Alan Sillitoe

New literary Trends. Working-class novel.

An important development of the 50s and early 60s was the emergence of a working-class novel. In their vigorous fiction Allan Sillitoe, Sid Chaplin, Stan Barstow and David Storey provide the lower class perspective of the post-war situation. The defiance of authority, a working man’s constant struggle in a hostile world-all this gives their characters a certain unity of fellow feeling directed against the forces exploiting their physical and spiritual powers.

Sillitoe, Alan (1928-), British novelist and poet. Born in Nottingham, Sillitoe left school to work in a bicycle factory at the age of 14. He served in the British Royal Air Force from 1946 to 1949 as a radio operator. Sillitoe then returned to England and was diagnosed with tuberculosis, spending several months in hospital. During this time he read and wrote a lot. In 1950 Sillitoe met American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1952 and with whom he traveled and lived for six years in France and Spain.

Sillitoe is best known best known for his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958; motion picture, 1960), which is the story of a young factory worker in post-World War II Britain for whom drink and sex on Saturday night provide the only relief from the oppression of the working life. As with Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain, and the lack of opportunities for the working class.

During this time Sillitoe wrote most of the poems later published in The Rats and Other Poems (1960). Sillitoe's poetry is informed by the same angry spirit as his successful first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Its hero, Arthur Seaton, is impatient with society and disaffected with middle-class values. The same feeling motivates the working-class characters who feel outcast from the larger society in Sillitoe's acclaimed volume of stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959; motion picture of title story, 1962). Other novels include Key to the Door (1961), in which the characters search for a way out of dissatisfaction, and The Lost Flying Boat (1983) and Last Loves (1990), both of which involve ex-servicemen returning to their theater of operation many years later. Sillitoe's other works include Collected Poems (1993) and The Far Side of the Street (1988), a collection of short stories.

Allan Sillitoe, who sets his novel against the lowest depths of England’s grimy industrial cities, makes his readers realize that his young heroes are unable to fulfill themselves within the prison of a class-bound system.

LECTURE 11

PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL

ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE LAST DECADES OF THE 20^TH CENTURY

POSTMODERNISM

Questions:

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06