The Age of Interrogation: A. C. Ward's Setting for Twentieth Century English Literature
This blog written as a lab activity task assigned by the Head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's video for background reading: Click Here
Here is the Mind Map of Twentieth-Century English Literature and Society: A Synthesis of Progress and Regress: Click Here
Reading material of The Setting Twentieth Century English Literature - A. C. Ward: Click Here
Worksheet Lab Activity Modernist Literature DH: Click Here
"Man's growing mastery of the physical world and its material resources is a story of ever-accelerating progress accompanied in its later phases by an unprecedented moral and spiritual relapse."
This Infograph shows a brief concise structure of the text:
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A “BRIEFING DOCUMENT” (REPORT) :
Twentieth-Century English Literature and Society: A Synthesis of Progress and Regress
Executive Summary:
This document synthesizes an analysis of the first half of the twentieth century, presenting a period defined by a profound paradox: unprecedented technological and material progress running parallel to a significant moral and spiritual decline. The era was characterized by a wholesale revolt against the perceived stability, certainties, and authority of the Victorian age, giving rise to an "interrogative habit of mind" that reshaped society and literature. This shift created a spiritual vacuum for many and led to a sharp bifurcation in the literary landscape. A clear demarcation is drawn at 1922, with the publication of Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land, separating the accessible, socially engaged literature of the early century from the esoteric, intellectually aloof modernism that followed.
The post-World War II era saw the rise of the Welfare State, which, despite delivering material benefits, is critiqued for fostering a culture of mass conformity, discontent, and conspicuous consumption fueled by manipulative advertising. This period also witnessed a "revolt of youth," the degradation of public discourse through witless satire, a decline in craftsmanship, and the emergence of an academic literary criticism increasingly detached from life itself. The overarching argument is that the rejection of old structures—social, moral, and artistic—without a coherent replacement, resulted in widespread cultural and spiritual fragmentation.
The Paradox of the Twentieth Century: Scientific Progress and Moral Relapse:
The defining characteristic of the early twentieth century is presented as a schism between material advancement and spiritual decay. Both progress and regress are identified as "fruits of the Scientific Revolution."
• Technological Duality: The perfecting of the internal combustion engine is cited as a prime example. While it granted millions unprecedented mobility via the motor car, it also enabled mass slaughter through the aeroplane in two world wars. The development of nuclear power further exemplified this, bringing both the threat of universal destruction and the possibility of peace through "saving fear of mutual annihilation."
• Social Disruption: Technological progress directly contributed to social upheaval. The motor car and motorcycle gave young people the ability to travel far from home, eroding "natural parental guidance and control." This facilitated a "revolt of youth," a phenomenon susceptible to mass manipulation, as demonstrated by movements like the Hitler Youth.
• Core Thesis: The central argument is encapsulated in the statement: "Man's growing mastery of the physical world and its material resources is a story of ever-accelerating progress accompanied in its later phases by an unprecedented moral and spiritual relapse."
The Revolt Against Victorianism:
A central theme is the twentieth century's conscious and total rejection of the preceding era's values, which were retrospectively viewed as "dull and hypocritical."
• Victorian Mindset: Victorianism was characterized by a firm belief in the permanence of its institutions (the home, the Empire, the Christian religion) and a willing submission to the "rule of the Expert" and the "Voice of Authority." This was not about a single doctrine but an "insistent attitude of acceptance" and an "innate desire to affirm and confirm rather than to reject or to question."
• The Twentieth-Century Interrogation: The new century displaced this stability with a "sense of a universal mutability." H.G. Wells spoke of "the flow of things" and a world that "ceased to be a home and became the mere sight of a home."
◦ The Role of Bernard Shaw: Shaw is identified as a foremost herald of this change. His creed was "Question! Examine! Test!" He challenged every authority—religious, scientific, political—and his writings spread the "interrogative habit of mind" for a generation.
◦ The Impact of Change: This questioning was invigorating for some. For others, it created a profound sense of loss and disorientation, as described in Shaw's Major Barbara: "I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word it reeled and crumbled under me." The ultimate result for the multitude was a "spiritual vacuum."
• Early Seeds of Revolt: The text notes that Victorianism was "bound to die, of its own excess," citing early critiques from Meredith, Hardy, and Samuel Butler, as well as the Decadents who were impatient "to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world."
A Bifurcated Literary Landscape:
The literature of the period is analyzed through several key divisions, most notably between social engagement and aestheticism, and between popular accessibility and intellectual elitism.
The Sociological vs. the Aesthetic: Fabian and Bloomsbury Groups
• The Fabian Society Group: Founded in 1884, the Fabian Society attracted authors like Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Their creed was "art for life's sake," using literature as a secondary tool for sociological and political motives, specifically the spread of Socialist opinions. Shaw is quoted as stating that "for art’s sake alone" he would not have written a single sentence.
• The Bloomsbury Group: This circle of friends, including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and J.M. Keynes, coalesced around G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. In contrast to the Fabians, they "went some way to restoring, though with a difference, the art-for-art's sake principle." They were intellectuals who valued good manners and creative ability but also tended to be "contemptuous of lesser minds."
The 1922 Divide: From the Common Reader to Esoteric Intellectualism
A critical turning point is identified in 1922, the year James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published.
• Pre-1922 Literature: Leading writers of the century's first decades—Hardy, Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Conrad—were enjoyed by the "general body of averagely intelligent readers." Their work was considered to be on the "highroad of communication."
• Post-1922 Literature: With the arrival of Ulysses and The Waste Land, literature "left the highroad of communication and retreated into an esoteric fastness." This shift was marked by "dictatorial intellectualism" and a contempt for normal intelligence.
◦ Evidence of Elitism:
▪ Stuart Gilbert's 1930 commentary on Ulysses praised Joyce for never betraying "the authority of intellect to the hydra-headed rabble of the mental underworld."
▪ T.S. Eliot wrote in The Criterion that those who see an "antimony between ‘literature’... and life are not only flattering the complacency of the half-educated, but asserting a principle of disorder."
• Public Taste vs. Critical Orthodoxy: The analysis points out a disconnect between critics and the reading public. While critics repeatedly claimed that "Nobody reads Galsworthy now," The Forsyte Saga progressed steadily toward its fiftieth impression, demonstrating enduring popular appeal.
The Rise and Failings of Academic Criticism:
The emergence of a new style of academic criticism, based on close textual analysis, is viewed with deep skepticism.
• Isolation from Life: Professional academic critics are described as handicapped by their "isolation from ‘life’ as it is lived by the community at large." This turns literature into "little but raw material for university exercise" and leads to a process of "professional inbreeding, a kind of cerebral incest."
• The Pitfalls of Textual Analysis: The text provides a detailed anecdote to illustrate the dangers of over-analysis:
◦ Professor William Empson, in his influential book Seven Types of Ambiguity, developed finely drawn theories about T.S. Eliot’s "Whispers of Immortality."
◦ His entire interpretation was based on a printer's common transposition error in the third edition of the poem, which swapped the punctuation of two lines.
◦ As Professor Bowers gleefully pointed out, "it was the faulty printer- and not the poet- who introduced the syntactic ambiguity that Empson so greatly admired and felt was the point of the whole poem."
• Lack of Scholarly Decorum: The correspondence pages of The Times Literary Supplement are cited as evidence of the "irascibility, the lack of philosophic calm, and (often) the discourteous quarrelsomeness pertaining to the literary profession."
The Post-War Condition: The Welfare State and the "Mass Man"
The period following World War II is portrayed as one of social and moral frustration, despite unprecedented material prosperity.
• From "Common Man" to "Mass Man": The century did not belong to the individual "Common Man" as H.G. Wells had conceived him, but to "Mass Man." This was driven by mass production, which was "destructive of interest... and a threat of death to craftsmanship," and the decline of the British Empire, which closed off opportunities for enterprise and adventure.
• Critique of the Welfare State: The architects of the Welfare State, like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, are credited with its material benefits. However, their system of State control is criticized for its blindness to the individual, inevitably treating men and women "as punched cards passing through the entrails of a computer."
◦ Unintended Consequences: It was assumed that removing economic stress would bring contentment. Instead, the post-war decades saw a "mood of sullen discontent," and crime and prostitution "flourished as never before." The new order bred a sense that the world "owed them an effortless living."
