1 S e n t i m e n t a l i s m , E x o t i c i s m , a n d M y s t i c i s m i n P o e t r y o f t h e 2 nd H a l f o f t h e 1 8 th C e n t u r y (R. Burns, W. Blake, T. Percy, J. Macpherson, and T. Chatterton)
R o b e r t B u r n s ( 1 7 5 9 – 9 6 ) L i f e : - democratic sympathies: admirer of the republican rev. in Am. and Fr. - opponent of the strict Calvinism (father of a number of illegitimate children) W o r k : - = consid. a natural genius, a poet by instinct; styled a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, or a ‘Caledonia’s Bard’ x but: well-read, though largely self-educated - < (a) the oral tradition of Scott. folklore and folk song - < (b) the lit. tradition of poems in the Scots dialect of E - > revived the lyric and the legends of folk culture, and wrote in the language really spoken by the common people > anticipated William Wordsworth F o l k S o n g s : - coll., ed., restored, and imitated traditional songs, also wrote new verses to traditional dance tunes - keen ear for Scots vocabulary, idiom, and rhythm - author of over 300 songs on love, drink, work, friendship, patriotism, and bawdry - hearty, generous, and tender in tone, with a sympathy to all humans The Scots Musical Museum (1787 – 1803): - as a co-ed. of James Johnson’s anthology of Scott. songs Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793 – 1811): - as a co-ed. of George Thomson’s (1757 – 1821, a collector) coll. P o e t r y : - (a) in Scots, the northern dialect of E spoken by rural people: his best poetry (“To a Mouse”) - (b) in standard E: poetry in the genteel poetic tradition, with few exceptions (“Afton Water”) conventional Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the Kilmarnock ed. (1786): - his 1st publ. vol., an immediate success Tam o’Shanter: - a mock-heroic verse narrative also wrote: satire, incl. devastating satires against the rigid relig.; and verse epistles to friends
W i l l i a m B l a k e ( 1 7 5 7 – 1 8 2 7 ) L i f e : - apprenticed as an engraver x but: followed his ‘divine vision’ a life of isolation, misunderstanding, and poverty W o r k : - author of paintings, engravings, and illustr. for works of oth. poets & his own - illustr. for his poems = an integral and mutually enlightening combination of words and design - ‘illuminated printing’ = his own method of relief etching, used to produce most of his books of poems (hand-coloured, or printed in colour) P o e t r y : - subtle, symbolic, and allusive x but: the ambiguous style veils radical relig., moral, and political opinions Poetical Sketches (1783): - his 1st vol., dissatisfied with the reigning poetic tradition sought new forms and techniques Songs of Innocence (1789) > Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794): - = visions of the world by ‘two contrary states of the human soul’ - (1) Songs of Innocence: a hymn-like simplicity, use of nursery-rhyme - (2) Songs of Experience: compressed metaphor and symbol of multiple references (“The Tyger”, “London”, & oth.) - interrelates the poems of both vol. as a series of shifting perceptions = (1) a falling away from the Edenic innocence to experience > (2) the possibility of progress twd a Christ-inspired ‘higher’ innocence - (1): challenges the innocent state - > “Holy Thursday”, celebrates the infant joy of the charity-children march x condemns the exploitation of ‘the aged men’ - (2): equates the ‘wisdom’ of the old with oppression satirical, even sarcastic - > “The Sick Rose”, suggests the mental, spiritual, and intellectual distortion by the “invisible worm” destroying the beauty of the rose - > “The Poison Tree” (= orig. “Christian Forbearance”), on the destructive force of repression; the tree = (a) the forbidden tree of knowledge, or (b) a metaphor of repressed emotion > (c) the negative Christian hypocrisy, and/or (d) the positive Christian forgiveness - > “The Garden of Love”, ironically wrecked by the ‘thou shalt nots’ of the priests - (1): introd. by the piper > (2): introd. by the ‘voice of the bard who present, past, and future sees’ = (1): a shift beyond the innocence… > (2): …into an awareness of the Fall - (2): the vol. opens with a daybreak > darkened by the following poems > closes by another morning in the concl. poem, “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” = a regeneration, a new age of spiritual liberty P r o p h e c i e s : - insisted he had been granted visions by God which he could transl. and interpret by interfusing picture and word (B.: ‘the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative’) - yearned for a faith free of dogmatic assertion > a visionary poetry based on a complete mythology of his own - < infl. by the Bible, the Bible-derived epic structures of Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321, [author of the epic poem The Divine Comedy]) and John Milton (1608 – 74, [author of the epic poem Paradise Lost]), and the hymnological tradition in E verse - < the eccentric Swedish visionary and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) > redefined his cosmology > close to the Ger. theosophist Jacob Boehme (1575 – 1624): God the Father = neither good nor evil x but: contains the germs of both > the necessity of merging heaven with the creative energy of hell celebrated the contraries - > infl. W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats The French Revolution (1791), America: A Prophecy (1793), sequel Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and the prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790 – 93): - wrote while supporting the Fr. Rev.: rev. = a purifying violence leading to the redemption of humanity - x but: his later poetry shifted from an apocalypse by rev. to an apocalypse by imagination (Orc = the fiery spirit of violent rev., gave way to Los) The First Book of Urizen (1794), and The Book of Los (1795): - = prophetic books - Urizen = oppressor and the negative God of “thou shalt nots” x embodiment of reason and law - Los = rebel against Urizen - Orc = both rebel and oppressor The Four Zoas (an unfinished manuscript), Milton (1804), and Jerusalem (1820): - = major prophetic books - conc. with the overall biblical plot interpreted in the ‘spiritual sense’: incl. the Creation, the Fall, the humanity in the fallen world, and redemption and the promise of a New Jerusalem - written in the persona, or ‘voice’, of ‘the Bard’, going back to Edmund Spenser (c. 1952 – 99, [author of the epic poem Faerie Queene]) > J. Milton > and the prophets of the Bible - the Four Zoas = Urizen + Tharmas + Luvah + Los = the results of the fall and division of the primeval man = Albion (= orig. an ancient mythological name for the Br. Isles) - the demonic characters in Jerusalem < the incident of his altercation with a private, haunting his imagination (B. pushed the soldier to the inn where he was quartered after he had refused to leave his garden and answered with threads and curses) also wrote: A Vision of the Last Judgement (1810), a prose book
T h o m a s P e r c y ( 1 7 2 9 – 1 8 1 1 ) L i f e : - a scholarly bishop x but: did not feel pressurised to concentrate his energies on theology only - educated to appreciate classical principles x but: reflected the shift twd a new and receptive poetic sensibility W o r k : - interested in lit. outside narrowly defined canons pioneered the explorations of alternative lit. traditions T r a n s l a t i o n s : - author of transl. of relig. / secular writings: transl. of the “Song of Solomon”, author of a key to the New Testament, & oth. Hau Kiou Choaan, or The Pleasing History (1761): - = a Chinese novel transl. from the Portug. Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language (1763): - transl. from the Icelandic and ‘improved’ by the transl. - aimed for the market for ‘ancient poetry’ newly opened by James MacPherson’s Ossian Northern Antiquities (1770): - transl. from the French B a l l a d s : Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765): - = a 3-vol. coll. of ballad poetry - < based on a various 17th c. manuscript coll. now known as ‘The Percy Folio’ (saved it from destruction when he discovered it ‘being used by the maids to light the fire’) - ed. and ‘improved’ x but: with an alertness to the virtues of a plain mode of expression, in spite of the ‘polished age, like the present’ - also visually pleasing: vignettes on the title pages, and a copperplate engraving in each of the 3 parts of the 3 vol. - > greatly successful x but: did not secure him an adequate living - > foreshadowed the ballad revival in E poetry, characteristic of the Romantic movement: W. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, & oth. The Hermit of Warkworth (1771): - = his orig. ballad on the Warkworth castle - combined the vogue for the ‘Churchyard Poets’ + the ballad vogue he himself had set in motion - > Samuel Johnson’s (= Dr. Johnson, 1709 – 84, a poet, essayist, and biographer) 3 satires on the ‘simplicity’ of the ballad verse form: the narrow line btw the beautiful simplicity and simple mindedness
J a m e s M a c p h e r s o n ( 1 7 3 6 – 9 6 ) - = a vicarious contrib. to lit.: pretended to have discovered and transl. the works of the early Scott. Gaelic poet ‘Ossian, the son of Fingal’ - > a widely received Romantic image of the primitive poet - > depicted parallel to Homer (8th c. BC, [author of epics Iliad and Odyssey]) as the Bard of the North on the proscenium arch of the rebuild Covent Garden Theatre (1858) ‘ O s s i a n i c ’ F a k e s : Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760): - = supposedly a transl. of poetry from Scott. Gaelic - < based on the manuscripts he claimed to have discovered in the Highlands and Islands Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books; Together with Several other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic Language (1762): - = supposedly a transl. of an epic by the 3rd c. bard Ossian - employed the musical measured prose he had used in his earlier vol. - (−) some Gaelic ballad poetry truly attributed to one ‘Oisean’, son of the warrior Fionn x but: cleverly adapted, re-created, and expanded mere fragments of surviving verse - (−) confounded stories belonging to different cycles to give a Homeric coherence and classical solemnity to the disparate ballad accounts of ancient Scott. feuds - (+) appreciated natural beauty, incl. the emotive associations of wild landscape - (+) treated the ancient legend of primitive heroism with a melancholy tenderness - > the authenticity immediately challenged by Dr. Johnson, claiming M. had found fragments of ancient poems and stories and woven them into a romance of his own composition - > modern critics tend to agree with Johnson - > admired by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 – 1803), Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), and Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 – 1832) who incorporated his transl. of a part of the work into his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Temora: An Ancient Epic Poem in Eight Books; Together with Several other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763): - = another epic The Works of Ossian (1765): - = a coll. ed. of Fingal and Temora also wrote: Iliad (1763), a stodgy prose version of Homer’s epic
T h o m a s C h a t t e r t o n ( 1 7 5 2 – 7 0 ) L i f e : - wayward from his earliest y.: uninterested in the games of oth. children, liable to fits of abstraction when sitting for hours as if in trance or crying for no reason > consid. educationally backward - < his uncle held an office in a church > familiar with the altar tombs commemorating the dead knights and ecclesiastics, and with ancient legal documents laying there forgotten - < a voracious reader of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400), T. Percy’s Reliques, J. Macpherson’s Ossian, etc. - from the age of 11 contrib. relig. poems to a local journal > later political satires to London periodicals: his contrib. accepted x but: paid for little or not at all - did not have to suffer the dire poverty x but: too proud to accept help - financial distress + lack of lit. success suicide (17+ y.) by drinking arsenic dissolved in water after tearing into fragments whatever lit. remains were at hand - > the Romantic image of the suffering of unacknowledged genius - > = the “marvellous Boy” in W. Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” (1807) - > = the dedicatee of John Keats’s Endymion (1818) - > = the subject of Henry Wallis’s (1830 – 1916, pre-Raphaelite painter) painting (1856) - > commemorated in poems by S. T. Coleridge, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, & oth. W o r k : - fascinated with the Middle Ages > lived in an ideal medieval world of his own creation forged the so- called ‘Rowley Poems’ = mock medieval poems by the imaginary 15th c. priest Thomas Rowley ‘ R o w l e y ’ F a k e s : “Elinoure and Juga”: - = the only of the ‘Rowley’ poems publ. during his lifetime, an ‘eclogue’ - written before he was 12 > claimed it to be a transcription of Rowley’s work - incl. obvious borrowings, deliberate use of archaic words picked out of dictionaries, and anachronistic use of Elizabethan verse forms “An Excelente Balade of Charitie”: - = another of the “Rowley” poems, rejected for publ. in a periodical Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777): - = a posthum. coll. of the ‘Rowley’ poems - ed. by a Chaucerian scholar then believing them genuine medieval works - the authenticity challenged shortly thereafter > proved to be fakes “Ode to Liberty”: - = a fragment of a larger unpreserved work = Tragedy of Goddwyn - may be counted among the finest martial lyrics in E Ælla, a Tragical Interlude: - inc. passages of rare lyrical beauty also wrote: prose / verse political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas, and satires
2 T h e F i r s t W a v e o f R o m a n t i c i s m (Concepts of Nature, Imagination, Fancy, Influence of French Revolution, and the Lake Poets: S. T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth, and R. Southey)
T h e R o m a n t i c P e r i o d ( 1 7 8 5 – 1 8 3 0 ) H i s t o r i c a l B a c k g r o u n d : - revolutionary and Napoleonic period in Fr. (1789 – 1815) - the storming of the Bastille (14th July), the Rev. begins (1789) - King Louis XVI executed, En. joins the alliance against Fr. (1793) - the Reign of Terror under Robespierre (1793 – 94) - Napoleon crowned emperor (1804) - Napoleon defeated at Waterloo (1815) - Br. slave trade outlawed (1807); slavery abolished throughout the empire in 1833 - the Regency = George, Prince of Wales, acts as regent for George III (1811 – 20) - accession of George IV (1820) T h e B r i t i s h R o m a n t i c P e r i o d : - establ. the canonical figures of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and William Blake - only G. G. Byron instantly famous x W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) publ. anonym. - the period marked by a multitude of political, social, and economic changes T h e R e v o l u t i o n a n d R e a c t i o n : C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s : - the Romantic period: 1785, W. Blake and Robert Burns publ. their 1st poems – 1830, major writers of the 18th c. dead or no longer productive - change from an agricultural society with wealth and power concentrated in the landholding aristocracy to a modern industrial nation - in the context of rev., 1st the Am. and then the much more radical Fr. T h e E a r l y P e r i o d o f t h e F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n > Enthusiasm: - the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” > the storming of the Bastille to release imprisoned political offenders - radical pro-revolutionaries incl. Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790, justified the Fr. Rev.), Tom Paine (Rights of Men, 1790, advocated the rev. for En.), and William Godwin (Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793, foretold an inevitable x but: peaceful evolution of society to democracy > infl. Romantic poets) T h e L a t e r P e r i o d o f t h e F r e n c h R e v o l u t i o n > Disenchantment: - En. in war against Fr., the Reign of Terror under Robespierre, the emergence of Napoleon as a dictator and his defeat > a reactionary despotism throughout continental Eur. - political changes in En.: harsh repressive measures - social changes: Benjamin Disraeli’s Two Nations = the 2 classes of capital/the rich x labour/the poor - economic changes: the Industrial Rev., incl. the power-driven machinery and Watt’s steam engine to replace hand labour; enclosing of open fields into privately owned agricultural holdings > a new landless class T h e F i r s t M o d e r n I n d u s t r i a l D e p r e s s i o n ( 1 8 1 5 ) : - the social philos. of laissez-faire (= let alone) = the government left people to pursue their private interests > harsh working conditions, child labour, etc. > petitions, protest meetings, agitation, and hunger riots; dispossessed workers destroyed machines > more repressive measures - the Peterloo Massacre (1819) = workers demanded a parliamentary reform, charged by troops: inspired P. B. Shelley’s poems for the working class, “England in 1819”, “A Song: ‘Men of England’”, and “To Sidmouth and Castlereagh” - but: suffering confined to the poor x the Br. Empire expanded to become the most powerful colonial presence in the world - the Regency Period = in London a time of lavish display and moral laxity for the leisure class, in provinces the gentry almost untouched by inter/national events: Jane Austen’s novels - women = regarded as inferior to men > little opportunities for education and work, almost no legal rights: M. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), advocated the equality of the sexes - the 1st Reform Bill (1832): extended the vote; universal adult suffrage in 1928 T h e ‘ S p i r i t o f t h e A g e ’ : - the term ‘Romantic’ applied to the writers of the period ½ a c. later by E historians x in their lifetime treated as individuals or grouped into separate schools: (a) ‘The Lake School’: W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, R. Southey (< settled in the Lake District) (b) ‘The Cockney School’: Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and associated writers incl. J. Keats (< settled in London) (c) ‘The Satanic School’: G. G. Byron, P. B. Shelley - the ‘spirit of the age’ = the writers’ sense of a distinctive intellectual and imaginative climate of their age marking a lit. renaissance: - < W. Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age, a coll. of essays conc. with the political, social and lit. rev. - > P. B. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, the lit. spirit as an accompaniment of political and social rev. - a general preocc. with the rev. - older generation, incl. R. Burns, W. Blake, W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, R. Southey, and M. Wollstonecraft: sympathetic - younger generation, incl. W. Hazlitt, L. Hunt, P. B. Shelley, and G. G. Byron: disappointed x but: still for the rev. purged of its errors as humanity’s best hope - the sense of limitless possibilities survived the shock of the 1st disappointment to 1798 (i.e. W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge’s publ. of Lyrical Ballads, revolutionising the theory and practice of poetry)
T h e R o m a n t i c P o e t r y W . W o r d s w o r t h ’ s “ A d v e r t i s e m e n t ”: - = in the 2nd ed. of the Lyrical Ballads as a “Preface” - a critical manifesto, statement of poetic principles, organising isolated ideas into a coherent theory based on explicit critical principles - opposed the 18th c. lit. tradition of John Dryden (1631 – 1700) and Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), who imposed on poetry artificial conventions and distorted its free and natural expression - S. T. Coleridge agreed with W. Wordsworth x but: corrected some of his statements in Biographia Literaria (1817) P o e t r y a n d t h e P o e t : - 18th c. theorists: poetry = ‘a mirror held up to nature’ x W. Wordsworth: poetry = ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ - source of a poem = not in the outer world x but: in the individual poet > emphasis on the mind, emotions, and imagination of the poet - subject = not external objects x but: the inner feelings of the author, or external objects transformed by the author’s feelings - form = esp. the lyric poem in the 1st person bearing traits of the poet’s own personality: W. Wordsworth’s Prelude, a poem of epic length conc. with the growth of the poet’s own mind - speaker = a ‘Bard’, a poet-prophet < modelled on John Milton (1608 – 74) and the prophets in the Bible: W. Wordsworth’s Prelude; the visionary poets W. Blake, early S. T. Coleridge, and P. B. Shelley - central lit. form = a long work about the formation of the self, an interior journey in quest of one’s true identity: W. Wordsworth’s Prelude, W. Blake’s Milton, P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, J. Keat’s Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion + autobiog. presented as fact in S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria; and E. Barrett-Browning’s Aurora Leigh P o e t i c S p o n t a n e i t y a n d F r e e d o m : - W. Wordsworth: the composition of a poem orig. from ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, may be preceded and followed by reflection x but: the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous, free from all rules and manipulation to foreseen ends - x W. Blake: claims to write from ‘Inspiration and Vision’, his long ‘prophetic’ poem Milton was given to him by an agency not himself and ‘produced without Labour or Study’ R o m a n t i c ‘ N a t u r e P o e t r y ’ : - W. Wordsworth: the necessity of looking steadily at one’s subject => a sensuous poetry with natural phenomena described with an accuracy of observation with no earlier match - Romantic poetry = nature poetry? x W. Wordsworth: to observe and describe objects accurately not at all a sufficient condition for poetry - nature = a stimulus to thinking! > meditative poetry: W. Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Ode: Intimations of Immortality; S. T. Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight and Dejection; P. B. Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind; and J. Keats’s Nightingale - landscape endowed with human life, passion, and expressiveness > natural objects correspond to an inner or a spiritual world > tendency to write a symbolist poetry with objects endowed with a significance beyond themselves: W. Blake, P. B. Shelley, & oth. T h e O r d i n a r y a n d t h e O u t c a s t : - W. Hazlitt on W. Wordsworth: W. transl. the political changes into poetical experiments > W. = the lit. equivalent of the Fr. Rev. - W. Wordsworth on Lyrical Ballads: - > form = ‘to choose incidents and situations from common life’ and to use a ‘language really spoken by men’, the source and model being ‘humble and rustic life’: R. Burns - > subject = ‘peasants, peddlers, and village barbers’, even the ignominious, the outcast, the delinquent, i.e. ‘convicts, F vagrants, gypsies, idiot boys, and mad mothers’ x G. G. Byron the only to maintain his lit. allegiance to aristocratic proprieties and to traditional poetic decorum - > aim = not simply to repres. the world as it is x but: to present ‘ordinary things in an unusual aspect’; to refresh our sense of wonder and divinity in the everyday, the commonplace, the trivial, and the lowly > to awaken the child’s sense of wonder, the ‘freshness of sensation’ in the repres. of ‘familiar objects’ T h e S u p e r n a t u r a l : - wonder in the familiar: W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge - wonder achieved by violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events in poems incl. supernatural ‘incidents and agents’: S. T. Colerige’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan - modern adaptations of old ballad and romance forms: J. Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci and The Eve of St. Agnes - ballad imitations: W. Scott’s verse tales and historical novels - => a medieval revival - typical setting in a distant past or faraway places, or both: S. T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, set in the Middle Ages and the Orient - unusual modes of experience > ‘addition of strangeness to beauty’ (W. Pater) (a) visionary states: W. Blake, W. Wordsworth, and S. T. Coleridge (b) hypnotism: S. T. Coleridge (c) dreams and nightmares: S. T. Coleridge (< addicted to opium) (d) satanic hero: G. G. Byron (e) ambivalence of pleasure and pain, destructive aspects of sexuality, longing for death: J. Keats - => anticipated the Gothic fiction of 18th c., and the Eur. decadence of the late 19th c. I n d i v i d u a l i s m , I n f i n i t e S t r i v i n g , a n d N o n c o n f o r m i t y : - 18th c.: humans = limited beings in a strictly ordered world; the mind = a mirrorlike recipient of a universe already created x Romanticism: emphasis on individualism, on human potentialities and powers; the mind = an active creator of the universe it perceives - human refuses to submit to limitations > ceaseless activity, a striving for the infinite (< Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust): P. B. Shelley’s Alastor, J. Keats’s Endymion, and G. G. Byron’s Manfred (a) writers deliberately isolated from society to give scope to their individual vision: W. Wordsworth’s masterwork The Recluse (b) a solitary protagonist separated from society because he has rejected it, or because it has rejected him > the theme of exile, of the disinherited mind unable to find a spiritual home anywhere: G. G. Byron, P. B. Shelley, and to a certain extend S. T. Coleridge (c) a solitary protagonist as a great sinner (a) made realise and expiate his sin: S. T. Colerige’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and W. Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow and Peter Bell x (b) remains proudly unrepentant: G. G. Byron’s Manfred, and P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound - new forms: - > W. Blake’s symbolic lyrics and visionary ‘prophetic’ poems - > S. T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a haunting ballad narrative - > W. Wordsworth’s The Prelude, an epic-like spiritual autobiog. - > P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a cosmic symbolic drama - > J. Keats’s sequence of odes conc. with the conflict in basic human desires - > G. G. Byron’s Don Juan, a satiric survey of Eur. civilisation M i l l e n n i a l E x p e c t a t i o n s : - enthusiasm with the Fr. Rev. = hope of humanity and the regeneration of the human race, modelled on biblical prophecy - the Bible’s concl. = the book of “Revelation”, i.e. the Apocalypse and return to the Edenic felicity; symbolised by a marriage btw the New Jerusalem and Christ the Lamb: W. Blake’s The French Revolution (1791) and America, a Prophecy (1793) - disenchantment by the Fr. Rev. = political rev. > spiritual rev. = new ways of seeing - regarded as the restoration of a lost earlier way of seeing; symbolised by the marriage btw the mind and the external world: S. T. Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode, W. Wordsworth’s Prospectus to The Recluse, P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus - => apocalypse = not a change of the world x but: a change of the worldview T h e R o m a n t i c D r a m a - < William Shakespeare = the idolised example - > P. B. Shelley = the most capable dramatist - (−) licensing to 1843 > only the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres allowed to produce spoken drama - (−) the Romantic genius ill adapted to the theatre (a) stage drama: - > G. G. Byron’s exhibitions of various aspects of the Byronic hero, readable x but: weaker on stage - > S. T. Coleridge’s Remorse, a tragedy, a minor hit - > P. B. Shelley’s The Cenci (1819), a true story of the It. Renaissance, a monstrous father violates his daughter, she murders him (b) closet drama: G. G. Byron’s Manfred and P. B. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound
T h e R o m a n t i c N o v e l T h e G o t h i c N o v e l : - < the term derived from the frequent setting of Gothic novels in a gloomy Middle Age castle - inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) > flourished in the closing y. of 18th c. - reacted against comfort and security, political stability, and commercial progress by resisting the rule of reason - Edmund Burke: (a) the sublime related to vastness, infinity, and astonishment; i.e. wild and mountainous scenery in nature, castle ruins and medieval cathedrals in architecture, (b) modified danger and pain produce a ‘delightful horror’ < infl. by Aristotle’s tragedy as an evocation of pity and fear to purge of these emotions: J. Milton’s Paradise Lost and W. Shakespeare’s tragedies - subject = exploitation of mystery and terror, supernatural phenomena, dark and irrational side of human nature, perverse impulses, etc. - protagonist = homme fatal, i.e. a villain torturing oth. because being himself tortured by an unspeakable guilt; with elements of diabolism, sensuality, and sadistic perversion: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Undolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1794) - setting = somewhere in the past, in sullen landscapes and decaying mansions with dark dungeons, secret passages, and stealthy ghosts - Gothicism in poetry: S. T. Coleridge’s Christabel; J. Keat’s Eve of St. Agnes; G. G. Byron’s hero- villains; and P. B. Shelley’s interest in the fantastic, the macabre, and in the unconscious mind, incl. incest T h e N o v e l o f P u r p o s e : - propagated the new social and political theories - frequently with Gothic elements - > William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), conc. with the persecution by a wealthy squire of his young secretary revealing evidence that the squire has committed murder the lower class as a subject to power of the upper class - > M. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), conc. with a fabricated monster the moral distortion imposed on an individual rejected by society because of his diverging from the norm - > M. Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), anticipated the Br. regional novel and the Br. historical novel T h e N o v e l o f M a n n e r s : J. Austen T h e H i s t o r i c a l R o m a n c e : W. Scott
T h e R o m a n t i c E s s a y - the Enlightenment > an explosion of potential readership - reviews = issued 4x yearly; publ. lit. essays and essays on contemporary issues - magazines = a monthly; publ. more miscellaneous materials - the ‘familiar essay’ = a commentary on a non-technical subject written in a relaxed and intimate manner; often autobiog., reminiscent, and self-analytic - the essayists incl. C. Lamb, W. Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey
S a m u e l T a y l o r C o l e r i d g e ( 1 7 7 2 – 1 8 3 4 ) L i f e : - a lifelong friendship with Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834) = addressee of “This Lime-tree bower my Prison” - friendship with Robert Southey: (a) collab. on the historical drama The Fall of Robespierre. An Historic Drama (1794) (b) both intended to establ. an ideal democratic community in Am. = ‘Pantisocracy’ x but: failed - youth.: sympathetic with the republican experiment in Fr. x middle age: conservative in both politics and relig. (Anglican) - a lifelong friendship with W. Wordsworth: (a) collab. on the Lyrical Ballads (1798) (b) together spent some time in Ger. to study Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) and the post-Kantian Ger. philos. (c) both settled in the Lake District - rheumatism > taking laudanum (= opium dissolved in alcohol) > a drug addict estranged from his wife, suffered from nightmares and agonies of remorse, quarrelled bitterly with W.: “Dejection: An Ode” (1802) - last y.: reconciled with both his wife and W. W o r k : - great in promise x but: not in performance: (a) adapted or adopted passages from oth. writers repeatedly charged with plagiarism (b) ambitious works unfinished or made up of brilliant sections eked out with filler: Biographia Literaria (1817) P o e t r y : - = associated with the ‘Lake Poets’ Religious Musings (1796): - poetised his political, relig., and philos. beliefs - conc. with the Fr. Rev. = a period of violence necessary for an earthly millennium accord. to the Book of Revelation - in the elaborate rhetoric, allegorical tactics and contorted syntax of the 18th c. ‘sublime ode’ x but: soon rejected this mode in favour of the relaxed style of heightened conversation: “Frost at Midnight”, & oth. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798) = Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800, 2nd ed.) - in collab. with W. Wordsworth - opened with his “Ancient Mariner” > concl. with W.’s “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” - the Preface to the 2nd ed. = stated the principles of the new criticism for the new poetry = ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity’ Biographia Literaria (1817): - = a loosely shaped series of meditations on poetry, poets, and the nature of the poetic imagination - < both orig. and plagiaristic, prophetic and indebted to tradition - like W. Blake recognised the contraries and complementary states of being x but: unlike him argued for interdependency - ‘fancy’ = juxtaposes images and impressions without fusing them x ‘imagination’ = actively moulds and transforms them into unity - ‘ primary imagination’ = reflects of the working mind of the Creator x ‘secondary imagination’ = creatively selects and shapes the stimuli of nature into new wholes (a) Conversation poems = interrelate description and meditation in blank verse: “Frost at Midnight”: - = a fireside meditation on a larger world beyond the cottage - his painful schoolboy memories: town x country, rural companionship x urban isolation, etc. - concl.: the prospect of his son blessed by nature’s benevolence “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison”: - = an address to C. Lamb - on the unity of human affection and natural world = transcends both separation and temporary confinement “Dejection: An Ode”: - = his last conversation poem and a farewell to health, happiness, and poetic creativity (b) Poems of mystery and demonism, or visionary poems: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: - on the voyage of discovery, both literally and figuratively, and the guilt and expiation of a Cain-like figure = the arbitrary ‘murderer’ of an albatross - concl.: discovers not only the consequences of breaking taboos, but: the existence of the interdependency of life - < indebted to the traditional ballad form in terms of metre / language “Kubla Khan or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment”: - began after awaking from a ‘profound sleep’ x but: interrupted by a caller a fragment - < read mythology, history, and comparative relig. - < read the story of Kubla Khan before falling asleep “Christabel”: - = a fragment of a ‘Gothic’ poem - on the attempted penetration of Christabel’s psyche by the demonic force = Geraldine - < indebted to old ballads D r a m a : The Fall of Robespierre. An Historic Drama (1794): - = a radical historical play - in collab. with R. Southey Remorse, A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1813) N o n - f i c t i o n : - lectured on various lit. and philos. topics, wrote for nwsps, founded the short-lasting periodical The Friend (1809 – 10) Lectures on Shakespeare (1808): - one of his most observant and provocative critics: acknowledged qualities x yet: allowed for shortcomings The Constitution of Church and State (1829): - attempted to free Christianity from fundamentalism also wrote: Zapolya: A Christmas Tale (1817), a prose book
W i l l i a m W o r d s w o r t h ( 1 7 7 0 – 1 8 5 0 ) L i f e : - a lifelong friendship with S. T. Coleridge: collab. on the Lyrical Ballads (1798) - a lifelong attachment to his sister Dorothy = his confidante, inspirer, and secretary - youth: radial x middle age: conservative in both politics and relig. - during his life: increasing prosperity and reputation (Poet Laureate, 1843) x but: personal disasters (death of his brother, death of 2 of his 5 children, the quarrel with C., and the physical and mental decline of D.) W o r k : - = associated with the ‘Lake Poets’ - conc.: ‘humble and rustic life’ where ‘the essential passions of the heart find a better soil’ and ‘speak a plainer and more emphatic language’ - sensitive to wild nature and to the co-operative workings of humankind and nature - aware of the acute distinctions btw urban x rural civilisation - < his childhood in the E Lake District - < R. Burns > “To the Sons of Burns after visiting their Father’s Grave” Descriptive Sketches (1793): - = a rather conventional verse account of his tour through Fr. and the Alps during the celebration of the 1 st anniversary of the fall of the Bastille - the Fr. Rev. = a millennial hope An Evening Walk (1793) Salisbury Plain (1793): - expressed his radical opinions against unnecessary suffering, injustice, incomprehension, and inhumanity rejected for publ. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798): - [see also: S. T. Coleridge] - > “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, a conversation poem, expressed his intense love to nature and its teachings, and inaugurated his myth of nature = a stimulus to thinking: the interaction btw his mind and the outer world made his mind grow to maturity - > “The Ruined Cottage”, a powerful tragic poem, gradually revised to delete the revolutionary aspects - > “Michael” Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).: - > “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, a delicate poem of occasional observation - > “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, a poem of precise recall of sight and sound - > also incl.: “My Heart Leaps up”, “The Solitary Reaper”, “The World is too much with us”, & oth. poetic decline (mid-1810s+): W. = the poet of the remembrance of things past > conc. with ‘two consciousnesses’ = himself as he is now x himself as he once was not an inexhaustible resource for poetry The Excursion (1814): - set in an ugly manufacturing district of northern En. - = the 2nd part of the intended long philos. poem in 3 parts, The Recluse x but: its 1st and 3rd parts left unfinished and fragmentary Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822 – 45): - = his most obvious public declaration in poetry - in a consciously Miltonic tone: J. Milton = the embodiment of the spirit of E liberty x as opposed to the Fr. revolutionary liberty The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850, posthum.): - = the ‘Prospectus’ (= prologue) to The Recluse - < the title chosen by his widow, himself referred to it as the ‘poem to Coleridge’ or the ‘poem on the growth of my own mind’ - = his autobiog. masterpiece: attempted to shape certain crucial incidents in his life into an ideal pattern of self-repres. - turned from books to nature = the teacher and the giver of an impulse > emphasised the morally educative infl. of nature, and the interrelationship of a love of nature and a love of humanity - described his literal journeys (his tour in the Alps [< Descriptive Sketches], love to a Fr. woman, estrangement during the war btw E x F agonies of guilt, divided loyalties btw E x F, disillusion with the Rev., etc.) x but: interpreted them in retrospect as metaphors for a spiritual journey - his persistent metaphor of life = a circular journey whose end is ‘to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time’ also wrote following poems of distinction: “Sonnets dedicated to Liberty”: - = a series of poems of public declarations “Surprised by Joy”: - = a moving sonnet on his abrupt realisation of time having gradually diminished the grief at the death of his children “Extempore Effusion”: - = an elegy on the poets he outlived
R o b e r t S o u t h e y ( 1 7 7 4 – 1 8 4 3 ) L i f e : - friendship with S. T. Coleridge: (a) collab. on the historical drama The Fall of Robespierre. An Historic Drama (1794) (b) both intended to establ. an ideal democratic community in Am. = ‘Pantisocracy’ x but: failed, S. = the 1st to reject the ideal as unworkable (c) married the sister of C.’s wife, settled at Greta Hall (Keswick, the Lake District), and shared the house with the Coleridges - youth: radical (a) expelled from school for writing a magazine article condemning flogging (b) experimented with a writing partnership with S. T. Coleridge - middle age: conservative (a) contrib. to a Tory magazine (b) received an annual allowance granted by the Tory government (c) appointed Poet Laureate (1813) - > criticized by George Gordon Byron and William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830) for betraying political principles for money W o r k : - = associated with the ‘Lake Poets’ - once: admired for a radical plainness and frankness of style x now: criticized for narrative dullness and flatness of expression D r a m a : The Fall of Robespierre. An Historic Drama (1794): - = a radical historical play - in collab. with S. T. Coleridge Wat Tyler (1817): - = a radical republican play - publ. much to his embarrassment 20 y. after it has been written P o e t r y : Joan of Arc (1795): - = a radical pro-revolutionary epic poem - written in his short-lived radical phase (like S. T. Coleridge and W. Wordsworth disillusioned by the progress of the Fr. Rev. > the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte [1769 – 1821]) Thalaba the Destroyer (1801): - = a long oriental verse epic based on a Mohamedan legend The Curse of Kehama (1810): - = an ambitious long poem based on Hindu mythology A Vision of Judgement (1821): - = a toadying poem on the death of George III (1738 – 1820, reign 1760 – 1820) - > mocked devastatingly by G. G. Byron’s The Vision of Judgement (1822) “The Inchcape Rock” and “The Battle of Blenheim”: - = successful ballad poems, once much loved by reciters, and now still read by schoolchildren - the latter being possibly one of the earliest anti-war poems N o n - f i c t i o n : The Book of the Church (1825) and Sir Thomas More (1829): - on the relationship btw history and the present, btw precedent and development also wrote: lit. criticism, author of biographies of John Bunyan (1628 – 88, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress), John Wesley (1703 – 91, leader in the Methodist movement, responsible for the emancipation of all slaves in the Br. Empire [1833]), & oth.
