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TOPIC

Contemporary

Submitted to

Miss Maria

Submitted by

Group 3

Class

M.A English (Evening)

Members

Roll Numbers

Hina Jaffar

13

Javeria Khan

M.Rafiq

Rashid Ali

14

Asma Muhammad Hussain :

12

Literature

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
WORLD WAR 2 TO THE PRESENT
Contemporary Era
The contemporary era has seen scientific and political progress, not so much in what has
been originated as by what has been developed. Notable achievements have been those such as
the redefinition of nationalities and nations and the ongoing technological advances that marked
the 20th century.
In contemporary science and technology, history notably includes spaceflight, nuclear
technology, laser and semiconductor technology and the beginning Information Age, and the
development of molecular biology and genetic engineering, and the development of particle
physics and the Standard Model of quantum field theory.
In contemporary African history, there was apartheid in South Africa and its abolition,
Decolonization, and a multitude of wars on the continent.
In contemporary Asian history, there was the formation of the People's Republic of
China, the independence and partition of India, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the ongoing
Afghan civil war, and the stationing of US Korea. In the Middle East, there Forces in Japan and
in South was the Arab-Israeli conflict, the conflict between Arab nationalism and Islamism, and
the Arab Spring. In contemporary European history, there were the Revolutions of 1989 which
contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the ongoing process of European
integration.

What is Contemporary literature?

The term literature signifies an array of meanings, the widest and most literal being derived from
the Latin "littera", and now meaning "acquaintance with letters". There are broad definitions of
literature as the entirety of written works and texts of a particular country, period, or knowledge.
In contemporary western culture and, it is largely defined now as it is taught within the context
of English; incorporating poetry, theatre and dramatic performance, essays, and fictional prose.
Contemporary literature is literature with its setting generally after World War II.
Subgenres of contemporary literature include contemporary romance. There is a fairly well
recognized belief that Literature, and therefore Contemporary literature, comprises of writings
of a class distinguishable by a high standard of writing; be it beauty, composition, style,
significance.

Characteristics
Contemporary literature reflects current trends in life and culture and because these things
change often, contemporary literature changes often as well. Contemporary literature most often
reflects the author's perspective and can come across as cynical. It questions facts, historical
perspectives and often presents two contradictory arguments side by side.
After World War II, the world had a different perspective on things. It changed
rapidly and literature changed with it, almost as rapidly, despite the fact that some authors held
on to their existing beliefs. These changes stemmed from a belief that continues to grow today,

the belief that there is no God. After the horrors of the war, many people came to the conclusion
that God was either dead or did not exist in the first place, which brought with it the idea that
maybe life was meaningless. Writers struggled to communicate in a way that showed the world
how to cope with this "truth."
In the 21st century, contemporary literature reflects these beliefs and changes often,
based on how the world changes. It is based on human diversity, character and emotion.

CONTEMPORARY INFLUENCES

Cold War
Threat of nuclear destruction
Vietnam Conflict
1960,s Civil right Violence
God is dead
Great sense of loss

TONE IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Emotional
Humorous Irony
Concern Vs Connections between people
Antiheros

Ironic Humour
Contemporary writers look at irony and absurd situations as a cause for subtle humor.
If you cant fight it, you might as well laugh.

Social Concern
The attitude toward the individual and society has changed. We now view individuals in relation
to others rather than as isolated from others.

Social Concern content

Contemporary literature often contains an implied criticism of the barriers between people.

The Anti-Hero
An anti-hero is a protagonist who has the opposite qualities of a hero. He/she may be insecure,
dishonest, most often a failure.
The purpose of an anti-hero is not to garner praise or criticism, but to aid in understanding.

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Historical Context

War
Existentialism
Colonialism
Nationalism
Unrelenting wars and destruction lead to
the question: Why is there always a WAR.

What is Existentialism?
A philosophical movement embracing the view that the suffering individual must create meaning
in an unknowable, chaotic, and seemingly empty universe.

