The Setting of the 20th Century Literature :-
Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took shape in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction the leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments.
Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers for example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild . The resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity.
The Setting of the 20th Century Literature session taken by Dilip Barad sir " :-
Detective fictions :-
From ancient Greece on, fictional narratives have entailed deciphering mystery. Sophocles’ Oedipus must solve the mystery of the plague decimating Thebes; the play is a dramatization of how he ultimately “detects” the culprit responsible for the plague, who turns out to be Oedipus himself. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines a successful plot as one that has a conflict that rises to a climax, followed by a resolution of the conflict, a plot line that describes not only Oedipus Rex but also every Sherlock Holmes story.
A particular genre of mystery writing is defined by the mystery at the center of the story that is crucially, definitively solved by a particular person known as a detective, either private or police, who by ratiocination uncovers and sorts out the relevant facts essential to a determination of who did the crime and how and why. The form of detective fiction throughout most of the 19th century was the short story published in various periodicals of the period. A few longer detective fictions were published as separate books in the 19th century, but book-length detective fiction, such as that by Agatha Christie, was really a product of the 20th century.
Most critics of detective fiction see the beginning of the genre in the three stories of Edgar Allan Poe which feature his amateur detective, Auguste Dupin, and were published in the 1840s. Although Poe’s 1840s stories as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which first appeared in the 1880s, are probably the most well known of 19th-century detective fictions, a number of other writers of generically recognizable detective fiction published stories in the almost fifty years between Poe and Conan Doyle, including a number that featured female detectives. Finally, from the 1890s into the early 20th century, a plethora of new detective fictions, still in short-story form for the most part, appeared not only in Britain but also in France and the United States.
Detective fiction has always been popular, but serious critical interest in the genre only developed in the 20th century. In the second half of that century, this critical interest expanded into the academic world. The popularity of the genre has only continued to grow. Both detective fictions and critical interest in the genre from a variety of perspectives are now an international phenomenon, and detective novels dominate many best-seller lists.
The word detective entered the English language in the mid-1800s, but it is ultimately derived from the Latin detegere, meaning “to uncover.” The label “detective” was not in common usage until there were actual official detectives, which did not happen until the mid-Victorian period, especially after the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police was instituted in 1842 with eight professionals, including two “inspectors.” In 1878, the detective branch was reorganized and renamed the Criminal Investigation Department . By 1888, there were eight hundred officers in the CID.
At almost the same period as the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police was evolving, the genre of detective fiction was also emerging, mainly in the short-story form. In these stories, a mystery or a crime occurs, and an amateur or professional detective is called in to solve it. The detective reveals the solution only at the end of the narrative, when he or she explains how the solution was reached, often through the scientific method conclusions drawn from material evidence. The settings of detective fictions are usually contemporary with the time written and frequently take place in urban areas.
The interest and pleasure in reading detective fiction, for the most part, come from discovering the way the detective uncovers the criminal and the criminal’s motive, which generally are a surprise to everybody, including the reader. The criminal is usually an individual, not part of a professional crime organization, which can be reassuring to the reader. The usually idiosyncratic personality of the detective as well as his or her inevitable success in solving the crime are other pleasures for the readers, which keep them coming back for more adventures of the specific detective whether Sherlock Holmes or, later, Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey. Thus another characteristic of most detective fiction is that the detective goes on to solve other crimes in other stories, making the series an important part of the creation of the character of the detective and the popularity of the genre.
A good number of critics of 19th-century British detective fiction, especially those in the early 20th century, included in their discussions and analyses the detectives in two canonized novels that appeared around the time of the establishment of the detective branch of the Metropolitan Police, the well-known novels Bleak House, by Charles Dickens , whose police detective is Inspector Bucket, and The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins , whose police detective is Sergeant Cuff. However, these classic novels are not centrally constructed around the detective’s work, nor do they culminate in the detective’s revelation of both the criminal who did the crime and how and why he or she did it. Nonetheless, many early critical studies of Victorian detective fiction discuss only Poe’s Dupin, Dickens’s Bucket , Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, and, mainly, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Coupled with feminist-inspired efforts to recover forgotten works by 19th-century women writers, the critical interest in detective fiction led to the discovery of many forgotten detective fiction writers between the 1840s and World War I. Finally, starting in the second half of the 20th century, critical attention tried to account for the popularity of the genre, using Freudian, Marxist, structuralist, feminist, and postcolonial critiques.
British detective fiction from 1840 to 1914 traces an arc of development from a few precursors to Poe’s Dupin stories and on through a variety of authors and detectives in the second half of the 19th century to the 1890s and Sherlock Holmes, arguably the best-known fictional detective in the world. Contemporaneous with the Sherlock Holmes stories and frequently influenced by them are an increasing variety of male and female detectives, including, for example, insurance investigators, educated women, doctors, and even a Catholic priest. After World War I, a new arc of development begins with Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
British Detective Fiction after Sherlock Holmes: 1893–1914 :-
The supposed death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893 coincides with another expansion of British detective fiction. New fictional detectives appeared regularly in the magazines from 1893 to 1914; there was, understandably, less publication of the genre during World War I, though there was some. Many of the new post-Holmes detective stories followed and, in some cases, developed variations on the structure of Conan Doyle, and many of the new detectives, both male and female, had elements of Sherlock Holmes in them. After World War I the detective story moved in a somewhat different direction from its 19th-century predecessors, into the period that has been called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. This “golden age” began with Agatha Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920 and includes, besides Christie, the detective novels of Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, as well as Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin, and others in Britain. In France there was George Simenon and, in the United States, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine. Also at this point in the United States, a new type of detective fiction, known as the “hard-boiled school” of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, moved away from the British model. The period between 1893 and 1914 is a kind of interregnum in the development of detective fiction in Britain. Thus this period is a convenient marker of the end of the development of 19th-century detective fiction in Britain.
Among the detectives who appeared in the wake of Sherlock Holmes’s death and reappearance, there was one who had been an insurance investigator; another was a ghost exposer, and at least five were women, one even being a so-called New Woman.11 The first husband-and-wife team of detectives also made their appearance during this period, as did the first armchair detective; another was a doctor, and one was a Roman Catholic priest. Detective fiction also expanded in the United States and in France during these years. In 1913 the first book-length study of the detective fiction genre appeared, The Technique of the Mystery Story, by Carolyn Wells, a prolific American writer who wrote many detective novels. Her guide to detective fiction gave a picture of the field just before the golden age began and included references to many still relatively unknown writers and detectives.
Thank you ,
Dilip Barad sir
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