• The Rise of Consumerism and Advertising:
◦ The era saw the birth of "status symbols" and "keeping up with the Joneses" in Britain, as habits of "conspicuous waste" once condemned in the rich became common to all classes.
◦ Advertisers exploited this, using "depth psychology" to create an "automatic emotional response." Advertising ceased to be about the quality of the product and instead subtly inculcated "the belief that there is an intimate connexion between human love and... beer, chocolates, gas stoves, refrigerators, corsets, face paint, footwear."
Cultural and Social Disintegration
The analysis details several concurrent trends pointing toward a broader decline in cultural standards, morality, and authority.
The Insurgent Youth and the Beatnik Cult
The "revolt of youth" became an outstanding phenomenon, encouraged by the "unprecedented and mainly undiscriminating spending power" of adolescents.
• The Beatniks: Originating in California around 1946, the Beatniks professed "utter disgust" with society and chose to "contract-out." Their culture involved abandoning respectability, embracing promiscuity and drug addiction, and living as homeless tramps. In Britain, they were seen as social parasites who benefited from the society they despised.
• Appearance and Identity: Beatniks of both sexes wore "shoddy ‘jeans’ and baggy sweaters, making the sexes often indistinguishable," leading to the suspicion that "shoddy garments are the index of shoddy minds."
The Decline of Morality and Authority
• Sexual Mores: The rise in the illegitimate birthrate is noted, along with the observation that "chastity became a by-word and to be chaste a matter for scorn and reproach in schools and colleges."
• Degradation of Satire: Satire, described as a "potent social and political corrective," was cheapened and degraded. Much of what passed for satire in the 1950s "did not rise above witless innocence, an infallible recipe for popularity."
• The Personality Cult: The rise of television created a "passion for exhibitionism" among writers, scholars, and politicians. This is seen as detrimental, as literature and scholarship "are not well served when transacted under the public eye."
The Vogue of Psychiatry and Abnormality
There was a growing literary preoccupation with disturbed states of consciousness, influenced by writers like Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Kafka.
• The World as Clinic: This led to a "growing assumption that most men and women are cases to be diagnosed, that the world is a vast clinic, and that nothing but abnormality is normal."
• Invasion of Literature: The jargon of psychiatry and "Freudianism in all its imperfectly understood manifestations" became rooted in fiction, drama, and verse. This is viewed as having "led to as much disordered in imaginative literature as it has contributed to the disintegration of individual personality."
The Literature of Conflict and Ideology:
The two World Wars had markedly different effects on literature.
• World War I: The conflict produced a "harvest of soldiers’ verse" (Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen) and, later in the 1920s, an "avalanche of anti-war books" like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
• World War II: The second war was faced with "stoical determination and endurance." In contrast to the first, it "produce little verse and that that little was mostly in minor key and often obscurely phrased."
• The Political Thirties: In the inter-war period, a conviction arose among younger writers that art must be the "Hands made of politics." This led to the production of "much dreary polemics" and "proletarian pamphlets for already converted comrades." E.M. Forster is presented as a counter-voice, arguing for the necessity of solitude and retreat from "the herd, the community, and the world."
This Infograph shows the detailed structure of the text:
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Here is the Video overview of Chap 1: The Setting Twentieth Century English Literature by A. C. Ward
Twentieth Century English Literature: Progress and Regress
English Video (made with NotebookLM)
Here is the Video Podcast Debate overview of Chap 1 in Hindi : The Setting Twentieth Century English Literature by A. C. Ward
Hindi Podcast (based on NotebookLM infographic + edited in Clipchamp)
Referances:
- Barad, Dilip. “Modernist Literature: Online Test & Thinking Activity.” Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, 23 Mar. 2017, https://blog.dilipbarad.
com/2017/03/modernist- literature-online-test.html.
- Barad, Dilip. Worksheet Lab Activity: Modernist Literature DH. 2025. ResearchGate, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.22260.
41603.
- Ward, A. C. The Setting: Unit 5. Google Docs, docs.google.com/
document/d/ 1jHd58kgj3JsTGiOYvf4PUKDElTl6N m42YjfUkRbfW7o/edit.
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