Speak the culture britain be fluent in b 96

The father of sci-fi Woking’s favourite ex-resident (his Martians landed near town in The War of the Worlds), H.G Wells, wrote his science fiction novels at the tail end of the 19th century but their Modernist slant was more at home in the early decades of the 20th The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) – not bad for three years’ work – were, of course, imaginative chunks of science fiction, but they also pre-empted the Modernists’ urge to rip up the old order, visualising new worlds, however bleak “WHAT PASSINGBELLS FO R TH ESE WHO DIE A S CAT T LE? O NLY THE MONSTRO US AN GER OF TH E GUN S ” Anthem for Doomed Youth (1917), Wilfred Owen The First World War poets The First World War was sharply chronicled in poetry It began well enough, with Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier (1915) patriotically calling men to arms, but the mood blackened when Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen began writing about life in the trenches Sassoon satirised the officers blithely sending thousands over the top in The General (1917), before Wilfred Owen, writing under Sassoon’s tutelage in hospital, considered the wider futility of war in Dulce et decorum est (1917) Owen died in battle a week before the war’s end Turn left at the 1930s: the Auden Group of poets American-turned-Englishman T.S Eliot dominated Modernism in early 20th century poetry He expressed distaste for the industrialised world in The Waste Land (1922), using the symbolism of mythology in a hugely influential ‘fragmented’ poem that leapt wildly between settings and timeframes A new generation of poets took Eliot’s disenchantment forward in the 1930s, even if they didn’t adopt his radical styling The Great Depression and the rise of fascism gave them plenty to write about Four (who earned the group nickname MacSpaunday) stood out: 86 Identity: the foundations of British culture Literature and philosophy Art, architecture and design Performing arts Cinema, photography and fashion Media and communications Food and drink Living culture: the state of modern Britain