Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent figure of
Modern literature. He graduated from Oxford with a first-class honours in English literature.
Early in his career Huxley edited the magazine Oxford Poetry and published short stories and
poetry. Mid career and later, he published travel writing, film stories, and scripts. He spent the
later part of his life in America.
Huxley became famous with the publication of his first two novels, Crome Yellow and Antic
Hay, emerging as a particularly witty chronicler of modern life among the educated and
pretentious. His best known novel is the Brave New World, set in a dystopian future (and its
utopian counterpart is his last novel Island). His other bestselling novel, Eyeless in Gaza, recalls
the story of Samson. After Many a Summer tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears
his impending death and is Huxley's examination of American culture, particularly what he saw
as its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth. The Perennial Philosophy and The
Doors of Perception represent Huxley's non-fictional expression of his own interests, including
even experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Brave New World Revisited is a series of essays
addressing the themes of his early novel, represents Huxley’s rethinking of the social challenges.
Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such
as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular universalism. By the end of his life,
Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was
nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

Brave New World

 The first scene, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned
according to the society's strict caste system, establishes the antiseptic tone and the theme of
dehumanized life. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in this world.

 Bernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus (or high-caste) psychologist, emerges as the single discontented
person in the world. He invites Lenina, a hatchery worker, to join him at the Reservation, an
area inhabited by native people that is not subject to the strict rules of society. While at the
Reservation, Lenina and Bernard encounter people who display signs of aging, something not
seen in the World State. They also meet John, a man raised at the Reservation who Bernard
learns is the son of the World State Director. Bernard takes John and his mother Linda back to
the World State. Upon returning, Bernard and John become very socially popular. John begins to
fight against the constraints of the society, questioning the dehumanization process and
encouraging citizens to fight back. As a result of John's actions, Bernard and a friend are exiled,
and John moves to a remote lighthouse to indulge in whipping himself to rid himself of his sins.
By the end of the story, John is so despondent over his submission to a society that upholds social
stability over the beauty of the human condition that he hangs himself.
  Although set in the future, Huxley's Brave New World is truly a novel of its time and reflects the
widespread concerns about the post-war era of the 1920s and 1930s.

James Joyce
Ulysses

Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American
journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety in
February 1922. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature, and has
been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement. Before Joyce, no writer of fiction
had so foregrounded the process of thinking.

Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the
course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's
epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between the poem and the novel, with
structural correspondences between the characters and experiences of Leopold Bloom and
Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and
themes of the early twentieth century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland's relationship to Britain.
The novel imitates registers of centuries of English literature and is highly allusive.

Ulysses is divided into eighteen episodes and has attracted controversy and scrutiny since its publication.
Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose — full
of puns, parodies, and allusions — as well as its rich characterisation and broad humour, have led it to be
regarded as one of the most representative works of Modern Fiction.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 First novel by Irish writer James Joyce.

 A Modern Bildungsroman

 Traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego
of Joyce and an allusion to Daedalus, the consummate craftsman of Greek mythology.

 Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has
grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe to become a writer.

 Before achieving his destiny as an artist, however, the young man experiences various epiphanies,
mostly misleading ones.

 The early chapters of the novel chronicle Stephen’s confusions as a small boy at a strict Jesuit
school; in his adolescence, he visits prostitutes and wallows in sin; later, he becomes deeply
religious and considers entering the priesthood; finally, he recognizes that his destiny is to
become not a Catholic priest but a writer, “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily
bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”
  Joyce attempts to represent each stage of the boy’s developing consciousness in the language
through which the child himself perceives the world.

 Premature example of stream-of-consciousness technique which is developed fully in Ulysses and

 Highlights important issues like the pitfalls of religious extremism, the role of an artist in the
society and the need for Irish autonomy

Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse

 A 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf

 Centres on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

 Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce,
the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection.

 Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalization, the novel includes
little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel
recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and
themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.

 Divided into three sections: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” Each
section is fragmented into stream-of-consciousness contributions from various narrators.

 In the first section, the character of Mrs. Ramsay is the lens through which most of the
perspectives are focused, and her son's desire to go "to the Lighthouse" is the organizing impetus
from which the picture takes shape. In the central section, the Lighthouse stands empty as the
narrative marks the passage of time and the death of many of the characters. In the third and final
section, with Mrs. Ramsay dead, the remaining family and friends finally get to the Lighthouse,
and the novel becomes a meditation on love, loss, and creativity.

 Lily Briscoe, a painter and one of the central characters in the novel , represents Woolf’s ideal
artist, who mingles “masculine” rationality with “feminine” sympathy. At the beginning of the
book, Lily is one of the guests at the Ramsay family’s summer cottage in the Hebrides. Her
determination in pursuing the career of an artist in a patriarchal society, the desire to break away
from conventional female cultural norms and stereotypes in order to achieve autonomy highlights
the feministic ideals of Woolf.

Mrs. Dalloway

 A Modern novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a
fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England.
 Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that
evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth and makes her wonder about her choice of
husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding
 Peter Walsh, and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton. Peter reintroduces these
conflicts by paying a visit that morning.
 Septimus Warren Smith, a First World War veteran suffering from traumatic stress, spends his
day in the park with his wife, where Peter Walsh observes them. Septimus is visited by frequent
and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war.
Later that day, after he is prescribed to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out
of a window.
 Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has
met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party
and gradually comes to admire this stranger's act, which she considers an effort to preserve the
purity of his happiness.

 All of the action in the novel, aside from the flashbacks, takes place on a day in June 1923. It
is an example of stream of consciousness storytelling: every scene closely tracks the momentary
thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect
speech throughout the novel, freely alternating her mode of narration between omniscient
description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy.

A Room of one’s Own

 A key work of the feminist movement, published in 1929, and based on two lectures on ‘Women
and Fiction’ that Woolf delivered in Cambridge in1928.

 The title of the essay comes from Woolf's conception that, "a woman must have money and a
room of her own if she is to write fiction"

 It begins with the visit of imaginary Mary Beton to an imaginary Oxbridge college where she
feels a complete outsider.

 Woolf goes on to describe the educational, social, and financial disadvantages against which
women have struggled throughout history, arguing that women will not be able to write well until
they have privacy and financial independence.

 In one section, Woolf invented a fictional character, Judith, "Shakespeare's sister," to illustrate
that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop
them because of the doors that were closed to women. Like Woolf, who stayed at home while her
brothers went off to school, Judith stays at home while William goes off to school.

 In the essay, Woolf constructs a critical and historical account of women writers thus far. Woolf
examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen,
the Brontë sisters, Anne Finch, and George Eliot. In addition to female authors, Woolf also
discusses and draws inspiration from noted scholar and feminist Jane Ellen Harrison.

 In the last chapter she discusses ‘androgyny’ by saying that ‘perhaps a mind that is purely
feminine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine’ highlighting the need to
portray the perspectives of both genders in fiction.
 E M Forster
 Forster had five novels published in his lifetime.

 His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who
falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from
Italy.

 The Longest Journey (1907) is an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from
Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster.

 Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic.

 Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups
within the Edwardian middle classes

 Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject
the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British
Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the
Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen
between them in the Marabar Caves.

 Maurice (1971) was published posthumously and became the subject of many controversies and
arguments. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first
three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending
Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire