Skripta - Uvod u Knj[1]

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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

29



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.

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