Modern Content and Techniques

A sense of alienation and loss

Rejection of traditional values and assumptions
Elevation of the individual
Emphasis on introspection and depths of the mind (Stream of Consciousness)
Irony-verbal, situational, dramatic

Famous Authors

James Joyce
Virginia Wolf
T.S Elliot
W.B Yeats
Beckett
Bertrand Rusell
Edward Said

RANGE OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Our faculty in contemporary literature and culture are an appropriately diverse group. Areas of
expertise include American literature and culture since 1945; African American literature and
rhetoric; twentieth and twenty-first century world literatures in English; Latino/a literature; Asian
American literature; American Jewish literature; the history of the avant-garde; poetics; the
rhetorical discourses and practices of biotechnology; literature and other arts; postpostmodernism as the logic of just-in-time capitalism; queer theory; feminist studies; and
disability studies.
Faculty in contemporary literature and culture teach graduate seminars in such subjects
as African American literature, experimental poetry, contemporary fiction, science fiction,

cultural studies, post-colonial literature, various ethnic literatures, and scientific and medical
issues viewed from literary and rhetorical perspectives.
Genres
Contemporay literature consists of multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama,
creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative.
Let us discuss them one by one.

Major Contemporary Poets

T. S. Eliot(1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a British, American-born essayist,
publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth
century's major poets". He immigrated to England in 1914 at age 25,
settling, working and marrying there. Wikipedia

Poems:
1. The Waste Land
2. The Hollow Men
3. A Song For Simeon

3. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

4. The Journey of Magi
5. Burnt Norton

W.H Auden(1907-1973)
Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet, best known for love poems
such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as
"September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and
psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious
themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae."

Keith Douglas(1920-1944)
Keith Castellain Douglas was an English poet noted for his war poetry during the Second World
War and his wry memoir of the Western Desert campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. He was killed
in action during the invasion of Normandy.

Keith Douglas Poems

How To Kill
Villanelle

Vergissmeinnicht
Of Spring Bells Cairo Jag

The Knife
Desert Flowers

Sidney Keyes(1922-1943)
Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes was an English poet of World War II.
Keyes books:
Keyes wrote the only two books of his lifetime.
The Cruel Solstice and The Iron Laurel.

R. S. Thomas(1913-2000)
Ronald Stuart Thomas, published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet
and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality
and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales.

Works:
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)
Judgement Day,
Poetry Book Society, 1960
Selected Poems, 1946196

Poetry for Supper (1958)

Postcard: Song (1968)
A Selection of Poetry (1983)

Dylan Thomas(1914-1953)
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, whose works
include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and
"And death shall have no dominion"; the 'play for voices'
Under Milk Wood.

Other Famous Authors:

Philip Larkin
Ted Hughes

Contemporary Drama
"Contemporary performance is hybrid work that integrates text, dance, objects, music, costumes,
lighting, image, sound, sets, and vocal expression into complex interactive systems.
Contemporary performance collages are often non-narrative, technically rigorous, and carefully
orchestrated anarchic chaos. They unsettle perception, demand critical engagement from
audiences, address conceptual debates within aesthetics, draw on a diverse range of cultural
interests, and bring pleasure to populations across the globe."

Realistic contemporary Drama

Adresses Societal Problems
Created a debate instaed of accepting cultural norms
Ibsen raised the following issues
Male and female relationships
Tyranny of the majority
Gender roles
Social Morals

Contemporary Setting
Time period current when written
Physical setting and location in the real world

Ordinary People and Situation

Characters are regular people

Not royalty or special people
Similar to audience members of time
Vernacular

Events are ordinary and realistic

Everyday Situations
Addresses a problem within the confines of every day setting

MODERN Dramatist
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright,
theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and
wrote in both English and French.
Plays:
1. Waiting for Godot(1952)
6.
Happy Days(1960)
2. Endgame(1957)
7.
Catastrope(1982)
3. Breath(1969)
8.
Words and Music(1961)
4. What Where(19830
9.
Not 1 (1972)
5. Footfalls(1975)
10.
All That Fall(1975)

Bertolt Brecht(1898-1956)
Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director
of the 20th century.

Famous Plays:
1. Mother Courage and Her Children(1941)
2. The ThreePenny Opera(1938)
3. The Caucasian Chalk Circle(1948)
4. Life of Galileo(1940)
5. The Good Person of Szechwan(1953)

Bernard Shaw(1856-1950)
George Bernard Shaw was a Nobel Prize and Oscar-winning Irish playwright,
critic and socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics
stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950.
Plays:
1. Major Barbara(1970)
4. Saint Joan(1920)
2. The Apple Cart(1930)
5. In Good King Charles,s Golde(1939)
3. The Millionaires(1935)
6. The Six of Calais(1934)

Other Famous Authors:

Edward Bond
Ahmad Ali
Seamus Heaney

CONTEMPORARY FICTION
The term contemporary fiction describes stories set in modern times that dont bring in any
elements of fantasy. It is technically a kind of realistic fiction.Contemporary fiction is normally
focused on giving people a window into some corner of everyday experience.Some of the stories
may be politically-motivated or designed to raise social awareness, while others exist purely for
the purposes of entertainment.
When authors create contemporary fiction, there is generally a focus on making everything as
realistic as possible. This often means avoiding any exaggeration.

Major Authors and their works

Catherine Mckenzie: Smoke,Arranged,Spin,Hidden
Aurellie Valognes: Out of Sorts
Alline Ohanesian:Orhan,s Inheritance
David Foster Wallace:Infinite Jest, Girl With Curious Hair,The Broom of the System.
Fern Michaels:Down Doubles of the Sisterth,In Plain Sight,About Face,Perfect Match.
A.J Banner:The Good Neighbour
Nicholas Sparkes:See Me ,The Choice ,The Guardian.
Susan Gloss:Vintage
Emilly Bleeker:Wreckage, Aus den Trummern(German Edition)

Contemporary Novel
Characteristics
1. The contemporary novel is realistic. It deals with all the facts of contemporary life, the
pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the beautiful as well as the ugly. Life is presented with
detached accurate, regardless of morals or ideological considerations. The sufferings of the poor,
their misery and wretchedness, as well as good in them, their sense of social solidarity, their
follow felling and sympathy, are realistically presented.

2.The modern age is an era of disintegration and interrogation.

3. Old values have been discarded and they have not been replaced by new ones. Man is today
caught between two worlds, the one dying, the other seeking to be born. The choice between
capitalism and communism, science and religion. God and the Atom Bomb is a difficult one, and
the result is that man is baffled and confused.
4. The modern novel presents realistically the doubts, and conflicts and frustrations of the
modern worlds.
5.It is therefore, pessimistic in tone.
6. There is large scale criticism. Even condemnation of contemporary values and civilization,
E.M. Forster is undisguised in his attack on the business mind, the worship of bigness in
industrialized England of the post-war generations. Aldous Huxley analyses the disease of
modern civilization and searches for a cure, and Conrads novel are all pessimistic and tragic.
7.There is a frank and free treatment of the problems of love, sex and marriage.
8. They revealed that human consciousness has very deep layers, and buried under the conscious,
are the sub-conscious and the unconscious.

Major Novelists
Henry Green
His style is simple and symbolic.
Works:1.
Blindness(1926)
2. Party Going(1939)
3. Caught(1943)
4. Loving(1945)
5. Nothing(1950)

Graham Greene
1. The Power and Glory(1940)
2. The End of the Affair(1951)

3. TheHeart of the Matter(1948)

Samuell Becket
His tone is comic.He got Nobel price for literature in 1969.His work is mostly positive.H is close
friend and helper of James joyce but his work is different from Joyce.
Works: 1. Murphy(1938)
2. Imagination Dead Imagine(1966)

Evelyn Waugh
Like Graham Greene She became Catholic.
Works: 1. Sword of Honour(1952-1961)

2.

Brideshead Revisited(1945)

Charles Morgan
She wrote the best single novel about the second world war.
Works: The River Line(1949)

George Orwell
He believed in equality.

Works
1. Keep the Aspidistra Flying(1936) 3.Homage to Catalonia(1938)
2. Animal Farm(1945)

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The Novel from 1970

Kazuo Ishiguro(1954)
1. The Remains of the Day(1989)
2. When We Were Orphan (2000)
3. An Artist of the Floating World

4.
5
6.

