skripta - uvod u knj[1]
TRANSCRIPT
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THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE:
Old English (Anglo - Saxon) Period 450 – 1066 Caedmon, Cynewulf
Middle English Period 1066 – 1500 ChaucerThe Renaissance 1500 – 1660
• Elizabethan Age 1558 – 1603 Shakespeare
• Jacobean Age 1603 – 1625 Jonson
• Caroline Age 1625 – 1649
• Commonwealth Period 1649 – 1660 Donne
The Neoclassical Period 1660 – 1785
• The Restoration 1660 – 1700• The Augustan Age (Age of Reason) 1700 – 1745 Pope, Dryden
• The Age of Sensibility 1745 – 1785 Austen
The Romantic Period 1785 – 1830 Keats, Shelley, Byron
The Victorian Period 1832 – 1901
• The Pre – Raphaelites 1848 – 1860 Rosatti
• Aestheticism and Decadence 1880 – 1901 Wilde
The Edwardian Period 1901 – 1914
The Georgian Period 1910 – 1936
The Modern Period 1914 –
Postmodernism 1945 –
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OLD ENGLISH PERIOD (5th – 11th Century)
• Period from the invasion of the Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) to
the conquest of England in 1066 by the Normans, led by William the Conqueror
• Up to the 7th century, all the poetry was passed on orally, by the wandering singers
– gleemen and scops, who performed songs from unknown authors
• ‘Legend of King Arthur and the Knights’ – some believe that he was a real person,
a chieftain; he was a romantic figure and had historical bases
• Monmouth used the character of King Arthur for the first time in his ‘Historia
Regnum Britannie’; Norman writer Wace added the knights in the 12th century
(to settle the dispute between knights)
• After being converted to Christianity in the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxons started
to develop written literature
• Monasteries were the centres of culture – the monks wrote down poetry in Latin,
the standard language of international scholarship• Churchmen such as Alcuin, Aldhelm and Venerable Bede wrote in Latin (about a
variety of subjects – remembered by the ‘Ecclesiastical history of the Anglos’
which records the history of the Anglos)
• Caedmon and Cynewolf wrote religious poetry, on biblical themes, lives of saints,
sermons and paraphrases of the Bible
• England was divided into 3 kingdoms:
Northumbria
Wessex
Mercia,
and there was no common language that covered the whole England
• Northumbrian dialect was dominant, but after the Danes invaded England,
Wessex,
under the reign of Alfred the Great, took over and united all the kingdoms of
South England
• Alfred the Great supported literacy and culture – he translated many works
himself from Latin to West-Saxon (the southern dialect), among which the
‘Ecclesiastical history of the Anglos’; and wanted to introduce mother tongue in
schools, instead of Latin
• He founded colleges – Oxford and Cambridge (11th and 12th century), which
improved education, since teachers were imported from Europe• He also instituted the Anglo – Saxon Chronicle (9th – 12th century), which was kept
by the monks, who wrote down the important happenings of the century in
England
• English language of the time was heavily inflected (many different forms of words)
and had a small vocabulary (which was for the most part Germanic)
• Works written in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon:
Epic poem ‘Beowulf’ (8th century)
Lyric laments ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’, ‘Deor’ – which
reflected real life conditions of the pagans, although written by Christianwriters
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• Literature of the time can be divided into heathen (pagan) and religious (whose
style reminds of heathen poetry)
• Literary forms of heathen poetry:
Charms = magic heathen prayers to natural forces, in verse Riddles = description of animals, used to portray Anglo-Saxon
society
Lyrical elegies = sad poems about death; any serious meditative
poem (‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’)
~ ELEGY = in Greek and Roman poetry any poem written in
special elegiac meter; in English poetry the term is applied to any meditative
poem (e.g. Donne’s ‘Elegies’ are love poems); in modern critical usage it is a
formal poem lamenting death of a particular person
Heroic epics = long narrative poems on a serious subject, often
related to elevated style (‘Beowulf’) Poems of war (‘Battle of Malden’, ‘Battle of Brumanburgh’)
• Literary style:
Writers invented new words – gave special names to common things
-Vocabulary gradually expanded: e.g. knight = a dark helmet
Words beginning the line had to rhyme (lines beginning with the
same sound, not letter) – head rhyme seemed natural
Melancholy, darkness, mystic atmosphere
• Characteristics:
Heavily inflected language
Very small vocabulary
Each line consisted of 2 half-lines separated by strong phrasal pause
caesura and joined by alliteration (repetition of consonants)
Example: ‘The blazing brightness of her beauties beam’ – Spenser
‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon remembrance of things past
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste’ –
Shakespeare
Each half-line consisted of 2 feet; each line had 4 stressed syllables
and a varying number of unstressed; no rhyme
• Christian poetry:
Christian poetry flourished in Northumbria
Caedmon and Cynewulf (the first author who signed his name)
wrote in Latin, about the creation of the world, the origin of mankind, the
story of genesis – used runic letters
This poetry was made in monasteries - it was religious anddidactical, but generally sad and melancholic
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The authors were in touch with Christian Europe – and often with
ancient Greece and Rome
Poems had literary verse, but style reminds of heathen poetry
(alliteration)
‘Exodus’, ‘Daniel’, ‘Christ and Satan’
• ~ EPIC = long narrative poem / heroic poem on a serious subject, written in a
formal and elevated style, centred on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose
actions depends the fate of a tribe, nation or human race (Milton’s ‘Paradise lost’)
• Two kinds of epic:
Traditional (primary) epics – written versions of originally oral
poems (legends) about a tribal or national hero, developed in a warlike age
(‘Odyssey’, ‘Iliad’, ‘Beowulf’, ‘Chanson de Roland’)
Literary (secondary) epics – composed by individual poet indeliberate imitation of the traditional form (Virgil ‘Aeneid’, Milton ‘Paradise
lost’, Dante ‘Divine comedy’, Keats ‘Hyperion’)
• Aristotle ranked epic second next to tragedy, but in renaissance it was the highest
form
• Epic has to have a hero who is of great national importance; love story,
supernatural characters; the setting is vast (worldwide or universe); the action
involves superhuman deeds (in battle), supernatural elements (caused by the will
of gods), gods and power (~ in neoclassical age these elements were called ‘agents’
and ‘machinery’)
• Bourgeois epic = all novels that reflect the social reality on a broad scale
Beowulf (8th century) – the longest epic in Anglo-Saxon language,
consisting of 2 parts; more than 3000 lines long, written in vernacular
language -> product of advanced pagan civilization
Grendel, imaginary character, (half-man, half-monster) attacks the
land of Danish king Hrothgar (real character); Beowulf comes from Sweden
to help and kills Grendel and his mother who comes to revenge her son
The author is unknown, the story is based on folklore and myth,
deriving from a Scandinavian legend – the aim was to portray the way of life
at the time, defects and vices and therefore has some criticism in it; also
depicting nature and climate Grendel represents winter and death; Beowulf represents the new
era, the time of transition to agriculture and rise of nobility
Harsh language, alliteration, head rhyme (words beginning with the
same sound ‘time’ and ‘tide’)
Expansion of vocabulary: the sea = the swans; way = the whale’s
road
Melancholic, mystic atmosphere
• When Alfred the Great united the kingdoms and the southern dialect became
dominant, prose started to be written
• Wulfstan (Archbishop of York) and Aelfric were the monks who wrote it –
Aelfric’s style was the best; he used alliteration to join sentences
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MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (11th – 16th Century)
• 3 periods:
Until 1250 – English was used by lower classes; written literature was mainly religious
because the Church wanted to teach the right way of living
When upper classes started to use English, literature was written to instruct, but also to
amuse
1350 – 1450… - English became the language of the court and common people; vernacular
language (‘middle English’) came into general literary use and this was the age of secular
literature (as opposed to former religious lit.)
The latter was the greatest period of middle English – the period of great individual
authors: Chaucer, Langland, Wycliffe, ‘the Pearl poets’
• The Norman conquest imposed a French – speaking ruling on England, so Norman
French developed as the language of the upper classes, while the Anglo-Saxon
developed as the language of the lower classes – French had a great influence on
the English literature and culture• Normans absorbed the culture of the Roman Empire, they were literate and
Christianised
• English won over Norman French by the end of 14th century because it was the
language of majority – the language had less inflections, was enriched by the
vocabulary from the French, but didn’t completely lose touch with tradition
• There were many dialects – the dominant one was East Midland (modern English
derives from it); the court and nobility used French, but writers used the dialect of
their own region; Latin was the language of science and church and philosophical
debates
• Later, the dialect of London became dominant
• Literary terms:
~ VERSIFICATION = the act of writing verse; how to compose
elements (accents, rhythm, meter, rhyme, stanza, form, diction)
~ METER = the recurrence (repetition) of a regular rhythmic unit in
a poetic line; patterns of accented and unaccented syllables; it is determined
mainly by the relations of stronger and weaker stresses in a syllable
• IAMBIC ∪ / (unstressed - stressed): ‘recall’, ‘away’
• TROCHAIC / ∪ : ‘older’, ‘accent’• ANAPESTIC ∪ ∪ / : ‘interrupt’
• DACTYLIC / ∪ ∪ : ‘openly’
• SPONDAIC / / : ‘heartbreak’
~ RHETORICAL ACCENT = the emphasis we give the word (for
special purposes)
~ METRICAL ACCENT = determined by the pattern of accents set
up earlier in the line or passage
~ WRENCHED ACCENT = deliberate change of stress (for special
purposes), forces the alliteration on the normal word accent
~ FOOT = basic metrical unit, the combination of stressed and
unstressed syllables which constitutes the recurrent rhythmic unit of a line
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~ METRICAL FOOT = the smallest unit of verse, consisting of an
accented syllable and one or more unstressed syllables
~ VERSE = a metric line named according to the number of feet
composing it (monometer, diameter, tetrameter…)
~ FEMININE ENDING = the last syllable in the line is unstressed
~ MASCULINE ENDING = the last syllable is stressed
~ END-STOPPED LINE = the natural pause in reading which comes
at the end of a phrase coincides with the end of the line
~ RUN-ON LINE (ENJAMBEMENT) = the phrase carries on over
the end of the line
~ COUPLET = a pair of rhymed lines, equal in length; iambic
tetrameter and heroic couplet (-> introduced by Chaucer – rhymed iambic
pentameter)
• Literary forms:
LYRICS – still anonymous, susceptible to French languageo ‘Cuckoo song’, ‘Alysolin’
o G. Moumoth’s ‘Historia Regnum Britannie’ was
translated into Latin by Wace
CHANSONS DE GESTE – short heroic epics, but also romances
because they show idealized characters and imaginative elaboration
ROMANCES – stories about kings, knights and love; first written as
poems (like epics ~ tales in verse), later also as prose;
o Introduced a heroine for the 1st time; love was a major
interest;
o Supernatural elements – in epics, will of gods causes
them, in romances they are mysteriously affected by magic, spells
o Escapist literature, imaginative (while epics deals with
actual historical characters – more realistic)
o ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ – 17th century
o ‘Arthur’s death’ by Malory
DEBATES – contest in words between two or more speakers
SKIT – mild satire
FABLIAU – short comic tale in verse that dealt with middle classes
in a realistic and satirical manner; medieval form established in the 12th
century
FABLE (APOLOGUE) – contest in verse between two or more
speakers written in octosyllabic couplet; exemplifies an abstract moral thesis
or principle of human behaviour
o Most common is the beast fable (Chaucer’s ‘The
Nun’s Priest Tale’)
o ‘The owl and the nightingale’ – representing 2 ways of
life: owl ~ monastic, nightingale ~ secular
ALLEGORY – abstract ideas are represented as concrete persons
and actions; personification of abstract entities (virtues, vices, states of mind,modes of life, types of character)
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Also: a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions, and
sometimes the setting as well, represent general concepts, moral qualities or
other abstractions
2 types: a) historical and political allegory – characters and actions
represent historical personages and events (John Dryden: ‘Absalom and
Achitophel’ -> King David ~ Charles II; Absalom ~ his son, Duke of Monmouth; the biblical plot ~ a political crisis in contemporary England)
b) the allegory of ideas – literal characters represent abstract
concepts and the plot exemplifies a doctrine or thesis (John Milton: ‘Paradise
lost’ -> the encounter of Satan with his daughter Sin as well as Death – who is
represented allegorically as the son born of their incestuous relationship)
Forms: allegorical drama, romance, prose narrative, lyrical poem
‘The Pearl Poems’:
• ‘The Pearl’ – holiday in August, the author falls asleep in the
field where his daughter Pearl died and gets a vision of his daughterMargaret who is now grown up and dressed like a queen in heaven; she
shows him Jerusalem in heaven and wants him to come, but he cannot
cross the river because he isn’t dead
• ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ – about king Arthur and
his knights; a knight in green challenges one of king’s knights; Sir
Gawain defeats him, but the Green Knight picks up his head and
challenges Sir Gawain to meet him again in one year’s time
BALLAD – an anonymous orally transmitted song, which tells a
story; many of them were sung
FOLK (POPULAR) BALLADS – narrative species of folk songswhich originate among illiterate people; author is unknown, and since it is
transmitted orally, each singer modifies it, so it exists in many versions
Typically, it is dramatic, condensed (reduced) and impersonal – the
narrator begins with the climatic episode and tells the story by means of
action and dialogue, without expressing personal attitudes
BALLAD STANZA – quatrain in alternate 4 and 3-stress iambic
lines, only second and fourth lines rhyme (e.g. ‘Sir Patrick Spens’)
‘Sir Patrick Spens’:
About a Scottish king who goes to Netherlands on a mission
o
First stanza exemplifies conventional abrupt opening;third-person narration
Elements of humour and irony
‘Chevy Chase’:
o Scottish ballad from the 15th century
o About the fight between 2 neighbouring families,
Percy and Douglas -> fight between the English and the Scots
‘Barbara Ellen’:
o About a young lady who killed her lover by her
wickedness and unkindness – he was lying in bed, dying, and
all she said: ‘I think you’re dying’
o Meant to be sung
‘The cycle of Robin Hood’:
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About the adventures of Robin Hood
‘Piers Plowman’:
o Written by William Langland in the end of the 14th
century
o Allegorical epic – a dream allegory – the first criticism
of the societyo A didactical work in 3 parts: ‘Do well’, ‘Do better’,
‘Do best’ – 3 degrees of Christian life
o The longest alliterative (4 accents) poem of social
protest – Langland was a priest who wanted to revive the
society, because it was Christian only in name
o Portrait of the common man of the time, the picture of
all classes; criticism of the Church for being rich and corrupt
o In his vision he sees a field of all kinds of people with
different characters
o Piers Plowman represents the common man who tellspeople that the only way to find the truth is to work hard and
live honest
• John Wycliffe was a social and religious performer, a realist, like Langland
He also criticized Church and wanted to reform the society
He encouraged the translation of the Bible to English so the poor could read it
• Geoffrey Chaucer:
Son of a wine merchant, but married into a rich aristocratic family
Studied French and Latin, but wrote in English dialect (East Midland) – so he had to
invent new words – he created the English language (new words, new lexis) andestablished literary tradition
Had a strong sense of humour – used to ridicule the society
Observations of life as it really is; real life figures, realistic, common men -> a catalogue of
personalities
Wanted to find flaws in characters and to portray the gullibility of the society
Skill, humour, passion, love for humanity
3 periods of creativity:
1. French – translations from ‘Roman de la rose’, allegorical
poems, ABC (a prayer to Mary in a form of alphabet)
2. Italian – Boccaccio’s influence, ‘The house of fame’, ‘Troilus
and Criseyde’, ‘The Parliament of Fawles’, ‘The Legend of Good Women’o In ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ he uses RHYME ROYAL (~
7 lines stanza;
A b a b b c c – rhyme; later used by King Dames)
3. English – leaves allegorical visions, writes about his
contemporaries
‘Canterbury tales’:
Collection of tales, more than 1700 lines long
The prologue – variety of characters, different casts, men and women
32 pilgrims on their journey to the grave of the former archbishop of Canterbury – each
has to tell 2 storiesHarry Bailey – their host - Chaucer himself (so that he could interfere and comment, but
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isn’t directly involved) – leaves it on the reader to understand the tale
The pilgrims – knights, priests, common people – describes their faults, as well as good
sides, but doesn’t judge the characters
‘The wife of Bath’ -> a woman ahead of her time, she controls the marriage; she had 5
husbands – opposite to the patriarchal society of the time, when marriages were
arrangements and women were lower than men‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ -> illustration of culture, faith and self-definition; Pardoner
represents the tradition of the faith (~ broken and twisted) and the respect for the Church
(~ corrupted); he wants to earn something for himself and that’s why he entered the
Church, he sells forgiveness – he is devious, twisted and ironic
‘The Knight’s Tale’ -> describes the knight as feminine
‘The Nun’s Priest Tale’ -> a beast fable written in rhymed iambic pentameter (heroic
couplet); cock, hen and the fox embody human virtues, vices, prudence and faults
-> romance is present: cock – Chaucer makes fun of his
crowing (bragging) because it’s the only thing the cock knows
to do – ironic approach to this animal, rhetorical debate
RENAISSANCE (14th – 17th Century)
• Began in Italy in the 14th century and continued in Italy and other countries of
western Europe, through the 15th and 16th century
• It came to England in the 16th century and had its flowering in the Elizabethan and
Jacobean age
• Discovery of world, discovery of man; era of individualism, thought, art
• It can be observed on various levels:
oPhilosophical – thought is liberated from the dogma
oReligious – reformation, rebellion against the authority of the Church
oPractical – discoveries (printing press, America, Copernican system…)
• Reformation ~ 16th century religious movement; establishment of Protestantism
had a great influence on English culture
• Thomas More: ‘Utopia’ – written in Latin, describing the perfect society on an
imaginary island;
o1st part: an explorer comes to an island and criticizes laws, nationalists,
ambitions…
o2nd part: no private possessions, no materialism, no unemployment, wars or
pain -> idealistic world
• John Colet – founded ‘St. Paul’s School’, where teaching was in Latin and Greek
• Erasmus – Dutch humanist philosopher who revised English grammar for ‘St.
Paul’s school’
• Humanists wanted to reconcile classical legacy of Europe with Christian religion
• William Caxton – first used printing press
• 3 periods of English renaissance:
oEarly Tudors (1485 - 1558)
The period of Henry VII and Henry VIII
Drama is the most appealing style, performed on stage, so that even
the illiterate could follow it Acting was very popular, though sometimes forbidden – but actors
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were under protection of some patronage
oShakespeare’s England – Elizabethan period (1558 - 1603):
Rapid development in commerce, maritime power and national
feeling
Great period of English literature, especially in drama
oEarly Stuarts and Commonwealth (1603 - 1660)
• First drama in English – tragedy ‘Gorboduc’, written by Norton and Sackville; it
has no artistic value
• The topic – murders in royalty, very violent play (subject taken from legendary
chronicles of Britain)
• Theatres – in colleges, courts – The Globe, The Fortune, The Swan, The Rose –
had no roof (~ pit – for those who couldn’t afford a seat in a gallery)
• There were no female actors – so boys from the choir played women’s roles and
were under the lord’s protection• First copies of the plays were given to actors so they could improvise
• Tragedies were still influenced by Seneca (the unity of time, place and plot) – in
English plays actors only talked about the horror, while in Italian, the violence was
shown on stage
• Comedies were written by Udall - ‘Ralph Roister Doister’ and Gurton - ‘Needle’
• Thomas Kyd – ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ – a revenge tragedy, deals with the victory
of Spain over Portugal; a tragedy of love and war
Some believe that he wrote the original ‘Hamlet’
• Revenge tragedies:
o3 conventional devices taken from Seneca: ghost, the theme of revenge for
the murder of a relative, liberal use of declamation and soliloquies
oHero’s quest for revenge
oScenes of insanity are present; scenes of graveyards and mutilation
oPlay within a play
• Literary terms:
~ BLANK VERSE = unrhymed iambic pentameter, 5 feet and 10
syllables; closest to natural English intonation
~ INTERLUDES = transition between medieval period and
renaissance; short comical one-act pieces in otherwise serious play
~ FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE = usage of words in order to achieve
some special meaning or effect; standard meaning ~ literal vs.
figurative
= Figures of thought (tropes) - radical change in meaning ->
metaphor, hyperbole, irony
= Figures of speech (rhetorical figures) – distinction from the
standard is achieved through the syntactical order or
pattern
of words -> rhetorical question, chiasmus, zeugma
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~ IMAGERY = objects and qualities of sense perception referred to
by description, allusion, similes or metaphors; it includes visual,
auditory, tactile, thermal, olfactory, gustatory and kinaesthetic
qualities
= it applies directly to our senses and suggests the
mental picture we get= Tennyson: ‘In Memoriam’: Unloved, that beach will gather
brown,…
And many rose carnation feed
With summer spice in the
humming air…
~ METAPHOR = a word or expression which in literal usage
denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different thing,
without asserting comparison
= e.g. ‘my love is a red rose’ (Burns)
~ SIMILE = a comparison between two distinctly different things,
indicated by linking words ‘like’ or ‘as’
= e.g. ‘my love is like a red rose’
= e.g.‘and ice came floating by as green as emerald
‘(Coleridge)
~ CONCEIT = unusual comparison; a figure of speech which
establishes a striking parallel between two apparently dissimilar
things or situations
= e.g. ‘if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head’(Shakespeare in ‘My mistress’ eyes’)
~ HYPERBOLE = figure of speech; bold overstatement, extravagant
exaggeration, used either for serious or comic effect
= e.g. ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh runs in blood down
Palace walls’ – William Blake’s ‘London’
~ IRONY = the meaning implied differs sharply from the meaning
expressed
= e.g.
~ IMAGES = mental pictures suggested by different literary
techniques; visual, auditory, olfactory…
= TIED IMAGE – meaning and value are the same forall readers
= FREE IMAGE – not so fixed by the context; has
various meanings for different people
= LITERAL IMAGE – the words call up a sensory
representation of a literal object or sensation
e.g. ‘it is a beauteous evening, calm and free’
= FIGURATIVE IMAGE – involves a turn on the
literal meaning of words, depends on the author and
each reader gets a different picture in his head
e.g. ‘the holy time is quiet as a nun’
~ SYNECDOCHE = a part of something is used to signify the whole
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= e.g. ‘ten hands’ ~ 10 workmen
~ PERSONIFICATION = an inanimate object or an abstract
concept is spoken of as though it had human attributes or feelings
= e.g. ‘some sad drops wept…’ (Milton’s
‘Paradise lost’)
~ SYNESTHESIA = description of one kind of sensation in terms of another (colour is attributed to sounds, odour to colours etc.)
= e.g. ‘Tasting of Flora and the country green
Dance and Provencal song and sunburnt
mirth’ – Keats (‘Ode to a Nightingale’ –
poet calls for a draught of wine)
= e.g. ‘A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue’ –
Rimbaud’s sonnet on the colour of vowel
sounds; or also Baudelaire’s sonnet
‘Correspondences’
~ ZEUGMA = use of a verb with 2 subjects or objects or of an
adjective with 2 nouns although appropriate to only one of them
= e.g. ‘to wage war and peace’
~ CHIASMUS = reversal in the order of words in two otherwise
parallel phrases
= e.g. ‘he went to the country, to the town went she’
~ ASSONANCE = repetition of vowel sounds in stressed syllables
= e.g. ‘Thou still unravished BRIDE of
QUIETNESS
thou foster CHILD of SILENCE and slow
TIME’ ~ ODE = a long lyric poem, serious in subject and treatment,
elevated in style, elaborated in its structure;
= ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (Keats), ‘Ode to the West Wind’
(Shelley), ‘Intimations’ (Wordsworth)
~ SONNET = a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of 14 iambic
pentameter lines and a particular rhyme scheme:
• Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet – abba abba cde cde – used by Sir
Thomas Wyatt, Milton, and Wordsworth…
• English (Shakespearean) – abab cdcd efef gg
• Spenserian sonnet – abab bcbc cdcd ee
• In the first part – the problem, in the second part or couplet –
the solution, the conclusion
• Topics: love, beauty of loved ones, sufferings of the rejected
lovers, intensely personal – even about love for a man
(Shakespeare)
• Petrarca’s sonnets – idealized, perfect portraits;
Shakespeare’s sonnets – mocks at these (‘My mistress’ eyes’)
~ WIT = often applied in criticism, combined with metaphysical
paradox; today it is applied to brief expressions intentionallycombined to produce a shock of comic surprise
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~ HUMOUR = originally, physiological term for the fluids of human
body (blood, choler, yellow bile, phlegm) – the temperament was
determined by the combination of these fluids
wit is always intentionally comic, humour may be unintentional;
humour applies to what is laughable in person’s appearance and
actions and what he says
• Christopher Marlowe – predecessor of Shakespeare’s
Introduced blank verse as a form of dramatic expression
Author of the tragedies: ‘Doctor Faustus’, ‘Queen of Cartage’, ‘The
few of Malta’
• Sir Thomas Wyatt – ‘They flee from me’
Theme – love, the poet is in prison and remembers his past loves
(‘they’)
He used to be popular, but now all his women left him because they
wanted a change – and he couldn’t give them that ‘She’ is special, the one he remembers the most – also seeking
change; he is talking about her lack of loyalty in love
He blames himself for his unhappiness – he couldn’t provide the
change they wanted
He compares his women to half - domestic pets – ‘gentle, tame and
meek…. To take bread at my hand’
Written under the influence of Italian sonnets – tone is sad,
melancholic (remembrance), comparisons, irony (‘I so kindly am
served’ – the disloyal relationship)
Written in iambic pentameter – ‘They flee from me, that sometime
did me seek’
• Poetry in effective way evokes vivid experience – conveys emotions, suggests ideas
– through imagery, tone, literary figures, meter…
• Robert Browning – ‘Meeting at night’
Written later, not in renaissance
Theme – love, presents a specific situation in which the poet goes to
meet his lover, although the word ‘love’ isn’t mentioned
He travels across the sea, land and can’t wait to meet her
The poet conveys experience through images – grey sea, long black
land, yellow half-moon, startled little waves (visual); warm sea-
scented beach (olfactory); tap at the pane, quick sharp scratch, voiceless loud (auditory)
• William Shakespeare – wrote sonnets, addressed to a certain male friend and a
Dark Lady
He printed his books in folio (2 leaves, 4 pages) and quarto (4 leaves,
8 pages)
• William Shakespeare – ‘That time of year’
English type of sonnet – 3 quatrains + 1 couplet
Theme – getting old, youth is passing
The writer thinks that the person he’s speaking to will love him evenmore, now that they must part
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In the beginning he mentions ‘yellow leaves…which shake against
the cold’ – metaphor -> autumn of life, getting old
‘The twilight of such day… black night’ – metaphor ->he is dying
‘Glowing of such fire’ – metaphor -> compares himself to glowing
ambers of dying fire
In the couplet – conclusion: he’s going to die and he wants theperson he’s speaking to to love him more because he’s leaving
• William Shakespeare – ‘My mistress’ eyes’
Mocking at sweet Italian sonnets – mentions ‘false compare’
Using conceits – ‘if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head’
‘when she walks, treads on the ground’
Talking about how horrible his mistress is, unusual images, very
weird, she seems to be ugly etc., but he loves her – ‘I think my love is
rare’
• William Shakespeare – ‘When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought’
Sorrow, painful memories of the friends he lost Typical sonnet: love, sorrow, feelings, suffer, joy, hate, friendship
He thinks that he wasted his time, thinks of his lost friends and his
lost love
He will always feel sorrow, but friendship is here to stay forever
• John Keats – ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
The poet is sad, sitting in an orchard and he sees the nightingale
The poet wants to escape from the reality he lives in and to see the
forest with the nightingale One way of following her is getting drunk, but he doesn’t want that
He wants to follow her through poetry because when we feel deep
pleasure, we want to see how it is to be immortal
Mentally, he’s in the woods with the nightingale and he’s
overwhelmed
He doesn’t want to die, but later he has some thoughts of death –
when the nightingale sings again, he would almost want to die
Usage of synesthesia to suggest the sweet smell of the flowers
Fairy land forlorn – midway between the world we want and the
world we live in
The poet confesses his frustration, his hunger for life, although he
had a thought of death
He wonders whether the world around him is real, or is the song he
heard real
Expression of his emotions
• Sir Philip Sidney
Poet, critic – posthumously published poems
Wrote about 150 sonnets and a sonnet sequence ‘Astrophel and
Stella’
Essay ‘The defence of Poesy’ – written in prose; defends poetrybecause it was said to be worthless and useless
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‘Poetry is important in every time…. Older than philosophy, teaches
morals…’ – its task is to teach and delight
He accepts Aristotle’s theory that poetry is imitation of nature – it
makes nature more beautiful than it actually is
He wrote a prose romance ‘Arcadia’ – written in ‘sanazzaro’, a
collection of pastoral dialogues (eclogues) Arcadia – the name of the mountain district in Peloponnese where
Pan reigned
• Edmund Spenser
Poet, one of his aims was to rid English language of unnecessary
establishments and make it simple
He wanted to show that English is fit for poetic writing
‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’ – poem for every month of the year;
written in different meters; 10 of them are eclogues; consists also of
complaints by Colin Clait (the author himself) ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale’ – satirical poem in which he attacks
Elizabethan court
‘Amoretti’ – sonnet sequence, finishes with the famous hymn (love
poem)
‘Faerie Queen’ – speaks of human virtues in the form of allegory;
gives each virtue a special knight or protector
Gloreana is the faerie queen – the glory that comes from possessing
a virtue -> you are rich if you have virtues
Addressed to 3 Elizabeths (mother, future wife, queen) – patriotic,
describes every social class
Spenserian stanza consists of 9 lines – 8 iambic pentameters and an
iambic hexameter with a rhyme scheme: abab bcbc c -> later used
by Keats and Shelley
• Ben Jonson
The first real poet laureate of England
Sought inspiration in contemporary life of London
Wanted to portray all traits of people (negative ones) in a satirical
way
‘The Alchemist’ – 2 rogues pretend to have discovered a formula to
turn matter into gold ‘Volpone’ – the fox pretends to be on a death bed -> people are
greedy
He writes in blank verse; obeys the 3 unities
Based his ‘Comedy of Manners’ on 4 body fluids – it deals with
relations and intrigues between ladies and gentlemen living in a
quiet and sophisticated society; evokes laughter – at the violation of
social conventions and decorum
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METAPHYSICAL POETRY (17th century)
• Metaphysics – a branch of philosophy, trying to understand and describe the
nature of reality
• Metaphysical poets were different, untraditional, eccentrics, inconsistent,
complicated – considered to be the forerunners of modern poetry
• Motto: ‘Carpe Diem!’
• Secular poetry: John Donne, Marvell, Cowley, Cleveland• Religious poetry: Herbert, Vaughn, Crashaw
• Poems are cynical, witty, full of logic, irony, intelligence, knowledge, unusual
images, modelled on actual speech and organized in a form of argument – ahead
of their time
• Poets use conceits, strange descriptions of women, abstruse (~hard to understand)
arguments and hidden meanings – because they don’t want to be understood as
easily as Petrarca or Spenser
• These poets often used their knowledge of philosophy and astronomy and often
described physical love; they opposed idealized human nature and beauty
•
John Donne is the main representative -> ‘A Valediction of Weeping’o ‘The Flea’, ‘Batter my Heart, Three Personed God’
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o ‘A Lecture Upon the Shadow’ – ironical, cynical, realistic
o ‘Songs and Sonnets’ – collection of 52 love poems
• Literary terms:
~ PARADOX = apparent contradiction that is in a sense true and
valid;carries a shock value and is in contrast with common experience
= e.g. ‘The child is the father of a man’ – Wordsworth
~ OXYMORON = combines direct contraries (e.g. ‘living dead’)
~ SATIRE =aims to make the subject ridiculous; more serious than
comedy, laughter is used as a weapon
• HORATIAN SATIRE – milder, weaker, tries to evoke
laughter at the foibles of man; shows the defects of the
characters and ridicules their pride about them
• JUVENALIAN SATIRE – evokes contempt and moral
indignation at the vices and corruption of men
Jacobean, Caroline and Commonwealth age
• After Elizabeth died, James Stuart came to throne - > Jacobean age, and then
puritan life was led
• Puritans rejected pleasures (enjoyment, art, literature) and were devoted to work
• Charles I. came to throne in 1625 -> Caroline age
• In 1642, there was a civil war, between the Parliament (round heads, Cromwell)
and the king (cavaliers) – it finished in 1649 when Parliament took power and
England was ruled by Parliament and their leader Cromwell for 11 years ->
Commonwealth period
• There was a religious, political and economical split: Tories (cavaliers) and Wigs
(roundheads)
• Puritans closed down theatres for moral and religious reasons – drama almost
diminished
• John Milton
Well-read, educated (attended Cambridge), spoke 7 languages – he
was familiar with Latin, French and Italian
He was puritan, but very passionate in his poems
He was blind when he grew old
His work is influenced by Donne, but he breaks the tradition 3 periods:
• 1) Poetry before civil war: he was an accomplished poet at
the age of 17
• ‘Elegy on the Death of the Fair Infant’ – for his sister, after
their father died
• ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ – describes victory
of Christ over false gods
• ‘Lycidas’ – elegy about his friend Edward King who
drowned and died; less about his feelings, more the
description of the political situation and criticism of Church,in a way (‘blind mouth’ – people who have high positions in
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Church)
• 2) Prose and poetry of the Commonwealth period: he
returned from Italy because of the civil war
• He wrote prose works, pamphlets – economical and political
(‘Freedom of press and free speech’)
• Prose pamphlets on various themes – marriage and divorce(he wasn’t happily married); education (wanted to introduce
scientific subjects)
• 3) Poems of Restoration: ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise
Regained’ – new approach to Biblical theme -> portrays
Adam and Eve as if there is hope for them
• ‘Paradise Lost’ – religious epic, written in blank verse;
medieval conception of Heaven and Hell
• He breaks the tradition – hope for the future
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THE NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD (1660 – 1785)
• Age of prosperity, progress and stability
• Middle class developed and became predominant; it became a force that dictated
the general taste in everything and in literature also
• Ideological concept of literature – writings which embodied the tastes of certain
class
• Now everything is literature – philosophical debates, letters etc.
• It is the age of reason, scientific age – everything comes from the head and
emotions have no importance
• Strong feelings lead to wars and anarchy, therefore poetry should not be
passionate because emotions represent chaos
• Form is more important than the content – everything had to be in order
• Towns are centres of culture so topics are: town themes, sophisticated themes,
intellectual topics, politics, moral classes, good manners• Revival of theatres – considerable technical changes -> roofed theatres, dropping
curtain, movable scenery, galleries; there was a proscenium ~ a part of the stage in
front of the curtain, which stretched into audience
• Plays were for upper classes, and the most popular form was the comedy of
manners (Moliere’s influence) – plot is based on an exaggerated feature of a
character
• John Dryden
The father of the modern criticism, most famous for his criticism on
the literary art Beginning of the literary theory
Literature has to give the picture of truth and imitate nature; it has
to satisfy the reason and obey rules
Iambic pentameter suggested disorder because it was unrhymed –
everything should rhyme
‘Essay on dramatic poesy’; ‘Aurengzebe’ – tragedy written in heroic
couplet
Augustian age
• Age of prosperity, empire was growing – balance between the king and the
Parliament
• Social conventions are more important than the individual ones, reason is more
important than emotions, form is more important than content
• Writers didn’t want to experiment – they rather repeated what they already knew
- same phrases all over again (petrification of language)
• They used heroic couplet, same rhythm, same phrases (e.g. women = nymphs)
• Dissociation of sensibility – strict reason, no emotions
• Deism – belief in existence of a divine being, but without acceptance of revelation
or religious dogma (miracles etc.)
