Interpretationen: Roman Und Lyrik

184 REVIEW: INTERPRETATIONEN: ROMAN UND LYRIK Der moderne englische Roman: InterpretatIonen. hrsg. von Horst Oppel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, cl965) - 428 pp. Die moderne englische Lyrik: InterpretatIonen. hrsg. von Horst Oppel (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, cl967) - 342 pp. These two volumes contain interpretations of modern English novels and poems, and together with an earlier one on drama (first published in I963, now re-issued In a revised edition) they offer a very useful introduction to contemporary English literature. These volumes are all the more valuable as they provide direct confrontations with specific works of art rather than being surveys of more or less brilliant generalisations. Dr. Oppel, Professor of English at Marburg University, Germany, has assembled contributions by many well-known Central European scholars as well as some of his younger colleagues. The fiction volume consists of 17 articles by 14 authors, and the poetry volume of 27 essays by 14 contributors. The editor himself has supplied (besides several interpretations) introductory essays which outline the major developments in each genre during this century. Very helpful bibliographies have been compiled for each volume by two young scholars from Marburg. The selection of novels and poems seems to be fairly representative . Inevitably, It will not please everybody. There are some omissions which come to mind at once: C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice , Stephen Spender among the poets; Arnold Bennett, George Orwell, John Galsworthy (whose reputation really has sunk low) among the novelists. But as the editor rightly says, any such list would have to be Just as Incomplete and personal as the list of authors included. Obviously, some choice had to be made, and he wisely seems to have shifted part of the responsibility to his contributors by giving their preferences some rein. The result, if one may Judge from the quality of the contributions, has Justified this procedure. One problem always comes up in such enterprises: when did "modern" literature begin, which writers are to be discussed first as pioneers and forerunners of "modernism"? Whereas Hopkins was a safe choice for first place ih the poetar volume, the novelists must have been less easy to deal with: Conrad was, of course, to be expected. Hardy Is perhaps less obvious, - but Dickens' Our Mutual Friend? It may seem a rather unorthodox decision, but the editor (who has contributed this article) makes It quite convincing . Other novelists Included are James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Charles Morgan, Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, Evelyn Waugh, William Goldlng, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Lawrence Durrell. Among the poets discussed are not only such more or less familiar names as Eliot, Yeats, and Auden, Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, as T. E. Hulme, Edith Sltwell, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, or de la Mare, Empson, Owen, George Barker, but also some less widely known older writers like F. W. Harvey and Austin Clarke, and 185 several poets of the post-World War II generation (or generations), like Charles Causley, R. S. Thomas, Charles Thomlinson, Diana Witherby, and the better known Philip Larkin, Thorn Gunn, and Ted Hughes. Some of these poets did not start publishing till the Fifties or early Sixties, and the poems analysed here are sometimes of very recent date. All this gives the poetry volume an added informational value. How well are the poets and novelists represented? Here the selection was apparently influenced by some "external" factors, such as the space available for any Individual article, the length and complexity of some works, the enormous amount of critical comment already lavished on certain books and poems, which made it virtually Impossible to say anything reasonably original that was also tolerably important. These practical considerations may account for the preference given to Portrait of the Artist ¿s a Young Man over Ulysses. St. Mawr over Womë"n~în"Tô"ve. or The ~~ Journey of the Magi over~The Waste Land, but In spite of the editor's apologetic remarks one is not quite happy about the fact that Eliot Is represented by only one poem (he surely has written more short poems than this one), whereas Audeη and Thomas each have two articles devoted to them...