3 T h e S e c o n d W a v e o f R o m a n t i c i s m (Influence of Antiquity, Lyricism, Passion, and Reason; P. B. Shelley, G. G. Byron, and J. Keats)
P e r c y B y s s h e S h e l l e y ( 1 7 9 2 – 1 8 2 2 ) L i f e : - = a radical nonconformist in every aspect of his (a) life and (b) thought: (a) married against his conviction of marriage = a tyrannical and degrading institution (a) left his wife (= a future suicide) for Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin (1797 – 1851); denied the custody of their 2 children (b) loved philos. and scorned orthodoxy (b) dedicated his life to a war against injustice and oppression - led a restless life x but: settled in Ita. for his last 2 y. > found contentment - ‘The Pisan Circle’ = a group of friends around him in Ita., incl. G. G. Byron for a time W o r k : - < his tragic experience of the death of 2 of his 3 children, the following apathy and self-absorption of his wife, and the consequent deterioration of their relationship - < his awareness of the lack of audience - < his extensive study of philos. incl. Plato (c. 427 – 347 BC), Neoplatonists, and Br. empirical philos. - adherent of ‘sceptical idealism’ = limitation of all knowledge to valid reasoning based on sense- experience [see “Mont Blanc” (1816)] N o n - f i c t i o n : The Necessity of Atheism (1810): - = a pamphlet challenging God’s existence = cannot be proved on empirical grounds - in collab. with Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792 – 1862) - > expelled from Oxford Address to the Irish People (1812): - = a pamphlet calling for the Cath. emancipation and amelioration of the oppressed and poverty-stricken people of Ir. A Philosophical View of Reform (1819): - = a penetrating political essay A Defence of Poetry (1821): - = an essay asserting the social function of poetry and the prophetic role of the poet - the criterion of literary value = a political improvement - dismissed the distinction btw poets x prose writers: the irrational power of the imagination should diminish the utilitarian view of art P o e t r y : - = associated with the ‘Satanic School’ Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (1813): - = an allegorical dream-vision poem - described the journey through space of the disembodied soul of the mortal maiden Ianthe and the fairy queen Mab revealing her the past, present, and future states of the human world - the woeful past = a product of one human error after another > the dreadful present = a corruption by the institutions of king, priests, and statesmen > the utopian future = a human blessedness achieved by a secular (x not relig.) apocalypse Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude (1816): - on a young idealist poet discovering the human love too late - against the Wordsworthian egotism The Revolt of Islam (1818): - on the heroic x but: doomed struggle for liberation of a brother and sister against the oppressions of the Ottoman Empire - condemned oriental despotism - reflected on the failure of the Fr. Rev. and on the present state of Br. The Mask of Anarchy (1819): - = a visionary poem calling for the proletarian rev. against the Br. repression - < inspired by ‘The Peterloo Massacre’ (1819) Peter Bell the Third (1819): - = a witty satire on W. Wordsworth Epipsychidion (1820): - = a rhapsodic vision of love = a spiritual union beyond earthly limits Adonais (1821): - = an elegiac tribute to the dead J. Keats = the triumphing hero even in the face of death D r a m a : - ‘lyrical drama’ = minimises theatrical action in favour of a dramatic repres. of imaginative motivation (Prometheus Unbound and Hellas) The Cenci (1819): - = a tragedy - < a true story of the It. Renaissance: a monstrous father violates his daughter, she murders him Prometheus Unbound (1820): - = a ‘lyrical drama’ - paralleled Prometheus to J. Milton’s Satan x but: treated him as ‘a moral being far superior to his God’ ( W. Blake) - described his battle against despair and arbitrary tyranny > his achievement of a heightened state of consciousness = a liberation of both body / spirit from enemies both internal / external - concl.: Jupiter overthrown and P. reunited with Asia - concl. act: a lyrical celebration of the triumph of the rev. = marked by the triumph of song Hellas (1822): - = a ‘lyrical drama’ - < inspired by the Gr. rebellion against the Ottoman oppressors - concl.: a possibility of a cyclical succession of one bloody rev. upon another also wrote following poems of distinction: “Ode to the West Wind”: - on his characteristic high x but: ordered passion “Mont Blanc”: - = a meditation on the natural world - expressed his view of the narrow limits of what human can know with certainty
L o r d G e o r g e G o r d on B y r o n ( 1 7 8 8 – 1 8 2 4 ) L i f e : - = marked by complicated relationships: fights with his mother when together x affectionate correspondence when apart, an incestuous relation with his half-sister, promiscuity, etc. - led a restless life, travelled extensively, for a time a member of P. B. Shelley’s ‘Pisan Circle’ - died after a series of feverish attacks while assisting in the Gr. war for independence from the Turks W o r k : - his lifetime: immensely pop. = the prototype of literary Romanticism x now: consid. the least consequential of the great Romantic poets, compared to the innovations of W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, or J. Keats - > J. W. Goethe, Herman Melville (1819 – 91), & oth. ‘ T h e B y r o n i c H e r o ’ : - = his chief contrib. to the Romanticism - 1st sketched in the opening canto of Childe Harold (1812 – 18) > developed in Manfred (1817) - = an archrebel in a non-political form - an alien, mysterious, and gloomy spirit superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity - driven by an enormous, nameless guilt twd an inevitable doom - absolutely self-reliant in his isolation, pursuing his own ends accord. to his self-generated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural - with a strong erotic interest - Heathcliff of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Ahab of H. Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), & oth. - > ‘Byronism’ = the attitude of ‘titanic cosmic self-assertion’ helped to form Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844 – 1900) concept of the Superman P o e t r y : - = associated with the ‘Satanic School’ (a) old-fashioned lyrics in neo-classic style: “Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos”: - in the gentlemanly mode of witty extemporisation and epigram “She walks in beauty” and “Stanzas for Music”: - in the Cavalier tradition of the elaborate development of a compliment to a lady (b) political poems: - preocc.: not nature x but: public life, recent history, Br. politics, Eur. nationalism stirred by the Fr. Rev., etc. - = the public role of a commentator on his times Hours of Idleness (1807): - = early conventional lyric verse - > treated harshly by the Edinburgh Review (1802 – 1929) [Edinburgh = Scott. capital] English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809): - < a verse reply to the criticism of the former coll. - = a brilliant but tactless satire ridiculing his important poetic contemporaries - in the couplet style of the late 18th c. followers of Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744, author of Rape of the Lock) Childe Harold (1812 – 18): - = an account of his adventurous 2-y. excursion through southern Eur. and Asia Minor - described the western Mediterranean scarred by war = the ‘sad relic’ of Gr. under Ottoman misrule - protagonist = melancholic and misanthropic aristocratic exile - > an immediate success (B.: ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’) Beppo (1818): - = a short preview of the narrative style and stanza of Don Juan (1819 – 24) Don Juan (1819 – 24): - = a satire against modern civilisation - deconstructed the myths of the supposed glory of war, of fidelity in love, of the Rousseauistic faith in human goodness, of the picturesque and educative journey across Eur., etc. - described Juan’s adventures and misadventures and accomp. them by the narrator’s worldly-wise commentary - in a neo-classic style = shared many of the aims and methods of A. Pope - in the colloquial ‘ottava rima’ = allowed for a variety of both expression and mood, for both satire and sentiment, etc.; but: adapted the orig. 8-line / 11-syllable to 8 / 10 The Vision of Judgement (1821): - = a devastating satire on the life and death of George III - < a mock on R. Southey’s A Vision of Judgement = the toadying poem on the death of G. III D r a m a : Manfred (1817) and The Two Foscari (1821): - = poetic tragedies Cain (1821), Sardanapalus (1821), and Marino Faliero: - = poetic ‘closet tragedies’
J o h n K e a t s ( 1 7 9 5 – 1 8 2 1 ) L i f e : - an apothecary-surgeon - befriended Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859) > introd. to W. Hazlitt, C. Lamb, and P. B. Shelley > encouraged to abandon medicine for poetry - fell in love with Fanny Brawne x but: his dedication to poetry, poverty, and growing illness made marriage impossible and love a torment - his mother, then brother (attended by him) died of TBC foreboded his own early death - stopped writing at 24, died at 26 W o r k : - = associated with the ‘Cockney School’ - poetry of (a) a slow-paced, gracious movement - (b) sensuous descriptions: combined all the senses to give the total apprehension of an experience - (c) delight at the sheer existence of things outside himself: capable to identify with external objects, animate or inanimate - (d) all experience as a tangle of inseparable x but: irreconcilable opposites: melancholy in delight, pleasure in pain, and love as an approximation to death - inclined equally twd a life of indolence x life of thought, imaginative dream world x the pressing actual one - (e) ‘Negative Capability’ = ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ < example of William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) - < wrestled with the problem of evil and suffering also in his life (K.: ‘the world is full of misery and heartbreak, pain, sickness and oppression’) “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816): - = a sonnet of enthusiasm marking his discovery of George Chapman’s (ca 1559 – 1634) transl. of The Iliad - > 1st announced as a major talent - > estbl. (together with W. Wordsworth) as a major Romantic craftsman in the sonnet form “Sleep and Poetry” (1816): - = a layout of his program deliberately modelled on the careers of the greatest poets (K.: ‘for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed / That my own soul has to itself decreed’) Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818): - = a profuse allegory of a mortal’s quest for an ideal feminine counterpart and a flawless happiness beyond earthly possibilities - > criticized by Tory-motivated reviewers, attacked as a member of the ‘Cockney School’ (= L. Hunt’s radical lit. circle in London) Hyperion (1818): - = an epic poem modelled on J. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) - achieved the Miltonic manner > abandoned the poem as a threat to his individuality > decided to write independently Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other Poems (1820): - > “Lamia”, a narrative poem contrasting the beautiful F half-serpent Lamia x an aged, rational philos. Apollonius = juxtaposing illusion x reality, the ideal x the actual, feeling x thought - > “Isabella”, a narrative poem drawing on a story of 2 tragic lovers by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 75) - > “The Eve of St Agnes”, a narrative poem of a medieval setting and intense contrasts: cold x warmth, dark x light, hardness x softness, noise x stillness, cruelty x love; its protagonist Madeline’s hopes set on a superstition x the concl. lovers’ escape ‘into the storm’ > a return to suggestions of sickness, death, and penitence - > “Ode to Psyche”, on the Soul ‘as distinguished from an Intelligence’ - > “Ode to a Nightingale”, on the contrast of the ‘full-throated ease’ of the bird’s song x the aching ‘numbness’ of the human observer - > “Ode on Melancholy, on the interrelationship of joy x sorrow - > “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, on an imagined Attic vase with scenes of bucolic lovers x a pagan sacrifice - > “Ode to Autumn”, on autumn = the season of fulfilment x decay, an intensification of life x the inevitable ageing and dying - > “Ode on Idolence”, posthum. The Fall of Hyperion (posthum., 1856): - = the epic Hyperion reworked into a dream vision - retold the story of the resistance of the last of the Titans against the coming new order of the Gods - a prefatory vision on the infl. of suffering on the imagination of a poet: the visionary requires to experience pain also wrote following poems of distinction: “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”: - = a ballad on the idea of fairy enthralment “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Again”
4 D o m e s t i c i t y a n d H i s t o r i c i t y i n E a r l y 1 9 th C e n t u r y N o v e l s (J. Austen, M. Edgeworth, and W. Scott)
J a n e A u s t e n ( 1 7 7 5 – 1 8 1 7 ) L i f e : - b. in a moderately Tory family - her cousin died on the scaffold in Fr., her 2 brothers served as officers against Napoleon B. x but: never personally politically committed or involved in inter- / national affairs W o r k : - < Maria Edgeworth - limited subject: provincial E gentlefolk = society defined in terms of land, money, and class - limited form: intricate, spare, and ironic novel of manners = examines and criticises the values men and women live by in their everyday social lives - untouched by the political, intellectual, and artistic rev. of her age; conservative against the current radical enthusiasm: (a) the war: - at the margin even in novels introd. naval officers as characters - > Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818) (b) the agricultural depression, destitution, and rural pauperism: - only as an occasion of genteel charity, or for scolding the poor ‘into harmony and plenty’ - > Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Pride and Prejudice (1813) (c) her conc.: - = getting married = the central preocc. for young leisure-class ladies with no oth. career than domesticity open to them - against a realistic background = the test for her F protagonists of the practical sense, moral integrity, and knowledge of the world and oneself - obliges the reader to participate in the moral processes of disciplined learning and judging - advocates the merits of good conduct, good manners, sound reason, and marriage as an admirable social institution - never scorns love x but: demands the complementary qualities of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and practicality - her protagonists can be as intelligent as Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, or as witty, egotistic, and independent as Emma Woodhouse of Emma x but: all finally brought to mature judgement and, by proper extension, emotional fulfilment Sense and Sensibility (1811): - = her 1st publ. novel - gently ridicules the cult of sensibility, sentiment, and passion by an ironic exposure of affectation and by a steady affirmation of the virtues of restraint - balances maturity against impulsiveness Pride and Prejudice (1813): - opens with one of the most famous lines in E lit.: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ Mansfield Park (1814): - = perhaps the most pragmatic and the least romantic of her novels - touches on the slave trade and the roots of the Br. upper-class’s wealth in corruption and exploitation Emma (1816): - = perhaps the most perfectly construed, the best, and most representative of her novels - concl.: the rebellious E. finds her personal liberation within the enclosure of the society by learning to respect and use its rules Northanger Abbey (1818, posthum.): - = chronologically her earliest novel x but: publ. posthum. - ridicules the taste for Gothic terrors and unsophisticated romances in her time - < incl. an elaborate parody on A. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Persuasion (1818, posthum.): - connected with the Northanger Abbey: (a) orig. bound up in one vol. and still so issued (b) both set from part in the health resort Bath (A. lived there for several y.)