• Man is basically good (deep down) and needs no external laws to tell him what isgood and what’s not -> laws and religion became unnecessary
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• Gothic novel
o The result of suppressing emotions – emotions are here exaggerated
o Fiction, emotions, mysterious and supernatural elements
o Stories are set in the medieval period, in gloomy castles, dungeons,
subterranean passages, sliding panels
o Focus is on the suffering imposed on an innocent heroine by a lustful villaino Ghosts, mysterious disappearances, supernatural occurrences (which turn
out to have natural explanations)
o The purpose is to evoke horror
o Exploration of the irrational and perverse impulses and the terrors that lie
beneath the surface of a civilized mind
o First Gothic novelist – Horace Walpole ‘The Castle of Otranto’
o The term ‘Gothic’ – extended to a type of fiction which develops a brooding
atmosphere of gloom and terror and represents melodramatically violent
o William Beckford: ‘Vathek’ – medieval and oriental setting; erotic and
sadistic subjecto Mary Shelley: ‘Frankenstein’, Charles Dickens: ‘Bleak house’ (chapters 11,
16 and 47) and ‘Great Expectations’ (Miss Havisham episodes)
o Jane Austen: ‘Northanger Abbey’ – made fun of the decorous instances of
Gothic vogue
• Alexander Pope
A classical poet; in a way, he sums up the 18th century
Called ‘Singer of the Universe’
Preaches correctness in writing, polishes his phrases and wants to
reach perfection He was also a critic: ‘Ode to Solitude’, ‘Essay on Man’ – he
advocates deism
‘The Rape of the Lock’ – a mock-heroic epic (mocks the epic by
treating a trivial subject in an elevated style); someone cut off a
girl’s lock of hair and she began to moan
He was a master of rhetorical figures
• Dr. Samuel Johnson
A critic on the metaphysical poetry – they made their strange
comparisons on purpose, not spontaneous
Famous as the author of the first English dictionary
Satires: ‘London’, ‘Vanity of Human Virtues’, ‘Idler’, ‘Rambler’
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ROMANTICISM (1785 – 1830)
• Began in the year of the French Revolution (1789) or alternatively in 1798 when
‘Lyrical Ballads’ by Wordsworth and Coleridge were published
• Characteristics:
o Interest in history, medieval times are important
o Exploration of the unknown, mysticism
o Oriental settings are interesting
o Interest in nature, beauty of the rural life
o Inspiration in primitive societies, legends, folk ballads
o Individualism, creativity, personality
o Pain, spleen, strong emotions, passion, solitude
o Prose became an artistic form
o Development of the historical novel – ‘Ivanhoe’ by W. Scott
o Fight against the social norms (they were against marriage, for example)
o Wanted to be free of any kind of limitationo Protagonists are not representatives of the society anymore – they are
nonconformists, outcasts
o Poems of meditation concerned with human experience and problems,
although often stimulated by a natural phenomenon
• Elizabethan way of language – language of poetry is the language of ordinary
people
• Wordsworth rejected poetic diction – his writing is simple
• English is studied at universities
• 2 generations of authors:o William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Robert
Burns
o Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, John Keats
• William Wordsworth
‘Good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’
The immediate act of composition must be spontaneous and free of
rules
Nature – the theme of his ‘Daffodiles’
• Robert Burns – ‘A Red, Red Rose’
Subject: love
Using simile – comparison with linking words ‘such’, ‘like’, ‘as’
‘My love is like a red, red rose’
• William Blake – ‘The Sick Rose’
Theme – illicit love affair
Using very strange images: rose ~ the invisible worm; bed of crimson
joy; dark secret love
Rose = feminine beauty, love, women – personification Worm = death/ secret lover
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Crimson joy = intense pleasure, passionate love-making
Dark secret love = concealed love affair
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VICTORIAN AGE (1832 – 1901)
• Time of rapid economic and social changes, which made England the industrial
power
• Atmosphere of national pride and optimism about the future times and progress
• Turbulence, social stresses and anxiety about the ability to cope with the social and
political problems of the age
• Industrialization played a great role – produced wealth for the expanding middle
class, but led rural England to massive poverty
• The term ‘Victorianism’ is often used to imply narrow-mindedness, sexual
correctitude and ignorance, social respectability
• Doubts about the religious dogma led to strict biblical fundamentalism
• Women started to fight for their right and equal status – ‘women question’
• Subdivided into 3 periods
o Early Victorianism (until 1848)o Middle Victorianism – Pre-Raphalites (1848 - 1860)
o Late Victorianism – Aestheticism and Decadence (1860 - 1901)
• Literature reflected the social, economic, religious and intellectual problems and
issues of the time
• Novel is the dominant form – they were published in monthly issues, to keep the
interest of the readers
• Critics of the time: Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold – rebellion against Victorian doctrines
(materialism, utilitarianism, insularity, narrow-mindedness) and wanted classical
harmony• Childhood is the dominant theme
• Poets: Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mathew
Arnold
• Essayists: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Mathew Arnold, Walter Peter
• Novelists: Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, William M. Thackeray,
Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Thomas
Hardy, Samuel Butler
• Charles Dickens
Very good in portraying characters
Novels are marked by the sense of injustice
Everything depends on the individual, problems cannot be solved by
laws
He had a feeling for the rhythm of speech of the poor and
uneducated
‘The Pickwick Papers’, ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘The
Tale of Two Cities’, ‘David Copperfield’, ‘Little Dorrit’, ‘Bleak
House’, ‘Great Expectations’
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• W.M. Thackeray
Wrote about upper classes, in a completely unromantic way
‘Vanity Fair’, ‘Book of Snobs’, ‘The Newcomers’, ‘Virginians’
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• Literary movements:
o PRE-RAPHAELITES = a group of critics organized a brotherhood in 1848,
wanting to replace the existing style of painting with the one of Raphael –
truthful, simple and with the spirit of devotion
A painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti,
William Morris
o AESTHETICISM = a European phenomenon that started in France in the
end of the 19th century – a work of art is a supreme value among human
products and has no use or moral aim outside its own being
Developed by Charles Baudelaire, who was influenced by Edgar
Allan Poe; later taken up by Flaubert, Mallarme, Verlaine
o L’ART POUR L’ART = Immanuel Kant proposed the supreme value of
beauty in his ‘Critique of Judgement’; Walter Peter introduced these views
into Victorian England – ‘love of art for its own sake’ Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson
o DECADENCE = started in 1860s, exploration of strange sensations,
experiments with drugs and different modes of sexual experience
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons
Representative work: ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’
EDWARDIAN AGE
• The period between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the World War I
• Poets: Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling
• Dramatists: Henry Arthur Jones, John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw
• Playwrights: Lady Gregory, Yeats, Synge
• Prose: Hardy, Galsworthy, Kipling, Henry James
GEORGIAN AGE• The period of the reign of George V (1941 - 1956)
• Georgian poets gathered their works into an anthology ‘Georgian Poetry’
• Poetry is rural in theme, delicate in manner, traditional in form
• Poets: Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Ralph Hodgson, W.H. Davies, John
Maefield
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MODERN PERIOD
• The literature written since the beginning of the World War I
• Development of science caused the shift of values – Darwin’s theory of evolution
shattered the beliefs in God
• Education becomes more and more important
• Influence of Sigmund Freud
• Period marked by experiments in form, subject and style
• Major achievements in all the genres
• Literary groups are formed
• Writers are in search for a myth – conscience ordering and explanation of
subconscious human drives -> they wanted to find the basic psychological pattern
of human experience – Yeats and Eliot
• Domination of anti-heroic characters
• Predominant use of irony, paradox and ambiguity• Poets are the explorers of experience, using language to build up patterns of
meaning
• No more omniscient author in novels, 1st person narrator is dominant
• In poetry – interior monologue – introduced by T.S. Eliot; irregular rhythm
• Avantgarde = writers ahead of their time, alienated from the established order; the
aim is to shock and to challenge the norms
• Poets: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas
• Novelists: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, AldousHuxley, Doris Lessing
• Dramatists: G.B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter
• Critics: T.S. Eliot, Richards, Woolf
LITERARY THEORIES:
• NEW CRITICISM = proper concern of literary criticism is the detailed
consideration of the work itself, and not the external circumstances or historical
position of the author
o Started in 1941 with the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The New
Criticism’ and was dominant in America in the 1960s
o Characteristic – close reading, detailed analysis of the complex interrelation
and ambiguities
o Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William K. Wimsatt
• RUSSIAN FORMALISM = proposes opposition between the poetical and practical
use of language
o Originated in Moscow and Petrograd in 1920s
o The main feature of poetical language is literariness, and of practical – toconvey messages
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o Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson
LITERARY MOVEMENTS:
• IMAGISM = abandoning conventional poetic materials and versification; freedom
to choose any subject matter and create personal rhythms, usage of commonspeech
o In England and America 1912 – 1917, as a revolt against the poetry of the
time
o Poems written in free verse, representing writer’s impressions of a visual
objects or scene
o Usage of metaphors, influence of Haiku poems
o Hilda Doolittle, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos, John Fletcher
•
SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT = exploiting an order of private symbols in poetryo Developed in the end of 19th century in France – Charles Baudelaire, Arthur
Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Paul Valery
o French authors had a great influence on: Arthur Symons, Yeats, Ezra
Pound, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens
• EXPRESSIONISM = revolt against the artistic tradition of realism, in subject,
matter and style; expression of a personal vision of life and society, describing an
individual alone and afraid in a technological and industrial urban society
o In Germany, 1910 – 1925
o Utopian views of future, symbolic images
o Drama – theatre of absurd -> anonymous human types instead of
individualized characters, episodic renderings
o Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch
o Nietzsche, Strindberg, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett
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NOVEL
A novel is an extended prose fiction narrative, broadly realistic--concerning the everyday
events of ordinary people--and concerned with character. "People in significant action" is
one way of describing it.
-"An extended, fictional prose narrative about realistic characters and events." It isa representation of life, experience, and learning. Action, discovery, and
description are important elements, but the most important tends to be one or
more characters--how they grow, learn, find--or don't grow, learn, or find.
- Influences on the development: journalism, biographies, letters
- The real predecessor is picaresque novel which originated from the Spanish “La
Vida de Lazarillo de Torres, de Sus Adventuras y Adversidades”
Types of novel:
Adventure novel. A novel where exciting events are more important than character
development and sometimes theme. Examples:
• Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Autobiographical novel. A novel based on the author's life experience. Many novelists
include in their books people and events from their own lives because remembrance is
easier than creation from scratch. Examples:
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Bildungsroman. Educational novel; the subject is the development of protagonist's mind
and character from his childhood to maturity, portraying their spiritual crisis. Examples:
• Charles Dickens, The Great Expectations
Dystopian novel. An anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone
wrong in the attempt to create a perfect society. See utopian novel. Examples:
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Epistolary novel. A novel consisting of letters written by a character or several characters.
The form allows for the use of multiple points of view toward the story and the ability to
dispense with an omniscient narrator. Examples:
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela
• Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
• Fanny Burney, Evelina
Fantasy novel. Any novel that is disengaged from reality. Often such novels are set in
nonexistent worlds, such as under the earth, in a fairyland, on the moon, etc. The
characters are often something other than human or include nonhuman characters.Example:
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• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Gothic novel. A novel in which supernatural horrors and an atmosphere of unknown
terror pervades the action. The setting is often a dark, mysterious castle, where ghosts and
sinister humans roam menacingly. Horace Walpole invented the genre with his Castle of
Otranto. Gothic elements include these:
• Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand.
• Mystery and suspense
• High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially
terror
• Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent
presence, a skeleton)
• Omens, portents, dream visions
• Fainting, frightened, screaming women
• Women threatened by powerful, impetuous males
• Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages• The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges,
howls in the distance, distant sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned
rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly, characters trapped in
rooms or imprisoned)
• The vocabulary of the gothic (use of words indicating fear, mystery, etc.:
apparition, devil, ghost, haunted, terror, fright)
Examples:
• Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
• William Beckford, Vathek
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Historical novel. A novel where fictional characters take part in actual historical events
and interact with real people from the past. Examples:
• Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
• Sir Walter Scott, Waverly
• James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans
• Charles Dickens, The Tale of Two Cities
Involuted novel. Postmodernist, multicultural, anti-novel. Includes esoteric data (e.g.
Detailed information about chess strategies or butterflies) Examples:
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Mystery novel. A novel whose driving characteristic is the element of suspense or mystery.
Strange, unexplained events, vague threats or terrors, unknown forces or antagonists, all
may appear in a mystery novel. Gothic novels and detective novels are often also mystery
novels.
Novella. A prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. There is nostandard definition of length, but since rules of thumb are sometimes handy, we might say
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that the short story ends at about 20,000 words, while the novel begins at about 50,000.
Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. Examples:
• Henry James, Daisy Miller
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Henry James, Turn of the Screw • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Novel of incidents. A novel focusing on and describing what the character will do next and
how the plot will come out. Examples:
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Novel of character. A novel focusing on protagonist's motives of what he does and how he,
as a person will come out. Examples:
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Novel of manners. A novel focusing on and describing in detail the social customs and
habits of a particular social group. Usually these conventions function as shaping or even
stifling controls over the behavior of the characters. Examples:
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Picaresque novel. An episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a
person of low social status) wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero
provides the author with the opportunity to connect widely different pieces of plot, since
the hero can wander into any situation. Picaresque novels tend to be satiric and filled with
petty detail. Examples:
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild
Pulp fiction. Novels written for the mass market, intended to be "a good read,"--often
exciting, titillating, thrilling. Historically they have been very popular but critically
sneered at as being of sub-literary quality. The earliest ones were the dime novels of thenineteenth century, printed on newsprint (hence "pulp" fiction) and sold for ten cents.
Westerns, stories of adventure, even the Horatio Alger novels, all were forms of pulp
fiction.
Regional novel. A novel faithful to a particular geographic region and its people, including
behaviour, customs, speech, and history. Examples:
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native
Social novel. A novel focusing on and describing in detail the social events and theconditions of a certain era. Examples:
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• John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Utopian novel. A novel that presents an ideal society where the problems of poverty,
greed, crime, and so forth have been eliminated. Examples:
• Thomas More, Utopia • Samuel Butler, Erewhon
Western. A novel set in the western United States featuring the experiences of cowboys
and frontiersmen. Many are little more than adventure novels or even pulp fiction, but
some have literary value. Examples:
• Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident
• Owen Wister, The Virginian
Author’s point of view:
Who the narrator within the story is (the author, a character from the story…)
Omniscient narrator. All-knowing narrator; he reads the minds of the characters in the
story; he is at several places at once and has access to private thoughts and feelings.
Examples:
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• George Eliot
Intruding author. Some authors serve the reader as guides in their fictional world; he
comments, gives opinions about characters; we are aware of his presence (as if he came
from the outside into the story to comment)
3rd person objective. The author chooses one character whom he follows through the
action and restricts the reader from the range of character. What characters think and
feel – it seems from the outside. Examples:
• Henry James, The Ambassadors
1st person autobiographical. The person itself talks about his experiences in a confessional
tone. Autobiographical material is shaped by creative imagination of the author. The
persona (“I” in the text) is the narrator and may have much in common with the author(author in disguise) or be a freely created imaginary identity.
1st person observer. A limited point of view, characteristic for modern authors. We are
aware of the reflector – the person inside or outside the story through whose eyes and ears
we register the events. We see the story through the perspective of a chosen interpreter.
Examples:
• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
1st person protagonist. The main character tells us his/her story in the 1st person. This
perspective places us in the center of the action. Examples:
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• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Naïve narrator. The narrator seems to know and understand less than the reader himself.
Examples:
• Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Interior monologue. The author goes deeper in the interior life of the characters. Stream
of consciousness, sequence of thoughts and feelings – not logical, no grammatical order.
Examples:
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
• James Joyce
Unintrusive narrator. He is objective, impersonal and shows the action without his
comments or judgments; he doesn’t go into motives and feelings. Examples:
• Ernest Hemingway
Characters:
People that carry on the action in the novel
Flat characters. Simple characters can be described in one sentence (type characters) –
occur in detective story.
Stock characters. Special kind of a flat characters => stereotypical figure who has
occurred so many times in fiction that his nature is immediately known (stingy person –
Scrooge; beautiful international spy).
Round characters. Complex and fully realized individuals.
Static character. Doesn’t change at all; same at the beginning and in the end of the story.
Dynamic character. Changes in the story, undergoes permanent changes in personality
(Mr Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice).
Setting:
The location and period in which the action takes place
Plot:
Succession of events; system of actions represented in the novel
Artistic unity – there must be nothing that is irrelevant and doesn’t contribute to the story
In a highly unified novel there is a succession of events – each element grows out of the
preceding and leads logically to the development of the action
Plot manipulation – the author gives a sudden turn to a story, unjustified by the situation
Deus ex machina – author cannot find the right solution so things resolve themselves;
something happens unexpectedly and solves the situation
Suspense:What will happen next, how will it turn out – carries the element of surprise
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Structure:
Organization or overall design or form of a literal work
Critics often disagree over structure
Symbols:
Something that on the surface is its literal self but which also has another meaning or even
several meanings. A symbol may be said to embody an idea. There are two general types
of symbols: universal symbols that embody universally recognizable meanings wherever
used, such as light to symbolize knowledge, a skull to symbolize death, etc. and
constructed symbols that are given symbolic meaning by the way an author uses them in a
literary work, as the white whale becomes a symbol of evil in Moby Dick.
a sword may be a sword and also symbolize justice, garden ~ fertility, nature
Name symbolism – Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of a Lot 49
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INTRODUCTION
The novel is only one of many possible prose narrative forms. It shares with other
narratives, like the epic and the romance, two basic characteristics: a story and a story-
teller. The epic tells a traditional story and is an amalgam of myth, history, and fiction. Itsheroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and women. The romance also tells
stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes adventure and often involves a quest
for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy. The events seem to project in symbolic form the
primal desires, hopes, and terrors of the human mind and are, therefore, analogous to the
materials of dream, myth, and ritual. Although this is true of some novels as well, what
distinguishes the novel from the romance is its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its
heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest, as Northrop Frye said, is
"human character as it manifests itself in society."
Development of the Novel
The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which suggests its
closeness to the medieval romance. The English name is derived from the Italian novella,
meaning "a little new thing." Romances and novelle, short tales in prose, were
predecessors of the novel, as were picaresque narratives. Picaro is Spanish for "rogue,"
and the typical picaresque story is of the escapades of a rascal who lives by his wits. The
development of the realistic novel owes much to such works, which were written to deflate
romantic or idealized fictional forms. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15), the story of an
engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance, explores the role of
illusion and reality in life and was the single most important progenitor of the modern
novel.The novel broke from those narrative predecessors that used timeless stories to mirror
unchanging moral truths. It was a product of an intellectual milieu shaped by the great
seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes and Locke, who insisted upon the importance
of individual experience. They believed that reality could be discovered by the individual
through the senses. Thus, the novel emphasized specific, observed details. It individualized
its characters by locating them precisely in time and space. And its subjects reflected the
popular eighteenth-century concern with the social structures of everyday life.
The novel is often said to have emerged with the appearance of Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). Both are picaresque stories, in that
each is a sequence of episodes held together largely because they happen to one person.
