Index
16
| William Shakespeare | Victorian
| Charles Dickens |
William Makepeace Thackeray | |||
George Eliot | |||
17 | John Donne | Thomas Hood | |
John Milton | |||
Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte | |||
John Bunyan | Alfred, Lord Tennyson | ||
Robert Browning | |||
Elizabeth Barrett Browning | |||
18
| Daniel Defoe | ||
Henry Fielding | |||
Jonathan Swift | |||
Oliver Goldsmith | |||
William Blake | |||
Romantic
| William Wordsworth | 20 | Thomas Hardy |
Gorge Gordon, Lord Byron | John Galsworthy | ||
Oscar Wilde | |||
Percy Bysshe Shelly | George Bernard Shaw | ||
John Keats
| D.H. Lawrence | ||
Virginia Woolf | |||
Walter Scott | James Joyce |
The Sixteenth Century
Beginning of 16th century | Thomas More | UTOPia. More gave a profound and truthful picture of the people’s suffering and put forward his ideal of a future happy society. |
End the century | Francis Bacon | Scientist and philosopher |
First half of 16th century | Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard | They initiated new poetical forms, borrowing freely from English popular songs and Italian and French poetry. Wyatt was the first to introduce the sonnet into English literature. |
Second half of the 16th century | Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion and Edmund Spenser | Lyrical poem become widespread in England. Edmund was the author of the greatest epic poem of the time The Fairy Queen. |
Court life and gallantry novel | John Lyly, Thomas Loge | Great popularity was won by John Lyly’s novel Ephesus which gave rise to the term “euphuism”, designating an affected style of court speech. |
Realistic novel | Thomas Delaney, Thomas Nashe | Devoted to every day life of craftsman, merchants and other representatives of lower class |
Drama | ChrisTOPher Marlowe | Reformed drama that genre in English and perfected the language and verse of dramatic works. It was Marlowe who made blank verse the principal vehicle of expression in drama. |
William Shakespeare
The works of William Shakespeare are a great landmark in the history of world literature for he was one of the first founders of realism, a master hand at realistic portrayal of human characters and relations.
Works
First period: Romeo and Juliet
Second Period:
Hamlet, Prince of Demark
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear
The Tragedy of Macbeth
The Seventeenth Century
Puritan Age
Puritan attitude | They believed in simplicity of life, breaking up of old ideas, an age of confusion. |
Puritan action | They disapproved of the sonnets and love poetry written in the previous period. |
In 1642 the theatres were close | |
The bible become one book of the people | |
Literary Characteristics | Absence of fixed standard of literary criticism, exaggeration of “metaphysical” poets. |
Poetry took new and startling forms in Donne and Herbert, and prose became as somber as Burrton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
The spiritual gloom sooner or later fastens upon all the writers of this age. This so called gloomy age produced some minor poems of exquisites workmanship, and one of great master of verse whose work would glorify any age or people---John Milton, in whom the indomitable Puritan spirit finds its noblest expression.
Restoration Age
Literary Characteristics | Renounced old ideas and demanded that English poetry and dream should follow the style which they had become accustomed in the gaiety of Paris. |
On the whole they were immoral and cynical. | |
French influence | Rimed couplets instead of blank verse, the unities, a more regular construction, and the presentation of tryes rather than individual |
The comedies are coarse in language and their view of the relation between man and won is immoral and dishonest. |
John Dryden
As a critic, poet and playwright was the most distinguished literary figure of the restoration age. The most popular genre was that of comedy whose chief aim as to entertain the licentious aristocrats.
John Donne
1. Poetry
Form
Part of his poetry is in such classical forms as satires, elegies, and epistles---though it style has anything but classical smoothness---and part is written in lyrical forms of extraordinary variety.
Characteristics
Most of it purports to deal with life, descriptive or experimentally, and the first thing to strike the reader is Donne’s extraordinary and penetrating realism.
The next is the cynicism which marks certain of the lighter poems and which represents a conscious reaction from the extreme idealization of woman encouraged by the Patrarchan tradition.
Love-poem
In his serious love-poems, however, Donne, while not relaxing his grasp on the realities the love experience, suffuses it with an emotional intensity and a spiritualized ardor unique in English poetry.
2. Sonnet
Contrast between conventional and Donne’s sonnet
Conventional sonnet | Donne’s sonnet |
The unvarying succession in form | Gives nearly every theme a verse and stanza form peculiar to itself |
Decorating his theme by conventional comparison | Illuminates or emphasizes his thought by fantastic metaphors and extravagant hyperbole. |
Style
In moments of inspiration his style becomes wonderfully poignant and direct, heart-searching in its simple human accents, with an originality and force for which we look in vain among the clear and fluent melodies of Elizabethan lyrists.
Conceit
Sometimes the “conceits”, as these extravagant figures are called, are so odd that we lose sight of the thing to be illustrated, in the startling nature of the illustration.