M a r i a E d g e w o r t h ( 1 7 6 7 – 1 8 4 9 ) L i f e : - = connected with Ir.: her understanding based on her grasp both of her family and the Ir. nation’s history - sympathised with the oppressed Cath. majority x contradictorily convinced of the superiority of E manners - cherished the visionary hope of the regeneration both of the landowning aristocracy and its nation W o r k : F e m i n i s t W r i t i n g s : - conc.: radically criticized esp. the inadequacy of contemp. women’s education Letters to Literary Ladies (1795): - = a feminist essay The Parent’s Assistant (1796 – 1800) - in several vol. Practical Education (1798): - in collab. with her father I r i s h N o v e l s : - = subtle, comic discourses on the present state of society - employed an interplay of voices, incl. that of the author as ed. and annotator - set immediately before / after the Act of Union (= The United Kingdom of GB + Ir., 1801) - attempted to counter a potential alienation of the land-owning class from its tenantry Castle Rackrent (1800): - = probably the 1st novel to repres. society in a specific region in a given historical period the 1st true regional novel and the 1st true historical novel - = probably also the 1st family saga, and the 1st novel to use the device of an unreliable narrator = an observer of, rather than a player in, the actions he chronicles - conc.: the 4 generations of the Rackrent family, and their inheritance > conversion > failure > dislodgement by the son of the narrator = the family steward - incl. a pointed glossary ‘for the information of the ignorant English reader’ = interpreted both a way of speaking and a way of observing The Absentee (1812): - on the desertion of Ir. by an aristocracy drawn by the magnet of E fashion after the Union - conc.: the return of a Lord and Lady to their Ir. estates, encouraged by their son - the Lady’s attempts to buy her way into the London high society ridiculed, the Lord’s finances ruined as a result of his wife’s lifestyle > the debts paid by their sensitive son on condition of their return to live in Ir. - ‘absentees’ = the new generation of voluntary exiles - concl.: (a) the necessity of return of the aristocracy to their tenants driven by their absence to the state of a ‘wretched, wretched people’ (b) the revival of principle, example, leadership, and good management of the disenchanted ruling class Ormond (1817)
S i r W a l t e r S c o t t ( 1 7 7 1 – 1 8 3 2 ) L i f e : - < admired J. Austen - < admired M. Edgeworth = has done more twd completing the Union than the legislative enactment - aimed to do the same for his own country - achieved a broad pop. understanding of Scott. history and culture W o r k : - = universally pop. F i c t i o n : - creator of the 19th c. historical novel - historical romance = based on ‘marvellous and uncommon incidents’ in the realm of history (a) Scott. novels: - romantic view of Scott. past: altered the order of events, etc. to suit his own Unionist and Tory ends x but: kept fidelity to the spirit of the past - conc.: Scott. affairs against the background of the observation of a pragmatic, often E, outsider - characters: the best from middle / lower classes with their dialogues in Scott. vernacular to emphasise their individuality - avoidance of the Scots dialect except for dialogues accessibility to a wide audience - setting = Scotland divided by factions [Jacobites x Unionists, Highland clansmen x urban Lowlanders, etc.] - protagonists = exposed to conflicting ways of seeing, thinking, and acting - an evolutionary clash of opposites leading to a progressive future - no more a fancy dress of Gothic fiction: fictional heroes encounter historical ones in his own imaginative and ideological interpretation Waverley (1814, anonym.): - = his 1st novel, his following novels advertised as ‘by the author of Waverley’ the series of novels on similar themes written during the same period also known under the collective name the ‘Waverley novels’ - set in the mid-18th c. - conc.: the gradual involvement of the Englishman Waverley in the ‘The Forty-five Jacobite Rising’ (1745 = the 2nd major rising, a part of a series of military campaigns attempting to restore the Stuart kings to the thrones of En. and Scott. [and GB after 1707 = the union of En. and Scott. to the Kingdom of GB]) Guy Mannering (1815): - set in the late 18th c. = the time of lawlessness, with smugglers operating along the coast and thieves frequenting the country roads - conc.: the fortunes and misfortunes of the protagonist as predicted on his birth by the eponymous astrologer, incl. his kidnapping as a little boy after witnessing the murder of a customs officer by smugglers, his struggle for heritage, etc. The Antiquary (1816): - = a Gothic novel of family secrets, hidden treasure, hopeless love, benighted aristocracy, and a mysterious, handsome, young M character - the eponymous character, an amateur historian, archaeologist, and collector of items of dubious antiquity = not the protagonist x but: a central figure for, and a sardonic commentator of, oth. more exciting characters and events Rob Roy (1817): - set in the early 18th c. in ‘The Fifteen Jacobite Rising’ (1715) - conc.: the son of an E merchant’s journey to the Scott. Highlands to coll. a debt stolen from him - the eponymous character x but: not the protagonist = based on the historical figure of the infamous Scott. folk hero and outlaw Robert Roy MacGregor x but: the story completely fictional Old Mortality (1816) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818): - = parts of a 7-vol. series of novels publ. in individual vol. during the period of some 15 y., also known under the collective title Tales of my Landlord (b) Non-Scott. novels: Ivanhoe (1820): - set in the late 12th c. En. - the eponymous character and protagonist = son of one of the remaining Saxon noble families among at the time overwhelmingly Norman nobility - conc.: the protagonist’s return from the Crusades [= the war of Christian Europe to conquer the Holy Land of Jerusalem from its Muslim occupants] seriously wounded, his falling out of favour with his father due to his unsuitable courting of the Saxon Princess Rowena and his allegiance to the Norman King Richard I [= ‘Richard the Lion-Hearted’], etc. - described the conflict btw the Saxons x the Normans, the exemplary protagonist as a model of a Saxon adapting to the life in Norman En, and: the jousting knights, burning castles, and damsels in distress characteristic of the adventurous historical novel The Talisman (1825) and The Betrothed (1825): - = parts of a 2-vol. miniseries, also known under the collective title Tales of the Crusaders - set in the 12th c. Crusades period - questioned the medieval code of chivalry and military honour - lengthy explications of historical detail and artificial dialogue attempted to establ. authenticity Kenilworth (1821): - set in the 16th c. En. of Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603, reign 1558 – 1603; = the ‘Virgin Queen’, immortalised by E. Spenser as the ‘Faerie Queene’) The Fortunes of Nigel (1822): - set in the early 17th c. En. of James I (1566 –1625, reign 1603 – 25) Quentin Durward (1823): - set in the 15th c. Fr. of Louis XI (1423 – 83) - conc.: the exiled Scott. knights at the courts of the king > the upright innocent abroad makes his way through mazes of corruption Redgauntlet (1824): - = probably his finest non-Scott. novel - conc.: the dying flame of Scott. Jacobitism in a clash of perspectives of one romantic x a phlegmatic character P o e t r y : - narrative poetry of energetic and rushing metre, varying line-length, and wandering stress within the lines - also introd. shorter lyrics / songs into the narrative - with Waverley abandoned narrative poetry > displaced by G. G. Byron The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805): - conc.: a 16th c. family feud - incl. sorcery, alchemy, and metaphysical intervention Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rokeby (1813) Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802 – 3): - = a coll. of previously uncoll. ballad folk-poetry and his own verse
5 E l e m e n t s o f H o r r o r , R o m a n c e , a n d S u p e r n a t u r a l i n G o t h i c N o v e l s (H. Walpole, A. Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, and M. Shelley)
H o r a c e W a l p o l e ( 1 7 1 7 – 9 7 ) L i f e : - b. Horatio W., son of the PM Sir Robert W. (1676 – 1745) and the 4th Earl of Orford - received uni education - undertook the 2 y. Grand Tour on the Continent with his homosexual lover, the poet Thomas Gray (1716 – 71) > quarrelled with him > returned to En. to take a seat in Parliament - a politician = an MP, devotee of King George II (1683 – 1760, reign 1727 – 60) x but: politically unambitious - an architectural innovator = began a new neo-Gothic architectural trend with his mock castle at Strawberry Hill (near Twickenham outside London) filled with an extraordinary eclectic coll. of art and a small press - a connoisseur, antiquarian, art historian,… a figure of considerable cultural importance - coined the term ‘serendipity’ [= sth interesting or pleasant happening by chance] for E from a Persian fairy tale W o r k : F i c t i o n : The Castle of Otranto (1764): - = a Gothic novel - supposedly a ‘translation’ of the manuscript of a medieval Ita. tale of improbable catastrophes - blended ‘two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’ - orig. accepted rather favourably x but: vilified by the press when revealed to be no transl. x but: a contemp. creation of the politically and socially well-connected son of the PM - > set a Gothic lit. trend to go with the architecture D r a m a : The Mysterious Mother: - = a Gothic drama - conc.: the incest - the mother seduces her ignorant son and gives birth to a daughter whom the son marries, not aware who her mother (let alone her father) is - avoids the supernatural, but: incl. the character of a wicked monk - > unperformed in his lifetime N o n - f i c t i o n : Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762 – 80): - in 4 vol. - > still a prime source for the study of the early pictorial arts in Br. Historic Doubts on Richard III (1768): - attempted to rehabilitate the character of Richard III (1452 – 85, reign 1483 – 85) Letters (posthum.): - a prodigious writer of letters: corresponded with many of the most important cultural and political figures of his time (incl. T. Chatterton, & oth.) - one of the most brilliant writers of the Deistic school: freely admitted his scepticism about immortality and his distaste for priests and churches Memoirs (posthum.): - portrayed the Georgian (= the reign of George II and George III) social and political scene - > still a useful primary source for historians x but: a heavily biased one
A n n R a d c l i f f e ( 1 7 6 4 – 1 8 2 3 ) L i f e : - started writing when found herself in a childless marriage < encouraged by her husband - increasingly famous and financially successful x but: quit writing suddenly - in her later life reclusive < possibly as a result of a nervous breakdown and an acute lifelong sense of propriety, decorum, and reserve - > enormously pop. in her day, esp. with upper / middle class young women W o r k : “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826, posthum): - = a serious essay - presented her view of her own work: (a) terror = ‘expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life’ (b) horror = ‘contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them’ (c) terror = the source of her own fictional sublime - < her notion of the sublime = closer to Edmund Burke (1727 – 97, statesman and philosopher) (whom she read) x than to the supernatural sensationalism of the later Gothic novelists - < her sensibility = formed by the wild and perilous landscape paintings of Salvator Rosa (1615 – 73) - centred her sublime on descriptions of imaginary scenery > pioneered the fictional use of landscape - typical setting = an imaged Ita., with frequent impressions of solemn or ‘peculiar grandeur’ both to elevate and awe the spirits of her protagonists: The Italian, the F protagonist imprisoned in a convent overlooks a plain fringed with a ‘vast chain of mountains’ - typical protagonist = a decorous and sensible woman finding resource in her reasonableness - typical technique = introd. apparently supernatural events x but: explains them afterwards carefully by natural means - > = a ‘founder of a class or school’ of ‘a peculiar style of composition affecting powerfully the mind of the reader’ (W. Scott) - > = a bridge btw the Augustans with her rationalistic explanations x the Romantics with her emphasis on the imagination and the supernatural - > a blend of moralism, aesthetics, and drama the Romantic period: definitive for a more genteel strain of Gothic fiction x now: a subject to challenge - > a subject to many imitators of her style, incl. J. Austen’s burlesque of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in Northanger Abbey The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789): - set the tone of the majority of her work - preocc.: innocent x but: heroic young women finding themselves in gloomy castles ruled by mysterious barons with a dark past The Sicilian Romance (1790) The Romance of the Forest (1792) The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) The Italian (1797)
M a t t h e w G r e g o r y L e w i s ( 1 7 7 5 – 1 8 1 8 ) L i f e : - = ‘Monk’ Lewis - educated for a diplomatic career - the ethical demerits of The Monk (1796) did not interfere with his reception into the best society (noticed favourably at court, served as an MP, etc.) - inherited estates in Jamaica > undertook a journey to that place to improve the condition of the slave population > died of a fever caused by the tropical climate W o r k : - emphasis on the supernatural, the horror x A. Radcliffe’s emphasis on the sublime, the terror F i c t i o n : The Monk (1796): - = a Gothic novel - < the poems of Gottfried August Bürger (1748 – 94) and oth. early romantics, the drama and fiction of F. Schiller - < the example of A. Radcliffe in inserting verse into novels: “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene”, an inserted ballad, showed his gift and an influential command of rapid rhythm > W. Scott’s early poetry - < W. Shakespeare: prefaced with an epigraph from his Measure for Measure (1603), echoes the monument scene from his Romeo and Juliet (1623) - set in a Capuchin friary in Madrid = a small world of repression, obsession, ambition, and intrigue x the calm reflection of A. Radcliffe’s convents - investigates a tormented soul, semi-pornographically exploits incidents and images suggesting the labyrinthine nature of the protagonist’s life x but: in no psychological depth - plays with hidden chambers, subterraneous passages, sealed vaults, etc. = concealed passion - protagonist = Ambrosio, a saintly monk to become a rapist and murderer led into a life of depravity by a fiend-inspired woman - his Faustian compact with the Devil terminates in his being physically and spiritually broken, his agonisingly slow death described in great detail - aesthetic demerits = messy, badly constructed, extravagant in every sense x but: incl. some scenes of power - > achieved an immediate celebrity x but: threatened to have its sale restrained because of its ethical demerits > the 2nd ed. omitted objectionable passages x but: retained its horrific character D r a m a : The Castle Spectre (1796): - = a musical drama, the best known of his melodramatic plays - of little lit. merit x but: enjoying a long popularity on the stage T r a n s l a t i o n s : The Minister (1797): - = a transl. from F. Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (1784, = Intrigue and Love) The Bravo of Venice (1804): - = a transl. from a Ger. romance, his 2nd best known novel besides The Monk
M a r y S h e l l e y ( 1 7 9 7 – 1 8 5 1 ) L i f e : - daughter of M. Wollstonecraft-Godwin and William Godwin (1756 – 1836), wife of P. B. Shelley W o r k : Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818): - < orig.: the lit. circle in Switzerland incl. P. B. Shelley, G.G. Byron, & oth. discussed philos. and nature, orig. and meaning of life, the myth of Prometheus, and the enterprise of modern science > each member wrote a ‘ghost story’ - = a study of the consequences of experiment and of moving into the unknown - a morally probing exploration of responsibility and science - narrative layers: (a) the 1st person account of the solitary explorer Robert Walton (b) the confessions of Dr Frankenstein (c) the confessions of the creature - a parallel btw classical myth and modern experiment: (a) Frankenstein Prometheus: both punished, P. by a jealous heaven, F. = the ‘modern Prometheus’ by a challenge to his authority on the part of the monster (b) the monster Adam: both ruined and questioning, turn to accuse their creators with an acute and trained intelligence, both insist on their loneliness and wretchedness (c) the monster Satan: overhears and grasps sth of J. Milton’s Paradise Lost, realises how much he has in common with his Satan - concl.: envy, defeat, and unhappiness lead to a jealous destruction - ends where it began = in a polar wasteland landscape with the shifting ice allowing for the opening of new perspectives and uncertainties - > the power lies not only in its ‘terror’ x but: in its prophetic speculation
6 V i c t o r i a n P o e t r y : I n s p i r a t i o n i n t h e P a s t , P o s t - R o m a n t i c F e a t u r e s , a n d A e s t h e t i c E l e m e n t s (A. Tennyson, M. Arnold, R. Browning, E. Barrett-Browning, and the Pre-Raphaelites [D. G. Rossetti, A. C. Swinburne, W. Morris, and C. Rossetti])
T h e V i c t o r i a n P e r i o d ( 1 8 3 0 – 1 9 0 1 ) H i s t o r i c a l B a c k g r o u n d : - the 1st Reform Bill (1832) - Victoria becomes queen (1837) - the Corn Laws repealed (1846) - A. Tennyson succeeds W. Wordsworth as Poet Laureate (1850) - the Great Exhibition in London (1851) - Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) - Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 71) - death of Victoria (1901) T h e V i c t o r i a n E n g l a n d : - shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing - (+) the world’s foremost imperial power (incl. more than a ¼ of all territory on the earth) - (─) social and economic problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialisation (a) Early Victorian phase (1830 – 48) (b) Mid-Victorian phase (1848 – 70) (c) Late Victorian phase (1870 – 1901) (d) + the 90s = a bridge btw 2 c. - reactions in lit.: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s enthusiasm x Matthew Arnold’s melancholy and an anxious sense of sth having been lost Q u e e n V i c t o r i a a n d t h e V i c t o r i a n T e m p e r : - Victoria’s self-identification with the qualities of her age = earnestness, moral responsibility, and domestic propriety V. as a young wife, mother of 9 children, and the black-garbed Widow of Windsor in the 40 y. after her husband Prince Albert’s death - Victorian temper = historical self-consciousness, a sense of a break with the past and call to action as distinguished from the attitude of the previous generation - > ‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.’ (Carlyle), i.e. abandon the introspection of the Romantics and turn to the higher moral purpose - x the Georgian period’s (1911 – 36) reaction against the achievements of the previous c., the separation from the Victorians Victorian in a pejorative sense as prudish or old-fashioned T h e R o l e o f W o m e n : ‘ W o m a n Q u e s t i o n ’ : - few employment opportunities for ‘redundant’ women (= unmarried for the imbalance in numbers btw the sexes): (a) governess: (−) isolated within the household for her ambiguous status btw servant x family member (b) factory/coal mine worker: (−) under gruelling working conditions (c) prostitute - the basic problem not only political, economic, and educational x but: the problem of how women were regarded, and regarded themselves, as members of a society - (+) > the Married Women’s Property Act (1882) = the right of married women to handle their own property > oth. acts (1870 – 1908) > basis for the rights of women in marriage - (+) > admission of women to uni by the end of Victoria’s reign R e a c t i o n s i n L i t e r a t u r e : Challenge to women’s role in society: - > M. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) > J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women and On Liberty (1959) - > Coventry Patmore’s “The Angel in the House” (1854 – 62), an immensely pop. poem with the concept of womanhood stressing woman’s purity and selflessness x T. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) with the F protagonist justifying the leaving of her husband by quoting a passage from J. S. Mill’s On Liberty Women’s education: - > W. M. Thackaray’s Vanity Fair (1847 – 48) with Miss Pinkerton’s Academy repres. the pop. finishing schools x A. Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), a fantasy women’s college with all M excluded Women’s employment: - the governess novel: C. Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), W. M. Thackaray’s Vanity Fair, & oth. L i t e r a c y , P u b l i c a t i o n , a n d R e a d i n g : - the Education Act (1870) = elementary education compulsory and universal > by the end the c. basic literacy almost universal - the growth of periodical magazines for every taste - the growth of serial publ., immensely pop. since the publ. of C. Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836 – 37) in individual numbers - until ca 1870s: a broad readership with a shared set of social conc. x by the end of the c.: no longer a unified reading public - function: accord. to public expectation lit. should be continuous with the lived world > should illuminate social problems > should not only delight x but: instruct
T h e E a r l y V i c t o r i a n P e r i o d ( 1 8 3 0 – 4 8 ) A T i m e o f T r o u b l e s ( 1 8 3 0 s – 4 0 s ) : - < economic and social difficulties attendant on industrialisation > ‘The Time of Troubles’ - (+) the 1st steam-powered public railway line in the world, the 1st underground railway system - (─) close to rev. = economic theory of laissez-faire > terrible conditions in the new industrial and coal- mining areas, employment of women and children under brutal conditions: Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1843) - the 1st Reform Bill (1832) = franchise for all M owning property ₤10 or more in annual rent, i.e. middle class - People’s Charter (1838 – 48) = a large organisation of workers, advocated the extension of franchise and oth. legislative reforms - abolition of the Corn Laws (1946) = i.e. high tariffs on imported grains > free trade system R e a c t i o n s i n L i t e r a t u r e : - > Thomas Carlyle’s contrib. to the “Condition of England Question” in Past and Present - > Benjamin Disraeli’s (1804 – 81, a novelist to become a PM) Sybil (1845), subtitled The Two Nations = the En. of the rich x the En. of the poor - > Elizabeth Gaskell
T h e M i d - V i c t o r i a n P e r i o d ( 1 8 4 8 – 7 0 ) P r o s p e r i t y : - the Factory Acts (1802 – 78) = regulated the conditions of labour in mines and factories > child labour restricted, working hours limited > conditions of the working classes improved - the 2nd Reform Bill (1867, under Disraeli) = franchise for the working class + abolition of the rotten boroughs and redistribution of parliamentary repres. - (+) economic prosperity > an enormous expansion of infl. throughout the globe > the growth of Empire - (+) the Great Exhibition (Hyde Park, 1851) = symbolised the triumphant feats of Victorian technology - (─) but: serious conflicts and anxieties beneath the placidly prosperous surface of the period R e l i g i o u s C o n t r o v e r s y : - division of the Church of En.: (a) Low Church = for a strictly moral Christian life; responsible for the emancipation of all slaves in the Br. Empire (1833) (b) Broad Church = open to modern advances (c) High Church = for holding to its orig. traditions x against liberal tendencies (d) + High Church Movement = The Oxford Movement (early 1830s): - < orig. in Oxford in the early 1830s as a Cath. revival within the Church of En. - reacted against state interference in relig. matters - for a revitalisation of the spirit of the great 16th – 17th c. divines, incl. J. Donne and Edward Herbert - > John Henry Newman (1801 – 90), the dominant figure among the orig. leaders: a thinker, preacher, essayist, prose writer, and poet of The Second Spring = the revival of the Roman Cath. Church (to which he converted) after 3 c. of persecution - > new hymn writers and poets, incl. John Keble (1792 – 1866) - > new attention to liturgy and liturgical celebration > transl. of Lat. and Greek hymns, incl. John Mason Neale (1818 – 66) - > new relig. Poets, incl. Christina Rossetti (1830 – 94) - later generation: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 89), & oth. U t i l i t a r i a n i s m : - < derived from the thought of Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) and his disciple James Mill (1773 – 1836, father of John Stuart M.) - human beings seek to maximise pleasure and minimise pain > a morally correct action = the one providing the greatest pleasure to the greatest number - x but: failed to recognise people’s spiritual needs: criticized by C. Dickens’s Hard Times S c i e n c e : - biology: C. Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) diminished the assumption of the humanity’s special role in the world - geology and astronomy with its new discoveries reduced the status of human species in time and space: A. Tennyson’s Maud, the stars as ‘innumerable’ tyrants of ‘iron skies’ - Higher Criticism: orig. in Ger. as a scientific attitude applied twd a study of the Bible, challenged the role of relig. in society R e a c t i o n s i n L i t e r a t u r e : - > C. Dickens’s attacks on the shortcomings of the Victorian society x Anthony Trollope’s more characteristic reflection of the mid-Victorian attitude twd the social and political scene - > R. Kipling’s ‘the White Man’s burden’, i.e. the moral responsibility for the expansion of empire x Queen Victoria’s mission ‘to protect the poor natives and advance civilisation’
T h e L a t e V i c t o r i a n P e r i o d ( 1 8 7 0 – 1 9 0 1 ) D e c a y o f V i c t o r i a n V a l u e s : - (+) a time of serenity and security = the age of house parties, longs weekends in the country, delights in London entertainment,…: the comfortable pace of these pleasant, well-fed gatherings immortalised in Henry James’s prose - (─) the cost of the empire apparent in colonial rebellions, massacres, and bungled wars, incl. the Boer War (1899 – 1902) to annex 2 independent rep. in the south of Af. controlled by Dutch settlers = Boers - the 2nd Reform Bill (1867, under Disraeli) > growth of labour as a political and economic force > growth of a variety of kinds of socialism R e a c t i o n s i n L i t e r a t u r e : - a sense of an overall change of attitudes: - attack on the mid-Victorian idols: Samuel Butler’s (1835 – 1902) criticism of C. Darwin and A. Tennyson, and satire on family life in The Way of All Flesh (1903) - notion of the pointlessness of the striving of the mid-Victorians > no answers to our problems to be found > our role = to enjoy the fleeting moments of beauty (Walter Pater)
T h e N i n e t i e s C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s : - the changing values embodied in Victoria’s pleasure-seeking son and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales x the opposite of his earnest-minded father, Prince Albert - the writers’ state of mind typical neither of the earlier Victorians x nor of the 20th c. > styled as ‘Late Victorians’ or ‘the first of the ‘Moderns’’ - reactions in lit.: no more a sense of gaiety x but: of melancholy T h e A e s t h e t i c M o v e m e n t : - ‘art for art’s sake’ = art unconc. with controversial issues, restricted to celebrating beauty in a highly polished style - art = independent for its having its own unique kind of value > poetry must be judged ‘as poetry and not another thing’ (T. S. Eliot) - self-conscious about living at the end of a great c. > a deliberate fin de siècle (= end-of-c.) pose: the drawings and designs of Aubrey Beardsley - consid. themselves anti-Victorians: the mid-Victorian earnestness of C. Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) x the late-Victorian comedy on earnestness of O. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) - the last heirs of the Romantics going back through D. G. Rossetti and A. Tennyson to J. Keats x but: the Romantic sensationalism developed into melancholy suggestiveness, world weariness, or mere emotional debauchery > a time of decadence and degeneration - the 1st to absorb the infl. of the Fr. symbolist poetry: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, & oth. - the Aesthetes incl. O. Wilde, A. Beardsley, W. Pater, & oth. + The Rhymer’s Club members, incl. W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, E. Dowson, John Davidson, Arthur Symons, & oth. R u d y a r d K i p l i n g & O t h e r s : - the dandyism and effeminacy of the Aesthetes x R. Kipling’s life of masculine action, and bearing of ‘the white man’s burden’ of responsibility for the civilizing mission of the Br. imperial power P o e t r y o f t h e 1 8 8 0 s – 9 0 s : - older generation: R. Browning, A. Tennyson, and C. A. Swinburne; to a certain extend T. Hardy - younger generation: - > R. Kipling’s balladry gave voice to the otherwise inarticulate, ordinary soldiers, and ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ > expressed middle-brow sentiments > pop. success: “Recessional”, on the Queen’s Jubilee; “The Ballad of East and West” and “Gunga Din”, on the Empire; “The Female of the Species” and “The Ladies”, on uppity women - > O. Wilde’s Fr.-inspired decadents: “Les Ballons” and “Symphony in Yellow”, precise, refined, impressionistic, conc. with beauty x The Ballad of Reading Gaol, vulnerable and protesting - > the Rhymer’s Club’s poised lyricism - > A(lfred) E(dward) Housman’s (1859 – 1936) preocc. with lost illusions, death, and homoeroticism - > Charlotte Mew’s (1869 – 1928) preocc. with unfulfilment, death, and burial T h e V i c t o r i a n P o e t r y C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s : - developed in the context of the novel - experimented with long narrative poems: A. Tennyson’s Maud, E. Barrett-Browning’s Aurora Leigh, R. Browning’s The Ring and the Book, & oth. - function: accord. to public expectation poets should be sages with sth to teach x but: older generation poets discomforted with the public role: A. Tennyson, R. Browning, and M. Arnold > younger generation poets distanced themselves from the public, embracing an identity as bohemian rebels F o r m : - experiments with character and perspective: R. Browning’s The Ring and the Book with the plot presented through 10 different perspectives - dramatic monologue - visual detail = use of detail to construct visual images repres. the poem’s dominant emotion brings poets and painters close together - sound = use of sound to convey meaning ‘where words would not’ (Arthur Hallam): the beautiful cadences of A. Tennyson and C. A. Swinburne x the roughness of R. Browning and G. M. Hopkins S u b j e c t : - heroic materials of the past: M. Arnold - materials of the poet’s own age: E. Barrett-Browning - < strongly infl. by the Romantics x but: lacked the confidence the Romantics felt in the power of the imagination - > W. Wordworth’s “Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”, an address to his sister upon revisiting a landscape x M. Arnold’s “Resignation”, the same subject x but: his rocks and sky ‘seem to bear rather than rejoice’ - > J. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” x T. Hardy’s “The Darkling Trush”, the nightingale becoming ‘an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small’ - Victorian reaction to the Romantic subjectivity: (a) attenuated Romanticism = art pursued for its own sake: D. G. Rossetti, C. A. Swinburne, & oth. (b) dramatic monologue = a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically distinct from the poet, ‘lyric in expression’ x but: ‘dramatic in principle’ (R. Browning): R. Browning, A. Tennyson, & oth.
T h e V i c t o r i a n N o v e l C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s : - novel = dominant form, extraordinary various in style and genre: - > C. Dickens’s extravagant comedy - > the Brontë sisters’ gothic romance - > W. M. Thackeray’s satire - > G. Eliot’s psychological fiction - > by the end of the c. also crime, mystery, and horror novels, sci-fi, detective stories, etc. - function: accord. to public expectation the novel should depict social problems to stimulate efforts for social reform: C. Dickens, E. Gaskell, & oth. F o r m : (a) a sprawling, panoramic expanse: - orig. publ. in a serial form encouraging a certain kind of plotting and pacing > novels = ‘large loose baggy monsters’ (H. James) (b) a multitude of characters, a number of plots: - repres. a large and comprehensive social world (c) a realistic presentation: - repres. a social world sharing the features of the one we inhabit C o n c e r n : (a) the protagonist’s effort to define his/her place in society: - stratified society x but: a chance for upward mobility: C. Dickens’s Pip can aspire to the ‘great expectations’ of the novel’s title, and C. Brontë’s Jane Eyre can marry her employer = a landed gentleman (b) the woman’s struggle for self-realisation: - woman = the repres. protagonist whose search for fulfilment emblematises the human condition - ‘ a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with meanness of opportunity’ (G. Eliot, Prelude to Middlemarch): Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, even Becky Sharp, & oth. - > women for the 1st time major authors: J. Austen, the Brontës, E. Gaskell, and G. Eliot the novel easily accessible for women writers = conc. with the domestic life they knew well, not built on uni education, not burdened by an august tradition as poetry, etc.