But the central character in both novels is so convincing and set in so solid and specific aworld that Defoe is often credited with being the first writer of "realistic" fiction. The first
"novel of character" or psychological novel is Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740-41), an
epistolary novel (or novel in which the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of
letters). It is a work characterized by the careful plotting of emotional states. Even more
significant in this vein is Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa (1747-48). Defoe and
Richardson were the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from
mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. They established the novel's claim as an
authentic account of the actual experience of individuals.
Since the eighteenth century, and particularly since the Victorian period, the novel,
replacing poetry and drama, has become the most popular of literary forms--perhaps
because it most closely represents the lives of the majority of people. The novel becameincreasingly popular as its social scope expanded to include characters and stories about
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the middle and working classes. Because of its readership, which included a large
percentage of women and servants, the novel became the form which most addressed the
domestic and social concerns of these groups.
Experimentation: The Developing Role of the Narrator
As it evolved, the novel expanded in terms of its form. Writers began to experiment
with different modes of presentation. Central to experimentation was the role of the
narrator. In a given novel, who talks to the reader? From whose point of view is the story
told? Is the narrator identifiable with the author? Is the narrator a character in the story
or another character who simply observes the actions of others in the story? Is the
narrator reliable--can you believe him or her? Or is he or she unreliable, unable to convey
the story without distortion? How does the device of the narrator "frame" the story? How
does the reader determine what the truth is about the events reported?
Nineteenth-century novelists like Thackeray and Dickens often told their stories
through an omniscient narrator, who is aware of all the events and the motivations of all
the characters of the novel. Through this technique the writer can reveal the thoughts of any character without explaining how this information is obtained. Henry James, who
began writing in the last third of the nineteenth century, used the technique of point-of-
view narration so completely that the minds of his characters became the real basis of
interest of the novel. In such works, our knowledge of events and characters is itself
limited by the limitations of this character or central consciousness.
Since Henry James' time, many writers have experimented with shifting the focus of
the novel further inward to examine human consciousness. Writers like Virginia Woolf,
James Joyce, and William Faulkner used a method of narration known as stream of
consciousness, which attempts to reproduce the flow of consciousness. Perceptions,
thoughts, judgments, feelings, associations, and memories are presented just as they occur,
without being shaped into grammatical sentences or logical sequences. In stream-of-
consciousness narration, all narrators are to some degree unreliable, which reflects the
twentieth century's preoccupation with the relativity and the subjective nature of
experience, of knowledge, and of truth.
Proliferation of Types
The novel continues in its popularity to this day. It has moved away from a primarily
realistic focus and has evolved into the expansive form that incorporates all other fictional
modes. Today, for example, there are many types of novels. There is the allegorical novel,
which uses character, place, and event to represent abstract ideas and to demonstratesome thesis. The science fiction novel relies on scientific or pseudo-scientific machinery to
create a future society which parallels our own. The historical novel is set in the past and
takes its characters and events from history. The social novel is concerned with the
influence of societal institutions and of economic and social conditions on characters and
events. These three types, the science fiction, social, and historical novel, tend to be
didactic, to instruct readers in the necessity for changing their morality, their lives, and
the institutions of society. The regional novel presents the influence of a particular locale
on character and events. The detective novel is a combination of the picaresque and
psychological novel in that it reveals both events and their motivation. And there are
many others.
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Aesthetic distance: degree of emotional involvement in a work of art. The most obvious
example of aesthetic distance (also referred to simply as distance) occurs with paintings.
Some paintings require us to stand back to see the design of the whole painting; standing
close, we see the technique of the painting, say the brush strokes, but not the whole. Other
paintings require us to stand close to see the whole; their design and any figures become
less clear as we move back from the painting.Similarly, fiction, drama, and poetry involve the reader emotionally to different
degrees. Emotional distance, or the lack of it, can be seen with children watching a TV
program or a movie; it becomes real for them. Writers like Faulkner and the Bronte
sisters pull the reader into their work; the reader identifies closely with the characters and
is fully involved with the happenings. Hemingway, on the other hand, maintains a greater
distance from the reader.
Alliteration: the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of a word, such as the
repetition of b sounds in Keats's "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" ("Ode to a
Nightingale") or Coleridge's "Five miles meandering in a mazy motion ("Kubla Khan").
A common use for alliteration is emphasis. It occurs in everyday speech in such phrases as"tittle-tattle," "bag and baggage," "bed and board," "primrose path," and "through
thick and thin" and in sayings like "look before you leap."
Some literary critics call the repetition of any sounds alliteration. However, there are
specialized terms for other sound-repetitions. Consonance repeats consonants, but not the
vowels, as in horror -hear er . Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, please-niece-sk i -
tree. See rhyme.
An allusion: a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase. The writer assumes
we’ll recognize the reference. For instance, most of us would know the difference between
a mechanic's being as reliable as George Washington or as reliable as Benedict Arnold.
Allusions that are commonplace for readers in one era may require footnotes for readers
in a later time.
Ambiguity: (1) a statement which has two or more possible meanings; (2) a statement
whose meaning is unclear. Depending on the circumstances, ambiguity can be negative,
leading to confusion or even disaster (the ambiguous wording of a general's note led to the
deadly charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War). On the other hand, writers often
use it to achieve special effects, for instance, to reflect the complexity of an issue or to
indicate the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of determining truth.
The title of the country song "Heaven's Just a Sin Away" is deliberately ambiguous; at
a religious level, it means that committing a sin keeps us out of heaven, but at a physicallevel, it means that committing a sin (sex) will bring heaven (pleasure). Many of Hamlet's
statements to the King, to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, and to other characters are
deliberately ambiguous, to hide his real purpose from them.
Ballad: a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic
action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these. Two
characteristics of the ballad are incremental repetition and the ballad stanza. Incremental
repetition repeats one or more lines with small but significant variations that advance the
action. The ballad stanza is four lines; commonly, the first and third lines contain four feet
or accents, the second and fourth lines contain three feet. Ballads often open abruptly,
present brief descriptions, and use concise dialogue.The folk ballad is usually anonymous and the presentation impersonal. The literary
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ballad deliberately imitates the form and spirit of a folk ballad. The Romantic poets were
attracted to this form, as Longfellow with "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Coleridge with
the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which is longer and more elaborate than the folk
balad) and Keats with "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (which more closely resembles the
folk ballad).
Characterization: the way an author presents characters. In direct presentation, a
character is described by the author, the narrator or the other characters. In indirect
presentation, a character's traits are revealed by action and speech. Characters can be
discussed in a number of ways.
• The protagonist is the main character, who is not necessarily a hero or a heroine.
The antagonist is the opponent; the antagonist may be society, nature, a person, or
an aspect of the protagonist. The antihero, a recent type, lacks or seems to lack
heroic traits.
• A persona is a fictional character. Sometimes the term means the mask or alter-ego
of the author; it is often used for first person works and lyric poems, to distinguishthe writer of the work from the character in the work.
• Characters may be classified as round (three-dimensional, fully developed) or as
flat (having only a few traits or only enough traits to fulfill their function in the
work); as developing (dynamic) characters or as static characters.
• A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major character; in Hamlet,
Laertes and Fortinbras, whose fathers have been killed, are foils for Hamlet.
Convention: (1) a rule or practice based upon general consent and upheld by society at
large; (2) an arbitrary rule or practice recognized as valid in any particular art or
discipline, such as literature or art (NED). For example, when we read a comic book, we
accept that a light bulb appearing above the head of a comic book character means the
character suddenly got an idea.
• Literary convention: a practice or device which is accepted as a necessary, useful,
or given feature of a genre, e.g., the proscenium stage (the "picture-frame" stage of
most theaters), a soliloquy, the epithet or boast in the epic (which those of you who
took Core Studies 1 will be familiar with).
• Stock character: character types of a genre, e.g., the heroine disguised as a man in
Elizabethan drama, the confidant, the hardboiled detective, the tightlipped sheriff,
the girl next door, the evil hunters in a Tarzan movie, ethnic or racial stereotypes,
the cruel stepmother and Prince Charming in fairy tales.• Stock situation: frequently recurring sequence of action in a genre, e.g., rags-to-
riches, boy-meets-girl, the eternal triangle, the innocent proves himself or herself.
• Stock response: a habitual or automatic response based on the reader's beliefs or
feelings, rather than on the work itself. A moralistic person might be shocked by
any sexual scene and condemn a book or movie as dirty; a sentimentalist is
automatically moved by any love story, regardless of the quality of the writing or
the acting; someone requiring excitement may enjoy any violent story or movie,
regardless of how mindless, unmotivated or brutal the violence is.
Fiction: prose narrative based on imagination, usually the novel or the short story.
Genre: a literary species or form, e.g., tragedy, epic, comedy, novel, essay, biography, lyricpoem. Click here for a fuller discussion of genres.
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• Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, what is said and
what is done, what is expected or intended and what happens, what is meant or
said and what others understand. Sometimes irony is classified into types: in
situational irony, expectations aroused by a situation are reversed; in cosmic irony
or the irony of fate, misfortune is the result of fate, chance, or God; in dramatic
irony. the audience knows more than the characters in the play, so that words andaction have additional meaning for the audience; Socratic irony is named after
Socrates' teaching method, whereby he assumes ignorance and openness to
opposing points of view which turn out to be (he shows them to be) foolish. Click
here for examples of irony.
Irony is often confused with sarcasm and satire:
• Sarcasm is one kind of irony; it is praise which is really an insult; sarcasm
generally involves malice, the desire to put someone down, e.g., "This is my
brilliant son, who failed out of college."
• Satire is the exposure of the vices or follies of an individual, a group, an institution,
an idea, a society, etc., usually with a view to correcting it. Satirists frequently use
irony.
Language can be classified in a number of ways.
• Denotation: the literal meaning of a word; there are no emotions, values, or images
associated with denotative meaning. Scientific and mathematical language carries
few, if any emotional or connotative meanings.
• Connotation: the emotions, values, or images associated with a word. The intensity
of emotions or the power of the values and images associated with a word varies.
Words connected with religion, politics, and sex tend to have the strongest feelings
and images associated with them.
For most people, the word mother calls up very strong positive feelings and
associations--loving, self-sacrificing, always there for you, understanding; the
denotative meaning, on the other hand, is simply "a female animal who has borne
one or more children." Of course connotative meanings do not necessarily reflect
reality; for instance, if someone said, "His mother is not very motherly," you
would immediately understand the difference between motherly (connotation) and
mother (denotation).
• Abstract language refers to things that are intangible, that is, which are perceived
not through the senses but by the mind, such as truth, God, education, vice,
transportation, poetry, war, love. Concrete language identifies things perceived
through the senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste), such as soft, stench, red,loud, or bitter.
• Literal language means exactly what it says; a rose is the physical flower.
Figurative language changes the literal meaning, to make a meaning fresh or
clearer, to express complexity, to capture a physical or sensory effect, or to extend
meaning. Figurative language is also called figures of speech. The most common
figures of speech are these:
o A simile: a comparison of two dissimilar things using "like" or "as", e.g.,
"my love is like a red, red rose" (Robert Burns).
o A metaphor: a comparison of two dissimilar things which does not use
"like" or "as," e.g., "my love is a red, red rose" (Lilia Melani).
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o Personification: treating abstractions or inanimate objects as human, that
is, giving them human attributes, powers, or feelings, e.g., "nature wept" or
"the wind whispered many truths to me."
o hyperbole: exaggeration, often extravagant; it may be used for serious or
for comic effect.
o Apostrophe: a direct address to a person, thing, or abstraction, such as "OWestern Wind," or "Ah, Sorrow, you consume us." Apostrophes are
generally capitalized.
o Onomatopoeia: a word whose sounds seem to duplicate the sounds they
describe--hiss, buzz, bang, murmur, meow, growl.
o Oxymoron: a statement with two parts which seem contradictory;
examples: sad joy, a wise fool, the sound of silence, or Hamlet's saying, "I
must be cruel only to be kind"
• Elevated language or elevated style: formal, dignitifed language; it often uses more
elaborate figures of speech. Elevated language is used to give dignity to a hero
(note the speeches of heros like Achilles or Agamemnon in the Iliad ), to express the
superiority of God and religious matters generally (as in prayers or in the KingJames version of the Bible), to indicate the importance of certain events (the ritual
language of the traditional marriage ceremony), etc. It can also be used to reveal a
self-important or a pretentious character, for humor and/or for satire.
Lyric Poetry: a short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses
thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like
the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of
thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion
is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung,
accompanied by a lyre. Click here for a discussion of Reading Lyric Poetry.
Meter: a rhythm of accented and unaccented syllables which are organized into patterns,
called feet. In English poetry, the most common meters are these:
• Iambic: a foot consisting of an unaccented and accented syllable. Shakespeare
often uses iambic, for example the beginning of Hamlet's speech (the accented
syllables are italicized), "To be or not to be. Listen for the accents in this line from
Marlowe, "Come live with me and be my love." English seems to fall naturally into
iambic patterns, for it is the most common meter in English.
• Trochaic: a foot consisting of an accented and unaccented syllable. Longfellow's
Hiawatha uses this meter, which can quickly become singsong (the accented
syllable is italicized):
" By the shores of Git cheGumee
By the shining Big -Sea-water."
The three witches' speech in Macbeth uses it: " Double, double, toil and trouble."
• Anapestic: a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables and an accented syllable.
These lines from Shelley's Cloud are anapestic:
"Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb
I arise and unbuild it a gain."
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• Dactylic: a foot consisting of an accented syllable and two unaccented syllables, as
in these words: swimingly, mannikin, openly.
• Spondee: a foot consisting of two accented syllables, as in the word heartbreak . In
English, this foot is used occasionally, for variety or emphasis.
• Pyrrhic: a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables, generally used to vary the
rhythm.
A line is named for the number of feet it contains: monometer: one foot, dimeter: two feet,
trimeter: three feet, tetrameter: four feet, pentameter: five feet, hexameter: six feet,
heptameter: seven feet.
The most common metrical lines in English are tetrameter (four feet) and pentameter
(five feet). Shakespeare frequently uses unrhymed iambic pentameter in his plays; the
technical name for this line is blank verse. In this course, I will not be asking you to
identify meters and metrical lines, but I would like you to have some awareness of their
existence.
Modern English poetry is metrical, i.e., it relies on accented and unaccented syllables.
Not all poetry does; Anglo-Saxon poetry relied on a system of alliteration. Skillful poetsrarely use one meter throughout a poem but use these meters in combinations; however, a
poem generally has one dominant meter.
Ode: usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and
an elaborate stanza pattern. There are various kinds of odes, which we don't have to
worry about in an introductory course like this. The ode often praises people, the arts of
music and poetry, natural scenes, or abstract concepts. The Romantic poets used the ode
to explore both personal or general problems; they often started with a meditation on
something in nature, as did Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale" or Shelley in “Ode to the
West Wind". Click here for a fuller discussion of the ode.
Paradox: a statement whose two parts seem contradictory yet make sense with more
thought. Christ used paradox in his teaching: "They have ears but hear not." Or in
ordinary conversation, we might use a paradox, "Deep down he's really very shallow."
Paradox attracts the reader's or the listener's attention and gives emphasis.
Point of view: the perspective from which the story is told.
• The most obvious point of view is probably first person or "I."
• The omniscient narrator knows everything, may reveal the motivations, thoughts
and feelings of the characters, and gives the reader information.
• With a limited omniscient narrator, the material is presented from the point of
view of a character, in third person.
•
The objective point of view presents the action and the characters' speech, withoutcomment or emotion. The reader has to interpret them and uncover their meaning.
A narrator may be trustworthy or untrustworthy, involved or uninvolved. Click here for
an illustration of these points of view in the story of Sleeping Beauty.
Rhyme:the repetition of similar sounds. In poetry, the most common kind of rhyme is end
rhyme, which occurs at the end of two or more lines. Internal rhyme occurs in the middle
of a line, as in these lines from Coleridge, "In mist or cloud , on mast or shroud" or
"Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white" ("The Ancient Mariner"). There are
many kinds of end rhyme:
• True rhyme is what most people think of as rhyme; the sounds are nearlyidentical--notion, motion, potion, for example.
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• Weak rhyme, also called slant, oblique, approximate, or half rhyme, refers to
words with similar but not identical sounds, e.g., notion-nation, bear-bore, ear-are.
Emily Dickinson frequently uses partial rhymes.
• Eye rhyme occurs when words look alike but don't sound alike--e.g., bear-ear .
Sonnet: a lyric poem consisting of fourteen lines. In English, generally the two basic kindsof sonnets are the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean or Elizabethan
sonnet. The Italian/Petrarchan sonnet is named after Petrarch, an Italian Renaissance
poet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The
Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains (four lines each) and a concluding
couplet (two lines). The Petrarchan sonnet tends to divide the thought into two parts; the
Shakespearean, into four.
Structure: framework of a work of literature; the organization or over-all design of a
work. The structure of a play may fall into logical divisions and also a mechanical division
of acts and scenes. Groups of stories may be set in a larger structure or frame, like The
Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, or The Arabian Tales.
Style: manner of expression; how a speaker or writer says what he says. Notice thedifference in style of the opening paragraphs of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that
looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the
river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the
water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went
by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the
leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell
early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust
rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching
and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
A Farewell to Arms
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ; but that ain't no matter. That book was
made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things
which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Symbol: in general terms, anything that stands for something else. Obvious examples are
flags, which symbolize a nation; the cross is a symbol for Christianity; Uncle Sam a
symbol for the United States. In literature, a symbol is expected to have significance.
Keats starts his ode with a real nightingale, but quickly it becomes a symbol, standing for
a life of pure, unmixed joy; then before the end of the poem it becomes only a bird again.
Tone: the writer's attitude toward the material and/or readers. Tone may be playful,
formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic, outraged, baffled, tender, serene, depressed, etc.
Theme: (1) the abstract concept explored in a literary work; (2) frequently recurring
ideas, such as enjoy-life while-you-can; (3) repetition of a meaningful element in a work,
such as references to sight, vision, and blindness in Oedipus Rex . Sometimes the theme isalso called the motif. Themes in Hamlet include the nature of filial duty and the dilemma
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of the idealist in a non-ideal situation. A theme in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is the
difficulty of correlating the ideal and the real.
Tragedy: broadly defined, a literary and particularly a dramatic presentation of serious
actions in which the chief character has a disastrous fate. There are many different kinds
and theories of tragedy, starting with the Greeks and Aristotle’s definition in The Poetics,
"the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete initself...with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such
emotions." In the Middle Ages, tragedy merely depicted a decline from happiness to
misery because of some flaw or error of judgment. Click here for a fuller discussion of
tragedy and the tragic vision.
