, in plays such as Arms and the Man (1894), Major Barbara (1905), and, most famously, Pygmalion (1913). His… Continue Reading George Bernard Shaw
Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherché du temps perdu)
by Pericles Lewis Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), also known by a more literal translation of its French title, In Search of Lost Time, is the only modernist novel that has a fair claim to being as important in the history of the genre as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce claimed not to have… Continue Reading Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherché du temps perdu)