T h e V i c t o r i a n P r o s e ( i . e . N o n - f i c t i o n ) - < the term used to distinguish non-fiction prose writers from fiction writers and: to stress the centrality of argument and persuasion to Victorian intellectual life - incl. history, biography, theology, criticism, etc. - conc. with a wide range of controversial relig., political, and aesthetic topics - the periodical = the vehicle of the Victorian prose - function: didactic mission in urgent social and moral issues - > M. Arnold + W. Pater: culture, i.e. the serious appreciation of great works of lit., provides the immanence and meaning people once found in relig. - > M. Arnold x W. Pater: A.’s culture = a moral experience x P.’s culture = an aesthetic experience - => moral + aesthetic experience = the basis for the claims of modern lit. criticism
T h e V i c t o r i a n D r a m a a n d T h e a t r e - theatre = a flourishing and pop. institution - => wide appeal x but: limited artistic achievement - comedy of Victorian pretence and hypocrisy: G. B. Shaw’s ‘problem plays' on difficult social issues, infl. by the socially controversial plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) x O. Wilde’s comedies - infl. of drama in the novel: - > C. Dickens composed many scenes in his novels with theatrical techniques - > W. M. Thackeray repres. himself as the puppetmaster of his characters + employed the stock gestures and expressions of melodramatic acting in his illustr. in Vanity Fair - > + A. Tennyson, R. Browning, and H. James = unsuccessful playwrights
L o r d A l f r e d T e n n y s o n ( 1 8 0 9 – 9 2 ) L i f e : - appointed poet laureate in succession to W. Wordsworth (1850) - awarded a peerage (1884) W o r k : - < admired Virgil (70BC – 19BC, = Publius Vergilius Maro, author of the epic Aeneid) - < Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881, author of Sartor Resartus [1833] and Past and Present [1843]) - (a) a poet of the countryside - (b) a poet of the past, esp. the classical past: Idylls of the King (1859) - (c) author of poems on technological changes: confident in the evolutionary human progress x but: aware of the horrors of industrialism (slums, greed, etc.): “Locksley Hall” x but: “The Dawn” - (d) author of ‘newspaper verse’ = his slow, ponderous, and brooding mind had no time to brood in the composition: “The Charge of the Light Brigade” - > his lifetime: the most pop. of the poets x the Edwardian / Georgian period: repudiated x now: re-establ. Early Period: - = melancholic and self-absorptive - employed hypnotic echoes, repetitions, and subtle lyricism - embodied himself in characters and their moods, delineated objects vividly = linked states of mind to the scenery - produced no ‘descriptive poetry’ x but: was ‘creating scenery’ - preocc.: death-like states, death = a releasing experience - > “Mariana”, on a melancholy isolation through the consciousness of an abandoned woman - > “The Kraken”, “The Ballad of Oriana”, “The Lady of Shalott”, “The Lotos-Eaters”, & oth. Poems by Two Brothers (1827): - in collab. with his brother - > encouraged by a group of gifted Cambridge undergraduates = ‘The Apostles’, under the leadership of his friend Arthur Hallam (1811 – 33) Mature Period: - < the traumatic death of A. Hallam, and his consequential mourning, relig. uncertainties, and extensive study of science - = no more simply debilitating melancholy x but: a desperate sense of exclusion by a private grieving, and a shift into the public realm - the old mood of narcotic drowsiness balanced with: (a) poems of urgent simplicity: “Break, break, break” (b) poems of positive social direction: “Ulysses”, on the idea of progressive development; “Morte d’Arthur”, on a cyclic movement and historic renewal; & oth. (c) poems of an implicit tribute to A. Hallam The Princess: A Medley (1847): - = a long narrative fantasy poem - set in a medieval past x but: with a present-day prologue - conc.: women’s higher education - princess Ida experiments with a women’s college with all M excluded x but: repents of her Amazonian scheme to be united with the prince In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850): - = a long elegy, a tribute to A. Hallam as a friend and mentor - conc.: our relation to God and to nature = both grief x belief in spiritual and physical evolution, exploration of doubts x assertion of faith, conflicting validities of the reasoning mind x feelings craving for present comfort, etc. - incl. seasonal and calendar events suggesting the movement and measurement of time independent on the human grief - > early vol.: under hostile criticism as ‘obscure’ or ‘affected’ x but: I.M.: won him full critical recognition and the post of poet laureate (1850) - > remarkable not ‘because of the quality of its faith but because of the quality of its doubt’ (T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot) Maud: and Other Poems (1855): - > “Maud”, orig. subtitled “The Madness”, a long experimental monologue poem, a love-poem x but: opens starkly with the words ‘I hate’; incl. both an exalted passion x a sense of a breakdown = displays the bitterness and despair its alienated protagonist feels twd society - > “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, a public utterance, vigorously combines a protest against and a celebration of the Crimean War (1854 – 56) - > “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington”, a public utterance Later Period: - = accentuated mannerism - dignified blank verse difficult to describe commonplace objects while retaining poetical elevation Idylls of the King (1859): - = a large-scale epic - < uses the body of the Arthurian legend [King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table: (I) the legend of Camelot = a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of Arthur and Lancelot, (II) the legend of the quests of various knights to achieve the Holy Grail = a Christian relic, (III) the motif of courtly love: Lancelot + Guinevere, Tristan and Iseuld, etc.] - conc.: a vision of the rise and fall of civilisation - Arthur’s court and its decay due to sexual betrayal = a paradigm for the failure of an ideal - women = inspiration for men’s highest efforts x but: also their destruction Enoch Arden and Other Poems (1864): - in a cultivatedly artificial = ‘Parnassian’ language (Gerard Manley Hopkins) - > “Enoch Arden”, a long blank verse narrative poem on the everyday life in a fishing village
M a t t h e w A r n o l d ( 1 8 2 2 – 8 8 ) L i f e : - son of Dr Thomas A. (1795 – 1842) = a clergyman, headmaster of the Rugby School, educational reformer, and the godfather of Victorian earnestness: demanded moral and social responsibilities, forced boys into adult decision-making before their proper time, etc. - youth = dandy of a frivol mind > geniality and wit even in his serious criticism - middle age = inspector of schools: (a) travelled extensively, experienced the middle-class life > criticized its dullness (b) studied the schools of Eur. > criticized E education (c) studied classical lit. > criticized E lit. - later age = a professor of poetry at Oxford and lecturer touring throughout Am. - aim: a system of education for the middle classes, good education = the crucial need - an anti-Victorian figure x but: characteristically Victorian in his assumption the puritan middle classes can be changed W o r k : - conc.: how to live a full and enjoyable life in a modern industrial society? - his non-fiction seeks to counter negatives x but: his poetry embraces negatives, worries over them, and attempts to redirect them twd some hope - phases: (1) 1850s: poetry (2) 1860s: lit. and social criticism (3) 1870s: relig. and educational writings (4) 1880s: lit. criticism P o e t r y : - at his best as a poet of nature, his settings work to draw the meaning together: “Thyrsis” - A.: his poems repres. the ‘movement of mind of the last quarter of a century’ = a sick individual in a sick society - conc.: his own experiences of the loneliness as a lover, a longing for a serenity not to be found, despair in a universe with humanity’s role seeming incongruous ( Thomas Hardy): “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” - aim of poetry: to bring joy and make life bearable - dissatisfied with his poems (“Empedocles on Etna”), attempted to meet his own requirements x but: failed (“Sohrab and Rustum”, “Balder Dead”, & oth.) and abandoned poetry after 1860 - aesthetic demerits: excessive reliance on italics instead of on meter, frequent prosy flatness x or over- elaborated similes when attempting ‘the grand style’ The Strayed Reveler (1849): - = his 1st coll. also wrote following poems of distinction: “Empedocles on Etna”: - dissatisfied with it as too expressive of a ‘depression of mind’ “The Scholar Gypsy”: - a joyful celebration of the freedoms of an Oxford student’s escape from routine: (a) = a gypsy rejection of the consequences of the urban civilisation (b) = a poet’s attempt to escape into an idealised history “Thyrsis”: - = an elegiac monody on the dead Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 – 61, poet) - the soul of the dead poet required to act as an inspirer and bringer of joy to the world - nostalgia for an idealised past: reminiscences of the Gr. and Rom. pastoral tradition “Dover Beach” “The Forsaken Merman” N o n - f i c t i o n : - conc.: to formulate ‘ideals’ to ‘heal’ a sick society - culture = an open-minded intelligence to view life in all its aspects, incl. the social, political, and relig., and to cure the ills of a sick society Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888): - = a 2-vol. coll. of lit. critical essays - argues for the virtues of a plain style and for ‘high seriousness’: the poet = a serious thinker offering a guidance for his readers - > “The Study of Poetry”, studied the Eur. poetic tradition > praised the intellectual, philos., and educational enterprise of Fr. / Ger. x criticized the mentally foggy En.: E Romantic poets as provincial and lacking wide reading, Charles Dickens as a classic of philistinism, etc. - > “The Function of Criticism at the present Time”, lit. and lit. criticism = a force to produce a civilised society; the present confusions and uncertainties prevent an expressive modern poetry Culture and Anarchy (1869) and Friendship’s Garland (1871): - = provocative socially critical tracts - T. Carlyle and John Ruskin (1819 – 96, art and social critic) criticized the Victorian middle classes for their materialism and selfish indifference = immorality x but: A. criticized the ‘Philistines’ for their ignorance and narrow-mindedness = dullness - civilisation constituted by the 4 ‘powers’ = conduct, intellect and knowledge, beauty, and social life and manners x but: the E society constituted by a ‘Barbarian’ aristocracy, a ‘Philistine’ bourgeoisie, and an unlettered ‘Populace’ = none of them possesses culture - the pragmatic and anti-idealistic E present x but: the bright and classless E future, universally enlightened and with the narrow strictures of an inherited E ‘Hebraism’ (= Puritanism) balanced by sweeter arts of the ancient Gr.s - incl. cajolery, irony, satire, quotations from the nwsps, and memorable catchwords (‘sweetness and light’) - claims to offer freedom x but: lays down rules, enforces peace x but: suppresses the inconvenient, suggests the authoritarianism despising pop. culture, etc. Literature and Dogma (1873): - = a relig. critical tract - the Bible and church = a force producing a civilised society / culture x but: middle classes do not know how to read the Bible intelligently - concl.: both the Bible / church should be preserved and properly understood
R o b e r t B r o w n i n g ( 1 8 1 2 – 8 9 ) L i f e : - = ‘Mrs Browning’s husband’ = during his marriage known for his wife rather than for himself - < P. B. Shelley > temporary atheism and liberalism, and permanent ardent romanticism [see his marriage] - married Elizabeth Barrett, a 6 years older semi-invalid guarded by her tyrannical father, and eloped with her to Ita. W o r k : Content: - = philos. + relig. ‘teacher’: resolved the doubts troubling M. Arnold and A. Tennyson - God created an imperfect world, a perfect heaven, and an immortal human soul - x but: aware of the existence of evil, preocc. with characters of murderers, sadistic husbands, and petty manipulators - characters = connoisseurs (the Duke of “My Last Duchess”), artists, musicians, thinkers, and: manipulators - characters of the past = bishops and painters of the Renaissance, physicians of the Rom. Empire, musicians of the 18th c. Ger. x but: problems of the present = problems of faith x doubt, good x evil, function of the artist in modern life, etc. Form: - = experiments with language and syntax: grotesque rhymes and jaw-breaking diction - the incongruities of language = a humorous and appropriate counterpart to the imperfect world - < John Donne (1572 – 1631, a Jacobean metaphysical poet) > often discordant style, unexpected juxtapositions, prosiness, and awareness of everyday realities x but: oth. Victorian poets, incl. A. Tennyson and D. G. Rossetti < J. Keats, J. Milton, E. Spenser, & oth. classical poets > elevated diction and subjects and pleasing liquidity of sound - Victorian prose writers: (a) prosiness (b) the grotesque: “Holy-Cross Day” ( Dickens) (c) psychological insights in devious ways in which our minds work, in the self-justifying contortions of the minds of sinners and criminals, and in the complexity of our motives: “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” ( George Eliot) (d) ‘subtlety’ and ‘tact of omission’ ( Henry James) dramatic monologue poems: - separates the speaker from the poet, makes difficult to discern the relationship of the poet x his speaker: “A Grammarian’s Funeral”, the central character = a hero or a fool? - overhears characters in a self-revelatory, if scarcely truth-telling, soliloquy - each character individual through his articulation, emphasis, pause, reiteration, and/or idiolect - establ. a physical context through details, references, and objects poems with an identified persona as narrator: - conversational directness, familiarity btw the addresser x the addressee “Pauline” (1833): - = his 1st publ. poem - < P. B. Shelley = the most personal poet - > criticized for affliction with an ‘intense and morbid self-consciousness’ - resolved to avoid confessional writings D r a m a : Strafford (1836): - = his 1st publ. play, a historical tragedy - > all his plays failed - resolved to write dramatic monologues to avoid explicit autobiog. through imaginary speakers, and to preserve the characters of drama P o e t r y : Dramatic Lyrics (1842): - = his 1st coll. of dramatic monologue poems Men and Women (1855): - reflects his enjoyment in Ita. = picturesque landscapes, lively street scenes, and monuments from the past (esp. Renaissance past) Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1864) Dramatis Personae (1864): - > “Caliban upon Setebos”, one of his finest dramatic monologues, criticises Darwinism and natural (as opposed to supernatural) relig. The Ring and the Book (1868 – 9): - = his greatest single poem in 4 vol., the culmination of his experiment with the dramatic monologue - < based on a legal record of a murder trial in the 17th c. Rome: a brutally sadistic husband accuses his young wife of adultery with a priest trying to rescue her from her husband’s tyranny, stabs her to death, and is executed - employs a texture of voices: contrasts multiple points of view of participants and spectators, and opens up freshly complex vistas and new questions with each witness - puts the reader in the role of an investigating magistrate probing the confessions and impressions - > anticipates later novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) also wrote following poems of distinction: “My Last Duchess”: - = a dram. monologue - the duke speaks of his dead wife “Two in the Campagna”: - < opens with a questioning voice reminiscent of J. Donne’s - speaks of distinctness x not union, and agnosticism in love x not ideal convergence “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”: - = an elusive and suggestive Gothic poem - medieval in setting, ominous and disturbing in its precise evocation of horror - < the title from Edgar’s song in W. Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605)
E l i z a b e t h B a r r e t t - B r o w n i n g ( 1 8 0 6 – 6 1 ) L i f e : - unusually educated for a woman of her time: studied Lat., Gr., history, philos., and lit. - married R. Browning, eloped to Ita.: deeply involved in Ita. nationalist politics W o r k : - (a) early period: Romantic visionary narrative poetry - (b) mature period = contemp. topics, esp. liberal causes of her day, treated with a fervent moral sensibility - responded to the topical issues of history, tradition, and politics of the Ita. experiencing a painful evolution into a modern state x R. Browning’s retreat into historical perspectives - (c) late period = the Risorgimento [= a movement to unify Ita. as a nation-state] - > her lifetime: the most pop. woman poet x the modernists: criticised for the inappropriate didacticism and the rhetorical excess of Victorian poetry x now: re-establ. The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838) “The Cry of the Children” (1843): - = a poem criticising the exploitation of children in coal mines and factories - lit. = a tool of social protest and reform ( Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811 – 96]) Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850): - < supposedly a transl. from the Portug. language x but: her orig. creation - = a sequence of 44 love-sonnets written during the courtship - records the stages of her love for R. Browning and her private emotional awakening Casa Guidi Windows (1851): - = a poetic sequence - on contemp. issues: the Ita. political flux and its often contradictory nationalist aspirations Aurora Leigh: A Poem in Nine Books (1857): - = a blank verse ‘novel’ = with its crowded canvas and melodramatic plot closer to fiction than to poetry - the 1st work in E by a woman writer with the F protagonist identical with the author = a ‘female Prelude’ - on the growth of a woman poet’s mind, her conflict as an artist x woman, and her self-liberation by the poetry releasing ‘elemental freedom’ - (a) a F artistic career: the artists = a young woman committed to a socially inclusive realist art, passionately interested in social questions, and longing for knowledge and freedom - (b) a M philanthropic career: the cousin interested in A. as a helpmate in his liberal causes - (c) digresses into oth. lives, repres. social issues conc. women from the feminist POV - A. refuses a marriage proposal from her cousin to pursue a poetic career; rescues a fallen woman, they settle in Ita. and confront the chastened cousin - concl.: visionary optimism - B.: the present = a fit subject for epic poetry x oth. Victorian poets, incl. M. Arnold: the present = no actions heroic enough, and A. Tennyson: the Arthurian legend to repres. contemp. conc. also wrote: a transl. of Aeschylus’s (525 BC – 456 BC) Prometheus Bound (1833)
P r e - R a p h a e l i t e B r o t h e r h o o d - = a group of young anti-establishment painters - against the establ. academic style of painting in favour of the superior directness of expression, simplicity, and pure colours of the pre-Renaissance artists before Raphael (1483 – 1520, a painter and architect of the Florentine school in the Ita. High Renaissance) - founded by D. G. Rossetti (1848) - incl. the painters D. G. Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, F. G. Stephens (1828 – 1907), and James Collinson (1825 – 81), and the sculptor Thomas Woolner - cultural heroes: Christ; G. Chaucer, W. Shakespeare, J. Keats, & oth. - The Germ (4 issues in 1850) = their short-lived journal, an experimental amalgam of poetry, prose, and essay
+ E x c u r s u s : P r e - R a p h a e l i t e P a i n t i n g + F o r d M a d o x B r o w n ( 1 8 2 1 – 9 3 ) The First Translation of the Bible into English (1847 – 48): pictures Chaucer standing by The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (1845 – 51, 1853): pictures Chaucer in the central position also painted: the sleeping King Lear attended by Cordelia
+ J o h n E v e r e t t M i l l a i s ( 1 8 2 9 – 9 6 ) Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1850): a scene from W. Shakespeare’s The Tempest Isabella (1848 – 49): a scene of tender love x brotherly jealousy
+ W i l l i a m H o l m a n H u n t ( 1 8 2 7 – 1 9 1 0 ) The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro (1848): a scene from J. Keats’s “Eve of St Agnes”
P r e - R a p h a e l i t e P o e t r y : + T h o m a s W o o l n e r ( 1 8 2 5 – 9 2 ) My Beautiful Lady (1864): a poetic sequence D a n t e G a b r i e l R o s s e t t i ( 1 8 2 8 – 8 2 ) - a painter and a poet of decorative and descriptive poetry = a poet in his painting and a painter in his poetry - founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848) - fascinated with the F face and body, idealised women both sexually and spiritually: woman = a supreme mistress, an object of desire and worship - painting: women with dreamy stares as if breathless from visions of heaven x but: parted lips and voluptuous curves suggest an earthly kind of ecstasy combines spirituality + sensuality - poetry: (a) early poetry = in the less elaborate Pre-Raphaelite mode: “My Sister’s Sleep” (b) mature poetry = in a stunning polysyllabic diction giving an effect of opulence and density to his lines - R.: art should be conc. with the beautiful x not with the useful or didactic, ‘colour and meter’ should be superior to ‘all intellectual claims’ - > anticipated the later Aesthetic Movement of Walter Pater (1839 – 94), Oscar Wilde, & oth. - < J. Keats and Dante The House of Life (1870): - = a sonnet sequence on the relationship of spirit and body in love - Coventry Patmore’s (1823 – 96) The Angel in the House (1854 – 63), an adoring long poem idolising his wife in her domesticity also wrote following poems of distinction: “The Blessed Damozel”: - = a fleshly x but: heavenly vision of a transfigured beloved from Dante’s Beatrice - set in a heaven warm with physical bodies “A Half-Way Pause”, “Autumn Idleness”, and “The Woodspurge”: - = landscape poems of a striking intensity of vision also wrote: The Early Italian Poets (1861), re-publ. as Dante and His Circle, a prose study of Dante
A l g e r n o n C h a r l e s S w i n b u r n e ( 1 8 3 7 – 1 9 0 9 ) - briefly involved with the Pre-Raphaelites x but: remained an outsider and a rebel - characteristic by his radicalism, libertarianism, paganism, and distaste for Christian narrowness - deep understanding of the forms and styles of classical culture Poems and Ballads (1866): - = metrical echoes of and variations on Gr. poetry - > “Hymn to Proserpine”, spoken by the dying anti-Christian Rom. Emperor - > “Dolores”, reverses the Cath. notion of the suffering Virgin to ‘a poisonous queen’ Songs before Sunrise (1871): - expresses his passionate political conviction for the Risorgimento
W i l l i a m M o r r i s ( 1 8 3 4 – 9 6 ) - revolutionised E design x but: his poetry lifeless, derivative, and long-winded P o e t r y : The Earthly Paradise (1868 – 70): - retells tales from classical and northern sources, esp. the newly rediscovered Icelandic sagas - attempts to create a pop. narrative art akin to G. Chaucer’s to unmake the false and artificial x but: his sophistication prevents his folksy aspirations “Chants for Socialists” (1885): - = a sing-song ballad poem - targeted at the Socialist politics P r o s e : A Dream of John Ball (1886 – 87) and News from Nowhere (1890): - = polemical fantasies - uses the past to project an ideal into the future - the latter a vision of a world freed from machines and mechanical thinking to release individual creativity C h r i s t i n a R o s s e t t i ( 1 8 3 0 – 9 4 ) L i f e : - daughter of an exiled Ita. patriot, younger sister of D. G. R. - her father became a permanent invalid, the economic situation worsened, and her own health deteriorated involved with the Anglo-Cath. movement within the Church of En. - spent the rest of her life bound with strict relig. principles and with charitable work W o r k : (a) early poetry: - in an escapist, dreamy, Tennysonian mode (b) mature poetry: - in a distinctive F voice - genres: a pure lyric, narrative fable, ballad, and devotional verse - her consciousness of gender criticises the conventional repres. of women in the Pre-Raphaelite art: “In An Artist’s Studio”, a sonnet - combines sensuousness and relig. severity in ‘an aesthetics of renunciation’ = a poetry of negation, denials, and constraints - reduces the self with a coy playfulness and sardonic wit x but: preserves for it a secret inner space: “Winter: My Secret” Emily Dickinson (1830 – 86) devotional poems: - < George Herbert (1593 – 1633, a poet, orator, and priest in the Church of En.) - > “Up-Hill”, a question-and-answer poem - > “A Bruised Reed shall He not Break”, a dialogue poem secular relationships poems: - emotional evasion and the failure of human sympathy = human alternatives to relig. consolation - preocc. with the absence of certainty - > “Promises Like Pie-Crust”, mocking - > “Winter My Secret”, elusive - > “Remember”, ambiguous and mortal - > Song “When I am Dead my Dearest”, treats the human love in a Keatsian mode, with a take-it-or- leave-it quality - > “Autumn Violets”, reverses the idea of autumnal fulfilment, claims love in middle age as forced and inappropriate as spring flowers in autumn Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862): > “Goblin Market”: - = a seemingly simple moral fable for children x but: the style deceptively simple - accumulative in imagery, restless in rhythm, both rhymed and half-rhymed - on the relig. themes of temptation and sin, and redemption by suffering S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” - strangeness Lewis Carroll x but: a spiritual message - climax: goblins force Lizzie to eat their seductive fruit, not from the Tree of Knowledge, but from an orchard of sensual delights, she resists Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872): - = rhymes of direct simplicity, for children The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866): - = poems of alliteration and assonance - > “The Prince’s Progress”, an allegory of the unhappy uncertainty of emotional commitment A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
7 C r o s s r o a d s o f R o m a n t i c i s m a n d R e a l i s m a s P i c t u r e d i n N o v e l s b y 1 9 t h C e n t u r y W o m e n W r i t e r s (The Brontës, G. Eliot, and E. Gaskell)
C h a r l o t t e B r o n t ë ( 1 8 1 6 – 5 5 ) L i f e : - daughter of a clergyman; also a younger sister of Branwell B. (1817 – 48), and an elder sister of Emily B. and Anne B. - attended a school for the daughters of poor clergy, her 2 elder sisters died here of harsh and unhealthful conditions [see her Jane Eyre (1847)] > educated at home by discussing poetry, history, and politics - all the 3 sister writers Charlotte, Emily, and Anne led a solitary life in a relative seclusion x but: possessed an informed view of the wider world W o r k : - < admired William Makepeace Thackeray = the ‘social regenerator’, and his novels = social statements: dedicated him the 2nd ed. of her Jane Eyre The Professor (1846): - < worked as a pupil-teacher in the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels - filters her own alien experience of Brussels through the reminiscence of a M narrator - turns away from the ‘ornamented and redundant’ of the early sagas in collaboration with her brother Branwell x to the ‘plain and homely’ Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847): - argues for independence and passionate commitment, apologises explosions of wrath, misery, and despair - x but: praises the virtues of sexual and marital interdependence, self-discipline, submission, and Christian resolution - the eponymous character and protagonist = an unloved and unjustly persecuted child suffering with her sense of sexual, relig., and familial injustice: ‘Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel…’ = women suffer from restraint and stagnation the same as men would - J. seeks a worthy partner to respect her, follows her conscience, and rejects both the adulterous and bigamous Rochester and the missionary St John Rivers - concl.: reunited with the widowed and maimed Rochester - the co-existence of alternative duties and vocations: J. follows her free will and the due exercise of a God-given conscience, and finds a secular happiness to be her means of salvation Shirley (1849): - = a ‘Condition of England’ novel - conc.: the machine-breaking in the industrial North Villette (1853): - < reshapes some of the material of her The Professor - conc.: restrictions on women’s choice and women’s employment - the protagonist = Lucy Snowe, an E Protestant isolated in the unlovely urban Belgian setting - asserts her separateness and the superiority of her own personal, moral, and professional sensibility - encounters a growing love and the hope for emotional happiness and professional achievement - x but: concl. = an Atlantic storm and an uncertainty of the fulfilment of her love
E m i l y B r o n t ë ( 1 8 1 8 – 4 8 ) L i f e : - [see also: Charlotte B.] - spent most of her life in a parsonage on the wild Yorkshire moors: reclusive and reserved W o r k : - Branwell and Charlotte’s childhood series of book-length manuscripts about the fantasy kingdom Angria < the elaborate stories, orig. acted out as plays, inspired by Branwell’s box of wooden soldiers - Emily and Anne’s later separate series about the imaginary island Gondal - < oriental and Gothic extravaganzas together with contemp. political realities and personalities P o e t r y : (a) the Gondal saga poems: - conc.: political intrigue, passionate love, rebellion, war, imprisonment, and exile - > “Remembrance”, “The Prisoner”, & oth. (b) personal lyrics: - conc.: freedom, death, and landscape - sought to break through the constrictions of ordinary life by the power of imagination or by death to transcendent the mortal life, and discover a fuller, freer world of spirit ( Catherine and Heathcliff’s love and self-identification with each oth. in Wuthering Heights [1847]) - a visionary world the Romantic poets, esp. G. G. Byron and P. B. Shelley x but: her hymn-like stanzas of a distinctive haunting quality - an acute, passionate attachment to place ( Catherine’s self-identification with the rocks and the moorland) - > “Shall earth no more inspire thee”, insists on the inspiring beauty of wild landscape - > “No coward soul is mine”, the pantheistic landscape both physical and visionary Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846): - Currer, Ellis, and Acton = genderless pseudonyms for Charlotte, Emily, and Anne B. - > sold only 2 copies x but: inspired each of them to write a novel F i c t i o n : Wuthering Heights (1847): - = a conventional Gothic novel x but: in an unconventional, diverse, and multi-layered narrative shape - an extraordinary narrative complexity: shifts times and perceptions, incl. the POV of 2 major and 5 minor characters - the prime narrator = Lockwood, the alternative narrator = Nelly Dean - Nelly shifts her loyalties and emotional alliances: Catherine: ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath… Nelly, I am Heathcliff…’ x Nelly: ‘I was out of patience with her folly.’ - juxtaposes the Trushcross Grange x the Wuthering Heights, the passive gentility of the Lintons x the restless energy of Heathcliff, the complacency of insiders x the intrusions of outsiders, and: freedom x restraint, and love x pain - the seeming randomness of events and associations and the arbitrariness of what and how the reader learns fall into their proper places only during the reading - the nature and phenomena within and beyond nature remain ‘wuthering’ and turbulent till the last: concl. = ‘phantoms’ of Heathcliff and a woman reported to have been seen
A n n e B r o n t ë ( 1 8 2 0 – 4 9 ) [see also: Charlotte B.] - > in the shadow of the work of her sisters Emily B. and Charlotte B. Agnes Grey (1847): - conc.: restrictions of middle-class women on the only respectable form of paid employment - the governess narrator endures a loss of status, humiliation, snobbery, and insult x but: retains a calm sense of her own moral justification The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848): - conc.: a drastically unhappy marriage and the woman’s escape - < the graphic and ‘coarse and disgusting’ description of the alcoholic brutality based on the language and behaviour of her brother Branwell B.