Greek Theory of Tragedy: Aristotle's Poetics
The classic discussion of Greek tragedy is Aristotle's Poetics. He defines tragedy as
"the imitation of an action that is serious and also as having magnitude, complete in
itself." He continues, "Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear.
Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involvingpersons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry
embellished with every kind of artistic expression." The writer presents "incidents
arousing pity and fear, wherewith to interpret its catharsis of such emotions" (by
catharsis, Aristotle means a purging or sweeping away of the pity and fear aroused by the
tragic action).
The basic difference Aristotle draws between tragedy and other genres, such as
comedy and the epic, is the "tragic pleasure of pity and fear" the audience feel watching a
tragedy. In order for the tragic hero to arouse these feelings in the audience, he cannot be
either all good or all evil but must be someone the audience can identify with; however, if
he is superior in some way(s), the tragic pleasure is intensified. His disastrous end results
from a mistaken action, which in turn arises from a tragic flaw or from a tragic error in
judgment. Often the tragic flaw is hubris, an excessive pride that causes the hero to ignore
a divine warning or to break a moral law. It has been suggested that because the tragic
hero's suffering is greater than his offence, the audience feels pity; because the audience
members perceive that they could behave similarly, they feel pity. Click here for excerpts
from Aristotle's Poetics .
Medieval Tragedy and The Wheel of Fortune
The medieval tragedy is a prose or poetic narrative, not a drama. Tragedy was
perceived as a reversal of fortune, a fall from a high position. This view of tragedy derivesfrom the Medieval concept of fortune, which was personified as Dame Fortune, a
blindfolded woman who turned a wheel at whim; men were stationed at various places on
the wheel--the top of the wheel represented the best fortune, being under the wheel the
worst fortune. However, the wheel could turn suddenly and the man on top could
suddenly be under the wheel, without warning.
Elizabethan and Shakespearean Tragedy
A distinctly English form of tragedy begins with the Elizabethans. The translation of
Seneca and the reading of Aristotle's Poetics were major influences. Many critics and
playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, insisted on observing the classical unities of action, timeand place (the action should be one whole and take place in one day and in one place).
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However, it was romantic tragedy, which Shakespeare wrote in Richard II , Macbeth,
Hamlet , and King Lear , which prevailed. Romantic tragedy disregarded the unities (as in
the use of subplots), mixed tragedy and comedy, and emphasized action, spectacle, and--
increasingly--sensation. Shakespeare violated the three unities in these ways and also in
mixing poetry and prose and using the device of a play-within-a-play, as in Hamlet . The
Elizabethans and their Jacobean successors acted on stage the violence that the Greek dramatists reported. The Elizabethan and later the Jacobean playwright had a diverse
audience to please, ranging from Queen Elizabeth and King James I and their courtiers to
the lowest classes.
Christopher Marlowe's tragedies showed the resources of the English language with
his magnificent blank verse, as in the Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and the powerful effects
that could be achieved by focusing on a towering protagonist, as in Tamburlaine. In
Elizabethan tragedy, the individual leads to violence and conflict. A distinctly non-
Aristotelian form of tragedy developed during this period was the tragicomedy. In a
tragicomedy, the action and subject matter seem to require a tragic ending, but it is
avoided by a reversal which leads to a happy ending; sometimes the tragicomedy
alternates serious and comic actions throughout the play. Because it blends tragedy andcomedy, the tragicomedy is sometimes referred to as a "mixed" kind.
The Problem Play or Drama of Ideas
The problem play or play of ideas usually has a tragic ending. The driving force
behind the play is the exploration of some social problem, like alcoholism or prostitution;
the characters are used as examples of the general problem. Frequently the playwright
views the problem and its solution in a way that defies or rejects the conventional view;
not surprisingly, some problem plays have aroused anger and controversy in audiences
and critics. Henrik Ibsen, who helped to revive tragedy from its artistic decline in the
nineteenth century, wrote problem plays. A Doll's House, for example, shows the
exploitation and denigration of middle class women by society and in marriage. The
tragedy frequently springs from the individual's conflict with the laws, values, traditions,
and representatives of society.
Genre is a French term derived from the Latin genus, generis, meaning "type,"
"sort," or "kind." It designates the literary form or type into which works are
classified according to what they have in common, either in their formal
structures or in their treatment of subject matter, or both. The study of genres
may be of value in three ways. On the simplest level, grouping works offers us an
orderly way to talk about an otherwise bewildering number of literary texts.More importantly, if we recognize the genre of a text, we may also have a better
idea of its intended overall structure and/or subject. Finally, a genre approach
can deepen our sense of the value of any single text, by allowing us to view it
comparatively, alongside many other texts of its type.
Classification By Types
While the number of genres and their subdivisions has proliferated since
classical times, the division of the literary domain into three major genres (by
Plato, Aristotle, and, later, Horace), is still useful. These are lyric, drama, and
epic, and they are distinguished by "manner of imitation," that is, by how thecharacters and the action are presented. The chart briefly summarizes the main
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differences in the way action and characters are presented in the lyric, drama,
and the epic.
Lyric: The poet writes
the poem as his or herown experience; often
the poet uses first
person ("I"); however,
this speaker is not
necessarily the poet
but may be a fictional
character or persona.
Drama: The characters are
obviously separate from the writer;in fact, they generally seem to have
lives of their own and their speech
reflects their individual
personalities. The writer is present,
of course, in stage directions (which
the audience isn't aware of during a
performance), and occasionally a
character acts as a mouthpiece for
the writer.
Epic: This long narrative is
primarily written in thirdperson. However, the epic poet
makes his presence known,
sometimes by speaking in first
person, as when the muses are
appealed to for inspiration (the
invocation) or by reporting the
direct speech of the characters.
The lyric includes all the shorter forms of poetry, e.g., song, ode, ballad, elegy,sonnet. Up to the nineteenth century, the short lyric poem was considered the
least important of the genres, but with the Romantic movement the prestige of the
lyric increased considerably. The relative brevity of the lyric leads to an emphasis
upon tight formal construction and concentrated unity. Typically, the subject
matter is expressive, whether of personal emotions, such as love or grief, or of
public emotions, such as patriotism or reverence or celebration.
Drama presents the actions and words of characters on a stage. The
conventional formal arrangement into acts and scenes derives ultimately from the
practice in Greek drama of alternating scenes of dialogue with choral sections.
From classical example also comes the standard subdivision into tragedy andcomedy. Historically, many of the specific conventions of these two types have
changed. We refer, for instance, to Greek tragedy, or to medieval tragedy, or to
Shakespearean tragedy. This does not deny interrelationships between them;
rather, it emphasizes the equal importance of their distinctive features. One thing
that Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy share is the "Tragic Vision."
It is helpful, in discussing plays, to have some familiarity with some basic
conventions of drama. Every play typically involves the direct presentation of
actions and words by characters on a stage. Although the structural principles
are quite fluid, dramatic form often tends to move from exposition or
presentation of the dramatic situation, through complication, setting of thedirection of the dramatic conflict, to a climax or turning point (connected to
Aristotle's peripeteia or "change of fortune"), and then through further action,
resolving the various complications, to the denouement or conclusion of the play.
This conventional movement in drama is not an absolute, but a tendency we
observe, and variations are frequent. ("Exposition" of character motivation, for
example, need not be limited to the first act.) It is useful to understand this
conventional structure of drama so that we can better appreciate departures from
it, as well as apply it more specifically to tragedies, and to comedies.
The epic, in the classical formulation of the three genres, referred exclusively
to the "poetic epic." It was of course in verse, rather lengthy (24 books in Homer,
12 books in Virgil), and tended to be episodic. It dealt in elevated language with
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heroic figures (human heroes and deities) whose exploits affected whole
civilizations or even, by implication, the whole of mankind. Its lengthiness was
properly a response to the magnitude of the subject material.
Today, we classify epics with other forms of the "mixed kind." That is, we see theclassical epic as but one of the generic subdivisions of the epic or fiction. This
broader classification can include many kinds of narratives, in prose as well as in
verse. Thus the "mixed kind" now includes the novel, the folktale, the fable, the
fairy tale, even the short story and novella, as well as the romance, which can be
in either prose or verse. Of these, the novel and the romance tend to continue the
epic tradition of length (we speak of the "sweep" of a sizeable novel).
It should be noted that the three-part division of lyric, drama, and epic or
fiction, while useful and relatively comprehensive, does not provide a place for all
of the known literary genres. Some obvious omissions are the essay, the pastoral,
biography and autobiography, and satire.
How Literary Critics Have Used Genres
Critics have employed the genre approach to literature in a number of ways.
From the Renaissance through most of the eighteenth century, for example, they
often attempted to judge a text according to what they thought of as the fixed
"laws of kind," insisting upon purity, that is, fidelity to type. Thus the placement
of comic episodes in otherwise predominantly serious works was frowned upon,
and hybrid forms like tragicomedy were dismissed. There was also a tendency to
rank the genres in a hierarchy, usually with epic or tragedy at the top, and
shorter forms, such as the epigram and the subdivisions of the lyric, at the
bottom. Modern critics have a different view of genres, and are likely to point out
how, in actual practice, writers play against as well as with generic traditions and
how specific conventions are imitated or defied, modified or renovated.
Literary Genres: Conclusion
All of the arts consist of genres. To name some of the outstanding types: in
painting, there are the landscape, the still life, the portrait; in music there are the
sonata, the symphony, the song; in film we have the domestic comedy, the
horror/thriller, the Western. If students think of the forms with which they aremost familiar (perhaps the film genres), they will understand that for
sophisticated appreciation, they need always to be acquainted with the specific
conventions of the type. The study of genres essentially is the study of
conventions. And in literature as in the other arts, an acquaintance with generic
conventions is critical to enriching our responses to particular texts. It is true that
since we are reading "landmarks," there will always be something marvellously
unique about each great work studied. But in each case there will also be a set of
expectations connected to its type, to its generic tradition, as well as to the
Zeitgeist (the "spirit of the time") in which the work was written.
Introduction to Romanticism
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Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as
"romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art.
Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined
the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about
themselves and about their world.
Historical Considerations
It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the
Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the
romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and
German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the
Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical
Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the
Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both
Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all
the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second
half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European,and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This
extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as
Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early
writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for
Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.
The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of
revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789)
revolutions--an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the
age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A
revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite
consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry (and
all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major precepts have
survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period.
Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind.
This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of
reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our
ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the
creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather thanpassive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for
creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to
constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world
around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge
described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is
extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile
differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of
opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably
bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty
which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.
Nature "Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it wasoften presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination,
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in emblematic language. For example, throughout "Song of Myself,"
Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in
nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine
elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the
handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to
nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a sourceof subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of
civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded
nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as
"organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system
of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of
the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the
analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the
same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural
phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this is as
true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry.
Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake.Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.
Symbolism and Myth
Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic
conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic
correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they
could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the
one-to-one communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to
express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of
language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) atanother.
Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three
concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by
greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and
Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary
supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the
creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's
definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"
marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of
valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic
qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a
mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within.
Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never
accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona
and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's
"Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the
growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic"
enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as
Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), aswell as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe
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Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development
of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The
artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.
Contrasts With Neoclassicism
Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic
contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical
manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the
Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and
of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they self-consciously
asserted their differences from the previous age (the literary "ancient regime"),
and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special features
of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted
two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary
place among the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive
orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In addition, neoclassicism hadprescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human
behaviour were more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual
manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of
Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I
have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not
superior, at least I am different."--this view was challenged.
Individualism: The Romantic Hero
The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the
eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical
drama. In another way, of course, Romanticism created its own literary types.
The hero-artist has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming
types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient
Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was Faust, who wins salvation in
Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his characteristic striving for the
unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for activity--
that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact
Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of Milton's
Paradise Lost .)In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for
restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free
experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they
promoted the conception of the artist as "inspired" creator over that of the artist
as "maker" or technical master. Although in both Germany and England there
was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part the Romantics
allied themselves with the very periods of literature that the neo-classicists had
dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom
Voltaire had called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in
the powers of faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics
generally rejected absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favourof the idea that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the system
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by which to live.
The Everyday and the Exotic
The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around
them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such
as the use of "local colour" (through down-to-earth characters, likeWordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's
northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary
forms, such as folk narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to
imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested
by the above examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-
century cult of the noble savage had promoted similar ideals, but now artists
often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk
legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to
contemporary country folk who used "the language of common men," not an
artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as
individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).
Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic
in time and/or place also gained favour, for the Romantics were also fascinated
with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the
ordered conceptions of "objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the
exotic appeared together in paradoxical combinations. In the Lyrical Ballads, for
example, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to divide their labours according to
two subject areas, the natural and the supernatural: Wordsworth would try to
exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar, while Coleridge would try to show
in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to dislodge vision
from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the beautiful soul in an ugly body,as characterized in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein , is another variant of the paradoxical combination. <>
The Romantic Artist in Society
In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social
world around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the
same time they began to distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier,
high Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these
emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would expect in a
period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in
the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with sociallyor politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began
to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining
boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their
individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of
intense interest, but also sometimes of horror. ("Nothing succeeds like excess,"
wrote Oscar Wilde, who, as a partial inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to
enjoy shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary and life styles.) Thus the gulf
between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often uncomprehending
audience began to widen. Some artists may have experienced ambivalence about
this situation--it was earlier pointed out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret
that her "letters" to the world would go unanswered. Yet a significant Romantictheme became the contrast between artist and middle-class "Philistine."
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Unfortunately, in many ways, this distance between artist and public remains
with us today.
Spread of the Romantic Spirit
Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the
Romantic Movement affected not just literature, but all of the arts--from music(consider the rise of Romantic opera) to painting, from sculpture to architecture.
Its reach was also geographically significant, spreading as it did eastward to
Russia, and westward to America. For example, in America, the great landscape
painters, particularly those of the "Hudson River School," and the Utopian social
colonies that thrived in the 19th century, are manifestations of the Romantic
spirit on this side of the Atlantic.
Recent Developments
Some critics have believed that the two identifiable movements that followed
Romanticism--Symbolism and Realism--were separate developments of the
opposites which Romanticism itself had managed, at its best, to unify and to
reconcile. Whether or not this is so, it is clear that Romanticism transformed
Western culture in many ways that survive into our own times. It is only very
recently that any really significant turning away from Romantic paradigms has
begun to take place, and even that turning away has taken place in a dramatic,
typically Romantic way.
Today a number of literary theorists have called into question two major
Romantic perceptions: that the literary text is a separate, individuated, living
"organism"; and that the artist is a fiercely independent genius who creates
original works of art. In current theory, the separate, "living" work has beendissolved into a sea of "intertextuality," derived from and part of a network or
"archive" of other texts--the many different kinds of discourse that are part of
any culture. In this view, too, the independently sovereign artist has been
demoted from a heroic, consciously creative agent, to a collective "voice," more
controlled than controlling, the intersection of other voices, other texts, ultimately
dependent upon possibilities dictated by language systems, conventions, and
institutionalised power structures. It is an irony of history, however, that the
explosive appearance on the scene of these subversive ideas, delivered in what
seemed to the establishment to be radical manifestoes, and written by
linguistically powerful individuals, has recapitulated the revolutionary spirit and
events of Romanticism itself.
The Romantic Poets and the Ode
In most required literature courses, students will read at least one novel and some
examples of lyric poetry, often drawn from the Romantic period, which raised the lyric to
unprecedented prominence. Although there are many different species of lyric, most of
them apply and/or renovate some set of conventions, whether derived from classical
models or from the lyric types generated in earlier periods of European and English
poetry. Selected for examination here is the ode, because British Romantic poets perfected
a special form of it--"the personal ode of description and passionate meditation," as M. H.
Abrams described it--sometimes called the "Romantic meditative ode."
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Origin and Development of the Ode
Traditionally, the ode is lengthy (as lyrics go), serious in subject matter, elevated in its
diction and style, and often elaborate in its stanzaic structure. There were two classical
prototypes, one Greek, the other Roman. The first was established by Pindar, a Greek
poet, who modelled his odes on the choral songs of Greek drama. They were encomiums,i.e., written to give public praise, usually to athletes who had been successful in the
Olympic games. Pindar patterned his complex stanzas in a triad: the strophe and
antistrophe had the same metrical form; the epode had another. What is called in English
the regular or Pindaric ode imitates this pattern; the most famous example is Thomas
Gray's "The Progress of Poesy."
As the ode developed in England, poets modified the Pindaric form to suit their own
purposes and also turned to Roman models. In 1656, Abraham Cowley introduced the
"irregular ode," which imitated the Pindaric style and retained the serious subject matter,
but opted for greater freedom. It abandoned the recurrent strophic triad and instead
permitted each stanza to be individually shaped, resulting in stanzas of varying line
lengths, number of lines, and rhyme scheme. This "irregular" stanzaic structure, whichcreated different patterns to accord with changes of mood or subject, became a common
English tradition. Poets also turned to an ode form modeled after the Roman poet,
Horace. The Horatian ode employed uniform stanzas, each with the same metrical
pattern, and tended generally to be more personal, more meditative, and more restrained.
Keats' "Ode to Autumn" and Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty" are Horatian odes.
The Romantic meditative ode was developed from these varying traditions. It tended
to combine the stanzaic complexity of the irregular ode with the personal meditation of
the Horatian ode, usually dropping the emotional restraint of the Horatian tradition.
However, the typical structure of the new form can best be described, not by traditional
stanzaic patterns, but by its development of subject matter. There are usually three
elements:
• the description of a particularized outer natural scene;
• an extended meditation, which the scene stimulates, and which may be focused on
a private problem or a universal situation or both;
• the occurrence of an insight or vision, a resolution or decision, which signals a
return to the scene originally described, but with a new perspective created by the
intervening meditation.
Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," and
Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," are examples, and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale,"while Horatian in its uniform stanzaic form, reproduces the architectural format of the
meditative soliloquy, or, it may be, intimate colloquy with a silent auditor.
Tragedy: An Overview
Tragedy usually focuses on figures of stature whose fall implicates others--a family, an
entire group, or even a whole society--and typically the tragic protagonist becomes
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isolated from his or her society (Phedre's "outcast and fugitive from all" would suit Lear
and Hamlet as well).
