HISTORICAL BACKGROUND (1918/1936)
11 November 1918 – World War I ends
Women over 30 who are married to a local government elector obtain the right to vote. It wasn’t the end of
the process because they continued to fight. Ration books introduced for butter, margarine, lard, meat and
sugar . Education act raised the school leaving age in England and Wales to 14 .
According to the Parliament Act, women over 21 are given the right to vote or stand . They could also take
part at Parliament becoming candidates. In 1919 – Sinn Fein refused to take their seats in the British
Parliament. In 1922 – The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin resulted in the setting up of the Irish Free State,
which became a dominion . In 1924 – George readily accepted the first Labour Government .
In 1931 – The international economic slump caused a political crisis in Britain. The King promoted the idea
of a national coalition government of Labour, Conservatives and Liberals, which was eventually formed . The
Labour party became the majority. Britain came first before ideology, and people needed to re-build Briain.
In 1935 – The King celebrated his Silver Jubilee, an occasion of great public rejoicing. He died on January
1936 and was succeeded by his son Edward. He abdicated because he married a divorced woman and it
wasn’t accepted. He wasn’t very strong as a king.
CULTURAL BACKGROUND
Joyce, Woolf and Eliot continued to write, but the new generation of poets trids to detach from their codes of
expression and obscurity . They testified that that modernism was going side by side with the new generation
of poets. the difference between new generation and old generation was that the N.G wanted to be useful to
the society, wanted to contribute to the society and to stop fascism. They used ideology to oppose against
society. They wanted their works to be easier to understand. The authors wanted to show that technology
could manipulated men.
W.H. Auden (1907-1973), Louis McNeice (1907-1963) and Stephen Spender (1909-1995), poets and
playwrights, founded the so-called «Auden Circle», and consider ideology, particularly Marxism, as a tool to
oppose against Fascism and Nazism. Their works mirror their determination to contribute to the cultural-
political debate of the time, and to use a more straightforward, concrete language .
Fiction in the inter-war years is dominated by Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s dystopian novels,
respectively Brave New World (1932), Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948). They too break away from the
obscurity of the Modernist tradition, and focus on scientific progress, ideology and individual reforms. The
reason why Orwell wanted to break away from Marxism was that he saw in Russia Stalin was applying this
type of system but men had to be free so it was a necessary fight for this freedom. According to Orwell,
Stalin wasn’t any different from Mussolini and Hitler.
DYLAN THOMAS
He was a Welsh poet, writer and playwright, he started writing poems at the age of 11 . His wife was a
charismatic woman. It is possible to consider that Thomas was dedicated to her but he had a type of life
which was bohemian. His life was ruined by alcohol. In 1934 – He published «Light breaks no sun shines»,
which catches the attention of the literary world (i.e. T.S. Eliot and Stephen Spender) .18 Poems is his first
collection, and it has visionary qualities.
In 1936 – He published Twenty-five Poems, which is equally praised . In 1937 – He married Caitlin
Macnamara: their relationship is stormy and mutually destructive . In 1940 – he published Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Dog. It is a collection of short stories, which can be considered real-life romances . His life