G e o r g e E l i o t ( 1 8 1 9 – 8 0 ) L i f e : - b. Mary Ann Evans; adopted a masculine pseudonym to publicly distinguish btw the highly moral narrator x the relig. sceptic, adulteress [lover of the married George Henry Lewes (1817 – 78), a philos. and lit. critic], and outcast - largely self-educated: studied relig. history (esp. the Ger. ‘Higher Criticism’ [= a scientific attitude applied twd a study of the Bible]), ancient classics, philos., modern science, sociology and politics - < her chapter epigraphs, narratorial reflections, and: arguments of her novels W o r k : - avoided outspokenness on faith, feminism, and sexual morality - employed the patient and generally tolerant narrative voice of gradual evolution - demanded an intellectual, emotional, and: moral response from the reader Adam Bede (1859): - set in a rural working community in the recent past = free of the confusions and contradictions of the industrial and urban present - advocates the values of an old-fashioned and stratified En. for the society potentially divided by war and industrialisation x but: held together by relig. and class-interdependence - introd. a new kind of heroism = a heroic uprightness emerging from the condition of ordinary country life x but: does not escape into a rural idyll - > enjoyed by Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901, reign 1837 – 1901) The Mill on the Floss (1860): - conc.: the provincial E society = reinforces family values x but: stifles bids for personal liberation - the protagonist = Maggie Tulliver, becomes disoriented when the stable world around her begins to shatter - concl.: a catastrophe literally overwhelms her Silas Marner (1861): - = a more schematised and optimistic moral fable - x but: explores a series of ethical, social, and spiritual dilemmas Romola (1863): - = a historical novel, set in the Renaissance Florence - the eponymous character and protagonist: the only feminist protagonist, rejects the narrow obligations of the Church and State = the framework of lost Renaissance values Felix Holt, the Radical (1866): - = a political novel, set in the period of the 1st Reform Bill [1832, franchise for all M owning property ₤10 or more in annual rent, i.e. middle class] - conc.: a pop. agitation in an E country town - explores the conservative fears for the Constitution x limited changes brought by the Reform Bill Middlemarch (1871 – 72): - = a carefully wrought novel, set in the period of the 1st Reform Bill - interweaves a web of individual destinies, contrasts public x private history, and juxtaposes the historic burden of Rome x the modern history of an E town - aspires an epic resonance: the Prelude conc. with the 16th c. St Theresa (= Teresa of Ávila, 1515 – 82, a major figure of the Cath. Reformation in Spain) x the fictional protagonist Dorothea Brooke - both aspire to serve and to reform x but: D. lacks ‘coherent social faith and order’ = women silenced by social conditioning - D.’s historical impact = nameless and not-remembered ‘unhistoric acts’ x but: contrib. to ‘the growing good of the world’ Daniel Deronda (1876): - = an Anglo-Jewish novel, her most cosmopolitan - set in a cultivated Eur. world of artists - contrasts the sensibilities of limited E aristocracy x intense Jewish outsiders - concl.: the F protagonist realises the inevitable progress into an uncertain future to destabilise the destinies of human beings
E l i z a b e t h G a s k e l l ( 1 8 1 0 – 6 5 ) - best known for her industrial Manchester novels - M. = the urban phenomenon of the age: (+) commercial success of manufacture, pioneering of the factory system, use of huge amounts of human and physical energy (−) human problems of rapid industrialisation, divisions of class, hard labour, low quality of life - Friedrich Engels (1820 – 95, [co-author of The Communist Manifesto (1848), author of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)]), the expatriate Ger. industrialist and M.’s most celebrated critic Mary Barton (1848): - = a ‘Tale of Manchester Life’ - conc.: the industrial conflict, strikes and lock-outs, low wages, enforced unemployment, and the consequentially growing class-consciousness, incl. the Chartists agitation [Chartism = a movement for social and political reform in the UK, the name from the People’s Charter (1838), setting out the main aims] - detailed observation of contrasting ways of living, working, and perceiving x the ignorance of both the readers and characters of conditions in M.’s slums - < the title-page quotes T. Carlyle and the opening half-echoes his Past and Present North and South (1854 – 55): - = her 2nd M. novel, politically optimistic - the protagonist = Margaret Hale, her only F protagonist to achieve active mastery over her situation - shocked by the market economy: ‘as if commerce were everything and humanity nothing’ x but: impressed by a dinner debate of M. men - contrasts the snobberies, chivalries, and artificiality of the country gentry of the South x the anti- gentlemanly self-made manufacturers of the North - the independence and pride of industrial workers despite the appalling working and living conditions x the subservience, acquiescence, and superstition of the rural poor Cranford (1851 – 53): - the protagonist: a woman of social status x but: her moral standing based on respect within the limited community of a country town Ruth (1853): - the protagonist: an unmarried mother, required to a redemptive self-sacrifice to win back respect from society (1) Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), (2) Wives and Daughters (1864 – 66): - = her finest novels - conc.: the growth of contrasted F protagonists - (1) Sylvia Robson = a farmer’s daughter, barely educated, self-willed, passionate, and divided btw resolution x equally heady irresolution: her marriage proves a disaster - set in the Napoleonic Wars - motif of the disappearance of a lover kidnapped by a gang enforcing recruitment into the Navy: violence of war x romantically dangerous draw of the sea - a sympathetic treatment of humble people, employment of northern speech and local detailing < indebted to W. Scott’s ‘Waverley novels’ - (2) Molly Gibson = a respected widowed doctor’s daughter, experiences a series of domestic crises and grows to maturity: her marriage proves a meeting of equals - = a series of interwoven stories, a psychological study of a household and its social connections
8 P o r t r a y a l o f S o c i a l P a n o r a m a a n d t h e M e t h o d o f C r i t i c a l R e a l i s m i n t h e W o r k s o f C h a r l e s D i c k e n s
C h a r l e s D i c k e n s ( 1 8 1 2 – 7 0 ) L i f e : - son of a clerk; the family suffered financial insecurity, moved from place to place, and ended up in London - his father imprisoned for debt, the family went to live with him x but: C. remained outside and worked in a shoe-blacking factory - = a traumatic experience, an intense feeling of injury and abandonment - a sense of himself as ‘a child of singular abilities’ suffering unjustly his Oliver Twist (1837 – 38), David Copperfield (1849), and Pip in Great Expectations (1860 – 61) - became a clerk, a freelance nwsp reporter, and author of fiction under the pseudonym Boz - (a) refused by his 1st love, a sense of having lost his ideal love > (a) his women characters as unreachable ideals - (b) married the daughter of a fellow journalist, Catherine Hogarth (1816 – 79), had 10 children, frustrated by the household chaos > (b) his women characters as inadequate keepers of domestic order - separated from his wife - underwent a series of lucrative professional readings, resulted in his exhaustion and sudden death W o r k : - author of baggy plots filled with incident and a multitude of characters - an acute observer of gesture and habit, London streets and interiors, spontaneity and misery - an acute ear for speech and its aberrations, a constant inventor of metaphorical language characters: - employs a reductive technique of characterisation (used by E[dward] M[organ] Forster as an example to illust. the ‘flat’ character x as opposed to the ‘round’ one) - builds a character from a repeated set of gestures, phrases, and metaphors - x but: the repeated tics identifying his characters repres. their emotional fixations and social distortions: whenever Mrs Micawber enters the story in David Copperfield, she repeats: ‘I will never desert Mr Micawber.’ - observes in great detail the outward character traits x does not speculate about the workings of the characters’ minds and consciences - x but: perhaps the finest delineator of mental aberration, creator of a varied line of murderers, self- tormentors, and Gothic villains - realises and exploits the relationship btw character and environment criticism: - = the wittiest, the most persuasive, and the most influential voice - (a) appeals for action and earnestness - (b) remains faithful to Christianity as a moral basis for thought, action, and writing - (c) favourite with a broad spectrum of Victorian readers - x but: a political edge and awareness of sth being wrong with the society (a) early period: - = a comedy of humours - conc. = social abuses: the workhouses in Oliver Twist, the abusive schools in Nicholas Nickleby (1838 – 39), etc. (b) mature period: - = a grotesque - his grotesque distortions reflect failures of humanity - his increasingly dark social vision accompanied by an urgent social criticism: Hard Times (1854) subtitled For These Times and dedicated to T. Carlyle = in the tradition of C.’s social indictment Signs of the Times (1829) - his vision reinforced by the systemically organised metaphors: Bleak House (1852 – 53), on the failing the legal system x but: symptomatic of a larger social ill symbolised by the fog in the opening - recurrent subjects of prisons = a particular social abuse, and a metaphor for the psychological captivity: A Visit to Newgate [= London’s criminal prison], Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers (1836 – 37), and Little Dorrit (1855 – 57) - fiction = a tool to stir the human heart and evoke humanitarian feelings - x but: his sentimental endings inconsistent with his social analysis, his characters never change the world outside, and end with an assertion of the virtues of home and heart - his novels together reflect the nature of the Victorian urban society with its conflicts and disharmonies, and the values to shape its perceptions, incl. its sentimentality J o u r n a l i s m : - founder & ed. of the weekly magazine Household Words (1850 – 59, [< the title from the line in W. Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599): ‘Familiar in his mouth and household words’]), publ. works on political and social issues, incl. his own work, E. Gaskell, & oth. - > due to a dispute btw D. and the publishers later replaced by All the Year Round (1859 – 83) - his novels publ. as monthly / weekly serialisations intimate relationship with his readers - > (a) early period: readily responded to what the public wanted - > (b) later period: restless about the burgeoning nature of his career Sketches by Boz (1836): - = an anecdotal and descriptive coll. - > successful offered to publ. a book in serial instalments accompanied by illustr. F i c t i o n : The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836 – 37): - = generally known as Pickwick Papers - = a picaresque novel - conc.: the adventures of Mr P. and his friends travelling around En. - successful next instalments Oliver Twist: or The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837 – 38): - the opening criticises the effects of the workhouse system - contrasts the insecurities of criminal life x the comforts of bourgeois respectability - contrasts different scenes, moods, and narrative styles Nicholas Nickleby (1838 – 39): - criticises the exploitation of unwanted children in a bleak Yorkshire school - criticises the do-nothing and snobbish aristocracy, the inefficiency of Parliament, and the aggression of market capitalism The Old Curiosity Shop (1840 – 41): - follows Little Nell to her rural death-bed moves the reader with her mortality Barnaby Rudge (1841): - = a historical novel, set in London of the Gordon Riots (1780, [< named for Lord George Gordon, founder of the Protestant Association = initiated a series of predominantly Protestant religious uprisings against the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1778) = ensured certain benevolence to Rom. Cath.] A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), & oth.: - = from his series of Christmas books Martin Chuzzlewit (1843 – 44): - criticises selfishness, self-centredness, criminality, and exploitation - M. finds Am. as much corrupted as his native En. Dombey and Son (1846 – 48): - thematically consistent and almost symphonic in its use of motifs, repeated phrases, and images David Copperfield (1849): - < semi-autobiog. - conc.: the 1st person narrator’s slow ‘disciplining’ of the heart Bleak House (1852 – 53): - = a satire on the workings of the Court of Chancery - solves private mysteries, lawsuits, and crimes x but: does not tackle the underlying problems of dirt, disease, and urban decay - a complex and demanding double narrative: one narrator employs the present tense, the oth. the past tense = together give a sense of an unfolding mystery Hard Times (1854): - = a satire on the effects of the Industrial Rev. in northern En. Little Dorrit (1855 – 57): - = his most sombre novel - set in a London debtors’ prison x but: gives a broader Eur. frame of reference A Tale of Two Cities (1859): - = a revolutionary novel - < T. Carlyle - set in London / Paris, in the prisons Newgate / the Bastille, and in 1770s / 1780s - the overturn of old oppressions and the introd. of new ones also a passionate amateur actor and a professional role-player on public platforms fascinated with double lives and masks: Great Expectations (1860 – 61): - the 1st person narrator and protagonist = Pip, gets manipulated and left empty Our Mutual Friend (1864 – 65): - the protagonist = obliged to adopt the persona of a dead man - incl. some of D.’s most fluently inventive dialogue and some of his finest black comedy The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870): - the protagonist = probably a murderer with one respectable life as a cathedral choirman x another as a London-based opium addict - left unfinished
9 C u r r e n t s a n d C o u n t e r c u r r e n t s i n t h e P e r i o d o f C r i t i c a l R e a l i s m (W. M. Thackeray, A. Trollope, and L. Carroll)
W i l l i a m M a k e p e a c e T h a c k e r a y ( 1 8 1 1 – 6 3 ) L i f e : - a lifelong friendship with Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800 – 59, [= advocate of a gradual political evolution, his History of England = the history of En. as ‘the history of progress’, reassured the liberal Victorian En., and by extension, Scot. and Ir.]): (a) admired each other’s books (b) T. consid. continuing M.’s History of England (1848 – 61) x but: did not fulfil the intention W o r k : S h o r t F o r m s : - = an essayist, a lecturer, and an intensely amusing comic journalist writing under various pseudonyms, incl. ‘Charles James Yellowplush, a footman’ & oth. Punch’s Prize Novelists: - = a series of parodies of leading writers of the day, incl. Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 81, a statesman, PM, and novelist) & oth. - < publ. in the Punch (1841 – 1992, 1996 – 2002, a weekly magazine of humour and satire) - incl. also satire against the modern ‘Newgate School’ of criminal lit. Book of Snobs: “By One of Themselves” (1847): - = orig. as The Snob Papers = a series of articles for the Punch - satirises the upper- / middle-class society - x but: acknowledges the familiar addiction to the vices it observes, even in the narrator himself The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1851): - = a series of lectures - < shares both Macaulayan Whiggism and his lit. tastes F i c t i o n : Catherine (1839 – 40): - = a short anti-heroic tale The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844; revised as The Memories of Barry Lyndon, 1852): - = a more ambitious novel - the narrator and protagonist = an Ir. adventurer - obliged to join the army x but: deserts and estbl. himself as a professional gambler in the courts and spas of Eur. - his upward mobility marked by the uneasy shifts in his own name: the final form derives from his unhappy marriage to a wealthy aristocratic widow - a congenital liar: his narrative = an exercise in unreliability - occasionally commented on by an ed. adds an extra layer to the fictional games Vanity Fair: “Novel without a Hero” (1847 – 48): - presents things ‘more melancholy than mirthful’, and as dark as funny - the narrator = the ‘Manager of the Performance’ of the Preface, the showman manipulating the puppets, and the preacher drawing lessons from their behaviour - sets himself up as a ‘Satirical-Moralist’ = does not only amuse x but: teaches - denies heroism to its characters, and undercuts both military / civil greatness - questions all pretensions to vice and virtue: contrasts the unscrupulous ambitions of Becky Sharp x the asinine complacency of Amelia Sedley x the ‘honesty’ of William Dobbin - concl.: William wins his beloved Amelia x but: the narrator squashes him and asks rhetorically and knowingly: ‘Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?’ - the masterpiece of his narrative disconcertion The History of Pendennis (1848 – 50): - = subtitled ‘his fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy’ - conc.: the development of the eponymous character and protagonist, Arthur P., a young gentleman - torn btw domestic virtue x the pleasures of the world, a maternal brunette x a seductive blond - his greatest enemy = himself and his sexual awaking, laziness, indulgence, debt, and immaturity - concl.: succeeds both in love and the literary life - [see also: The Adventures of Philip (1861 – 62)] The History of Henry Esmond (1852): - set in the reign of Queen Anne (1665 – 1714, reign 1702 – 14) - (a) pays tribute to the fiction of the 18th c. - (b) provides the 19th c. insight into the historical process - (c) intermixes the private x the public - the 1st person narrator and protagonist: a moody, melancholic, self-doubting, and fitfully romantic aristocrat = allows for the expression of confused motives - concl.: a passive withdrawal Macaulayan Whiggish confidence - [see also: The Virginians (1857 – 59)] The Newcomes (1853 – 55): - = his most obviously ‘Victorian’ novel - conc.: an extended genteel family - the upright Colonel Newcome, an Ind. Army officer = the only to remain the ‘most respectable’ of the subtitle and to maintain the virtues of true ‘gentlemanliness’ The Virginians (1857 – 59): - = a sequel to The History of Henry Esmond - conc.: the genteel Esmond family in their Virginian retreat - on the dilemmas posed by political divisions within a family in the period of the Am. Rev. The Adventures of Philip (1861 – 62): - < loosely interconnected with The History of Pendennis, as if a part of an expanding loose family chronicle - purports to be narrated by Arthur Pendennis
A n t h o n y T r o l l o p e ( 1 8 1 5 – 8 2 ) L i f e : - < the most determined and consistent admirer of W. M. Thackeray - < hater of a noisily committed lit.: dismissed C. Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ - fascinated by party politics as observer of human tribalism, ambition, and delight in power - unsuccessfully tried to enter Parliament - described himself as a Conservative-Liberal aspired to neutrality also as a writer W o r k : - = the most informed and observant political novelist in E - conc.: the politics of parliamentary and ecclesiastical manoeuvres and scandals, country-house shuffles and reshuffles, and personalities in conflict and in mutual complement - author of nearly 50 novels, and of travel-books, biographies, essays, and critical works La Vendée (1850): - = his earliest work, an unsuccessful experiment with historical fiction - < his experience of and affection for the modern Ir. Autobiography (1875 – 76): - often misleading - puts an exaggerated stress on his supposedly miserable childhood due to bad schooling and parental neglect - his father: a barrister and unsuccessful farmer = a model failure to him - his mother Frances T. (1780 – 1863): a professional writer supporting the family [author of the best- seller Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) and a subsequent stream of novels and travel-books, incl. the socially conscious Manchester novel The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840)]: (a) offended by her lit. career > caricatured her as a genteel scribbler in The Way We Live Now (1874 – 75) (b) x but: impressed by her efficiency > inspired his own self-discipline and an addiction to routine The Prime Minister (1875 – 76): - the protagonist = a thin-skinned x but: upright man with no greater ambition than only to introd. a decimal currency - (a) power both elusive and hollow - (b) heroes and ideals constantly to be challenged - < W. M. Thackeray - > himself a great political novelist because he distrusts both politics and politicians T h e ‘ B a r c h e s t e r ’ S e r i e s : - = a sequence of novels set in a fictional E cathedral town and its surrounding countryside The Warden (1855): - conc.: a local scandal broadens into a national issue, and an upright man becomes a victim of circumstances beyond his control Barchester Towers (1857): - = one of his most successful comic observations of the political process at work = a series of petty ploys and manoeuvres, and a clash of personalities - conc.: a threat to the complacent security by the advent of a new Bishop and his Evangelical wife The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867): - = a conscious concl. - suggests the effects of ageing, death, and an ill-founded suspicion on an establ. community Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), and The Small House at Allington (1862 – 46): - conc.: less clerical politics x more secular match-making and failures in love T h e ‘ P a l l i s e r ’ S e r i e s : - = a sequence of novels conc. with the family connections of the Duke of Omnium - of a more metropolitan consciousness and cosmopolitan culture Can Your Forgive Her? (1864 – 65), and The Eustace Diamonds (1871 – 73): - political interests only peripheral - parliamentary conc. relieved by ‘love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport, for the sake of my readers’ (A. Trollope) Phineas Finn (1867 – 69) and Phineas Redux (1873 – 74): - conc.: the political career of an Ir. MP, outsider to the Br. Establishment - the protagonist = the object of F flirtation and the victim of M jealousy and suspicion also wrote: The Way We Live Now (1874 – 75): - fits in no ‘series’ - takes a broad critical view of society and its corruption = a nation caught up in deceit, decadence, and financial speculation - his most disconcerting work and the most distinctive tribute to the Thackerayan precedent
L e w i s C a r r o l l ( 1 8 3 2 – 9 8 ) L i f e : - = b. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll - his pen name plays on his real name: ‘Lewis’ = the anglicised form of Ludovicus, Lat. for Lutwidge, and ‘Carroll’ = the anglicised form of Carolus, Lat. for Charles - searched for a vocation amid the negative ‘Babel of voices’ of the mid-Victorian En., and accepted the dull stability of life as a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, and a deacon in the Church of En. - also one of the very best Victorian photographers, esp. famous for his pictures of F child nudes (now suspected of paedophilia) x but: also a well-known gentlemen-photographer, author of pictures of people, animals, landscapes, works of art, etc. W o r k : - displays a facility at word play, logic, and fantasy - x but: all embedded deeply in the modern human culture P r o f e s s i o n a l W r i t i n g s : A Syllabus of Plain Algebraical Geometry (1860) Condensation of Determinants (1866) Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879) C h i l d r e n F i c t i o n : Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1862 +): - = the provisional title of the story he began telling to the children of Dean Henry Liddell (1811 – 98), incl. Alice Pleasance L. (1852 – 1934), in a rowing boat travelling on the Thames for a picnic outing - a series of fantastic adventures of the child protagonist Alice after she fell through a rabbit-hole x but: the author denied his ‘little heroine’ was based on any real child - Alice L. asked him to write the story down for her and 2 y. later she was presented with the manuscript Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865): - = the revised and renamed manuscript of the former - managed to transcend the dry reserve demanded by his clerical and educational position: the recapture of childhood seemed to offer him release from his sense of himself as a to some degree unfulfilled man - an intelligent and whimsical children’s book: takes a new view of children as distinct from adults x rather than as adults-in-waiting, and re-consid. the adult assumptions through the children’s eyes - finds a pleasure in exploring nonsense = an alternative way of viewing things (like looking-glasses) - finds a joy in disjunction, distortion, and displacement = the mirror images of unity, shapeliness, and stability - seemingly untroubled by the scientific and relig. controversies of his time: allows for a space to remain in the gloomy grown-up world where the playful and the joyfully absurd can triumph x but: a wistful sadness - the protagonist = a child insistent on the rightness of the values of middle-class society and of the elementary education - experiences the landscapes overturning ordinary perception x but: survives the nightmares because she is only partly aware of their being nightmares, her earnest assurance and self-confidence give her a mental clarity to counter the games confronting her Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872): - = a sequel of the former - in a darker mood - x but: A. always wakes from her dreams / crosses back through the looking glass into what child readers are led to assume is an emotionally, physically, and intellectually secure world P o e t r y : - plays rhythmically with the paradoxes and whimsically with the philos. propositions that fascinated him in his professional life - evident in his parodies of Isaac Watts (1674 – 1748, the 1st prolific and pop. E hymn writer = the ‘Father of English Hymnody’), R. Southey, and W. Wordsworth - > “Jabberwocky”, a nonsense poem jesting at OE verse - > “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, a poem stretching the sense The Hunting of the Snark (1876): - = a fantastic comic ‘nonsense’ poem stretching the logic - conc.: the adventures of a bizarre crew of variously inadequate beings, and one beaver, setting off to find the eponymous creature
1 0 L i t e r a r y a n d S o c i a l N i n e t i e s : D e c a d e n c e a n d A e s t h e t i c i s m (O. Wilde, E. Dowson, and A. Beardsley)
T h e R h y m e r ’ s C l u b ( 1 8 9 0 – 1 9 0 4 ) - = an informal loose gathering of London-based poets with common interests and lit. ambitions - orig. not much more than a dining club meeting in a pub or private homes - founded by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys (1859 – 1946) - produced 2 anthologies of poetry (1892 and 1894) - incl. W. B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson (1867 – 1902, author of poems on homosexuality, Rom. Cath., and Ir.), John Davidson (1857 – 1909, a Scott. ballad poet), Arthur Symons (1865 – 1945, a poet and critic), occasionally O. Wilde, & oth. - W. B. Yeats: = ‘the tragic generation’ destined for failure and in many cases early death
O s c a r W i l d e ( 1 8 5 4 – 1 9 0 0 ) L i f e : - b. in Dublin; studied the classics - left for Oxford; settled in London - < infl. by the aesthetic theories of J. Ruskin and W. Pater - aestheticism = the Br. counterpart of Decadence and Symbolism - a spokesperson for the school of ‘art for art’s sake’ = the aesthetic movement incl. Fr. poets and critics, and a line of E poets going back through D. G. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites to J. Keats (accord. to W.) - a dazzling conversationalist: mastered the polished and witty wordplay - a gifted actor: delighted in gaining attention with both his outrageous and incongruous opinions and his flamboyant style of dress - his colourful costumes x contrasted with the sober black suits of the late mid-Victorian middle classes a typical dandy - married and fathered 2 children x but: kept a homosexual relationship with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas (1870 – 1945) - sued by D.’s father for sodomy, sentenced to a 2 y. jail, consequentially divorced and bankrupt, died in a Paris exile - a close relationship btw his life and work = both reject mid-Victorian values and provoke a response to difference W o r k : L i t e r a r y a n d S o c i a l C r i t i c i s m : - = an amusingly provocative critic: enjoys his chosen roles as an aesthete and iconoclast - questions institutions, moral imperatives, and social clichés, and explores alternative moral perspectives The Decay of Lying (1889): - = a Platonic dialogue - ‘the proper aim of Art’ = ‘the telling of beautiful untrue things’ The Critic as Artist (1890): - < develops W. Pater’s aestheticism - art = superior to life, with no obligation to any standards of mimesis The Truth of Masks (1891) The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891): - advocates a larger and expanding idea of freedom from drudgery and from the rule of machines F i c t i o n : The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): - the preface: art and morality = totally separate x but: to some degree portrays the evils of self-regarding hedonism in the self-destructive and darkly sinning protagonist - the eponymous character and protagonist = a handsome young man in a selfish pursuit of sensual pleasures - himself fresh and healthy in appearance x but: his portrait = the image of his corrupted soul - internal contradictions: aestheticism damned x upheld, hedonism indulged x disdained, D. as a desperate suicide x martyr De Profundis (1905, [= from the Lat. transl. of the line of a psalm: ‘Out of the depths, I cried to you, Lord!’]): - = his confessions written during his imprisonment D r a m a : - = a playwright of an aphoristic and paradoxical wit (a) tragedies: - > unsuccessful Vera: or, The Nihilists (1880): - = his 1st tragedy The Duchess of Padua (1883): - = a blank verse tragedy Salome (1894): - = the Bible account of the death of John the Baptist - x but: shocking juxtapositions of repulsion x sexual desire, death x orgasm, etc. - written in Fr., transl. into E by A. Douglas - > his most influential tragedy - > the Ger. version = the libretto of Richard Strauss’s (1864 – 1949) revolutionary opera (1915) A Florentine Tragedy (1897) (b) comedies: - undercurrents of boredom, disillusion, and alienation - evocations of flippancy and snobbery - captures the mood of ‘irresponsibility’ challenging all pretensions except that of the artifice of the plays themselves Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play about a Good Woman (1892) and A Woman of No Importance (1893): - conc.: the discovery of a dire secret - (+) witty speeches of a dandified M aristocrat - (−) a feminist bias in stressing the innate strength of the central F characters An Ideal Husband (1895) The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) P o e t r y : - < admired R. Browning, D. G. Rossetti, and A. C. Swinburne - > his 1st vol. (1881) highly derivative and excessively elaborate also wrote following poems of distinction: “The Harlot’s House” and “Impression du Matin” (1881) [= Fr. for ‘impression of the morning’]: - > his distinctive perspective on city streets anticipates T. S. Eliot “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898): - sober and emotionally high-pitched - < written during his imprisonment
E r n e s t D o w s o n ( 1 8 6 7 – 1 9 0 0 ) L i f e : - left Oxford without taking a degree - led an active social life: met uni students, attended music halls, etc. - (a) fell in love with a 12 y. old girl, courted her for 2 y. x but: she married another crushed - > the girl = a symbol of love and innocence in some of his verse - (b) his parents both committed suicide himself rapidly declined - (c) died of TBC (?) / alcoholism W o r k : - = associated with the Aesthetes - = member of the Rhymers’ Club (1890 – 1904) - an unpaid reviewer for a critical magazine - a frequent contrib. to The Yellow Book (1894 – 97) - publ. 2 coll. of poems, a 1-act verse play, several short stories, and 2 novels in collab. P o e t r y : Verses (1896) Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899) “Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” [= Lat. for ‘I am no more the man I was in the reign of the Good Cynara’]: - = an exquisite poem with a Lat. title x but: written in E - < semi-autobiog.: a lover tries to put aside his feelings for a former lover x but: fails - > his most anthologised poem P r o s e : Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment (1895)
A u b r e y B e a r d s l e y ( 1 8 7 2 – 9 8 ) L i f e : - died of TBC (aged 25+) W o r k : - = associated with the Aesthetes I l l u s t r a t i o n s : - = the most controversial visual artist of the ‘Art Nouveau’ era (1890s – beginning of the 20 th c., [= Fr. for ‘New Art’, a self-consciously radical and mannered prelude to Modernism, characteristic for its dynamic, undulating, and flowing curves, hyperbolas, and parabolas]) - his drawings present not mere illustr. x but: form an integral part of the Br. Aesthetic Movement best understood in this context - style: typically black-and-white drawings in ink, contrasts large dark areas x large blank ones, areas of fine detail x areas with none at all - themes: dark and perverse images, the grotesque erotica - preocc. with the grotesque both in life / art - (a) an art ed. of The Yellow Book (1894 – 97, the quintessential avant-garde lit. quarterly of the 1890s) x but: fired a y. later due to a suspicion of homosexuality because of his friendship with O. Wilde - (b) an illustr. of The Savoy, the rival periodical ed. by Arthur Symons (1865 – 1945, a poet and critic) - (c) a caricaturist: political cartoons mirroring O. Wilde’s irreverent wit in art - (d) author of extensive illustr. for books (incl. Thomas Malory’s [1405 – 71] Le Morte d’Arthur, a compilation of Fr. and E Arthurian romances) and magazines (incl. The Studio) - his most famous sensuous illustr. on themes of history and mythology: incl. his illustr. for O. Wilde’s Salome - illustr.: O. Wilde’s Salome, A. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, & oth. - his work reflects the decadence of his era - > the Fr. Symbolists - > the later-period Art Nouveau artists: incl. Alfons Mucha P o e t r y : “The Ballad of a Barber” (1896): - = a poem, publ. orig. in The Savoy - conc.: a demon barber P r o s e : The Story of Venus and Tannhauser (1907): - = an unfinished erotic novel, pub. orig. as Under the Hill in The Yellow Book - < based loosely on the medieval German legend of Tannhäuser [T. = a knight and poet, finds the home of the goddess Venus and spends here a y. to worship her; after leaving, he asks the pope to be absolved of his sins x but: the pope claims it as impossible as it would be for his papal staff to blossom; the staff does so in 3 days x but: T. has already returned to Venus never to be seen again]
1 1 T h e m e s a n d P o e t i c M e t h o d s i n L a t e V i c t o r i a n P o e t r y (G. M. Hopkins, T. Hardy, and A. C. Swinburne)