In tragedy, life goes on; in comedy, life goes onward and upward. In the tragic vision,
the possibility of a happy ending is unrealised, although it is sometimes suggested, as when
Lear is briefly reconciled to Cordelia. When tragedy pauses to look at comedy, it views
such a happy ending as an aborted or by-passed possibility. At best, it acknowledges"what might have been" as an ironic way of magnifying "tragic waste." Tragedy tends to
exclude comedy. In the tragic vision, something or someone dies or lapses into a winter of
discontent.
The "Tragic Vision"
In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish
what we may call the "Tragic Vision":
• The conclusion is catastrophic.
• The catastrophic conclusion will seem inevitable.• It occurs, ultimately, because of the human limitations of the protagonist.
• The protagonist suffers terribly.
• The protagonist's suffering often seems disproportionate to his or her culpability.
• Yet the suffering is usually redemptive, bringing out the noblest of human
capacities for learning.
• The suffering is also redemptive in bringing out the capacity for accepting moral
responsibility.
The Catastrophic Conclusion
In tragedy, unlike comedy, the denouement tends to be catastrophic; it is perceived as
the concluding phase of a downward movement. In comedy, the change of fortune is
upward; the happy ending prevails (more desirable than true, says Northrop Frye in the
Anatomy of Criticism), as obstacles are dispelled and the hero and/or heroine are happily
incorporated into society or form the nucleus of a new and better society. In tragedy, there
is the unhappy ending--the hero's or heroine's fall from fortune and consequent isolation
from society, often ending in death.
The Sense of Inevitability
To the audience of a tragedy, the catastrophe will seem, finally, to be inevitable.
Although tragedy can not simply be identified with uncontrollable disasters, such as an
incurable disease or an earthquake, still there is the feeling that the protagonist is
inevitably caught by operating forces which are beyond his control (sometimes like
destiny, visible only in their effects). Whether grounded in fate or nemesis, accident or
chance, or in a causal sequence set going through some action or decision initiated by the
tragic protagonist himself or herself, the operating forces assume the function of a distant
and impersonal power.
Human Limitation, Suffering, and Disproportion
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Ultimately, perhaps, all the instances that we find in tragedy of powerlessness, of
undeniable human limitations, derive from the tragic perception of human existence itself,
which seems, at least in part, to be terrifyingly vulnerable, precarious, and problematic.
And it is precisely because of these human limitations that suffering also becomes basic to
the tragic vision. Tragedy typically presents situations that emphasize vulnerability,
situations in which both physical and spiritual security and comforts are undermined, andin which the characters are pressed to the utmost limits--overwhelming odds, impossible
choices, demonic forces within or without (or both). Against the tragic protagonist are the
powers that be, whether human or divine, governed by fate or chance, fortune or accident,
necessity or circumstance, or any combination of these. The more elevated, the more
apparently secure and privileged the character's initial situation, the greater is our sense
of the fall, of the radical change of fortune undergone, and the greater our sense of his or
her suffering. Tragedy testifies to suffering as an enduring, often inexplicable force in
human life.
In the suffering of the protagonists, there is frequently, something disproportionate.
Even to the extent that there is some human cause, the eventual consequences may seem
too severe. In Lear's case, we may or may not agree that he is "more sinned against thansinning," but Cordelia certainly is. This inequity is particularly profound for some of
those who surround the protagonists, those who seem to bear (at worst) minor guilt, the
so-called "tragic victims."
The Learning Process and Acceptance of Moral Responsibility
Despite the inevitable catastrophe, the human limitation, the disproportionate
suffering, the tragic vision also implies that suffering can call forth human potentialities,
can clarify human capacities, and that often there is a learning process that the direct
experience of suffering engenders--Lear and Phedre are transformed by it. Gloucester
may think that we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys--"they kill us for their sport"--
but such a conception of brutal slaughter is alien to the tragic vision. Indeed, tragedy
provides a complex view of human heroism, a riddle mixed of glory and jest, nobility and
irony. The madness that is wiser than sanity, the blind who see more truly than the
physically sighted, are recurring metaphors for the paradox of tragedy, which shows us
human situations of pitiful and fearful proportions, but also of extraordinary
achievement.
For tragedy presents not only human weakness and precarious security and liability to
suffering, but also its nobility and greatness. Tragedies do not occur to puppets. While the
"tragic victim" is one of the recurring character types of tragedy (Cordelia, Ophelia,
Desdemona, Andromaque, Hippolytus, and even, perhaps, Richard II and Phedre), tragicprotagonists more frequently have an active role, one which exposes not only their errors
of judgment, their flaws, their own conscious or unwitting contribution to the tragic
situation, but which also suggests their enormous potentialities to endure or survive or
transcend suffering, to learn what "naked wretches" feel, and to attain a complex view of
moral responsibility.
The terrifying difficulty of accepting moral responsibility is an issue in Hamlet as well
as in Sophocles' Antigone or Oedipus Tyrannus. It is an issue in all tragedy, even when the
moral status of the protagonist(s) is not admirable. Whatever Aristotle's hamartia is, it is
not necessarily moral culpability, although it may be, as the case of Macbeth illustrates.
Tragic vision insists upon man's responsibility for his actions. This is the essential element
of the vision that permits us to deny access to its precincts to puppets, who, by definition,have neither free will nor ultimate responsibility for their existence. Tragedy
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acknowledges the occasional disproportion between human acts and their consequences,
but imposes or accepts responsibility nevertheless. In this way, pain and fear are
spiritualised as suffering, and, as Richard Sewall suggests in The Vision of Tragedy, the
conflict of man and his "destiny" is elevated to ultimate magnitude.
One of the conventions discerned and analysed by Aristotle was that the change of
fortune, peripety or reversal, experienced by the tragic hero, should be accompanied byanagnorisis or cognitio, "discovery" or "recognition." The conditions and the degree of
this discovery vary considerably. It may even be relatively absent from the protagonists's
awareness, as we have noted. But it is almost always central to the audience's responses. In
the school of suffering we are all students, witnessing, like Lear, essential,
"unaccomodated" man, and we become caught up in an extended discovery, not only of
human limitation, but also of human potentiality.
In grouping texts according to "type," the concept of genre is applied to all literary
works, past, present, or future. Thus seeing a single work in its generic context becomes
inseparable from seeing it as part of literary history. The concept of literary period also
implies a grouping through time. But a work, rather than being "placed" within the entiresweep of literary history, is "placed" within a much more restricted time frame. The
period concept provides another system of classification, ordering literary and cultural
data chronologically, within certain discrete time periods. It assumes every age has its
characteristic special features, which are reflected in its representative artifacts or
creations. (Indeed, among these characteristic features may be its typical choice of
genres.) The kind of coherence displayed is not accidental, for literary works participate
in the culture of their times.
The Period Concept
Basically, the period concept suggests two things: (1) that literary works can be
grouped according to what they share with each other within a given time span, and (2)
that this grouping can be differentiated from other such chronological groupings. Literary
periods share, in Rene Wellek's phrase, "systems of norms," which include such things as
conventions, styles, themes, and philosophies.
Cautions and Qualifications
When we read, most of us like to have at least some information about historical
periods because it seems to give us immediate and satisfying entry into a literary work. It
often seems to explain a number of things about a poem, play, or novel. Yet before we look more specifically at how study of a period can help us, we ought to raise certain kinds of
questions that are important for literary study or, for that matter, for any study which
purports to search for truth. Scholarly method and scholarly care often mean observing,
questioning, and noting necessary qualifications to any general theory.
We may ask, for example, how are the "characteristic features" of a given period
determined? The facts suggest that very often the majority of writers in a period will
continue to use the norms of the previous period. We should note, then, that it is usually a
special minority, the greatest and most significant artists, who shape and reflect the
defining character of a literary period.
It also becomes clear that at least three qualifications to the period concept are
necessary. First, the features that differentiate periods are always relative: works writtenin one time period often display continuities with works of other periods as well as
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differences among themselves. Second, the beginning, the flowering, and the end of each
literary period can be defined, but cannot be fixed precisely; in addition, such terminal
dates may vary from one country to another. Third, no individual work can ever embody
all that is associated with a given period.
Another thing we might try to avoid as we read in, or about a period, is what may be
called the "evolutionary fallacy." This involves the claim that a particular periodrepresents an "advance" of some sort or that something "higher" has "evolved" out of
earlier, more "primitive" forms. The more one studies literature, the more one recognizes
that the paradigm of cumulative progress is untenable, that one period cannot be said to
be "better" than another. What we do see is that works of differing styles (which reflect
their time periods) often go through cycles of enthusiastic reception, then disfavor, and
then perhaps revival of interest.
Finally, the attentive student may note that even the labeling of literary periods and
movements does not always appear to be consistent. This has come about because the
traditional names derive from a variety of sources. "Humanism" came from the history of
ideas, and the "Renaissance" from art historians; "Restoration" came from political
history, and "The Eighteenth Century" is strictly chronological; "Neoclassic" and"Romantic" came from literary theory, while both "Elizabethan" and "Victorian" came
from the names of reigning monarchs.
Usefulness of the Concept
Despite these cautions and qualifications, the study of literary periods and movements
can be helpful in three ways. At the least, for student or for scholar, there is always some
teasing contemporary allusion that can only be cleared up by study of the age. More
significantly, such study may help one avoid the potential danger of misreading a work
through ignorance of its historical context. Finally, and most importantly, great works of
art do indeed seem clearer and more interesting in proportion to the reader's possession of
certain broad kinds of information about the age in which they were produced--whether it
be about the age's religious orientation or its cosmology, about its attitude toward "love,"
toward the classics or its own place in history, toward the state, the individual, or society.
The reader's experience of literature will necessarily be enriched by knowledge of the
prevailing attitudes toward education, money, arranged marriages, duty, ethics; by its
attitudes toward human nature, including the importance attached to various human
faculties (spirit, reason, feeling, imagination). And especially important to the student of
literature is the age's representative attitudes toward art and the methods of its creation.
Period Descriptors
The literary periods and movements following the classical period are usually labeled
as follows:
• medieval (from the fall of Rome through the fourteenth or
fifteenth century);
• Renaissance (from its earliest beginnings in Italy in the
fourteenth century through the sixteenth century elsewhere in
Europe, with a shift in some countries to "Baroque" in its last
phase);
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• the neoclassical (starting in the mid-seventeenth century,
with its subsequent eighteenth-century development as the "Age of
Enlightenment");
• the Romantic period (beginning in the last decades of the
eighteenth century and continuing at least through the middle of the
nineteenth);• the Realist movement and its late nineteenth century
extension into "naturalism";
• and finally, the modern period, which has been given many
names, all of them, so far, provisional.
Each of these major periods and movements is international in scope and designates the
system of norms that dominated Western culture at a particular time of the historical
process. Historians of English literature employ period labels which emphasize, in
some cases, local variations of these international periods. For example, "Elizabethan"
designates a period that corresponds to the late Renaissance. "Victorian" designates the
literature of the mid-nineteenth through the turn of the twentieth century in England andits spheres of influence. Nevertheless, the multiple labelings, while derived from varied
sources, are ultimately compatible.
Most required literature courses present a sampling of "landmarks," representing
different genres and selected from different literary periods. There are of course elective
courses in literature which study both genre and period in greater detail, by examining
more specifically works of a given "type" or period, or by reading the works of a single
author.
Medieval View of Love: General :The Chain of Being and Caritas
At the start of one of the most influential philosophical works in the Middle Ages,
Boethius's On the Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524 A.D.), the poet seems abandoned by
God, situated at the bottom of the wheel of fortune. Once a highly placed counselor to
Emperor Theodoric, Boethius had been suddenly toppled from his position, accused of
treason, and thrown into prison. His consolation, written in prison before his execution,
consists of learning to ignore the vagaries of fortune ("look unmoved on fortune good or
bad," he is advised) and learning instead to keep his sight on the source of all Goodness
and Love, that is, on God ("to see Thee is our end, / Who art our source and maker, lord
and path and goal"). It was this force, called God, or love in its spiritual sense, which
governed the movements of the planets, the tides, the changes of seasons, the treatiesbetween nations, and the human bonds of fealty, marriage, and friendship. Boethius sums
up the notion:
And all this chain of things
In earth and sea and sky
One ruler holds in hand:
If Love relaxed the reins
All things that now keep peace
Would wage continual war
The fabric to destroy
Which unity has formedWith motions beautiful. . . .
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O happy race of men
If Love who rules the sky
Could rule your hearts as well!
(Trans. V. E. Watts, Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, II)
The medieval world was therefore part of a multifaceted and hierarchical universe inwhich all elements were bound together in a "great chain of being." The force which
bound all these elements together was love, also called caritas or charity, what St.
Augustine (354-430 A.D.) called the whole motion of the soul towards God for His sake
and towards one's self and one's fellow man for the sake of God. All of scripture, indeed
all of Christian doctrine, taught the essential importance of charity in this spiritualized
sense.
Caritas Versus Amor
Distinguished from the spiritualized sense of love as caritas, was the more worldly
sense of love which was referred to as amor . The men and women of the Middle Ages, likepeople everywhere from the beginning of recorded history, were caught up by love in its
many earthly forms and variations. Amor signified the love of things of this world--money,
power, possessions, other men and women--things which, however attractive and
compelling, were by their own natures fragile and short-lived. Despite these drawbacks,
money and possessions were ardently pursued during the Middle Ages, and so, of course,
was romantic love. When the pursuit of human love expressed itself in literature, it often
appeared in the form we now call courtly love, a term coined in the late nineteenth
century to describe a loose set of literary conventions associated almost exclusively with
the aristocracy and their imitators.
Courtly Love
Courtly love as a literary phenomenon reflects one of the most far-reaching
revolutions in social sensibility in Western culture--the dramatic change in attitude
towards women that began in the late eleventh century, spread throughout western and
northern Europe during the twelfth century, and lingered through the Renaissance and on
into the modern world where traces can still be found. In its essential nature, courtly love,
or fin' amors, as the Provencal poets called it, was the expression of the knightly worship
of a refining ideal embodied in the person of the beloved. Only a truly noble nature could
generate and nurture such a love; only a woman of magnanimity of spirit was a worthy
object. The act of loving was in itself ennobling and refining, the means to the fullestexpression of what was potentially fine and elevated in human nature.
More often than not, such a love expressed itself in terms that were feudal and
religious. Thus, just as a vassal was expected to honor and serve his lord, so a lover was
expected to serve his lady, to obey her commands, and to gratify her merest whims.
Absolute obedience and unswerving loyalty were critical. To incur the displeasure of one's
lady was to be cast into the void, beyond all light, warmth, and possibility of life. And just
as the feudal lord stood above and beyond his vassal, so the lady occupied a more celestial
sphere than that of her lover. Customarily she seemed remote and haughty, imperious and
difficult to please. She expected to be served and wooed, minutely and at great length. If
gratified by the ardors of her lover-servant, she might at length grant him her special
notice; in exceptional circumstances, she might even grant him that last, longed-for favor.
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Physical consummation of love, however, was not obligatory. What was important was the
prolonged and exalting experience of being in love.
It was usually one of the assumptions of courtly love that the lady in question was
married, thus establishing the triangular pattern of lover-lady-jealous husband. This
meant that the affair was at least potentially adulterous, and had to be conducted in an
atmosphere of secrecy and danger. The absolute discretion of the lover was thereforeindispensable if the honor of the lady were to be preserved. Though the convention did not
stipulate adultery as a sine qua non, it is nevertheless true that the two great patterns of
courtly love in the Middle Ages--Tristan and Isolt and Lancelot and Guenevere--both
involved women who deceived their husbands.
Implications of Courtly Love
What practical effect did the convention of courtly love have on the situation of women
in the Middle Ages? Very little, if we are to believe social historians, who point out that
there is no evidence to show that the legal and economic position of women was materially
enhanced in any way that can be attributed to the influence of fin' amors. In a broadercultural context, however, it is possible to discern two long range effects of courtly love on
western civilization. For one thing, it provided Europe with a refined and elevated
language with which to describe the phenomenology of love. For another, it was a
significant factor in the augmented social role of women. Life sometimes has a way of
imitating art, and there is little doubt that the aristocratic men and women of the Middle
Ages began to act out in their own loves the pattern of courtly behavior they read about in
the fictional romances and love lyrics of the period. The social effect was to accord women
preeminence in the great, central, human activity of courtship and marriage. Thus women
became more than just beloved objects--haughty, demanding, mysterious; they became, in
a very real sense, what they have remained ever since, the chief arbiters of the game of
love and the impresarios of refined passion.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in the work of Dante and other poets of the
fourteenth century, the distinction between amor and caritas became blurred. Chaucer's
Prioress ironically wears a brooch on which is inscribed, "Amor Vincit Omnia" ("Love
Conquers All"). The secular imagery of courtly love was used in religious poems in praise
of the Virgin Mary. The lover with "a gentle heart," as in a poem by Guido Guinizelli,
could be led through a vision of feminine beauty to a vision of heavenly grace. One of
Dante's greatest achievements was to turn his beloved, seen primarily in physical, worldly,
courtly love terms in his early work, La Vita Nuova, into the abstract, spiritualized,
religious figure of Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.
General Characteristics of the Renaissance
"Renaissance" literally means "rebirth." It refers especially to the rebirth of
learning that began in Italy in the fourteenth century, spread to the north,
including England, by the sixteenth century, and ended in the north in the mid-
seventeenth century (earlier in Italy). During this period, there was an enormous
renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity.
Yet the Renaissance was more than a "rebirth." It was also an age of new
discoveries, both geographical (exploration of the New World) and intellectual.
Both kinds of discovery resulted in changes of tremendous import for Western
civilization. In science, for example, Copernicus (1473-1543) attempted to provethat the sun rather than the earth was at the center of the planetary system, thus
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radically altering the cosmic world view that had dominated antiquity and the
Middle Ages. In religion, Martin Luther (1483-1546) challenged and ultimately
caused the division of one of the major institutions that had united Europe
throughout the Middle Ages--the Church. In fact, Renaissance thinkers often
thought of themselves as ushering in the modern age, as distinct from the ancient
and medieval eras.Study of the Renaissance might well center on five interrelated issues. First,
although Renaissance thinkers often tried to associate themselves with classical
antiquity and to dissociate themselves from the Middle Ages, important
continuities with their recent past, such as belief in the Great Chain of Being,
were still much in evidence. Second, during this period, certain significant
political changes were taking place. Third, some of the noblest ideals of the period
were best expressed by the movement known as Humanism. Fourth, and
connected to Humanist ideals, was the literary doctrine of "imitation," important
for its ideas about how literary works should be created. Finally, what later
probably became an even more far-reaching influence, both on literary creation
and on modern life in general, was the religious movement known as theReformation.