The fashion of conceiting writing, somewhat like euphuism in prose, appeared in Italy and Spain also. Its imaginative exuberance has its parallels in baroque architecture and painting.
Song
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all the past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Servers to advance an honest mind.
If thou beest born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And answer
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair,
If thou find’st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet,
Yet do not, I would no go
Though next door we might meet,
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
John Milton
Days in Horton
L’ Allegro | Describing happiness |
Il Penseroso | Describing meditation |
Lycidas | Praising a dear friend who had been drowned |
Comus | Presenting a masque or play |
Pamphlets
Areopagitica, Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing | A bold attack on the censorship of the press |
Eikinoklastes | A pamphlets in which the author justified the execution of Charles I |
Defense for the English People | A defense of the Commonwealth and Revolution |
Paradise Lost
It represents the author’s views in an allegorical religious form,
And the reader will easily discern its basic idea---the exposure of reactionary forces of this time and passionate appeal for freedom.
It is based on the biblical legend of the imaginary progenitors of the human race---Adam and Eve, and involves God and his eternal adversary, Satan in plot.
John Bunyan
Milton and Bunyan
| Milton | Bunyan |
Education | Well educated | Poorly educated |
Inheriting | Son of Renaissance | an excess of that spiritual independence which had cause the Puritan struggle for liberty |
Puritan | The only epic since Beowulf | The only great allegory |
Books helpful for Bunyan significantly
The books from his wife The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety gave fire to his imagination, which he saw new visions and dream terrible new dreams of lost souls.
Without fully digestion of Bible and scripture, he was tossed about alike a feather by all the winds of doctrine.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
Bunyan’s most important work is The Pilgrim’s Progress, written in old fashioned, medieval form of allegory and dream.
The Eighteenth century
1. Enlightenment
Nature | An expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeoisie against feudalism |
Against | Class inequality, stagnation, prejudice and other survival of feudalism |
Repudiate the false religious doctrines about the viciousness of human nature | |
Accept | Place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people |
Accept bourgeois relationship as rightful and reasonable relations among people. | |
Compared to France
| revealed to the most progressive minds of the century the contradictions of new society instead of “cleared the minds of men for the coming revolution” of France |
1.1 First representatives of Enlightenment
Common comment | Though in their works they criticized different aspects of contemporary English, they never set themselves the task of struggling against the existing order of life, but on the contrary, attempted to smooth over social contradictions by moralizing and proclaiming, as Pope did, that “whatever is, is right”. |
Joseph Addison "> Devoted not only to social problem, but also to private life and adventures, gave an impetus to the development of the 18소 century novel | |
Alexander Pope | The highest authority in matters of literary art |
Elaborated certain regulations for the style of poetical works and made popular the so-called heroics couplets---five foot iambic rhymed in couplet |
1.2 Founders of novel
The development of industry and trade brought to the foremen of a new stamp, who had to be typified in the new literature.
Author | Work | Description | Comment |
Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe | The image of an enterprising Englishman of the 18소 century was created. | One of the forerunners of the English 18소 century realistic novel. |
Henry Fielding |
| Unfolds a spread of panorama of life in all sections of English society | Real founder of the genre of the bourgeois realistic novel in England and Europe |
Exposes the depraved aristocracy, the avaricious bourgeoisie | |||
Contrasts the life of ruling classes to the lack of rights and misery of the people | |||
T.G.Smollet | The Adventure of Roderick Random | Mercilessly attacked , among others things, the regime in the English fleet | Real founder of the genre of the bourgeois realistic novel in England and Europe |
The Adventure of Peregrine Pickle | Exposed all kinds if political charlatans, mocked at the State system and laughed to scone various prejudices and conventionalities | ||
Created an unforgettable gallery of common English people, conspicuous for their generosity, kind-heatedness and sense of humor | |||
1.3 Innermost life Writers
Along with the depiction of morals and manners and social mode of life the writers of the Enlightenment began to display interest of the inmost life of an individual.
Author | Work | Description | Comment |
Samuel Richardson | Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandson | Deals with the private life of an individual | Enriched European literature with the method of psychological analysis |
Jonathan Swift
| Gulliver’s Travels | Typified the bourgeoisie world, drew ruthless pictures of the depraved aristocracy and satirically portrayed the whole of the English State system | The most outstanding personality of the epoch of enlightenment in England |
Richard B.Sheridan | School for Scandal | False virtue and actual vices of aristocracy society are derided | A sharp criticism of contemporary system |
2. Sentimentalism
The middle of the 18소 century in England sees the inceptions of a new literary current---that of sentimentalism.
The sentimentalism came into being as a result of bitter discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social society.