G e r a r d M a n l e y H o p k i n s ( 1 8 4 4 – 8 9 ) L i f e : - studied Oxford - < his professor of poetry M. Arnold - < the aesthetician W. Pater > apprehended sensuous beauty - became professor of classics in Dublin - < John Henry Newman (1801 – 90) > entered the Rom. Cath. Church as a Jesuit priest (esp. distrusted by Victorian Protestants) estranged from his family - corresponded with Robert Bridges (1844 – 1930, a physician, poet, and holder of the post of Poet Laureate) = his lit. executor and ed. W o r k : - = striking experiments in meter and diction - > hailed as a pioneering figure of ‘modern’ lit. x but: his experiments emerge from the 19th c. culture (a) early period: - = in the Keatsian mode - > burnt after his conversion (b) mature period: - experiments with a ‘new rhythm’ - observes nature in painstaking detail, pays attention to the exactness of things Pre-Raphaelite painters / poets - apprehends the beauty of individual objects, celebrates the glory and wonder of God implicit in nature an ecstatic illumination of the presence of God (c) late period: - ‘ terrible sonnets’ = poems of despair x awareness of a barely comprehended God comprehending all things - his distinctive individuality isolates him from God, cannot escape the world of his own imagining - > “No worst, there is none” - > “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day” - > “Patience, hard thing!” content: - preocc.: celebration of the wonders of God’s creation - x but: awareness of pain, of the humankind marring the beauty of nature, and of violence in the animal kingdom - > “The Windhover” - < Duns Scotus (1266 – 1308, a phil., theologian, and logician): (a) ‘inscape’ = the distinctive design constituting individual identity (b) ‘instress’ = the act of a human being recognising the inscape of oth. beings and apprehending the specific distinctiveness of an object (c) the individual identity of any object = the stamp of divine creation on it the instress of inscape leads a human being to Christ - aim of poetry = inscape each poem should have a unique design capturing the initial inspiration form: - violates syntactic order to repres. the shape of mental experience: omits syntactical connections to fuse qualities more intensely, uses ellipsis and repetition - coins and compounds words to repres. the unique interlocking of the characteristics of an object, uses puns to suggest how God’s creation rhymes in a divine patterning - ‘sprung rhythm’ = a line with a given number of stresses x but: a highly variable number and placement of unstressed syllables - = natural rhythm of common speech - < OE poetry and nursery rhymes - a style designed to capture the mind’s own motion R. Browning - his rhythm and syntax modern x but: his conc. with the imagination’s shaping of the natural world remain within the Romantic tradition also wrote following poems of distinction: “The Wreck of Deutschland” (1876) - = a rhapsodic lyric-narrative - a long ode about the wreck of a ship in which 5 nuns were drowned - > the ed. of a Jesuit magazine ‘dared not print it’ “The Loss of the Eurydice”: - = a parallel to the former “God’s Grandeur” (1877): - = a God-centred poem “The Windhover”: - on the wonder of a creature and the sense of the presence of God - the beast’s predatorial ecstatic swoop and its beauty = ‘brute’ x but: ‘brutality’ = the essence of its animal perfection “Pied Beauty”: - on the harmonised oppositions expressing the energy of the visible world x but: held together by a divine force “Spring and Fall”
T h o m a s H a r d y ( 1 8 4 0 – 1 9 2 8 ) [see also: H. under ‘12 New Trends and Genres…’] - after the public furore over Jude the Obscure (1895) ostensibly abandoned fiction for poetry - in poetry found the expression of his instinctive ambiguity and intellectual evasiveness - = an older generation Victorian poet x but: his poetry chartered a new territory - agnostic both in prose / poetry x but: in poetry controlled and disciplined the conflicting perceptions [see his “The Darkling Trush”] - conc.: incidents from personal past and from an immediate history touching on oth. histories - love recalled = love lost Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914): (a) content: - = mostly elegiac poems celebrating, and in part expiating, the memory of his 1st wife, Emma - tends to reject the ‘satiric’ mode as ‘harsh’ - physically returns to Cornwall to revisit spots where he had courted E. 40 y. earlier > finds that so much has changed - > “Under the Waterfall” (shaped on the page to resemble the cascade it describes), the act of plunging an arm into cold water in a porcelain wash-basin recalls the memory of lovers picnicking beside a waterfall and losing a wineglass in the water: the glass remained intact under the waterfall x but: the pledges once made in it have since been shattered (b) form: - lyric verse x but: proves a metrical inventiveness and a technical mastery of a variety of forms - plain style x but: plays with localised ‘Wessex’ words to jolt a reader with the unexpected - an ‘easy’ reading often challenged by a word or idea modifying what has been assumed or taken for granted - > “The Phantom Horsewomen”, obliges the reader to reconsid. the meanings of ‘phantom’ and of ‘he’ and ‘she’ and ‘they’ as the poem’s perspective shifts also wrote following poems of distinction: “The Darkling Thrush”: - set in an impersonal landscape x but: shot through with a strange anthropomorphism [= personification, applying human or animal qualities to inanimate objects] - ‘every spirit upon earth’ seems to share a lack of fervour with the speaker x except the thrush singing lustily of ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware’ - concl.: the ‘I’ left unaware no longer seeks interpretations, moves away from his fiction’s pressing need to offer explanation “During Wind and Rain”: - contrasts the moments of fulfilment x steady obliterations of human memory - each human achievement wrecked like summer blooms torn by an autumnal storm - the echoed refrain interrupting each stanza: ‘ah, no; the years O!’ = as if expressing a wider, impersonal regret - climax: a tombstone in rain the time allowed one of his many triumphs “Epitaph on a Pessimist”, “Hap”, “Middle-Age Enthusiasms”, “Neutral Tones”, “The Man He Killed”, and “Weathers”
A l g e r n o n C h a r l e s S w i n b u r n e ( 1 8 3 7 – 1 9 0 9 ) [see also: S. under ‘6 Victorian poetry’] L i f e : - b. in a distinguished family, studied Oxford x but: shocked by a variety of rebellious gestures, incl. paganism in relig., dedication to the overthrow of establ. governments in politics, and preocc. with practices of Marquis de Sade in love - demonstrated his scorn of establ. codes also by his personal behaviour: sought the company of Paris and London bohemians, became an alcoholic, etc. W o r k : - = temporarily associated with the Pre-Raphaelites - convinced ‘that art of poetry has nothing to do with didactic matter’ - firmly fixed in ‘an attitude of revolt against current notions of decency and dignity and social duty’ also in his work P l a y s : Atalanta in Calydon (1865): - = a play filled with classical allusions - did not admire the Gr. lit. for the traditional quality of classic serenity ( M. Arnold) x but: loved Gr. as a land of liberty ( P. B. Shelley, whom he most closely resembles) P o e t r y : Poems and Ballads (1866): - poetry of metrical virtuosity: heady rhythmical patterns, words relished as much for their sound as for their sense - > “The Triumph of Time”, one of the finest demonstrations of his qualities - > “The Garden of Proserpine” - preocc.: death and the re-creations of the underworld garden of Proserpine frozen in timelessness - no oth. E poet author of more elegies Ave Atque Vale: - the title: from the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus’s (84 BC – 54 BC) ‘hail and farewell’ - = an elegy in the honour of Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 67, [author of The Flowers of Evil (1857)] - of ‘elusive beauty and enigmatic greatness’ - > hoped to be the 4th in line among the major elegies in E, following J. Milton’s Lycidas (1638, on his college-mate Edward King]), P.B. Shelley’s Adonais [on J. Keats], and M. Arnold’s Thyrsis [on A. H. Clough] also wrote following poems of distinction: “Anactoria”: - = a dramatic monologue poem - the poet Sappho’s (btw 630 and 612 BC – 570 BC, [a Greek lyric poet b. on the island of Lesbos = homosexual inclinations]) address to a woman with whom she is madly in love “Hymn to Proserpine”
1 2 N e w T r e n d s a n d G e n r e s W i t h i n R e a l i s m o f t h e T u r n o f t h e 1 9 t h a n d 2 0 t h C e n t u r y (T. Hardy, J. Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and G. K. Chesterton)
T h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y H i s t o r i c a l B a c k g r o u n d : - WW I (1914 – 18) - Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry publ. (1918) - T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) - period of depression and unemployment begins (1930) - WW II (1939 – 45) - Ind. and Pakistan become independent (1947) - death of George VI; accession of Elizabeth II (1952) - Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955) - collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) - South Af. becomes democratic (1994) T h e E n d o f a n E r a : - the consequent weakening of traditional stabilities marked by: ‘art for art’s sake’: - the aesthetes assaulted the assumptions about the nature and function of art held by ordinary middle- class readers - the breach btw artists x the ‘Philistine’ public widened < foreshadowed by M. Arnold’s war on the Philistines in Culture and Anarchy > resulted in the now commonplace ‘alienation of the artist’ and the tradition of the bohemian life: J. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the Education Act (1870): - elementary education compulsory and universal > a large unsophisticated lit. public - the audience for lit. split up into ‘highbrows’, ‘middlebrows’, and ‘lowbrows’ - the gap btw pop. art x art esteemed only by the sophisticated widened pessimism and stoicism: - pessimism: T. Hardy’s novels and poems - stoicism = the determination to stand for human dignity by enduring bravely, with a stiff upper lip, whatever fate may bring: R. Kipling’s Jungle Book and many of his stories anti-Victorianism: - > Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, the classic of ironic debunking - > S. Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), the bitterest indictment in E lit. of the Victorian way of life - > G. B. Shaw’s plays women emancipation: - the Married Women’s Property Act (1882) = the right of married women to handle their own property > oth. acts (1870 – 1908) > a basis for the rights of women in marriage - admission of women to the uni by the end of Victoria’s reign - the fight for women’s suffrage > won in 1918 > fully won in 1928 P o l i t i c a l B a c k g r o u n d : C o n f l i c t s : (a) the Boer War (1899 – 1902): - to annex 2 independent rep. in the south of Af. controlled by Dutch settlers = Boers - a reaction against Br. imperialism > a gradual development of the Br. Empire into the Br. Commonwealth (i.e. an association of self-governing countries) - > reactions in lit.: R. Kipling, E. M. Forster, J. Conrad, & oth. (b) the Ir. question: - a rising Ir. nationalism = against the cultural, economic, and political subordination of Ir. to the Br. Crown and government - Northern Ir.: the IRA (= the Ir. Republican Army) and its political wing Sinn Fein (= Ourselves Alone) - => the Ir. lit. revival of the late 19th – early 20th c. = to achieve a national life culturally even if the road seemed blocked politically: W. B. Yeats, J. Joyce, & oth. T h e E d w a r d i a n E n g l a n d ( 1 9 0 1 – 1 0 , E d w a r d V I I ) : - a vulgar age of conspicuous enjoyment by those who could afford it - artists kept away from involvement in high society - the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age unimpaired x but: a sense of change and liberation on the level of ideas T h e G e o r g i a n E n g l a n d ( 1 9 1 0 – 1 4 , G e o r g e V ) : - a temporary equilibrium btw Victorian earnestness x Edwardian flashiness - > but: a restlessness in T. S. Eliot’s 1st experiments in a radically new kind of poetry > and: major shifts in attitudes with the war poets T h e P o s t - W W I E n g l a n d ( 1 9 2 0 s – 3 0 s ) : (a) 1920s: the post-war disillusion = a spiritual matter like T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land a spiritual and not a literal wasteland (b) 1930s: depression and unemployment - older generation with the political right: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence x young intellectuals with the left: W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden and his contemporaries - the Red Decade = the right-wing army’s rebellion against the left-wing rep. government in Sp. (1936) > the Civil War - > writers more anxious to express their attitudes than to experiment with new kinds of works of art T h e P o s t - W W I I E n g l a n d ( 1 9 4 0 s + ) : (a) 1940s – 50s: a sudden end of the Red Decade - GB won the war x but: lost the empire by the independence of Ind., Pakistan, and the Ir. Rep. (1947) (b) 1960s: decentralising developments - > renaissance of regional lit. = new writers and artists outside London (building on the native tradition of T. Hardy and W. B. Yeats) > the growth of black Br. writing > the growth of post-colonial writing: V. S. Naipaul & oth. - the government under increasing pressure from the regions and the wider world: the Labour government of Harold Wilson (1964 – 70) capitulated to the demands of the powerful labour unions > inflation spiralled out of control (c) 1970s – 80s: the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (1979 – 81) curbed the power of the unions and of the ‘welfare state’ in favour of the free-market economy (d) 1990s: the Labour government of Tony Blair (1997 +)
T h e 2 0 th C e n t u r y P o e t r y C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s : - poetry rev.: 1911 (the 1st y. of the Georgian poets) – 1922 (the y. of the publ. of The Waste Land) - < the Fr. impressionist, post-impressionist, and cubist painters > a radical re-examination of the nature of reality - < the publ. of the poetry of G. M. Hopkins by Robert Bridges (1918) > experimentation in language and rhythms: the poets of the 1930s, incl. W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, & oth. infl. by G. M. Hopkins as well as by T. S. Eliot - => W. B. Yeats’s early spare ironic language of the aesthetes > the mature symbolic and metaphysical poetry => his work itself a history of E poetry btw 1890 – 1939 I m a g i s m : - < infl. by the philos./poet Thomas Ernest Hulme’s insistence on hard, clear, and precise images - > encouraged by the Am. poet Ezra Pound, then living in London - against romantic fuzziness and emotionalism in poetry, against the using of all words not contrib. ‘to the presentation’ x for a freer metrical movement - successful with short descriptive lyrics x but: no technique for longer and more complex poems M e t a p h y s i c a l P o e t r y : - < infl. by the new ed. of the 17th c. metaphysical poetry by J. Donne (1912) - < the Fr. symbolist poetry appreciated now for its imagistic precision and complexity x rather than for its dreamy suggestiveness as in the 1890s - poetry of a higher degree of intellectual complexity - use of the highly formal + the colloquial, even the slangy - use of irony, wit, and puns to achieve the union of thought and passion characteristic of the metaphysical poetry (for T. S. Eliot) - + T. S. Eliot’s new king of irony achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial P o e t r y S i n c e t h e W W I : - 1930s, ‘a neutral tone’ (Donald Davie): W. H. Auden & oth. - 1940s, the New Apocalypse < infl. by the violence of expression of the Fr. surrealist poets and painters seeking to express the operation of the subconscious mind: incl. Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and the painters/poets Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso - 1950s, The Movement = for a neutral tone, purity of diction, and fidelity to experience x against the verbal excesses of the modernism: incl. D. Davie, Thom Gunn, and Philip Larkin (the noisiest rejecter of the imported modernism of E. Pound and T. S. Eliot in favour of the native tradition repres. by Hardy) - The Martian School (< Craig Raine’s poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”) < inspired by the painters seeking to see the world with the freshness of a child or a visitor from Mars - 1990s, the New Generation Poets = lack any unifying programme - ‘performance poetry’ = an informal and loosely structured poetry written for the stage T h e 2 0 th C e n t u r y F i c t i o n ( I ) H i g h M o d e r n i s m ( 1 9 2 0 s ) > a celebration of personal and textual inwardness: - the problems of lit. idea and practice became matters of intense debate as never before - the confidence in the great old certainties/old Grand Narratives shattered > seeking new alternatives to the old belief systems - incl. the later Henry James, J. Conrad, J. Joyce, D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf R e a l i t y : - aim of fiction = to reproduce what appears to be the nature of the real - V. Woolf’s Modern Fiction (1919) = against the ‘materialism’ of the Edwardian heirs of Victorian confidence, i.e. Arnold Bennett, H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells, and John Galsworthy - reality existed only as it was perceived > a new impressionistic, flawed, even utterly unreliable narration presented by a not-to-be-relied-on narrator, ‘reflector’ (H. James): J. Conrad’s Marlow of Heart of Darkness and of his oth. fiction x the 19th c. authoritative narrating voice - => reality and its truth had gone inward: ‘Look within,’ V. Woolf urged the novelist C o n c e r n : - rejected materialist externality x but: the worldly subject, politics, and moral questions never completely omitted: (a) perplexities of the London and Dublin urban life: V. Woolf and J. Joyce (b) industrialism and provincial life: D. H. Lawrence (c) social subject and satire: George Orwell and Graham Greene ( the condition humaine in C. Dickens; and A. Bennett, H. G. Wells, and J. Galsworthy) - modern myth making: (+) J. Joyce’s Ulysses with Bloom mythicised as a modern Ulysses and his life’s odyssey paralleling episodes from Homer’s Odyssey; the old ‘narrative method’ replaced by a new ‘mythical method’, finding ‘a continuous parallel btw contemporaneity and antiquity’ (T. S. Eliot) x (−) D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod with its fascist sympathies; and his The Plumed Serpent with the revived Aztec blood-cult - the metafictional novel = conc. with writers, artists, and surrogates for artists: V. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway with her party = one of the ‘unpublished works of women’ C h a r a c t e r : - < infl. by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic movement = the reality of persons narrated as the life of mind in all its dimensions, i.e. consciousness, subconsciousness, unconsciousness, id, libido, etc. - stream of consciousness = the main modernist access to ‘character’: V. Woolf’s preocc. with ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ - free indirect style = entering the characters’ mind to speak as if on their behalf - existential loneliness = characters doomed to make their way through life’s labyrinths without much confidence in the knowable solidity of the world: J. Conrad’s Lord Jim, J. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, and V. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway > confidence leaks away from the novel itself: V. Woolf’s Jacob remains stubbornly unknowable to his closest ones, above all to his novelist - => tricky, scattered, fragmentary narratives P r e s e n t a t i o n : - old conclusive tendency of plots ( detective story) x new open endings: the unending vista of the last paragraph of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the circularity of J. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake with the last sentence hooking back to be completed in the novel’s 1st word, & oth. - linguistic self-consciousness: G. Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984, the culmination of his politically motivated engagement with E, and J. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the greatest example of linguisticity rampant as such and a monumental dead end ( I I ) S o c i a l R e a l i s m ( 1 9 3 0 s ) > a reaction against modernism: - < the impact of the Sp. Civil War and WW II > a return to registering the social scene - > WW II inspired fiction: G. Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, & oth. ( I I I ) P o s t m o d e r n i s t P l u r a l i s m ( 1 9 4 0 s + ) > a variety of realisms: - various realisms incl. urban, proletarian, regional (esp. Scott. and Ir.), provincial E, immigrant, postcolonial, feminist, gay, etc. P o l i t i c s a n d R e l i g i o n i n t h e P o s t - W W I I N o v e l : - > the new Welfare State atmosphere of the 1950s: John Wain’s Hurry on Down, a graduating scholarship-boy’s protest against the educational poshocracy - > the young demobilised officer class: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim - a sense of posteriority (i.e. post-war flatness and post-imperial diminution of power and infl.) + a sense of the Grand Narratives now really losing their force > questioning for new moral bases - > William Golding’s post-Christian moral fables (The Lord of the Flies) and Iris Murdoch’s moral philos. (Under the Net) + their Roman Cath. contemporaries incl. G. Greene, Muriel Spark, and E. Waugh S t a g n a t i o n o f F i c t i o n : - the late-c. E novel far too obsessed with the past > the postmodernists seemed condemned to simply parroting old stuff - obsession with Ger. and the ghosts of the Hitlerzeit: Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, & oth. - nostalgia for old imperial days: Lawrence Durrell (Alexandrian Quartet) x the earlier accusations for Br. overseas behaviour: J. Conrad, E. M. Forster (A Passage to India), & oth. - grief over the post-imperial decline of the once-grand centre of London: the later K. Amis, Doris Lessing, I. McEwan, and M. Amis (London Fields, The Information) N e w T r e n d s i n t h e 1 9 7 0 s – 8 0 s F i c t i o n : - new energetic end-of-c. writers from margins: (a) women writers: Beryl Bainbridge, dark historiciser of M as well as F plights; Angela Carter, feminist neo-mythographer, reviser of fairy tales, and rewriter of de Sade; & oth. (b) regional writers, esp. Ir./Scott. (c) genre writers (i.e. writers pushing their way into the mainstream from the generic edge, esp. sci-fi): Martin Amis (d) M-gay writers: Alan Hollinghurst, the pioneer of the openly M-homosexual novel (e) post-colonial writers: (a) old Commonwealth novelists residing in Br.: V. S. Naipaul, D. Lessing, & oth. + (b) overseas writers of Commonwealth orig.: Kazuo Ishiguru; Salman Rushdie, the Ind.-born importer of South Am. and Ger. (Gunther Grass-type) magic realism, a satirist of Ind./Pakistani/Br. life (The Satanic Verses); & oth. E n d - o f - C e n t u r y C o n d i t i o n o f F i c t i o n : - the end-of-c. (and end-of-millennium) Br. fiction desperately attempts to ward off the Br. novel’s contemporary sterility - => efforts important in their way x but: telling overdone: A. Carter’s sadomasochistic F heorics, M. Amis’s stylistic and formal extremes (the backward narration of his Holocaust novel Time’s Arrow), & oth.
T h e 2 0 th C e n t u r y D r a m a P r e l u d e t o M o d e r n D r a m a : - > O. Wilde’s witty drawing-room comedies, with verbal play + serious reflections on social, political, even feminist issues beneath - > G. B. Shaw’s discussion plays, with a provocative paradox to challenge the complacency of the audience I r i s h D r a m a : - the 1st major theatrical movement of the 20th c. orig. in Dublin - (I) The Irish Literary Theatre (1899) = founded by W. B. Yeats, A. Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn; inaugurated by W. B. Yeats’s The Countess Cathleeen > (II) The Irish National Theatre (1902) = maintained a permanent all-Irish company > (III) The Abbey Theatre (1904) = moved to a building of that name - > J(ohn) M(illington) Synge’s use of the speech and imagination of Ir. country people; W. B. Yeats’s use of the themes from old Ir. legends; and Sean O’Casey’s use of the Ir. civil war as a background for plays combining tragic melodrama, humour, and irony E n g l i s h D r a m a : - > T. S. Eliot’s ritual poetic drama, incl. Murder in the Cathedral + his plays combining contemporary social chatter with profound relig. symbolism, incl. The Cocktail Party > uneven M o d e r n D r a m a H i g h l i g h t s : (a) Ibsenism (1890s): - < the Norwegian dramatist H. Ibsen = then perceived as a critic of middle-class society x rather than now as a poetic dramatist experimenting with symbolic modes of expression - > a sentimental social comedy, highly pop. in its time: Noel Coward (1899 – 1973), J(ames) M(atthew) Barrie (1860 – 1937), & oth. - => typically produced in the London West End Theatre (b) radio drama (1940s): - wartime verse plays written for and commissioned by the BBC radio: Louis MacNeice, & oth. (c) absurd drama (1950s +): - < S. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948 Fr., 1953 E), an apparent lack of plot > focus on language as ‘the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is’ - => typically produced in the Royal Court Theatre (d) the Angry Young Men (1950s – 60s): - > John’s Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), technically traditional x but: the novelty in its non- metropolitan setting and the emotional cruelty and directionless angst of Jimmy Porter, the prototype of the E rebel without a cause - > technically more adventurous: J. Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957), a challenging allegory of the protagonist’s declining fortunes as a music-hall artist and of the changes in E society; and his Luther (1960), a study of the historical rebel with a tangible cause (e) the kitchen-sink drama x symbolic drama (1950s – 60s): - new challenges of cinema and TV > the response of the Br. theatre with changes - new dramatists esp. from lower middle-class/working-class, educated on state grants, employed in odd jobs (kitchens, etc.), often jobs with the theatre (actors) - > (a) the naturalist kitchen-sink drama (1950s): Arnold Wesker’s trilogy Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), & oth. - > x (b) the drama of language and symbolism: Harold Pinter’s ‘comedies of menace’, incl. The Room (1957), a study of working-class stress and inarticulate anxiety; The Dumb Waiter (1960), a black farce; and The Homecoming (1965), a comic study of middle-class escape from working-class mores - => typically produced in the Royal Court Theatre (f) black comedy (1960s): - self-conscious theatricality to show theatre as different from film and TV - > Joe Orton’s parodies of oth. forms of theatre, incl. What the Butler Saw (1969), a farce ending even with a deus ex machina, & oth. - > Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1968), a parodic homage to the verbal texture and theatrical technique of S. Beckett; his The Real Inspector Hound (1968), a pastiche of the murder mystery, blurring the gap btw proscenium and audience; his Travesties (1974), a study of the role of memory and imagination in the creative process, incl. time-slips and memory lapses; and his Arcadia (1955), an account of a Romantic poet and his modern critics occupying the same physical space x but: never reaching intellectual common ground E n d - o f - C e n t u r y C o n d i t i o n o f D r a m a : - Lord Chamberlain’s abolition of the state censorship of plays (1968) > emergence of controversial political, social, and sexual issues in plays: Edward Bond’s Lear (1971), typical of new plays combining soaring lyrical language and realistic violence; & oth. - a new trend of collab. and group development of plays - women pushing their way onto mainstream stages: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), the discourse aspiring to reproduce the ebb and flow of normal speech; & oth. - the opening of the new National Theatre Complex on London’s South Bank (1976) = a high-water mark > drama recession due to TV (1980s – 90s)
T h o m a s H a r d y ( 1 8 4 0 – 1 9 2 8 ) [see also: H. under ‘11 Late Victorian Poetry’] religion: - called himself ‘churchy’ x but: little real evidence of this in his novels beyond his early Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) - appreciated church architecture aesthetically (an architect by training) x but: consid. the historic relig. practised in churches redundant - > Far From the Madding Crowd (1874): contrasts the medieval barn in which the sheep-shearing takes place x a church and a castle in that ‘the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same to which it was still applied’ - his fictional world lacks the comfortable shapes and contours of the old theology, the Church of En. still firmly rooted in a rural society x but: incapable of interpreting a grand, but essentially discomforting, idea of the universe - > Jude the Obscure (1895): the Christian relig. and ‘Christian’ morality irrelevant to the complexities of modern experience, relig. serves to complicate and further frustrate the destinies of the central characters - the novel’s climax: 2 clergymen overheard discussing where they should stand liturgically at the altar, at the time when a more immediate sacrifice has been offered in the form of Jude’s children: ‘Good God’, the traumatised Jude exclaims, ‘the eastward position, and all creation groaning’ (= reverses St Paul’s image of creation groaning in its birth pangs) Darwinism: - claimed to have been amongst the 1st readers of Charles Darwin’s (1809 – 82 [= Br. naturalist, explained the evolution by the means of natural and sexual election]) The Origin of Species (1859) - D. re-articulated in him an older, peasant fatalism, inherited from his Dorset forebears: the fatalism with which he later endowed Tess Durbeyfield of his Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) - D. displaced humankind from its assumption of superiority, challenged the idea of a benevolent Creator and the comforting belief in Providence - the immense process of evolution advances regardless of human bane and human blessing: to Tess Durbeyfield, ‘as to not a few million of others’, remarks twd the end of the novel there was a ‘ghastly satire’ in W. Wordsworth’s confident lines: ‘Not in utter nakedness / But trailing clouds of glory do we come’ history: - fascinated by the slow and painful progress of human history - history, geology, geography, and astronomy = macrocosmic ramifications of the human microcosm - the impassive infl. of the relics of pre-Christian civilisations: (a) > Tess of the D’Urbervilles: T. arrested at Stonehenge at dawn (b) > Jude the Obscure: the visionary Christminster, the ‘city of light’ = a human artefact older than the historic uni for which J. vainly yearns; J. excluded from the city’s colleges as much by their architecture as by their narrow admissions policy x but: the ‘Fourways’, the ancient central crossroads = an alternative life ‘of human groups, who hat met there for tragedy, comedy, farce’ F i c t i o n : The Trumpet Major (1880): - = his most obviously ‘historical’ novel, one of the most carefully located of all his novels - set in the Napoleonic period - a delicate study of characters choosing and making the wrong choices Two on a Tower (1882): - observation of the courses of the stars coupled with an evocation of prehistory The Return of the Native (1878): - the looming presence of Egdon Heath = a disturbing shaper of consciousness The Well-Beloved (1892, 1897): - the physical peculiarity of the setting in the Isle of Slingers = the odd twists of the plot The Woodlanders (1887): - Hintock Wood = expressive of the ‘Unfulfilled Intention which makes life what it is’ Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895): - shifts from the straightforward expositions of ‘tragedy, comedy, farce’ to the complex stratification of his later work - remains within the disciplined lines of Gr. tragedy x but: his prose aspires to the freer conditions of poetry - interfuses dense lit. and biblical citation, scientific reference and allusion, philos. speculation, superstitious hints, dark suggestions of genetic conditioning and even animism - conc. with characters wrenched from their roots and from the communities which might have sustained, or at least tolerated, their distinctiveness - his complex view of woman culminates in the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ = educated and individualistic x but: still unfulfilled because of her continued subservience to men - his F characters more determined and more truly sophisticated than his M characters: (a) Tess Durbyfield of Tess: much of a passive instinctive fatalist x but: her strength of will defies M domination and bourgeois condemnation (b) Arabella Donn of Jude: crude and exploitative x but: a practical survival against the odds (c) Sue Bridehead of Jude: divided btw freethinking x obsessive religiosity = the deep ambiguity of her characterisation echoes the ambiguity of the novel itself (d) received much critical attention, incl. D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence’s: this sort of women only seems ‘to exist to be betrayed by their men’ - it is not only ‘the letter that killeth’ (= the quotation of St Paul in Jude’s subtitle) x but: a general human inability to grasp the implications of the modern spirit offering a more clear-sighted, though painful, freedom D r a m a : The Dynasts (1904 – 8): - = a poetic drama - set in the Napoleonic period - the petty delusions and ambitions of humankind watched over by the choric forces undercutting any assumption of heroic action - concl.: Napoleon achieves nothing despite his illusion of his own greatness
J o h n G a l s w o r t h y ( 1 8 6 7 – 1 9 3 3 ) L i f e : - b. into an establ. and wealthy family; st. Oxford (a barrister, though never practised law) - travelled extensively to look after the family’s shipping business interests - met and befriended J. Conrad on a South Sea voyage - married the ex-wife of one of his cousins, with whom he had lived for 10 y. in secret - tried to enlist in WW I x but: rejected due to his short-sightedness, worked for the Red Cross W o r k : - his lifetime: pop. and well establ. x now: consid. the last major story-teller of the Victorian era / or one of the 1st writers of the Edwardian era because of his challenging some of the ideals of the Victorian society - author of a number of highly readable realist or ‘materialist’ (Virginia Woolf) novels, dealing with social questions and giving a precise account of the upper class’s opinions and attitudes - the novel = an instrument of social debate, the artist’s duty = to examine a problem x but: not to offer a solution - preocc.: class-consciousness and class conflict - campaigned for a variety of causes in his writing: prison reform, women’s rights, animal welfare, censorship, etc. x but: of a limited appeal outside the era of their orig., also less convincing when dealing with lower classes - a Nobel Prize winner (1932) F i c t i o n : - began writing under a pseudonym, only after his father’s death under his real name The Island Pharisees (1904): - = his 1st work publ. under his own name, consid. his 1st important work The Forsyte Saga (1906 – 22): - = a trilogy: The Man of Property (1906), In Chancery (1920), and To Let (1921) - did not immediately continue after the publ. of the 1st novel x but: resumed it after a 15 y.-break - a vast account of the fortunes of the 3 generations of the wealthy upper middle class Victorian family: (I) Soames marries the beautiful and rebellious Irene, rapes her, and she leaves him (II) Irene and Soames divorce, she marries Soames’s cousin Jolyon and bears the son Jon; Soames has the daughter Fleur with his 2nd wife (III) Fleur and Jon fall in love witch each other x but: Jon refuses to marry her - his recurring theme = a woman in an unhappy marriage: the character of Irene modelled on his wife’s previous marriage, though not so miserable as Irene’s) - generally sympathetic to his characters x but: highlights their snobbish attitudes and suffocating moral codes - orig. satirical and harshly critical of the upper middle classes x then nearly admiring, came more and more to identify himself with the world of his novels with his growing age: evident in his changing attitude to Soames Forsyte = ‘the man of property’ of the 1st vol. - > inspired Romain Rolland (1866 – 1944 [= Fr. writer, received the Nobel Prize for Lit. [1915]) to coin the term ‘roman-fleuve’ = a series of novels which can be read separately x but: form a coherent narrative - > won him the Nobel Prize; filmed several times A Modern Comedy (1924 – 28) and End of the Chapter (1931 – 33): - = both trilogies, loose sequels of The Forsyte Saga The Patrician D r a m a : - in his time appreciated mainly as a playwright - stark, one-word titles expressive of their once urgent social themes - propagandist: the bourgeois theatre should confront bourgeois audiences with the need to examine their social consciences - sympathetic to the victims of an uncaring society x but: sentimental and politically impartial now awkward The Silver Box (1906): - on the double standards of justice applied to the upper x lower classes - the mutual alienation of a rich x a poor family complicated by the theft of the box of the title Strife (1909): - on the confrontation of capital x labour in a mining strike Justice (1910): - portrays human suffering - moved Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965 [= Br. politician, MP during WW II, and writer, received the Nobel Prize for Lit. (1953)] then Home Secretary, to abolish solitary confinement in prisons The Skin Game (1920): - on the enmity of the two families - > filmed by Alfred Hitchcock (1899 – 1980 [= Br. film director and producer]) Loyalties (1922): - on anti-Semitism Escape (1926): - the protagonist = a law-abiding, man meets a prostitute, accidentally kills a police in defending her; escapes from prison, and meets different people before giving himself up - > filmed also wrote: short stories, poetry, essays, letters, and many sketches and miscellanies