Renaissance thinkers strongly associated themselves with the values of
classical antiquity, particularly as expressed in the newly rediscovered classics of
literature, history, and moral philosophy. Conversely, they tended to dissociate
themselves from works written in the Middle Ages, a historical period they looked
upon rather negatively. According to them, the Middle Ages were set in the
"middle" of two much more valuable historical periods, antiquity and their own.
Nevertheless, as modern scholars have noted, extremely important continuities
with the previous age still existed.
The Great Chain of Being
Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period
was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every
existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical
order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended. ("Hierarchical" refers
to an order based on a series of higher and lower, strictly ranked gradations.) An
object's "place" depended on the relative proportion of "spirit" and "matter" it
contained--the less "spirit" and the more "matter," the lower down it stood. At
the bottom, for example, stood various types of inanimate objects, such as metals,
stones, and the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Higher up were various
members of the vegetative class, like trees and flowers. Then came animals; thenhumans; and then angels. At the very top was God. Then within each of these
large groups, there were other hierarchies. For example, among metals, gold was
the noblest and stood highest; lead had less "spirit" and more matter and so stood
lower. (Alchemy was based on the belief that lead could be changed to gold
through an infusion of "spirit.") The various species of plants, animals, humans,
and angels were similarly ranked from low to high within their respective
segments. Finally, it was believed that between the segments themselves, there
was continuity (shellfish were lowest among animals and shaded into the
vegetative class, for example, because without locomotion, they most resembled
plants).
Besides universal orderliness, there was universal interdependence. This wasimplicit in the doctrine of "correspondences," which held that different segments
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of the chain reflected other segments. For example, Renaissance thinkers viewed
a human being as a microcosm (literally, a "little world") that reflected the
structure of the world as a whole, the macrocosm; just as the world was
composed of four "elements" (earth, water, air, fire), so too was the human body
composed of four substances called "humours," with characteristics
corresponding to the four elements. (Illness occurred when there was animbalance or "disorder" among the humours, that is, when they did not exist in
proper proportion to each other.) "Correspondences" existed everywhere, on
many levels. Thus the hierarchical organization of the mental faculties was also
thought of as reflecting the hierarchical order within the family, the state, and the
forces of nature. When things were properly ordered, reason ruled the emotions,
just as a king ruled his subjects, the parent ruled the child, and the sun governed
the planets. But when disorder was present in one realm, it was correspondingly
reflected in other realms. For example, in Shakespeare's King Lear , the
simultaneous disorder in family relationships and in the state (child ruling parent,
subject ruling king) is reflected in the disorder of Lear's mind (the loss of reason)
as well as in the disorder of nature (the raging storm). Lear even equates his lossof reason to "a tempest in my mind."
Though Renaissance writers seemed to be quite on the side of "order," the
theme of "disorder" is much in evidence, suggesting that the age may have been
experiencing some growing discomfort with traditional hierarchies. According to
the chain of being concept, all existing things have their precise place and
function in the universe, and to depart from one's proper place was to betray
one's nature. Human beings, for example, were pictured as placed between the
beasts and the angels. To act against human nature by not allowing reason to rule
the emotions--was to descend to the level of the beasts. In the other direction, to
attempt to go above one's proper place, as Eve did when she was tempted by
Satan, was to court disaster. Yet Renaissance writers at times showed
ambivalence towards such a rigidly organized universe. For example, the Italian
philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in a work entitled On the Dignity of Man,
exalted human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through
philosophical contemplation. Also, some Renaissance writers were fascinated by
the thought of going beyond boundaries set by the chain of being. A major
example was the title character of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus.
Simultaneously displaying the grand spirit of human aspiration and the more
questionable hunger for superhuman powers, Faustus seems in the play to be
both exalted and punished. Marlowe's drama, in fact, has often been seen as the
embodiment of Renaissance ambiguity in this regard, suggesting both its fear of and its fascination with pushing beyond human limitations.
Political Implications of the Chain of Being
The fear of "disorder" was not merely philosophical--it had significant
political ramifications. The proscription against trying to rise beyond one's place
was of course useful to political rulers, for it helped to reinforce their authority.
The implication was that civil rebellion caused the chain to be broken, and
according to the doctrine of correspondences, this would have dire consequences
in other realms. It was a sin against God, at least wherever rulers claimed to rule
by "Divine Right." (And in England, the King was also the head of the Anglican
Church.) In Shakespeare, it was suggested that the sin was of cosmic proportions:civil disorders were often accompanied by meteoric disturbances in the heavens.
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(Before Halley's theory about periodic orbits, comets, as well as meteors, were
thought to be disorderly heavenly bodies.)
The need for strong political rule was in fact very significant, for the
Renaissance had brought an end for the most part to feudalism, the medieval
form of political organization. The major political accomplishment of the
Renaissance, perhaps, was the establishment of effective central government, notonly in the north but in the south as well. Northern Europe saw the rise of
national monarchies headed by kings, especially in England and France. Italy saw
the rise of the territorial city-state often headed by wealthy oligarchic families.
Not only did the chain of being concept provide a rationale for the authority of
such rulers; it also suggested that there was ideal behavior that was appropriate
to their place in the order of things. It is no wonder then that much of
Renaissance literature is concerned with the ideals of kingship, with the character
and behavior of rulers, as in Machiavelli's Prince or Shakespeare's Henry V .
Other ideals and values that were represented in the literature were even
more significant. It was the intellectual movement known as Humanism that may
have expressed most fully the values of the Renaissance and made a lastingcontribution to our own culture.
Humanism
A common oversimplification of Humanism suggests that it gave renewed
emphasis to life in this world instead of to the otherworldly, spiritual life
associated with the Middle Ages. Oversimplified as it is, there is nevertheless
truth to the idea that Renaissance Humanists placed great emphasis upon the
dignity of man and upon the expanded possibilities of human life in this world.
For the most part, it regarded human beings as social creatures who could create
meaningful lives only in association with other social beings.
In the terms used in the Renaissance itself, Humanism represented a shift
from the "contemplative life" to the "active life." In the Middle Ages, great value
had often been attached to the life of contemplation and religious devotion, away
from the world (though this ideal applied to only a small number of people). In
the Renaissance, the highest cultural values were usually associated with active
involvement in public life, in moral, political, and military action, and in service
to the state. Of course, the traditional religious values coexisted with the new
secular values; in fact, some of the most important Humanists, like Erasmus,
were Churchmen. Also, individual achievement, breadth of knowledge, and
personal aspiration (as personified by Doctor Faustus) were valued. The conceptof the "Renaissance Man" refers to an individual who, in addition to
participating actively in the affairs of public life, possesses knowledge of and skill
in many subject areas. (Such figures included Leonardo Da Vinci and John
Milton, as well as Francis Bacon, who had declared, "I have taken all knowledge
to be my province.") Nevertheless, individual aspiration was not the major
concern of Renaissance Humanists, who focused rather on teaching people how to
participate in and rule a society (though only the nobility and some members of
the middle class were included in this ideal). Overall, in consciously attempting to
revive the thought and culture of classical antiquity, perhaps the most important
value the Humanists extracted from their studies of classical literature, history,
and moral philosophy was the social nature of humanity."Imitation"
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Another concept derived from the classical past (though it was present in the
Middle Ages too), was the literary doctrine of "imitation." Of the two senses in
which the term had traditionally been used, the theoretical emphasis of
Renaissance literary critics was less on the "imitation" that meant "mirroringlife" and more on the "imitation" that meant "following predecessors." In
contrast to our own emphasis on "originality," the goal was not to create
something entirely new. To a great extent, contemporary critics believed that the
great literary works expressing definitive moral values had already been written
in classical antiquity.
Theoretically, then, it was the task of the writer to translate for present
readers the moral vision of the past, and they were to do this by "imitating" great
works, adapting them to a Christian perspective and milieu. (Writers of the
Middle Ages also practiced "imitation" in this sense, but did not have as many
classical models to work from.) Of course Renaissance literary critics made it
clear that such "imitation" was to be neither mechanical nor complete: writerswere to capture the spirit of the originals, mastering the best models, learning
from them, then using them for their own purposes. Nevertheless, despite the fact
that there were a great many comments by critics about "imitation" in this sense,
it was not the predominant practice of many of the greatest writers. For them, the
faithful depiction of human behavior--what Shakespeare called holding the
mirror up to nature--was paramount, and therefore "imitation" in the mimetic
sense was more often the common practice.
The doctrine of "imitation" of ancient authors did have one very important
effect: since it recommended not only the imitation of specific classical writers,
but also the imitation of classical genres, there was a revival of significant literary
forms. Among the most popular that were derived from antiquity were epic and
satire. Even more important were the dramatic genres of comedy and tragedy. In
fact, Europe at this time experienced a golden age of theater, led by great
dramatists such as Shakespeare.
The Protestant Reformation
Finally, as it developed during the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation
was a movement that had profound implications, not only for the modern world
in general, but specifically for literary history. Just as Renaissance Humanists
rejected medieval learning, the Reformation seemed to reject the medieval formof Christianity. (It should be noted, however, that both Catholics and Protestants
were Humanists, though often with different emphases.) In the early sixteenth
century, the German monk Martin Luther reacted against Church corruption,
the sort depicted, for example, by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales.
Many Catholics like Erasmus wanted to reform the Church from within.
However, Luther's disagreements with Church policy ultimately led him to
challenge some of the most fundamental doctrines of the Church, which in turn
led him and his followers to break away from the Catholic Church in protest;
hence they were known as Protestants. The Reformation had significant political
ramifications, for it split Europe into Protestant and Catholic countries which
often went to war with each other during this period. Protestantism broke up theinstitution that had for so long unified all Europe under the Pope (though there
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were also national struggles with the Papacy that had little to do with
Protestantism).
Among the most important tenets of Protestantism was the rejection of the
Pope as spiritual leader. A closely related Protestant doctrine was the rejection of
the authority of the Church and its priests to mediate between human beings and
God. Protestants believed that the Church as an institution could not grantsalvation; only through a direct personal relationship with God--achieved by
reading the Bible--could the believer be granted such. Many scholars argue that
this emphasis on a personal, individual connection with God spawned the modern
emphasis on individualism in those cultures affected by Protestantism. On the
other hand, some Protestants also believed that after the Fall of Adam in Eden,
human nature was totally corrupted as far as human spiritual capabilities were
concerned. (Early Protestantism's emphasis on human depravity distinguishes it
sharply from Renaissance Humanism.) Humans therefore are incapable of
contributing to their salvation, for instance through good deeds; it could only be
achieved through faith in God's grace. Overall, there is a good deal of
ambivalence regarding many of the Protestant positions, and in fact thedisagreement among the many Christian sects may be precisely what
distinguishes Renaissance from Medieval religion.
Literary Ramifications
Among the literary ramifications of the Reformation, two stand out. First, the
Protestant rejection of the authority of Church representatives resulted in placing
that authority entirely on the Bible, at least in theory. Consequently, Protestants
stressed the need for all believers to read the Bible for themselves. To help make
that possible, they were active in translating the Bible into the vernacular
languages so that all laymen could read it. This practice was opposed by theCatholic Church, which insisted on preserving the Bible in Latin. At the same
time, Protestants also stressed the need to understand the Bible in its original
languages (Hebrew and Greek) so that it could be properly translated. In their
interest in such learning, particularly of ancient languages, Protestants were
similar to Humanists. This emphasis on the Bible had a significant impact on
literature because the Bible became a renewed source of literary inspiration, both
in literary form and subject matter; it also became a rich source of symbols.
The other way the Reformation impacted on literature was perhaps more
subtle, and the effects did not appear till much later in literary history. Certainly
the emphasis on inner feeling found later in the Romantic Movement received at
least some of its inspiration and reinforcement from the religious thrust of theProtestant Reformation.
When student readers approach Renaissance literary works, they may
experience certain concepts (the doctrine of "correspondences," for instance), as
a bit strange. Yet they are also likely to sense some very modern things in the
works written in this remarkable age. And among its many wonders, they will
also be experiencing the revival of great drama, as it underwent a "rebirth" in
the Renaissance, embodied most fully in the works of our greatest English writer,
William Shakespeare.
English Theater in the Mid-Sixteenth Century
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When its greatest playwright was born, in 1564, the English theater hardly existed at
all as an organized commercial or artistic institution. Troupes of actors roamed the
countryside, performing in courtyards or in the great halls of noble houses; little better
than vagrants in the eyes of the law, they lived precariously by presenting crude native
tragedies, bawdy interludes, or adaptations of the classics, in exchange for a meal, a bed,
or a few coins. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, the stage was one of London's thriving industries, supporting at least three successful repertory companies of
which one--the Lord Chamberlain's Men--boasted the services of William Shakespeare as
a resident actor, playwright, and shareholder.
Shakespeare's Stage
The Chamberlain's Men (who changed their name to the King's Men after James I
took the throne in 1603), performed most of their plays on the multi-leveled spaces of the
Globe Theater. Many of us are familiar with a different kind of theater altogether; the
"modern" stage consists of a single flat playing surface separated from the audience by a
proscenium arch, artificially lighted, furnished with sets and props and peopled by actorswhose costumes, gestures and speech suggest a world that corresponds closely with our
own. Shakespeare's stage also held, as Hamlet put it, a mirror up to nature, but it did not
do so by the same means, and its reflection tended to be less realistically detailed. Perhaps
the greatest difference is that what contemporary plays often accomplish through sets,
props and costumes, Shakespeare gave his audiences almost entirely through language.
We know that we are in the Forest of Arden, for example, or on the battlements of a
Danish castle, or on the seacoast of Bohemia, because the characters tell us so, not because
we can see or hear for ourselves that we are; there are no trees or battlements or roaring
surf but only a bare stage jutting out among the spectators, flanked by galleries and
balconies and backed by an inner recess into which the action might move. Visual
spectacle, though not unimportant, was secondary to dialogue; we speak of going to "see"
a play where audiences up to the nineteenth century spoke of "hearing" one.
Shakespeare's Language
We must not think of Shakespeare's stage as impoverished because it lacked the
technical resources of our own, for the richness of his dramatic speech more than
compensates us. Shakespeare did not invent those unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter
known as blank verse, but he perfected it; he shaped the stiff, stilted, and oratorical meter
that he inherited into a rhetorical instrument that could range from the most colloquial
and realistic dialogue to discourse of an almost operatic grandeur and eloquence. Andperfectly complementing and counterpointing Shakespeare's verse was his prose, a vehicle
capable of distinguishing the commoners from the noble characters, the subplots from the
main plot, the comic from the tragic.
Shakespeare's Genres
The distinction between tragedy and comedy, still useful in our age, was particularly
important in Shakespeare's time. Elizabethan tragedy was the still familiar tale of a great
man or woman brought low through hubris or fate (though some of Shakespeare's tragic
heroes--Romeo, say, or Timon, or Macbeth--do not easily accomodate Aristotle's
definition of the type). Shakespearean comedy, like much of our own, was descended fromthe Roman "New Comedy" of Plautus and Terence (an influence seen most clearly in The
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Comedy of Errors), crossbred with fairy tale and Italian romance and sometimes undercut
by bitingly ironic satire. Tragedies and comedies are two of the genres into which the First
Folio of Shakespeare divides the plays; the third category is Histories, comprising plays
that chronicled the lives of English Kings, but these plays themselves often tended toward
the tragic ( Richard II or Richard III , for instance) or the comic (the Falstaff subplots of
both parts of Henry IV and the Pistol-Fluellen encounters of Henry V ). Thus almost fromthe start, Shakespeare's method was to mingle the heretofore antagonistic visions of
comedy and tragedy in ways that still seem novel and startling. There is more to laugh at
in the tragedy of Hamlet than there is in a comedy like The Merchant of Venice, and some
modern critics go so far as to consider King Lear at once the pinnacle of Shakespeare's
tragic achievement and a kind of divine comedy or even absurdist farce. Romeo and Juliet
is a tragedy assembled from comic materials (a story of young lovers struggling to
overcome the obstacle of parental disapproval), and in Shakespeare's later tragedy of
romantic love, Anthony and Cleopatra, there is much poignant humor at the expense of
middle-aged lovers attempting with difficulty to sustain the passion usually associated
with adolescence. Indeed, some of Shakespeare's comedies-- Measure for Measure and
All's Well That Ends Well are the most notable--seem so far removed from the optimismusually associated with that genre that they have acquired the qualifying title of "problem
comedies."
Shakespeare's Multiple Perspectives
In other ways besides the generic, Shakespeare's theater presents to us a mixed, even a
contradictory aspect. The Aristotelian tradition demanded of serious playwrights that
their plays be unified in the continuity of their action. But instead of telling us a single
coherent story, Shakespeare sometimes tells us two or even three, alternating among them
or even (through his favorite device of the play-within-a-play) placing one inside the other.
Instead of limiting his casts to a few characters, he gives us so many that his actors are
forced to "double," racing offstage as a page or messenger to reappear the next moment
as an old man or a flattering courtier. The plays do not hold a single mirror up to nature,
then, but many mirrors at once--like the characters whose function it is to parallel and
reflect each other, and so comment upon each other; thus, in King Lear , we are given not a
single father mistreated by his children but two, and in Hamlet , not one son of a slain
father but three. Multiple perspectives, actions, and characters looked at from different
and even contradictory points of view, abound in the plays, which themselves, by setting
the subjective beside the objective and the real beside the illusory, become instruments for
investigating the nature of reality itself.
How NOT to Read Shakespeare
The above may make Shakespeare sound like a philosopher or a scientist, and many
people have thought of him in this way: as a writer whose most valuable contributions are
to the history of ideas, to psychology, to theology, to sociology. But this is a way to misread
Shakespeare and to ignore what he did best; it has even been the basis for those now
largely discredited claims that not Shakespeare but some better-educated or more
aristocratic writer must have written his plays. Shakespeare is not so much a "thinker" as
a writer capable of bringing thoughts to life. Every one of his plays, like those of his
contemporaries, is an adaptation of some story, history, or other play; many of the
"ideas" for which Shakespeare is now given credit are part of the intellectualcommonplace of his age. We should not read or attend his plays to find out how people
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lived in Elizabethan London, or what true love is, or whether God exists, though such
matters are debated in them. The nineteenth century, in particular, tended to regard the
plays as slices of life and to remove characters from their dramatic context to argue their
motives, speculate upon their childhoods, or predict their futures. But they are not real
people who live in our world; each of the plays is its own world in miniature: the happy-
go-lucky farcical world of The Comedy of Errors or The Taming of the Shrew, theromantic, fairy-tale world of Cymbeline and The Tempest , the darkly ironic world of
Troilus and Cressida and the tragic world of Lear or Othello are all places different from
each other and from our own. The thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare are not moral
sermons, not handbooks of etiquette, not philosophical treatises, not documentaries of
English life in the Renaissance. They are exercises in dramatic imagination,
demonstrations of mimetic magic, celebrations of the power of illusion over reality; and, if
we come to them in the right spirit, they will move and entertain us as the works of few
other writers can hope to do.