A Pale View of Hills

.The Unconsoled(1995)
Never Let Me Go(2005)

Timothi Mo(1950)
Novels
1. The Monkey King. ( 1980)
4.
2. An Insular Possession( 1986)
5.
3. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard( 1995)

Sour Sweet( 1982)

The Redundancy of Courage( 1991)

Anita Brookner:(1928)
Major Works:
1. Late Comers(1988)
2. The rules of engagement(2003)

3. A start in Life(1981)
4. The Bay of Angels(2001)

John Fowles;(1926-2015)
Fowles' novels:
1. The Collector[1963]

2. The Magus[1966]
3. The Ebony Tower
6. Daniel Martin
4. Mantissa
7. A Maggot
5. The French Lieutenant's Woman[1969]

Contemporary American Literature

The Contemporary period in American literature begins at the end of World War 2.With writers
like Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot, the Modernist period explored the ways that
truth is not straight forward, rational or clearly defined, but rather how it is completely
influenced by human perception. Their writing brought us deeper into the workings of the human
mind as a means to get at reality.
In other words, Modernists believed that the characters' thoughts mattered more than the plot,
and the way things are said - in terms of the rhythm and imagery - may communicate more about
the character than what they are doing. Passages may not proceed in an ordered way, but may be
more choppy or fragmented. The shift from working to objectively portray events and
experiences in the world to the often nonsensical exploration of human psychology is a clear
marker for Modern literature.

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Effects of

World War II

Throughout the end of modernism, people were dealing with the horror of WWII. The bombs
dropped on citizens in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki left the world traumatized, wondering
if there was any point to human existence. Whereas Modernist writers really began to explore
human consciousness as a primary mode of getting at truth, the Contemporary writers following
the war also struggled to reconcile the irrational and violent actions taken by humans.

Major Poets,Dramatists,Novelists and their major works

Poets
Robert frost
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially
published in England before it was published in America. He is highly
regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of
American colloquial speech.
Poetic Works:
1. The Road Not Taken
4. The November Guest
2. Mending Wall
5. Chrissmas Trees
3. Gathering Leaves

Adrine Rich(1929-2012)
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the
most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",[1][2] and was
credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic
discourse."
Poetic Works:
1. Aunt Jennifer,s Tigers
3. Diving into the Wreck
2. Gabriel
4. Final Notations

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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and
Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, before receiving
acclaim as a poet and writer.
Poetic Works:
1. Poppies in October
4. The Arrival of Bee Box
2. Arriel
5. The Bee Meeting
3. Daddy
6.
Morning Song

John Ashbery (1927John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes
of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in
1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
Poetic Work:
1. Melodic Trains
2. The Painter

Richard Wilbur(1921Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second
Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989.
Poetic Works:
1. Marginalia
3. After the Last Bulletins
2. Still Citizen Sparrow

Dramatists
Arther Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was a prolific American playwright, essayist, and
prominent figure in twentieth-century American theatre. Among his most
popular plays are:
1. All My Sons(1947)
5. Death of a Salesman(1949)
2. The Crucible (1950)
6. A View from the Bridge (1955)
3. After The Fall(1964)
7. Broken Glass(1994)
4. The Price(1968)
8. Everybody Wins(1990)

Eugene O,neill(1888-1953)
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill c was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His
poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of

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realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright
Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey Into
Night is often numbered on the short list of being among the finest American plays in the 20th
century.
Plays:
1. Now I Ask You, 1916
6. Beyond the Horizon, 1918 - Pulitzer Prize, 1920
2. The Emperor Jones, 1920
7. Anna Christie, 1920 - Pulitzer Prize, 1922
3. The Hairy Ape, 1922
8. Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931
4. Ah, Wilderness!, 1933
9.
Days Without End, 1933
5. Long Day's Journey Into Night-(1956) Pulitzer Prize 1957

Novelists
Earnest Hemingway(1899-1961)
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and
journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on
20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image
influenced later generations.
Works:
1. A Farewell to Arms
3. The Sun Also Rises
2. For Whom The Bell Tolls
4. The Old Man and the Sea

Toni Morrison(1931Toni Morrison is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their
epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are
The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.
Works:
1. Jazz (1992)
4. Beloved(1987)
2. Tar Baby(1981)
5. Song of Solomon(1977)
3. God theHelp Child(2015)
6. A Mercy(2008)

William Faulkner(1897-19620)
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford,
Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays.
Works:
1. The Sound And The Furry (1929)
4. As I Lay Dying(1930)
2. Light in August(1932)
5. A Rose For Emily(1930)
3. Intruder in The Dust(1948)
6. That Evening Sun(1931)