H ( e r b e r t ) G ( e o r g e ) W e l l s ( 1 8 6 6 – 1 9 4 6 ) - evident political edge - contrasts the advantages of a socialistically and scientifically planned future x the anti-humanist aspects of scientific progress S c i e n c e - f i c t i o n : The Time Machine (1895) The Island of Dr Moreau (1896): - an alarmist prophecy in a fable of genetic engineering - M. = a post-Darwinian Frankenstein and a tyrannical exile on a Pacific island tortures and metamorphoses animals in his ‘House of Pain’ - concl.: M. destroyed The War of the Worlds (1898) The Shape of Things to Come (1936): - a scary prognostication of apocalyptic war S o c i a l F i c t i o n : Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905): - criticises the capital - employs sympathetic socialist characters x but: also a vision of the nation and the society ruled by Stupidity which no ideals can pierce Tono Bungay (1909): - contrasts the defunct world of the country house x the narrow perspective of the draper’s shop x the world of market capitalism and invention - a small-town apothecary uncle makes a fortune out of a spurious wonder-tonic x his nephew re-establ. the lost family fortune by building battleships - employs a questioning socialism: not persuaded by the E socialism, remains individualistic x George Bernard Shaw, his sometime friend and Fabian socialist colleague Ann Veronica (1909): - on marriage and women’s rights - advocates the ‘free and fearless’ participation of women ‘in the collective purpose of mankind’ The History of Mr Polly (1910): - avoids the muddling nature of E society by a fantasy escape into a rural idyll The New Machiavelli (1911): - portrays the parliamentary life in the early y. of 20th c. from the POV of a pragmatic Member of Parliament - > his last major novel before he retreated into writing pop. histories / digests of science
G ( i l b e r t ) K ( e i t h ) C h e s t e r t o n ( 1 8 7 4 – 1 9 3 6 ) L i f e : - a keen debater: engaged in friendly public debates broadcast as radio lectures with G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970 [= Br. philos., logician, and mathematician, received the Nobel Prize for Lit. (1950)]), & oth. - a convinced Christian: received in the Rom. Cath. church (1922) > Christian themes and symbolism in much of his writing - an advocate of ‘distributism’ = private property should be divided into smallest possible freeholds and then distributed throughout society - a critic of both socialism / capitalism W o r k : - a novelist, poet, playwright, lit. and social critic, nwsp columnist, historian, Cath. Christian theologian, debater, and mystery writer - also an ed. of his own paper G. K.’s Weekly (1925 – 36) and a contributor to Encyclopaedia Britannica (since 1768 [= the most important general encyclopaedia in the E language]) - one of the most prolific writers of all time: author of fiction / non-fiction, poetry, short stories, essays, and a stage play - a down-to-E-earth writer with social prejudices based on a nostalgic vision of a lost, happy, Cath. En.: evident in his jolly later verse and often presumptuous essays - of mid-Victorian En. lit. tastes [see his study of C. Dickens] F i c t i o n : - = fantasies of narrative playfulness lacking from the often glum political fiction of the period - Father Brown = his best known character, the priest-detective of his short-story series The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904): - = his 1st novel, a political fantasy set in the future - < shaped by his anti-centralist, anti-authoritarian, and anti-theoretical prejudices - an utopian romance of an independent London ruled from an undistinguished inner suburb The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908): - = his best known novel, a paradoxical fable set in an anarchic present - < a fin-de-siècle decadence > a story of London artists and London anarchists made up of layers of deception and artifice - the protagonist = a poet turned an employee of Scotland Yard, reveals a vast conspiracy against civilisation - concl.: the Christian God coalesces with rampant human individualism - < the title = the members of that secret anarchist gang named for the days of the week - > draws on tradition x but: moves twd the fragmentation of Modernists N o n - f i c t i o n : - displays wit, a sense of humour, and paradox - the style contrasts with the serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philos., theology, etc. C. Dickens, O. Wilde, G. B. Shaw, & oth. - the ‘prince of paradox’ = author of whimsical prose filled with startling formulations (‘Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.’) Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), and R. L. Stevenson (1907): - = lit. biographies St Francis of Assisi and St Thomas Aquinas: - = relig. biographies P o e t r y : - little known x but: well reflecting his beliefs and opinions “Lepanto”: - = perhaps his best poem “The Rolling English Road”: - = his most familiar poem “The Secret People”: - = his most quoted poem: ‘we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet’
1 3 N e o - R o m a n t i c i s m : N e w T r e a t m e n t o f R o m a n t i c C o n c e p t s a nd M e t h o d s (J. Conrad, R. L. Stevenson, and R. Kipling)
J o s e p h C o n r a d ( 1 8 5 7 – 1 9 2 4 ) L i f e : - b. in Poland (then under Rus. rule), son of a Polish patriot suffering exile in Rus. for his Polish nationalist activities - a merchant seaman: travelled the Pacific, esp. the East & West Indies, etc. - met and befriended J. Galsworthy on a South Sea voyage - a naturalised Br. subject > a sense of betrayal, guilt and dislocation in his work - with the success of his 1st novel Almayer’s Folly (1895) settled in London as a writer W o r k : - started learning E when 21 x but: became a master of E prose - pop. for the romantic descriptions of exotic eastern landscapes x but: underlying serious themes - (a) sea stories: employs the sea and the circumstances of life on shipboard or in remote settlements as a background for exploring moral ambiguities in human experience: tests the codes we live by in moments of crisis to reveal their inadequacy or our own - his sea-stories at least find some kind of resolution, though a singularly fragile one - (b) later more obviously political fiction - as much a pessimist as Hardy x but: projects it in subtler ways - conc.: the effects of Eur. imperialism in the Pacific, the East Indies, South Am., and Af. - colonisers = uncomprehending, intolerant, and exploitative - power = corrupting and open to abuse colonialism both brutal and brutalising The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897): - the eponymous character = a dying black seaman, corrupts the morale of a ship’s crew by producing sympathy - symbolically: the necessity and at the same time the dangers of human contact An Outpost of Progress (1898): - the eponymous ‘progress’ = an obvious misnomer - a nwsp from ‘home’ brightly discusses ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in terms of ‘the rights and duties of civilisation to the dark places of the earth’ x but: the ‘darkness’ corrupts both internally and externally - > further develops the idea in his Heart of Darkness (1899) Heart of Darkness (1899): - < his own experience in a steamboat going up the Congo River in nightmarish circumstances - imperialism begins as a variety of brutish idealism, redeemed by the idea only x but: proves to lack such an idea as the narrative develops Lord Jim (1900): - conc.: a gross failure of duty on the part of a romantic and idealistic young sailor - the eponymous character = a successful colonial agent, earns himself the tile of Lord from his grateful subjects x but: marred by the lasting memory of the corruption of his predecessor - an intermediate narrator, a series of different POV suggest the complexity of experience and the difficulty of judging human actions Typhoon (1902): - = a sea novel Nostromo (1904): - = his masterpiece, a political novel - set in an unstable South Am. rep. in a tottering social order - conc.: the corrupting effects of politics and ‘material interests’ on personal relationships corruption both imported and exportable The Secret Agent (1906): - = a political novel, veers simultaneously twd farce and tragedy - set in a murky, seedy, untidy London - the eponymous character = Verlock, an agent provocateur in the employ of a ‘foreign’ (= almost certainly Rus.) embassy, required to blow up the Greenwich Meridian - < looks back to C. Dickens (esp. his policemen) - > the modern sense of alienation, disquiet, and dislocation; and the fragmented, reiterated phrases of the concl. anticipate the Modernists Under Western Eyes (1911): - = a political novel of Dostoyevskian power [Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 81), author of Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), & oth.] - conc.: the dangerous instabilities of society under the Rus. autocracy - the protagonist = Razumov (= ‘son of reason’), a Rus. student and government spy, gets involuntary involved with antigovernment violence in the tsarist Rus. and betrays a revolutionary fellow-student to the Tsar’s police - consequentially becomes a double exile in Switzerland, pretends to be a revolutionary among revolutionaries, to be the opposite of what he is - the narrator = an elderly E teacher of languages in Geneva, draws on his experience of R. and on his diary, observes all with foreign ‘western’ eyes, and only partially grasps R.’s pressing need for confession and expiation The Secret Sharer (1912): - set in the Gulf of Siam as felt by a young sea captain on his 1st command - in a small hierarchical society of the ship an individual decision and responsibility take on the moral force of paramount virtue - opening: the ‘great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land’ and the shipboard life present ‘no disquieting problems’ x but: becomes ironical as the narrative develops - conc.: the difficulty of true communion, communion as forced unexpectedly on us, and the recognition of our opposite as our true self - symbolically: the paradoxes of identity and sympathy The Shadow-Line (1917)
R o b e r t L o u i s S t e v e n s o n ( 1 8 5 0 – 9 4 ) - singularly fascinated with horror x but: achieved greater variety and invention - employed small-town settings and the Scots vernacular a precise sense of Scott. place - = member of the ‘Kailyard School’ = rooted in the work of W. Scott, and also incl. J(ames) M(atthew) Barrie (1860 – 1937 [= a Scott. novelist and dramatist]), Ian Maclaren (1850 – 1907 [= the pseudonym of Rev. John Watson, a Scott. writer and divine]), and S(amuel) R(utherford) Crockett (1860 – 1914 [= a Scott. novelist]) M y s t e r y F i c t i o n : The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886): - = a mystery story - written in the exile of the E seaside stimulated his fascination with the widening gap btw the worlds of Jekyll and his alter ego Hyde - examines the divided self and the possession of a successful London physician Dr Jekyll - concl.: J.’s suicide = the only effective release from the predatory Hyde H i s t o r i c a l F i c t i o n : - set in Scot. - < W. Scott x but: lacks his urge to find a historical and fictional compromise justifying the idea of progressive evolution Kidnapped (1886) and the sequel Catriona (1893): - set in the 18th c. Scotland torn by Jacobite divisions - conc.: deception, suspicion, injustice, and obligatory flight - concl.: no sense of achieved serenity, no emphasis on historic justice or justification The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (1889): - set in the aftermath of ‘The Forty-five Jacobite Rising’ - narrated episodically by a family steward responding dually to 2 politically and emotionally divided brothers = symbolically: historic tensions within Scott. culture A d v e n t u r e F i c t i o n : - fascinated with travel, the dangerous, and the exotic Treasure Island (1883): - = a famous boys’ story The Beach at Falesá (1893) and The Ebb Tide (1894): - = South Sea adventure stories - criticises the effects of 18th c. colonialism = a new variation on piracy
R u d y a r d K i p l i n g ( 1 8 6 5 – 1 9 3 6 ) L i f e : - b. in Bombay (Ind.), sent to En. for education, unhappy - < affected by the E schoolboy code of honour and duty, esp. when it involved loyalty to a group or team - rejoined his parents in Ind. as a nwsp reporter / part-time writer - after the success of his stories settled in En. W o r k : - conc.: Ind. = in the final decades of the 19th c. the most important colony of Br. empire: (a) E people curious about the world of Ind. (b) K. consid. the Br. imperial adventure in Ind. more romantic than that in Af. - fascinated by the way of life of the Ind. and perceptive to the anomalies of the Br. Raj - retained the detachment of a Eur. outsider x but: tried to see Ind. from inside and portray the people with understanding - a world of masculine action x but: also alert to human weakness, vulnerability, and failure - a master of the short story: new subjects, wonderful ear for dialect, economy of style, complex irony x but: as a rule not successful with long narratives (except for Kim [1901]) - a commonsensical, almost proverbial, philos. - a deliberately ‘plain’ style, seemingly flat and coarse story-telling x the stylistic refinements of W. Pater and O. Wilde, the complex allusiveness of H. James, & oth. - the 1st E writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Lit. (1907) F i c t i o n : Plain Tales from the Hills (1888): - = his 1st vol. of short stories - conc.: the psychological and moral problems of the Anglo-Ind. and their relationship with the people they had colonised Jungle Books (1894, 1895): - in 2 vol. - < draws on his experience of the Ind. scene to create a world of jungle animals Kim (1901): - = his only successful novel and a large-scale attempt at multi-focusing - allows for many voices and conflicting traditions: the eponymous character and protagonist = Kim, the orphan son of an Ir. colour-sergeant, wanders both geographically and culturally, serves both a Tibetan Lama as his disciple and the Br. Secret Service as a spy - treats the contemplative and relig. way of life of the Ind. with no less sympathy than the active and worldly way of life of the Victorian En. - the Lama’s worldview: freedom lies in withdrawal = an end to his spiritual search - x but: K.’s questions about identity, race, relig., isolation loneliness, courage, etc. remain unsolved and his destiny ambiguous “The Man Who Would Be King”: - = a clever and entertaining short story - conc.: soldierly individualism - soldiers = pragmatic and stoical survivors coping both with the discipline of their regiment and the multiple confusions of Ind. “Baa Baa Black Sheep”: - = a short story - conc: the suffering of E children sent back ‘home’ for education, and the inability of adults to assimilate to native Ind. - both the merits and demerits of the colonial regime P o e t r y : - < the traditional sources: family connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, incl. C. A. Swinburne and R. Browning - < the Protestant hymn - < the songs of the music hall (a) content: - introd. new subjects: the E working-class private soldier of the regular army (= termed ‘Tommy Atkins’) and the Ind. scene seen through his eyes - often employed a racist POV today found offensive: “The Ladies” - often unjustly seen as a pop. apologist for Br. imperialism: “The White Man’s Burden” x but: - > “The Widow at Windsor”, lacks flag-waving and celebration of the triumph x presents a soldier bewildered by the events, having done his duty x but not seeing the course of the empire as a divine design to which he has been a contrib. - > “Boots”, presents the Af. campaigns (= the Boer wars) more as a matter of slog than of swashbuckling, and Af. more as a pain in the feet than a ‘burden’ (b) form: - introd. the accent of the London cockney - mastered the swinging verse rhythms, and a jingling, jingoistic verse - many of his poems call to be set to music and gain immeasurable by being sung: “The Road to Mandalay”, “Gentlemen Rankers”, & oth. Barrack-Room Ballads (1890, 1892): - > an immediate success “Recessional”: - = the Queen’s Jubilee poem “If”
1 4 V a r i e t y o f T h e m e s a n d L i t e r a r y M e a n s i n P l a y s o f G . B . S h a w
G ( e o r g e ) B ( e r n a r d ) S h a w ( 1 8 5 6 – 1 9 5 0 ) L i f e : - b. in Dublin x but: went to London to become a novelist, wrote 5 unsuccessful novels - studied Karl Marx’s (1818 – 83 [= a Ger. philos., political economist, social revolutionary, and co- founder of Marxism with Friedrich Engels]) Das Kapital (1867) and Richard Wagner’s (1813 – 83) opera Tristan and Isolde (1865): (a) socialism = the answer to society’s problems: joined the Fabian Society = a socialist organisation (b) a public speaker, author of public pronouncements and tracts: advocated gradual reform rather then rev., with wit absent from most oth. political writing of the time (c) met and befriended William Archer (1856 – 1924 [= a Scott. journalist and critic]) (d) an art critic: pioneered a new standard of wit and judgement of reviewing - a music critic: championed the operas of R. Wagner - a drama critic: championed the plays of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) [see his The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)] - a public character: experienced historical changes of the last ½ of the 19th c. / the 1st ½ of the 20th c. and pronounced on them in a witty epigrammatic style - a literary celebrity: used his publicity to advocate his social ideas x O. Wilde used his to define his aesthetic POV - a radical in many aspects: vegetarian, non-smoker, non-drinker, advocate of women’s rights, the abolition of private property, and the simplification of E spelling and punctuation W o r k : - author of more than 50 plays (a) content: - < H. Ibsen > men-mastering, no-nonsense, and strong-willed women characters - < C. Dickens > tends to comedy, aspires to a dramatic reflection of D.’s comic energy, social diversity, and political observation - set predominantly in the En. of the turn of the 20th c. - fuses elements of socialism, science, and philos. x but: not as much didactic as instructive - ‘a drama of ideas’ = the characters argue their POVs to justify their social positions: the prostitute of Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), the munitions manufacturer in Major Barbara (1905), etc. - his history illuminating, present reforming, and future exciting: his intellectual confidence lacks in the cautious, agnostic, and depressive writing of most of his contemporaries (b) form: - emphasises the discussion: makes play and discussion practically identical, makes the spectators themselves the persons of the drama, and the incidents of their own lives its incidents - produces dialogues of rhetorical brilliance - reverses plot conventions, attacks conventional moralism of the audience, and moves the audience to an uncomfortable sympathy with the POVs and characters violating traditional assumptions - orig.: difficulty getting his plays performed publ. in a book form with a didactic preface as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) - then: performed in the Royal Court Theatre = the centre for avant-garde drama in London - received the Nobel Prize for Lit. (1925) The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891): - explains his reasons for admiring H. Ibsen - defines the kind of drama he wanted to write Widower’s Houses (1892): - = his 1st play - criticises the slum landlordism The Philanderer (1893): - > forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893): - conc.: the contemp. women’s question of the lack of employment occasions - contrasts the future professional career of an educated, would-be-independent woman x the oldest profession of F prostitution: argues for the propriety of both vocations - preface: prostitution caused not by F depravity x but: by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women - women forced to resort to prostitution infamous of society to offer such alternatives - internal tensions: juxtaposes the liberated daughter Vivie x her brothel-keeping mother - concl.: no reconciliation, compromise, or empty gestures of feminine solidarity x but: a slammed door with an isolated Vivie happily engrossed in her work - > the 1st legal public performances in E allowed only in the y. after his receiving the Nobel Prize Arms and the Man: An Anti-Romantic Comedy (1894): - = a ‘pleasant’ play for the commercial theatre - challenges ideas of soldierly and masculine heroism Candida: A Mystery (1894): - = a ‘pleasant’ play - turns H. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879 [= criticises the traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage]) upside down in the context of a Christian Socialist family The Devil’s Disciple (1896) Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) The Perfect Wagnerite (1898): - < R. Wagner’s innovatory music-dramas of ‘The Ring Cycle’ (1848 – 74 [= The Ring of the Nibelung, a series of 4 epic music dramas based on elements of Germanic paganism]) - transforms W.’s mythology into an analyses of modern realities - ‘the dwarfs, giants and gods’ = ‘dramatisations of the three main orders of men’ (a) dwarfs = ‘the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people’ (b) giants = ‘the patient, toiling, stupid,…money-worshipping people’ (c) gods = ‘the intellectual, moral, talented people’ - < further develops the idea in his Heartbreak House (1919) You Never Can Tell (1899): - = a ‘pleasant’ play - allows for the victory of a new generation over the old Man and Superman (1903): - < Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756 – 91 [= an Austrian composer]) Don Giovanni (1787) - set in an infernal afterlife - transforms the play’s characters into those of Don Giovanni in a vast post-Nietzschean argument John Bull’s Other Island (1904): - = one of his rare direct treatments of Ir. Major Barbara (1905): - conc.: the idea of the future reconstruction of society by a power-manipulating minority - contrasts a strong-willed father x his equally strong-minded daughter Androcles and the Lion (1912) Pygmalion (1912): - conc.: the developing relationship btw a ‘creator’ x his ‘creation’ - < possibly shares this ‘grotesque’ idea with C. Dickens’ Great Expectations - > the basis of the musical My Fair Lady (1956) Heartbreak House (1919): - the title: from its subtle series of encounters btw characters each of which has to come to terms with disillusion and some kind of ‘heartbreak’ - < develops the theme of 3 contending orders of men of his The Perfect Wagnerite - concl.: the god-like survivors destroy the oth. 2 orders Back to Methuselah (1920) Saint Joan (1923): - celebrates the recent canonisation of the Fr. military heroine Joan of Arc (1412 – 31) x but: scarcely in a churchy way - Joan = a self-aware, self-asserting woman ‘saintly’ not in the sentimental sense x but: by merit of the effects she has on oth. and in her willingness to give her life for the freedom opened up to her by her convictions
1 5 I r i s h R e n a i s s a n c e i n P o e t r y a n d D r a m a (W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, A. Gregory, and S. O’Casey)
W ( i l l i a m ) B ( u t l e r ) Y e a t s ( 1 8 6 5 – 1 9 3 9 ) L i f e : - b. in Dublin - relig. by temperament x but: unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy - inclined to the traditions of esoteric thought: mysticism, folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism - moved btw (a) Dublin, (b) London, and (c) Sligo (west of Ir.): (a) Ir. nationalism: poetry contrib. to the rejuvenated Ir. culture (b) the important poets of the day: poetry in the dreamy Pre-Raphaelite tradition (c) life of countryside peasantry: poetry in the folklore tradition P o e t r y : - created a symbolic system of his own = mystical and quasi-mystical ideas based on a variety of sources common to W. Blake and P. B. Shelley - the system strengthens the coherence of his poetic imagery - able to communicate the significance of his symbols by the way he expresses and organises them even to readers who know nothing of his system - asserts the power of a mystical vision and an often passionate sexuality and sensuality - presses for both spiritual and political commitment phase 1 = a self-consciously Romantic poet: (ca 1890s) - < E. Spenser, P.B. Shelley, and W. Blake - < Sligo experience - Gaelic poetry from the heroic age of Ir. history - precise natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore: “The Stolen Child” - links even neoplatonic ideas with the Ir. heroic themes gives dignity and style to his imagery not normally associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess: “The Rose of the World” - a habit of revising earlier poems in later printings - also a co-founder of the ‘Rhymer’s Club’ (1890 – 1904) The Celtic Twilight (1893): - = an essay - explains his notion of poetry - combines an escapist post-Paterian aestheticism x a nationalistic Celticism: withdraws into ideal landscapes of Celtic legends (Innisfree) = an alternative way of seeing and repres. the world “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: - controls the handling of the imagery to achieve a haunting quality “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland”: - contrasts human activities x strangeness of nature “The Madness of King Goll”: - the disturbing sense of the otherness of the natural world drives the king mad phase 2 = Ir. nationalist: (ca 1900s) - < F. Nietzsche > a more active stance a more masculine, simpler, and more pop. style - < Maud Gonne (1866 – 1953 [= an Ir. actress and violent nationalist]) > refused to marry her: “No Second Troy” - < Augusta Gregory > invited to her country house Coole Park (county Galway) to experience the ‘country house ideal’ = an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure imposing order on chaos: “A Prayer for My Daughter” - detests the middle classes with their Philistine money grubbing, finds his ideal characters above them (aristocracy), or bellow them (peasants and beggars) because of the own tradition they have and live accord. to - abandons ‘impersonal beauty’ in favour of ‘the normal, passionate, reasoning self’ - combines the colloquial with the formal: “The Folly of Being Comforted”, “Adam’s Curse”, & oth. In the Seven Woods (1903) The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) “The Wild Swans at Coole”, “In the Seven Woods”, and “Coole Park, 1929”: - < inspired by A. Gregory’s house and surroundings phase 3 = a national figure: (ca 1910s) - < A. Gregory > co-founded the ‘Irish Literary Theatre’ (1899 – 1901), actively participated in play production - makes poetry pronouncements on public controversies - after the defeat of his cause by the Rom. Cath. middle class representatives moves to En. - after the Easter Rising (1916 [= an attempt of Ir. republicans to force independence from the UK, led largely by a group of poets rather than military minded people; the rebellion suppressed, the leaders executed] returns to Ir. - occupies, refurbishes, and renames the Norman tower on A. Gregory’s land to mark his new commitment = central symbol of his later poetry - becomes a senator supporting the Protestant landed class - during the WW I preocc. with the Easter Rising x not with the war x but: “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, on the death of A. Gregory’s only child in WW I The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1821): - combines the colloquial and the formal - adds a metaphysical and an epigrammatic element - experiments with different kinds of rhythm The Trembling of the Veil (1922): - recalls the members and meetings of the ‘Rhymer’s Club’ - > later incorporated into his Autobiographies A Vision (1925, 1937): - = a highly speculative essay - works out the elements of the symbolic system derived from his wife’s automatic writing he believed to have been dictated by spirits - develops a theory of the movements of history and of the different types of personality = each related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon phase 4 = the mature realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet (ca 1920s) - subject matter: revolutionary politics x personal regret, evocations of ideal past x prophecy, private agonising over the process of ageing x celebration of cultural history - recurrent symbol of winding stairs and spirals of all kinds: (a) symbol of life = a journey up a spiral staircase, both repetitious and progressive (b) symbol of the means resolving contraries and paradoxes The Tower (1928) The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) “Vacillation”: - opening: ‘Between extremities / Man runs his course’ - presents an argument framed by contraries and complements: dialogues btw soul and heart, evocations of the public domain of the soldier and the withdrawal of the meditating saint, etc. “Leda and the Swan”: - = a tense sonnet - conc.: the rape of Leda by a superb, mastering bird, and the long-term consequences of the rape in the ruin of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon - joins the human x the divine, transforms the intimate into the public, the woman’s violation into a wider human tragedy - [note: Leda and Zeus’s illegitimate daughter = Helen of Gr., married the King of Sparta Menelaus and was abducted by Paris of Troy; Leda’s legitimate daughter = Clytemnestra, married Agamemnon, murdered him because of her lover, and was herself murdered by her son Orestes] “Sailing to Byzantinum”: - escapes from the turbulence of life to the calm eternity of art “After Long Silence” phase 5: (ca 1930s) - last poems of a controlled x but: startling wildness - consid. the greatest 20th c. poet of the E language D r a m a : - aimed: (a) to create a ‘poetical or legendary drama’ within an ‘only symbolic and decorative setting’, and to turn away from the ‘common realities’ of H. Ibsen’s work and his own early drama (b) to create a national dramatic style drawing from Ir. traditions, and to provide a focus for future national, and nationalist, aspiration - acquired the ‘Abbey Theatre’ in Dublin (1904) together with his associates, incl. A. Gregory, George Moore (1852 – 1933), and J(ohn) M(illington) Synge The Countess Kathleen (1892): - = an early episodic poetic drama - mixes folkloric elements x nationalism - > inaugurated the ‘Ir. Literary Theatre’ Cathleen ni Houlihan The Golden Helmet The Hour Glass ‘The Cuchulain Sequence’: - = a sequence of plays conc. with the ancient hero C. - an increasingly innovative stage technique > On Baile’s Strand (1903): - opens the sequence - the characters reflect abstract ideas > At the Hawk’s Well (1916): - < the symbolic patterns of the Japanese Noh drama recommended to him by Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) > a freer symbolic and ritual drama - C. transfigured into a series of patterned words and symbols emphasised by light effects, masks, dance, and the music of a drum, gong, and zither - climax: a ritualistic dance > Purgatory and The Death of Cuchulain (both 1939): - incl. bare stages, hauntings, and disconcerting shifts of time-perspective
J o h n M i l l i n g t o n S y n g e ( 1 8 7 1 – 1 9 0 9 ) - = more conventionally shaped plays - minimises conventional action, achieves the singular effect through language - echoes the rhythms of the Western Ir. E moulded by Gaelic syntax and provincial Cath. - his mature plays perfect a distinctively Ir. comic form - < London 17th c. comedies Riders to the Sea (1904): - = a short ‘poetic’ play - suggests the perennial failure of those working with and on the sea - subsumes characters and action in a choric flow expressive of a submissive fatalism The Tinker’s Wedding (1903 – 7) The Well of the Saints (1905) The Playboy of the Western World (1907): - set on the remote Mayo coastline - an isolated rural community disturbed by the arrival of a fugitive = a supposed parricide - concl.: the fugitive departs with his thrice ‘resurrected’ father in a triumphant act of myth-making in which he claims to go away ‘like a gallant captain with his heathen slave’ - minimises action in favour of words and the illusion words create
L a d y A u g u s t a G r e g o r y ( 1 8 5 2 – 1 9 3 2 ) L i f e : - < her nurse = a native Ir. speaker, made her familiar with histories and legends of the local area - a cultural nationalist: the main organiser and driving force of the ‘Irish Literary Revival’ - made her house at Coole Park a meeting place for the leading Revival figures, incl. W. B. Yeats [see also: his “The Wild Swans at Coole”, & oth.] - co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre (1899 – 1901: collapsed due to lack of funding) > the Irish National Theatre (1904+) > the Abbey Theatre - contrib. to the renaissance esp. of Ir. drama: one of the Abbey’s most prolific playwrights, a director, and an occasional stage manager - her only child killed in WW I [see also: W. B. Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”] W o r k : - a dramatist and folklorist - author of a number of short plays and books retelling stories from Ir. mythology - an unusual ear for dialect: (a) wrote in an attempted transliteration of the Hiberno-E dialect spoken around Coole Park = ‘Kiltartanese’, from the nearby village Kiltartan (b) co-authored W. B. Yeats’s early plays, esp. the dialogue passages involving peasant characters Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Gods and Fighting Men (1904), & oth.: - = coll. of Kiltartanese versions of Ir. myths A Book of Saints and Wonders (1906), The Kiltartan History Book (1909), The Kiltartan Wonder Book (1910), & oth.: - = coll. of tales from the area around her Coole Park home Spreading the News (1904), The Rising of the Moon (1906), the tragedy The Gaol Gate (1906) and The Workhouse Ward (1908): - = one-act plays about the Ir. peasantry The White Cockade (1905), The Canavans (1906), and The Deliverer (1911): - = Ir. folk-history plays Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (1913) Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920): - = a 2-vol. study of the folklore of her native area
S e a n O ’ C a s e y ( 1 8 8 0 – 1 9 6 4 ) L i f e : - b. John Casey, at the peak of his association with the nationalist Gaelic League known as Sean O Cathasaigh - a poor Protestant Dubliner by birth W o r k : - = the last major early 20th c. Ir. dramatist to be associated with the Dublin Abbey Theatre - his plays based on his own experience of the sounds, rhetoric, prejudices, frustrations, and manners of tenement dwellers of the Dublin slums - avoids romanticising Ir., fantasising about its past or its bloody present, or poeticising the vigorously rhythmical language of the Dublin poor - avoids apologising the troubles of Ir., or taking sides with its oppressor x its supposed liberators - his poor: (a) caught up in a struggle disrupting their lives x rather than enhancing or transfiguring them (b) no dumb victims x but: uncomprehending and unwilling sufferers for sb’s else cause - tragedies x but: relieved by a wit as instinctive as irreverent: ‘the whole worl’s in a state o’chassis’ in Juno and the Paycock (1924) D u b l i n D r a m a : The Shadow of a Gunman (1923): - < J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World - the theme of deception and self-deception x but: ironically set against a revolutionary and urban background instead of the rural one - set in a tenement back room, in the time of the ‘Black and Tan’ repression (1920) - the title itself ambiguous: the gunman of the play = a sham, not the supposed warrior, the ‘poet and poltroon’, dying violently x but: the girl who looking upon him as a hero, the ‘Helen of Troy come to live in a tenement’ Juno and the Paycock (1924): - set in a single tenement room in the time of the Irish Civil War (1922 – 23) - [‘Anglo-Irish Treaty’ (1921) establ. the Irish Free State, precursor of today’s Rep. of Ir., as a dominion within the UK x but: the Northern Ir. opted out of the Ir. Free State ‘Irish Civil War’ (1922 –23) btw supporters and opponents of the Treaty, result: the anti-Treaty IRA forces defeated, the Treaty accepted] The Plough and the Stars (1926): - set in / around the rooms of an old tenement house, in the time shortly before and during the Easter Rising - the tenement both partially detached from the political struggle x bound up in its confusions, injustices, and bloody accidents L o n d o n D r a m a : - moved to En. (1926) - his later plays marred by awkwardness and socialist rhetoric neither managed to recall the tense and unsentimental energy of his Abbey plays The Silver Tassie (1928): - = an experimental ‘Tragi-Comedy’ marred by accentuated paradoxes - commented on the WW I - rejected by the Abbey Theatre, performed in a London theatre Red Roses for Me (1943) Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (1949) and The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955): - = anti-clerical and anti-capitalist analyses of modern Ir.
