Key terminology. William Butler Yeats started the trend to poetic drama with plays based on Irish folklore, including on Baile’s Strand

William Butler Yeats started the trend to poetic drama with plays based on Irish folklore, including On Baile’s Strand. John Millington Synge’s masterpiece is The Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey is best known for The Plough and the Stars.

Another Irish-born playwright is George Bernard Shaw. He applied his satirical approach to such contemporary and eternal themes as war, religion, and women’s rights. Pygmalion is one of Shaw’s most popular plays, a box-office success as well as a biting satire on male-female relationship and British class distinctions.

With the exception of Yeats and Eliot, Britain’s greatest writers of the 20th century are novelists. In British fiction daring innovation produced a stunning string of achievements. Virginia Wolf reflected this enormous change of the new century in her elegant, intellectual, and introspective novels. Her use of stream of consciousness, lyrical imagery, and sophisticated wit made Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse modern masterpieces.

Polish-born Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a second language, wrote lush and vivid adventures like Lord Jim that explored such themes as honour, fate, identity, and disillusion. Agatha Christie ’s detective novels and stories brought her immense fame all over the world. Science fiction by Herbert George Wells is an outstanding example of the genre until now.

No writer can match Irish novelist James Joyce. Joyce took the stream of consciousness technique to its limits in Ulysses, creating a book that is simultaneously realistic, symbolic, poetic, didactic, comic, ironic and mythical.

The novelists mentioned and others – among them William Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene – also produced short stories. Some authors as Katherine Mansfield and Nadine Goldimer established their literary reputations largely through short stories.

detective story	a genre of fiction in which a crime is depicted and investigated, and the culprit is revealed
fiction	literary works comprising imaginative narration, especially in prose
free verse	poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme
myth	a traditional story that attempts to explain a natural phenomenon or justify a certain practice or belief of a society
psychological realism	a genre whereby authors place special emphasis on the interior life of the protagonist or secondary characters
rhythm	the ordered or free occurrences of sound in poetry
short story	a brief fictional work which usually contains one major conflict and at least one main character
science fiction	a genre of fiction in which imaginary stories often tell about science and technology of the future (e.g. space travel or life on the other planets)
stream of consciousness	a style of writing in which the thoughts and feelings of the narrator (author) are recorded as they arise in the course of the plot
subject matter	plot, topic, etc. of a book or speech (contrasted with style)
working-class novel	a type of fiction with a focus on labour relations, with attention paid to working class life, culture and resistance to power

Ex. 1. Answer the questions:

1. What are characteristics of modern English literature?

2. What writers belonged to the group” Angry Young Men”?

3. Who wrote working class novels?

4. What novels written by Archibald Joseph Cronin can you remember?

5. What poet provides a bridge from the Victorian Age into the 20th century?

6. Who wrote the play “Pygmalion”?

7. What technique did Virginia Wolf use in her prose?

8. Whose detective stories are well known all over the world?

9. What is Joyce’s most notable novel?

10. What modern writers produced short stories?

Ex. 2. Match pairs of antonyms. 1. illusion a. unconnected 2. success b. superficial 3. connected c. native 4. former d. disillusion 5. expatriate e. latter 6. introspective f. failure

Ex. 3. Join the words to make phrases. 1. match sth a. with smb 2. sympathize b. success 3. take sth c. of consciousness 4. develop d. to sth 5. stream e. to the limits 6. box-office f. in a direction

Ex.4. Offer English equivalents for the following terms:

flux de conştienţă	поток сознания
roman poliţist	детективный роман
romane ştiinţifico-fantastice	научная фантастика
literatura artistică	художественная литература
vers alb	белый стих
povestire	рассказ
mit	миф
realism psihologic	психологический реализм
ritm	ритм

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