Angry Young Men

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Angry Young Men (German: "angry young men") or Angries for short is a journalistic catchphrase that was applied to numerous socially critical British artists and writers of the 1950s and 1960s who addressed social alienation and class conflicts. The term was originally coined in 1956 by an employee of the press office of the Royal Court Theater in connection with a performance of John Osborne's play Blick zurück im Zorn . It is believed that this was inspired by the title of the 1951 biography of Woodcraft Folk founder Leslie Paul Angry Young Man . The most famous representatives besides Osborne are Harold Pinter , John Braine , Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe , who came from the working class, while Kingsley Amis and John Wain belonged to the middle class.

Representative works for the Angry Young Men

Look back in anger

John Osborne's play Looking Back in Anger is the literary work that coined the term Angry Young Men . Osborne wrote the piece to express what life was like in Britain in the 1950s. It was characterized by dissatisfaction with the status quo, a refusal to cooperate with a bankrupt society and a fundamental solidarity with the lower classes of the population. The life and experience of the lower classes were among the subjects largely ignored in British literature in the decades before Osborne and Amis. The Angry Young Men movement changed that.

Osborne thematizes the life of the lower classes through his protagonist Jimmy, who experiences during the play that the wrong people starve, the wrong people are loved and the wrong people die. In the British post-war period , known as Austerity Britain , the life of the lower classes of the population was marked by comparatively severe deprivation. Osborne addresses this and accuses British society of neglecting essential sections of the population.

Lucky for Jim

Kingsley Amis' satirical debut novel Glück für Jim , published in 1954, is considered to be one of the key works of British literature of the 1950s, which changed British literature in a similar way as John Osborne's simultaneous play Glance Back in Anger changed British theater literature . It was not just the way the novel was written that was influential, but also the subject and type of hero the Americans chose. David Lodge said of the novel:

“ Glück für Jim is a book of great eloquence that hides behind an apparent clumsiness, but at the same time is rooted in the English tradition of situation comedy, which has always remained alien to Joyce . Happiness for Jim is a magical book to me - as it is to so many of my English contemporaries who come from backgrounds similar to me: aspiring, scholarship winners and a first generation of college graduates. It gave us exactly the linguistic means of expression that we needed to express our sense of social identity, that difficult thing between independence and self-doubt, irony and hope. "

- David Lodge

Other literary critics have emphasized that with Jim Dixon Amis created an archetypal figure with whom an entire generation could identify: disrespectful, powerless and rebelling against the forces of the "establishment", he is not an anti-hero, but a non-hero. Dixon is an ordinary man with ordinary desires and an everyday reaction to his experiences. Despite his work at the university, he is not an intellectual, his work bores him and his relationship with his manager is that of an everyday job holder.

Jim Dixon reacts to a lot of things that are associated with culture with violent rejection - Amis speaks at one point of " filthy Mozart " ( stinky Mozart ) and at another point describes a work of modern art as the doodles of a kindergarten idiot. This has led some critics to confuse Jim Dixon's simplicity with Ami's attitude. Moseley points out that it is not just a mistake to confuse Dixon's attitude with that of the Americans. In addition, it is wrong to accuse Jim Dixon, who identifies Mozart as the composer of a song that is sung in the bathroom, to actually lack culture. Jim's reactions are rather those of an ordinary man who is disturbed by the pompous and self-important handling of art and culture.

Authors who are typically counted among the Angry Young Men

The term Angry Young Men is not clearly defined, so it has been applied to a number of authors. The term is commonly used for the following authors:

The playwright Shelagh Delaney was the only woman to be included in this movement. Colin Wilson, whose The Outsider appeared at the same time as Look back in Anger , was also counted among the Angry Young Men, although he did not share the typical socially critical attitude.

Further use

In common parlance later and until today a youthful hero in literature and film, as well as some musicians, was referred to as angry young men . Perhaps the world's best-known example is Elvis Presley , who used the expression angry young man several times in his 1969 hit in the Ghetto .

The relation to the original meaning is blurred. Any potential for frustration can turn you into an angry young man .

See also

literature

  • Heinz Antor : The narrative of the angry young men. A study on the didactic significance of reception-directing group stereotypes. Winter, Heidelberg 1989, ISBN 3-533-04196-4 .
  • Mark Brady, John Dodds, Christopher Taylor: Four fits of anger. Essays on the angry young men. Campanotto, Udine 1986
  • Ingrid Kreuzer: Alienation and Adjustment. The literature of the Angry Young Men in England in the 1950s. Winkler, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-538-07701-0
  • Humphrey Carpenter : The Angry Young Men. A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. Penguin Books, London 2003, ISBN 0-14-100004-X
  • Colin Wilson : The Angry Years. The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men. Robson Books, London 2007, ISBN 1-86105-972-8 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b Gilleman, Luc (2008). "From Coward and Rattigan to Osborne: Or the Enduring Importance of Look Back in Anger ." Modern Drama : Vol. 51, No. 1: 104-124. 104
  2. ^ Weiss, Samuel (1960). "Osborne's Angry Young Play." Education Theater Journal : Vol. 12, No. 4: 285-288
  3. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 19
  4. ↑ quoted from Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 20. The original quote is: Lucky Jim (1954), a book of grad verbal dexterity disguising itself as clumsiness, but rooted in an English tradition of comedy of manners quite foreign to Joyce. Lucky Jim was another magic book for me - and for most English readers of my age and background, upwardly mobile, scholarship-winning, first-generation university graduates - for it established precisely the linguistic register we needed to articulate our sense of social identity, a precarious balance of independence and self-doubt, irony and hope.
  5. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 20 and p. 21
  6. ↑ Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , p. 63.
  7. ↑ Lucky Jim . Penguin Books, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-195804-0 , p. 180.
  8. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 21
  9. ↑ Merritt Moseley: Understanding Kingsley Amis . University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 1993, ISBN 0-87249-861-1 . P. 22.