The representatives of sentimentalism continued to struggle against feudalism but they vaguely sensed at the same time the contradictions of bourgeois progress that brought with it enslavement and ruin to the people. The philosophy of the enlighteners, though rational and materialistic in its essence, did not exclude sense, or sentiments, as a means of perception and learning. Moreover, the cult of nature and, a cult of a “natural man” whose feelings display themselves in a most human and natural manner, contrary to the artful and hypocritical aristocratic---this cult was upheld by the majority of the enlighteners and helped them to fight against privileges of birth and descent which placed the aristocracy high above common people.
But later enlighteners of England having come to the conclusion that, contrary to all reasoning, social injustices, still held strong, found the power of reason to be insufficient, and therefore, appealed to sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and social justice.
Oliver Goldsmith | The Vicar of Wakefield | the depravity of the aristocrats and corruption of town life are contrasted to idyll of quite family happiness, patriarchal life in the bosom of nature and peaceable manners of the village |
Laurence Sterne | Tristan Shandy, Sentimental Journey | the style and structure of which are the very antithesis of rationally composed novels, reveal a purely emotional approach to life on the part of the narrator |
Sterne is full of pity and compassion for the poor and the afflicted. But though he scoffs at prejudices and sings praise to liberty he is inferior to Swift and Fielding in the broad and critical portrayal of contemporary life. | ||
Sympathy for the peasant | O. Goldsmith | The Deserted Village |
Thomas Gray | Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard | |
George Crabble | The Village | |
3. Pre-romanticism
Another conspicuous trend in the English literature of the latter half of the 18소 century was the so-called pre-romanticism. It originated among the conservatives group of men of letters as a reactions against enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the Gothie novel”, the terms arising from the fact that the greater part of such romance were devoted to the medieval times.
Horace Walpole | The Castle of Oranto | Evil forces reign in the world, and it is futile to struggle against one’s fate. The mysterious element plays an enormous role on the Gothic novel; it is so replete with bloodcurdling scenes and unnatural feelings that it is justly called “a novel of horrors”. |
Ann Radcliff. | The Mysteries of Udolpho | |
William Blake | In spite of his mysticism, wrote poems full of human feelings and sympathy for the oppressed people | |
End
The task of upholding revolutionary struggle of the people for their rights in the 18소 century was initiated by Robert Burns and later taken up in the 19소 century by the writers of revolutionary romanticism.
Daniel Defoe
Four facts stand out clearly, which help the reader to understand the characters of his works.
Facts | Explanation |
Defoe was a jack-at-all trade | His interest was largely with the working classes and notwithstanding many questionable practices, he seems to have had some continued purpose of educating and uplifting the common people |
Defoe was a radical Non-conformist in religion, and was intended by his father for the independent ministry | The puritan zeal for reform possesses him, and he tried to do so by his pen. The seal for reform marks all his numerous works, and accounts for the moralizing to be found everywhere |
Defoe was a journalist | A newspaper man’s instinct for making a “good story”. He wrote an immense number of pamphlets, poems, and magazine article |
Defoe knew prison life. |
|
Henry Fielding
Fielding’s position | Henry Fielding is the greatest novelist if the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest that England ever produced. | |
Fielding’s character | Passive
| Aristocrats and men set in authority embody all the evils; they persecute the heroes and obstruct their every move and action |
Positive
| positive characters are always people with natural, unpreserved feelings, and though “for the sake of appearance”, and to make them acceptable to the 18소 century reader, Joseph Andrews, the manservant, and Tome Jones, the foundling, are eventually give parents of noble descent, still they have nothing aristocratic about them, and in their feelings and behavior, remain closely related to the common people | |
Fielding’s satire | He hates that hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a mask of morality. In the evolution of the plots of his novels, he invariably puts such characters in position which tear away their mask. He displays almost savage pleasure in making them ridiculous. | |
Joseph Andrews | Comments | Fielding’s best work: Amelia is the story of a good life in contrast with an unworthy husband |
Description | Joseph Andrews, was inspired by the success of Richardson’s novel Pamela, and began as a burlesque of the false sentimentality and the conventional virtues of Richardson’s heroine. In the end Scott’s heroes acquire their titles and return to the prosperous life of the ruling class. Taken as whole, Scott’s main hero is rather spastically, lacking in virility and lacking dept of psychological characterization.
Scott’s novel is the consummation and development of two different trends of the English literature of the 18소 and the beginning of the 19소 centuries: that pertaining to the realistic novel of H. Fielding and T.G. Smollett and of the earlier 19th century realists, such as Jane Austen and others on the one hand, and that of the so-called Gothic novel of the pre-romanticists, such as H. Walpole and A. Radcliff and of whole romantic school of poetry on the other.
The great realists of the 19th century made use of, and developed, the method of a realistic presentation of the past in their description and treatment of contemporary life. Thus we may say that Walter Scott’s historical novel paved the path for the development of the realistic novel of the 19th century.
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