A huszadik századi angol irodalom főirányai [antikvár]

The Emergence of Aesthetic Interest in English Literature Dickens' s name and oeuvre are inseparable from the image of 19th century England. His death in 1870 in a way points symbolically to the breakdown of Victorian values that was inevitable. The contradictions between scientific progress and religious belief, authority and individual judgment and between an attitude which laid stress on reason and one in which feeling was all Important - such as had been felt for a number of decades - now burst into the open. Liberalism was questioned from all quarters. More and more people felt op-pressedby a way of life insensitive to beauty and the growing feeling of alienation that this involved led to disillusionment. This characteristic atmosphere of uncertainty and loneliness was expressed by Matthew Arnold in his Dover Beach, a poem in which he speaks of man's loneliness in a hostile world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another I for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams. So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. Arnold's elegiac poetry is the confession of a man imbued with culture, deeply concerned with the state of society and of civilisation in general. His prose writings show two new features in English literature — namely a growing interest in beauty and a less British more Europe-conscious attitude. He fought a courageous fight against England's isolationism, the overestimation- of material wealth and the neglect of beauty in English life. His most important ideas are expressed in Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Essays in Criticism, (1865, 1881). His main target were the middle-class, the Philistines as he called them after Heine, their desire for profit and their disdain of culture. Arnold tried to awaken in them an interest for things aesthetic with a fervour that was almost prophetic, directing his attacks mainly against the principle of utility. Thus he refused to recognise the utility of railways which he considered, took English people merely from "dismal Islington to dismal Camberville". His slogan came from Swift and he hoped to spread "sweetness and light" in an - 5 -