Introduction to Neoclassicism
After the Renaissance--a period of exploration and expansiveness--came a reaction in
the direction of order and restraint. Generally speaking, this reaction developed in France
in the mid-seventeenth century and in England thirty years later; and it dominated
European literature until the last part of the eighteenth century.
The New Restraint
Writers turned from inventing new words to regularizing vocabulary and grammar.
Complex, boldly metaphorical language, such as Shakespeare used in his major tragedies,
is clarified and simplified--using fewer and more conventional figures of speech. Mystery
and obscurity are considered symptoms of incompetence rather than signs of grandeur.
The ideal style is lucid, polished, and precisely appropriate to the genre of a work and the
social position of its characters. Tragedy and high comedy, for example, use the language
of cultivated people and maintain a well-bred tone. The crude humor of the gravediggers
in Hamlet or the pulling out of Gloucester's eyes in King Lear would no longer be
admitted in tragedy. Structure, like tone, becomes more simple and unified. In contrast to
Shakespeare's plays, those of neoclassical playwrights such as Racine and Moliere develop
a single plot line and are strictly limited in time and place (often, like Moliere's The
Misanthrope and Tartuffe, to a single setting and a single day's time).
Influence of the Classics
The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art
forms of classical times, emphasizing even more than their Renaissance predecessors the
classical ideals of order and rational control. Such simply constructed but perfect works
as the Parthenon and Sophocles' Antigone, such achievements as the peace and order
established by the Roman Empire (and celebrated in Book VI of Vergil's Aeneid ), suggest
what neoclassical writers saw in the classical world. Their respect for the past led them to
be conservative both in art and politics. Always aware of the conventions appropriate to
each genre, they modeled their works on classical masterpieces and heeded the "rules"
thought to have been laid down by classical critics. In political and social affairs, too, they
were guided by the wisdom of the past: traditional institutions had, at least, survived thetest of time. No more than their medieval and Renaissance predecessors did neoclassical
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thinkers share our modern assumption that change means progress, since they believed
that human nature is imperfect, human achievements are necessarily limited, and
therefore human aims should be sensibly limited as well. It was better to set a moderate
goal, whether in art or society, and achieve it well, than to strive for an infinite ideal and
fail. Reasonable Philinte in The Misanthrope does not get angry at people's injustice,
because he accepts human nature as imperfect.
Neoclassical Assumptions and Their Implications
Neoclassical thinkers could use the past as a guide for the present because they
assumed that human nature was constant--essentially the same regardless of time and
place. Art, they believed, should express this essential nature: "Nothing can please many,
and please long, but just representations of general nature" (Samuel Johnson). An
individual character was valuable for what he or she revealed of universal human nature.
Of course, all great art has this sort of significance--Johnson made his statement about
Shakespeare. But neoclassical artists more consciously emphasized common human
characteristics over individual differences, as we see in the type-named characters of Moliere.
If human nature has remained constant over the centuries, it is unlikely that any
startling new discoveries will be made. Hence neoclassical artists did not strive to be
original so much as to express old truths in a newly effective way. As Alexander Pope, one
of their greatest poets, wrote: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was
thought, but ne'er so well expressed." Neoclassical writers aimed to articulate general
truth rather than unique vision, to communicate to others more than to express
themselves.
Social Themes
Neoclassical writers saw themselves, as well as their readers and characters, above all
as members of society. Social institutions might be foolish or corrupt--indeed, given the
intrinsic limitations of human nature, they probably were--but the individual who rebelled
against custom or asserted his superiority to humankind was, like Alceste in The
Misanthrope, presented as presumptuous and absurd. While Renaissance writers were
sometimes fascinated by rebels, and later Romantic artists often glorified them,
neoclassical artists expected people to conform to established social norms. For individual
opinion was far less likely to be true than was the consensus of society, developed over
time and embodied in custom and tradition. As the rules for proper writing should be
followed, so should the rules for civilized conduct in society. Neither Moliere nor JaneAusten advocate blind following of convention, yet both insist that good manners are
important as a manifestation of self-control and consideration for others.
The Age of Reason
The classical ideals of order and moderation which inspired this period, its realistically
limited aspirations, and its emphasis on the common sense of society rather than
individual imagination, could all be characterized as rational. And, indeed, it is often
known as the Age of Reason. Reason had traditionally been assumed to be the highest
mental faculty, but in this period many thinkers considered it a sufficient guide in all
areas. Both religious belief and morality were grounded on reason: revelation and gracewere de-emphasized, and morality consisted of acting rightly to one's fellow beings on this
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earth. John Locke, the most influential philosopher of the age, analyzed logically how our
minds function (1690), argued for religious toleration (1689), and maintained that
government is justified not by divine right but by a "social contract" that is broken if the
people's natural rights are not respected.
As reason should guide human individuals and societies, it should also direct artistic
creation. Neoclassical art is not meant to seem a spontaneous outpouring of emotion orimagination. Emotion appears, of course; but it is consciously controlled. A work of art
should be logically organized and should advocate rational norms. The Misanthrope, for
example, is focused on its theme more consistently than are any of Shakespeare's plays. Its
hero and his society are judged according to their conformity or lack of conformity to
Reason, and its ideal, voiced by Philinte, is the reasonable one of the golden mean. The
cool rationality and control characteristic of neoclassical art fostered wit, equally evident
in the regular couplets of Moliere and the balanced sentences of Austen.
Sharp and brilliant wit, produced within the clearly defined ideals of neoclassical art,
and focused on people in their social context, make this perhaps the world's greatest age of
comedy and satire.
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:: GLOSSARY OF SOME SORT ::
Allegory. A figurative work in which a surface narrative carries asecondary, symbolic or metaphorical meaning. In The Faerie Queene, forexample, Red Cross Knight is a heroic knight in the literal narrative, but
also a figure representing Everyman in the Christian journey. Many works contain allegories or are allegorical in part, but not many areentirely allegorical. A good example of a fully allegorical work is
• Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Apologue. A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals orinanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to commenton the human condition. Often, the apologue highlights the irrationality of mankind. The beast fable, and the fables of Aesop are examples. Somecritics have called Samuel Johnson's Rasselas an apologue rather than a
novel because it is more concerned with moral philosophy than withcharacter or plot. Examples:
• George Orwell, Animal Farm• Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
Blank Verse. Unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Caesura. A pause, metrical or rhetorical, occurring somewhere in a lineof poetry. The pause may or may not be typographically indicated.
Canon. In relation to literature, this term is half-seriously applied tothose works generally accepted as the great ones. A battle is now beingfought to change or throw out the canon for three reasons. First, the listof great books is thoroughly dominated by DWEM's (dead, white,European males), and the accusation is that women and minorities andnon-Western cultural writers have been ignored. Second, there ispressure in the literary community to throw out all standards as thenihilism of the late 20th century makes itself felt in the literaturedepartments of the universities. Scholars and professors want to choosethe books they like or which reflect their own ideas, without worryingabout canonicity. Third, the canon has always been determined at least in
part by political considerations and personal philosophical biases. Booksare much more likely to be called "great" if they reflect the philosophicalideas of the critic.
Conceit. An elaborate, usually intellectually ingenious poetic comparisonor image, such as an analogy or metaphor in which, say a beloved iscompared to a ship, planet, etc. The comparison may be brief orextended. See Petrarchan Conceit. (Conceit is an old word for concept.)See John Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," for example: "Letman's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, / The Intelligence that moves,devotion is."
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End-stopped. A line that has a natural pause at the end (period, comma,etc.). For example, these lines are end stopped:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.Coral is far more red than her lips red. --Shakespeare
Enjambed. The running over of a sentence or thought into the nextcouplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. Forexample, the first two lines here are enjambed:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration findsOr bends with the remover to remove. . . . --Shakespeare
Epic. An extended narrative poem recounting actions, travels,
adventures, and heroic episodes and written in a high style (withennobled diction, for example). It may be written in hexameter verse,especially dactylic hexameter, and it may have twelve books or twenty four books. Characteristics of the classical epic include these:
• The main character or protagonist is heroically larger than life,often the source and subject of legend or a national hero
• The deeds of the hero are presented without favoritism, revealinghis failings as well as his virtues
• The action, often in battle, reveals the more-than-human strengthof the heroes as they engage in acts of heroism and courage
• The setting covers several nations, the whole world, or even theuniverse
• The episodes, even though they may be fictional, provide anexplanation for some of the circumstances or events in the history of a nation or people
• The gods and lesser divinities play an active role in the outcome of actions
• All of the various adventures form an organic whole, where eachevent relates in some way to the central theme
Typical in epics is a set of conventions (or epic machinery). Among themare these:
• Poem begins with a statement of the theme ("Arms and the man Ising")
• Invocation to the muse or other deity ("Sing, goddess, of the wrathof Achilles")
• Story begins in medias res (in the middle of things)• Catalogs (of participants on each side, ships, sacrifices)• Histories and descriptions of significant items (who made a sword
or shield, how it was decorated, who owned it from generation togeneration)
• Epic simile (a long simile where the image becomes an object of artin its own right as well as serving to clarify the subject).
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• Frequent use of epithets ("Aeneas the true"; "rosy-fingered Dawn";"tall-masted ship")
• Use of patronymics (calling son by father's name): "Anchises' son"• Long, formal speeches by important characters• Journey to the underworld
• Use of the number three (attempts are made three times, etc.)• Previous episodes in the story are later recounted
Examples:
• Homer, Iliad• Homer, Odyssey • Virgil, Aeneid• Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered• Milton, Paradise Lost
Euphemism. The substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrasefor a harsh or blunt one, as in the use of "pass away" instead of "die." The basic psychology of euphemistic language is the desire to put something bad or embarrassing in a positive (or at least neutral light). Thus many terms referring to death, sex, crime, and excremental functions areeuphemisms. Since the euphemism is often chosen to disguise somethinghorrifying, it can be exploited by the satirist through the use of irony andexaggeration.
Foot. The basic unit of meter consisting of a group of two or threesyllables. Scanning or scansion is the process of determining the
prevailing foot in a line of poetry, of determining the types and sequenceof different feet.Types of feet: U (unstressed); / (stressed syllable)Iamb: U /Trochee: / U Anapest: U U /Dactyl: / U USpondee: / /Pyrrhic: U USee also versification, below.
Free verse. Verse that has neither regular rhyme nor regular meter. Free verse often uses cadences rather than uniform metrical feet.
Heroic Couplet. Two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter. Most of Alexander Pope's verse is written in heroic couplets. In fact, it is the mostfavored verse form of the eighteenth century. Example:
u / u / u / u / u /
'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
u / u / u / u / u /
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Appear in writing or in judging ill. . . .
--Alexander Pope
Horatian Satire. In general, a gentler, more good humored andsympathetic kind of satire, somewhat tolerant of human folly even whilelaughing at it. Named after the poet Horace, whose satire epitomized it.Horatian satire tends to ridicule human folly in general or by type ratherthan attack specific persons. Compare Juvenalian satire.
Humanism. The new emphasis in the Renaissance on human culture,education and reason, sparked by a revival of interest in classical Greek and Roman literature, culture, and language. Human nature and thedignity of man were exalted and emphasis was placed on the present lifeas a worthy event in itself (as opposed to the medieval emphasis on the
present life merely as preparation for a future life).
Humours. In medieval physiology, four liquids in the human body affecting behavior. Each humour was associated with one of the fourelements of nature. In a balanced personality, no humour predominated. When a humour did predominate, it caused a particular personality.Here is a chart of the humours, the corresponding elements andpersonality characteristics:
• blood...air...hot and moist: sanguine, kind, happy, romantic• phlegm...water...cold and moist: phlegmatic, sedentary, sickly,
fearful• yellow bile...fire...hot and dry: choleric, ill-tempered, impatient,
stubborn• black bile...earth...cold and dry: melancholic, gluttonous, lazy,
contemplative
The Renaissance took the doctrine of humours quite seriously--it wastheir model of psychology--so knowing that can help us understand thecharacters in the literature. Falstaff, for example, has a dominance of blood, while Hamlet seems to have an excess of black bile.
Juvenalian Satire. Harsher, more pointed, perhaps intolerant satiretypified by the writings of Juvenal. Juvenalian satire often attacksparticular people, sometimes thinly disguised as fictional characters. While laughter and ridicule are still weapons as with Horatian satire, theJuvenalian satirist also uses withering invective and a slashing attack.Swift is a Juvenalian satirist.
Metaphysical Poetry. The term metaphysical was applied to a style of 17thCentury poetry first by John Dryden and later by Dr. Samuel Johnson because of the highly intellectual and often abstruse imagery involved.Chief among the metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert,Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan. While their
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poetry is widely varied (the metaphysicals are not a thematic or even astructural school), there are some common characteristics:
• 1. Argumentative structure. The poem often engages in a debate orpersuasive presentation; the poem is an intellectual exercise as well
as or instead of an emotional effusion.• 2. Dramatic and colloquial mode of utterance. The poem often
describes a dramatic event rather than being a reverie, a thought,or contemplation. Diction is simple and usually direct; inversion islimited. The verse is occasionally rough, like speech, rather than written in perfect meter, resulting in a dominance of thought overform.
• 3. Acute realism. The poem often reveals a psychological analysis;images advance the argument rather than being ornamental. Thereis a learned style of thinking and writing; the poetry is often highly intellectual.
• 4. Metaphysical wit. The poem contains unexpected, even strikingor shocking analogies, offering elaborate parallels betweenapparently dissimilar things. The analogies are drawn from widely varied fields of knowledge, not limited to traditional sources innature or art. Analogies from science, mechanics, housekeeping, business, philosophy, astronomy, etc. are common. These"conceits" reveal a play of intellect, often resulting in puns,paradoxes, and humorous comparisons. Unlike other poetry wherethe metaphors usually remain in the background, here themetaphors sometimes take over the poem and control it.
Metaphysical poetry represents a revolt against the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry and especially the typical Petrarchan conceits(like rosy cheeks, eyes like stars, etc.).
Meter. The rhythmic pattern produced when words are arranged so thattheir stressed and unstressed syllables fall into a more or less regularsequence, resulting in repeated patterns of accent (called feet). See feetand versification.
Mock Epic. Treating a frivolous or minor subject seriously, especially by using the machinery and devices of the epic (invocations, descriptions of
armor, battles, extended similes, etc.). The opposite of travesty.Examples:
• Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock
Novella. A prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than anovel. Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. Examples:
• Henry James, Daisy Miller• Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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Parody. A satiric imitation of a work or of an author with the idea of ridiculing the author, his ideas, or work. The parodist exploits thepeculiarities of an author's expression--his propensity to use too many parentheses, certain favorite words, or whatever. The parody may also befocused on, say, an improbable plot with too many convenient events.
Fielding's Shamela is, in large part, a parody of Richardson's Pamela.
Petrarchan Conceit. The kind of conceit (see above) used by ItalianRenaissance poet Petrarch and popular in Renaissance English sonnets.Eyes like stars or the sun, hair like golden wires, lips like cherries, etc.are common examples. Oxymorons are also common, such as freezingfire, burning ice, etc.
Rhyme. The similarity between syllable sounds at the end of two or morelines. Some kinds of rhyme (also spelled rime) include:
• Couplet: a pair of lines rhyming consecutively.• Eye rhyme: words whose spellings would lead one to think that they
rhymed (slough, tough, cough, bough, though, hiccough. Or: love,move, prove. Or: daughter, laughter.)
• Feminine rhyme: two syllable rhyme consisting of stressed syllablefollowed by unstressed.
• Masculine rhyme: similarity between terminally stressed syllables.
Romance. An extended fictional prose narrative about improbable eventsinvolving characters that are quite different from ordinary people.Knights on a quest for a magic sword and aided by characters like fairies
and trolls would be examples of things found in romance fiction.Examples:
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote• Sir Philip Sidney, The Arcadia
In popular use, the modern romance novel is a formulaic love story (boy meets girl, obstacles interfere, they overcome obstacles, they live happily ever after). Computer software is available for constructing these stock plots and providing stereotyped characters. Consequently, the booksusually lack literary merit. Examples:
• Harlequin Romance series
Sarcasm. A form of sneering criticism in which disapproval is oftenexpressed as ironic praise. (Oddly enough, sarcastic remarks are oftenused between friends, perhaps as a somewhat perverse demonstration of the strength of the bond--only a good friend could say this withouthurting the other's feelings, or at least without excessively damaging therelationship, since feelings are often hurt in spite of a close relationship.If you drop your lunch tray and a stranger says, "Well, that was really intelligent," that's sarcasm. If your girlfriend or boyfriend says it, that'slove--I think.)
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Sonnet. A fourteen line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, with a varied rhyme scheme. The two main types of sonnet are the Petrarchan(or Italian) and the Shakespearean. The Petrarchan Sonnet is dividedinto two main sections, the octave (first eight lines) and the sestet (lastsix lines). The octave presents a problem or situation which is then
resolved or commented on in the sestet. The most common rhymescheme is A-B-B-A A-B-B-A C-D-E C-D-E, though there is flexibility in thesestet, such as C-D-C D-C-D.The Shakespearean Sonnet, (perfected though not invented by Shakespeare), contains three quatrains and a couplet, with more rhymes(because of the greater difficulty of finding rhymes in English). The mostcommon rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B C-D-C-D E-F-E-F G-G. In Shakespeare,the couplet often undercuts the thought created in the rest of the poem.
Spenserian Stanza. A nine-line stanza, with the first eight lines in iambicpentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter (called an
Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B B-C-B-C C. EdmundSpenser's Faerie Queene is written in Spenserian stanzas.
Style. The manner of expression of a particular writer, produced by choice of words, grammatical structures, use of literary devices, and allthe possible parts of language use. Some general styles might includescientific, ornate, plain, emotive. Most writers have their own particularstyles.
Versification. Generally, the structural form of a verse, as revealed by scansion. Identification of verse structure includes the name of the
metrical type and the name designating number of feet:The most common verse in English poetry is iambic pentameter. See footfor more information.