1 6 P o e t r y a n d t h e W o r l d W a r s (E. Thomas, R. Brooke, W. Owen, I. Rosenberg, S. Sassoon, D. Gascoyne, D. Thomas, and A. Lewis)
E d w a r d T h o m a s ( 1 8 7 8 – 1 9 1 7 ) L i f e : - a gifted lit. critic, esp. good in reviewing poetry - the 1st to salute the new stars incl. W(illiam) H(enry) Davies (1871 – 1940, a Welsh poet and the ‘Super- Tramp’), Robert Frost (1874 – 1963), and Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) - T.: poetry = the highest form of lit. x but: no serious attempt to write poems himself until the autumn 1914 - started writing poetry under the stress of deciding whether or not to enlist, on encouragement by R. Frost - enlisted for the attraction of the soldier salary to enhance his meagre income from selling his books and review copies, and for his feelings of patriotism - killed in the Western Front by the blast of a shell W o r k : - ed. of 16 anthologies and oth. ed., author of 30 prose books on nature, and of some poetry - < Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1888, an E journalist and countryside fiction writer) - his love of southern En. and its seasons, celebrated in his prose, distilled to a purer form in his poetry - his awareness of the richness and beauty of the natural world intensified by a sense of impending loss and the certainty of death - perceptive to the violence done by a distant conflict to the natural order of things: an acute observer of the suffering occasioned by war at home and on the battlefield, and of death as the ultimate destroyer of the already violent co-operation of man and nature - history implicit in his humanised landscape, the ingrained past can be read in nature: his landscapes haunted by the ghosts of past occupants and users (both animals and human), and expressive the evidence of exploitation, work, and decay - plain diction, style, and rhythm characteristic of both his prose and poetry “Rain”: - < curiously indebted to his earlier prose writings “Adlestrop”: - evokes a disappearing En. through which the poet passes merely as a traveller “A Tale”: - ambiguously contrasts the growing blue periwinkles x broken blue china plates amid the ruins of a cottage “Digging”: - ‘let[s] down…into the earth’ the clay pipe of a soldier and that of the narrator - = as if their clay were that of human bodies joined in a common burial “As the Team’s Head-Brass”: - develops a sporadic conversation conc. the war btw a ploughman and his team at work x the narrator - interrupted each time the ploughman returns to his work, and the war, somewhere over a horizon = suggests more drastic breakings “Lights Out”: - transl. the military command into a journey through a dark wood ‘where all must lose / Their way - the unnatural silence of the wood = a sense of loss of direction and the violated self
R u p e r t B r o o k e ( 1 8 8 7 – 1 9 1 5 ) L i f e : - travelled extensively: Eur., U.S., Canada, and the South Seas - enlisted (winter 1914) and began producing his ‘war sonnets’ - died of blood poisoning on a troopship in the Mediterranean, buried on a Gr. Island - strikingly handsome, athletic, intelligent, and witty - his death symbolic of the death of a whole young generation of brilliant and beautiful patriotic Englishmen W o r k : - < the Elizabethans, J. Donne, and R. Browning - author of essays and poetry (a) pre-war poetry: - jesting, often colloquially nostalgic - > “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, a cleverly urbane poem (b) war poetry: - youthfully enthusiastic - achieved an immediate pop. impact Poems (1911): - > criticized by reviewers for their blunt diction 1914 and Other Poems (1915, posthum.): - > criticized for not responding to the horrors of war - x but: died too soon to could have done so “The Soldier”: - > praised posthum. by W. Churchill as an example for soldiers “Peace”
W i l f r e d O w e n ( 1 8 9 3 – 1 9 1 8 ) L i f e : - an assistant to a country vicar - a firm believer in Christian teaching x but: as distinct from church practice, criticised the role of the church in society - broke with the vicar, became a teacher of E in Fr. - could not decide whether or not to enlist as a poet and a Christian x but: enlisted - wounded, invalidated out of the front, met Sigfried Sassoon in the hospital: (a) encouraged to write poetry by his fiercely realistic war poems and his guidance (b) ed. the magazine Hydra - achieved success both as a soldier (the Military Cross) and as a poet - killed in action a week before the war ended W o r k : (a) early poetry: - < J. Keats - > “Song of Songs”, publ. in the Hydra - wrote poems of compassion to the sufferings of the poor (b) mature war poetry: - < suffered nightmares symptomatic of shell shock, the experience erupted into his dreams and then into the poems haunted with obsessive images: (a) blinded eyes: “Dulce et Decorum Est” (from Horace’s ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ = ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland’) (b) the mouth of hell: “Miners” and “Strange Meeting” - mastered alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, and half-rhyme - pioneered the ‘para-rhyme’ = rhyming of 2 words with identical / similar consonants x but: differing stressed vowels (hall / hell), the 2nd usually lower in pitch to produce effects of dissonance, failure, and unfulfilment reinforcing his themes - the poems ed. by S. Sassoon and publ. posthum. (1920) (c) late war poetry: - wrote eloquent elegies on the tragedy of young men killed in battle - combined a disciplined sensuality x a passionate intelligence “Dulce et Decorum Est”: - reverses the romantic assumptions about patriotic sacrifice - contrast the ghastliness of death by mustard gas x the defunct Horatian dignity damned as an ‘old lie’ “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”: - looks back to biblical precedent x but: the clever, disturbing, and clinching final couplet turns the story of Abraham and Isaac on its head “Anthem For Doomed Youth” and “The Next War’: - experiments with inherited form of the sonnet “Futility”: - expresses bitterness and anger at the sheer waste of human life “Strange Meeting”: - describes an escape from battle into ‘some profound dull tunnel’ and a meeting of enemies - = a mystic post-mortal reconciliation of the 2 slaughtered soldiers - unfinished, often conveniently interpreted as a knowing epitaph “Disabled”
I s a a c R o s e n b e r g ( 1 8 9 0 – 1 9 1 8 ) L i f e : - b. in a humble Anglo-Jewish family - apprenticed as an engraver x but: aspired to be a painter, supported by 3 Jewish women to study art - circulated copies of his poems in London lit. circles, gained some reputation x but: no material success in either poetry or painting - enlisted, killed in action in the last y. of the war W o r k : (a) early poetry: - drew on Jewish history and mythology, experimented (b) mature war poetry: - < served in the ranks because of his working-class background - vividness: the fierce apprehension of the physical reality of war, the vivid sense of involvement, the exclamatory directness of language - stark and often contrary energy: a detached and curious fascination with the nature of war, with the ravaged men and landscapes, and the imagery around him in the desolation of the trenches - originality: broke new ground in imagery, rhythms, and the handling of dramatic effects - association of dissociated elements: the ‘queer, sardonic rat’, or the dropping poppies ‘whose roots are in men’s veins’ in his “Break of Day in the Trenches” - a proto-Modernist fragmentation Night and Day (1912), Youth (1915), and Moses, A Play (1916): - = early pamphlets of poetry publ. at his own expense “Returning, We Hear Larks”: - death = as natural and as dangerously deceptive as larks singing behind the battlefield (c) also wrote following poems of distinction: “Break of Day in the Trenches”, “Louse Hunting”, and “Dead Man’s Dump”
S i e g f r i e d S a s s o o n ( 1 8 8 6 – 1 9 6 7 ) L i f e : - b. in a rich Jewish family - enlisted, fought with a conspicuous courage (Military Cross), wounded, and invalidated - then took a different view of the war [see his “A Soldier’s Declaration”] - returned to the Western Front, wounded, and invalidated home - then converted to Rom. Cath. W o r k : (a) mature war poetry: - short and blunt lyrics - masterly use of direct speech, shock tactics, and bitter irony - the chasm btw those making decisions x those suffering the consequences - attacks the old men of the army, church, and government responsible for the miseries and murders of the young (b) late poetry: - conversion to Rom. Cath. - mainly devotional poetry “A Soldier’s Declaration” (1917): - a public statement sent to his commanding officer - ‘an act of wilful defiance of military authority’ because of the war ‘being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’, being no more ‘a war of defence and liberation’ x but ‘a war of aggression and conquest’ Satirical Poems (1926): - later poetry - still attacks the society x but: in a milder, changed style “Base Details”: - attacks the generals “The Glory of Women”: - accuses the uncomprehending non-combatants “Repression of the Experience”: - describes the seeming unnaturalness of life on leave from the front - nervously gestures twd a breakdown of the mind and of the very structure of the poem “A Working Party”: - in an elegiac way memorialises an unmemorable soldier ‘accidentally’ killed “The Redeemer”: - intermixes relig. and secular contexts - a soldier carries wood = Christ-like while the light of a flare lasts x surrenders his aura after the light fades x but: retains his suffering humanity “Attack” (c) also wrote: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston’s Progress (1936): - an autobiog. trilogy written from a fictionalised POV - contrasts an experience of the world of lit. London and that of the country gentleman x the brutally different world of the trenches T h e S u r r e a l i s t M o v e m e n t ( l a t e 1 9 3 0 s ) - = a relatively brief experimental verbal and pictorial movement - < the work of W. Blake and L. Carroll - Herbert Read (1893 – 1968, a E poet and critic): a ‘classical art’ appeals to the intellect x a ‘romantic art’ (= surrealism) draws on ‘irrational revelations’ and ‘surprising incoherencies’ - put a Freudian stress on the significance of the unconscious: nightmares and daydreams, distortions and distensions - incl. Salvador Dalí (1904 – 89, a Sp. painter), & oth. - 1930s: the surrealist group overlooked, the period dominated by more political and social poetry by W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden & oth. - 1960s – 70s: attracted a renewed interest due to the ‘Br. Poetry Revival’ = a loose modernist-inspired poetic movement reacting against the more conservative approach to Br. poetry of ‘The Movement’
D a v i d G a s c o y n e ( 1 9 1 6 – 2 0 0 1 ) L i f e : - joined the Communist Party (1936), participated in the propaganda radio broadcasts x but: soon disillusioned, left the party - lived in Paris shortly before and then on and off after the WW II, befriended Salvador Dalí - suffered a mental breakdown and returned to live in En., wrote little from that point on W o r k : - = associated with the Surrealists (d) S u r r e a l i s t W r i t i n g : A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935): - one of the most determined Br. apologists for the surreal experiment Man’s Life is This Meat (1936) and Hölderlin’s Madness (1938): - = often obsessively odd coll. of poems - coll. his own early surrealist work and his transl. of Fr. surrealists - > establ. his reputation as one of the small group of E surrealists “Figure in a Landscape’: - enacts a kind of ritual awakening - > nods to the iterations of Eliot “The Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis”: - intermixes the extraordinary, the challenging, and the unapologetically silly - dispenses with capital letters and with punctuation (apart from 2 almost arbitrary full stops) (e) W a r P o e t r y : - ‘deviates’ into a certain kind of logical sense Poems 1937-1942 (1943): - = an illustr. coll. of poems from the period of his pre-WW II stay in Paris - shifts twd a more explicitly relig. sensibility estranged from the Paris surrealists A Vagrant and Other Poems (1950) and Night Thoughts (1956): - = coll. of his later poems - shifts completely away from surrealism twd a more metaphysical and relig. poetry “Farewell Chorus”: - signed ‘New Year 1940’ = greets the sphinx of ‘the Forties’ with assertion that ‘each lonely consciousness’ mirrors ‘War’s world…without end’ “Walking at Whitsun”: - wonders at the ‘anguish’ making the E landscape seem ‘Inhuman’ and ‘unreal’ - concl.: veers twd the uneasy thoughts of helmets, ruins, and ‘invading steel’
D y l a n T h o m a s ( 1 9 1 4 – 5 3 ) L i f e : - b. in Wales - a nwsp reporter and a poet discovered through a poetry contest in nwsp - a brilliant talker and brilliant reader of his own and oth.’ poems - the role of the wild bohemian poet: died suddenly of ‘an insult to the brain’ precipitated by alcohol W o r k : - < the school of J. Donne > emotionalism, lyric intensity, and the metaphysical speculation (the title of his Deaths and Entrances derived from J. Donne] (a) early poetry: - introd. a new kind of strength and romantic picturesqueness after the deliberately mute tones of T. S. Eliot - early critics consid. him the founder of a neo-Romantic movement x but: did not turn out to be so (b) war poetry: - detaches himself from private reminiscence - addresses the idea of Death touching the Resurrection: his explicitly and even noisily Christian coll. Deaths and Entrances Eighteen Poems (1934): - = an early vol. - extravagant and pulsating rhetorical style: violent imagery, suggestive obscurity The Map of Love (1939), Deaths and Entrances (1946), and Collected Poems (1953): - < the Bible, the Welsh folklore and preaching, and Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939, an Austrian and ‘the father of psychoanalysis’) - a closely woven imagery suggest the unity of all life - the continuing process of life and death locks men and women in a round of identities: love leads to new growth and so in turn to death again and to life again - seeks for a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity “Poem in October”: - presents reminiscence and autobiog. Emotion - re-enacts the freedoms of childhood before summers turns to autumn and the sun to showers - makes a compelling use of simple natural images and a lyrical feeling “In Memory of Ann Jones” (= his aunt): - yearns for a future universal release from death - specifically Welsh in terms of local reference “Twenty-four Years Remind the Tears of My Eyes”: - interweaves the turbulent pulses of nature and the stillness of death - typifies the confident loose-limbed swing of much of his verse “Fern Hill”: - celebrates his youth = the age of innocence with the knowledge of death kept at a distance explicitly war poetry: “Deaths and Entrances”: - links incendiary bombs and fire-storms x an impending Armageddon - in an apocalyptic manner “Ceremony After a Fire Raid” and “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”: - both grieves x refuses to grieve, comforts himself with the unity of humankind and nature, past and present, and life and death - the former transl. destruction into reconstitution - the latter ecstatically reflects on the promised Resurrection “Do not go gentle”: - = the most celebrated late poem - a personal protesting anxiety and a ‘rage against the dying of the light’ intrudes itself btw death and ecstasy also wrote: - prose: observes his subject with equal vividness, and combines violence and tenderness in expression equally as in his poetry Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940): - = his autobiog. Under Milk Wood (1945): - = a radio play
A l u n L e w i s ( 1 9 1 5 – 4 4 ) L i f e : - b. in a mining village in Wales - won a scholarship for uni education - a convinced pacifist x but: entered the army shortly after the outbreak of WW II - killed accidentally ‘by a pistol shot’ in Burma (Ind.) during the WW II campaign against the Japanese W o r k : - rarely a specifically Welsh poet-at-war despite his Welsh orig.: except for his “Destruction” and “A Welsh Night” - the most assertively civilian of all the distinctive soldier writers of WW II - sympathetic with the impoverished coal miners because of his own humble orig. Raiders’ Dawn (1942): - = his 1st vol. - incl. mostly poems about the army life in En. training camps - pays tribute to E. Thomas and to the E landscapes most associated with him “All Day It Has Rained…”: - agonises about the tedium of life in an encampment in rain and wind - a man passionately loves his home and wife x but: becomes dumb and indifferent in the confines of the camp Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (1945, posthum.): - = his 2nd vol., in 3 parts - the title: from the description of a war-horse in the Book of Job - incl. mostly poems written after his leaving En. for military duty in the East: (1) his tense waiting En. (2) his voyage to the East (3) his uncomfortable coming to terms with the alien contours, harsh light, and dry wastes of the Ind. landscape “Goodbye”: - = a leave-taking poem - recalls the last few hours he spent with his wife before leaving for Ind. (never saw her again) “Indian Day” and “Observation Post: Forward Area”: - at his best - suggest his reluctant, deracinated, restlessness
1 7 M o d e r n i s m a n d i t s M a n i f e s t a t i o n s i n t h e W o r k s o f J . J o y c e a n d V . W o o l f
J a m e s J o y c e ( 1 8 8 2 – 1 9 4 1 ) L i f e : - b. in Dublin - received a Cath. education at Jesuit institutions, then studied modern languages - created some stir with his outspoken articles during his studies: (a) one on the Norwegian playwright H. Ibsen publ. (b) another called “The Day of Rabblement” refused and publ. privately - rebelled against Dublin’s Philistinism and against Cath. - chose the career of an exile and writer: J.: the latter implies the former, the lit. mission involves rebellion and exile - aided by wealthy patrons to enhance his meagre income - aided by his brother Stanislas = his ‘brother’s keeper’ to control his heavy drinking W o r k : - moved / wrote btw Paris, Trieste, and Zurich x but: able to re-create the Dublin life with total understanding and total objectivity - expressed and complexly explored the loyalty to his native city in each of his prose works - Dublin = a microcosm / a small-scale model of all human life and experience, of all history, and of all geography - a humanely comic vision of all life - publication troubles: (a) Dubliners: the publication held up for 9 y., finally publ. with the addition of 3 further stories (b) Ulysses: charged for obscenity and banned in both GB and US for 11 y. (c) Finnegans Wake: publ. immediately by ‘Faber and Faber’, the firm controlled by T. S. Eliot “Epiphanies”: - = short prose sketches from his notebooks - each shaped around a moment of revelation = epiphany = ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation’ - the title : from theological terminology - the 1st major E writer since the Reformation (except for the converts J. H. Newman and G. M. Hopkins) ‘supersaturated’ in specifically Rom. Cath. teaching D u b l i n e r s ( 1 9 1 4 ) : - = a series of orig. 12 short stories: 3 deal with childhood, 3 with adolescence, 3 with mature life, and 3 with public life - (a) = sharp realistic sketches of D. - (b) = a book about human fate - (c) ‘a chapter of the moral history’ of Ir. - Dublin = ‘the centre of paralysis’, its citizens = bound up in private conc. and incapable to judge properly their experience - the detached narrator shapes the narratives x but: does not offer his judgement - chooses and organises the detail to produce symbolic meanings, new meanings arise from the relation of the stories presented in a particular order “The Sisters” - = the 1st story - opening: stresses the cultural ‘paralysis’: (a) the 1st line refers to the priest’s fatal stroke (b) the 1st paragraph repeats the word as the narrator gazes up nightly at a window in the priest’s house “The Clay”: - = the haunting 10th story - the ageing Maria loses a slice of plum cake on a tram: gives the seemingly inconsequential loss a contextual perspective - concl.: M. sings a song superstitiously held to foretell mortality her vulnerability “The Dead”: - = the long last story, added later - conc.: the nature of artistic objectivity - the protagonist = the literate and articulate Gabriel Conroy: shifts the general conc. away from the uneducated and the narrow-minded - the setting = a family party: its quality establ. by snatches of conversation, exchanged politenesses, familiar memories, pop. quotations and songs = these fragments re-echo themes from earlier stories - (a) a sharp exchange btw G. and the insular Miss Ivors conc. the nationalist tensions of the contemp. Ir.: G. accused of being a ‘West Briton’ (= an Ir. content not to undo the Union with GB) - (b) G. temporarily alienated from his wife by her recall of a dead suitor from the Celtic West of Ir. - concl.: G. muses in his hotel room as snow falls in the city to unite it to the whole white island stretching westwards beyond it - a momentary vision of a release from time and from purely temporal preocc.: G. freed from his egotism to attain supreme neutrality = the beginning of artistic awareness - > further develops this view of art by Stephen Dedalus in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man A P o r t r a i t o f t h e A r t i s t a s a Y o u n g M a n ( 1 9 1 6 ): - = his autobiog. woven into a novel - conc.: the parallel movement twd art and twd exile - art moves: (a) from the simplest lyrical form = the personal expression of emotion (b) to the narrative form = no longer purely personal (c) to the highest dramatic form = impersonal - this view of art involves the objectivity, even the exile, and the rejection of the ordinary world of middle- class values the bohemian artist - = representatively true not only of J. x but: of the relation btw the artist and society in the early 20th c. - the protagonist = Stephen Dedalus (the name: from Daedalus = the builder of Cretan mazes and the ingenious feathered escaper from islands): (a) admires the prose style of J. H. Newman (b) shapes his complex aesthetics accord. to the theology of Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 74, an It. Cath. philos. and scholastic theologian) Stephen Hero (1944, posthum.): - = a part of the orig. draft A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: - = a reworked version - in contrast more carefully organised and stripped of everything superfluous Part 1: - conc.: the growth of an artist’s mind - plays with the fairy-tale phraseology, nursery-rhyme rhythms, and baby talk = suggests an infant’s experience as shaped by sensual stimuli Part 2: - conc.: the assuming of a new priesthood = that of the artist - moves forward from being the passive feeler to being the doer - concl.: breaks into a series of diary entries of the potential artist preparing himself for flight U l y s s e s ( 1 9 2 2 ) : - took him 7 y. to write - = an account of 1 day in the lives of citizens of Dublin: involves a limited number of events, a limited number of people, and a limited environment - x but: aspires to create a microcosm: uses devices to render the events symbolic of the activity of ‘the Individual in the World’ - the most obvious device = the parallel with Homer’s Odyssey: (a) each of the 18 extended Ulysses episodes corresponds in some way to an Odyssey episode: Bloom attends the funeral = Homer descents to Hades, etc. (b) each of the Ulysses characters corresponds to an Odyssey character: Bloom = Odysseus, Stephen = his lost son Telemachus, Molly = his Penelope, etc. - Ulysses = the most ‘complete’ man because shown in all his aspects: coward x hero, weak x strong, etc. - makes Bloom a modern Ulysses = makes him Everyman = makes Dublin the World Plot: - opening: 8 A.M., June 16, 1904 - Stephen Dedalus = the one of the Portrait, 2 y. later: - called back to his native Dublin by his mother’s fatal illness - his early morning activities and the main currents of his mind: preocc. with guilt over his failure to pray at his mother’s death-bed and with intellectual speculation - S.: an aloof artist = the incomplete man x the complete man Bloom - Leopold Bloom = an Ir. Jew: - his activities: attends a funeral, transacts his business, shops, cooks, eats his lunch, walks through the Dublin streets, and worries about his wife’s infidelity - the contents of his mind incl. retrospect and anticipation to reveal all his past history = far less organised: returns to the snippets of half-understood Hebrew and E words, the smell of soap, his dead son, an advertisement, etc. - S. drinks with some medical student and gets drunk - B. discovers a paternal feeling twd him = S. symbolically takes the place of B.’s dead son - climax: S. and B. succumb to a series of hallucinations, present their subconscious and unconscious in a dramatic form, and reveal their personalities with a completeness and frankness unique in lit. - B. takes S. home and gives him a meal - S. departs and B. retires to bed - Molly Bloom: - seemingly marginalised in her bed: sleeps, entertains a lover - holds the final long and extraordinarily unpunctuated monologue presenting her experiences as woman - concl.: 2 A.M., June 17, 1904; with M.’s confident ‘Yes’ - symbolically presents the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability (B. both Jew and Dubliner, exile and citizen) and the problems of the relations btw parent and child, btw the generations, and btw the sexes Style: - < themes from Homer, Dante, and W. Shakespeare, from lit., philos., and history - the subtle pattern of allusion and suggestion illuminates many aspects of human experience - linguistic virtuosity: the stream of consciousness method = presents the consciousness of the characters directly without any explanatory comment - mingles past and present in the texture of the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness: indicated by puns, sudden breaks into a new kind of style or subject matter - = the kaleidoscopic nature of human awareness F i n n e g a n s W a k e ( 1 9 3 9 ) : - took him 14 y. to write - the title = from an Ir.-Am. ballad: Tom Finnegan, a hod carrier, falls off a ladder when drunk, and apparently kills himself x but: revives during the wake [= the watch by the dead body] when sb spills whiskey on him - conc.: aspires to embrace all of human history - < the cyclical theory of the phases of history by Giambattista Vico (1668 – 1744, an It. philos.): (a) divine, theocratic: people governed by their awe of the supernatural (b) aristocratic: the ‘heroic age’ described in Homer and Beowulf (ca 700 – 1000 AD, an OE heroic epic poem) (c) democratic, individualistic (d) chaos: a fall into confusion, people startled back into supernatural reverence of (a) - J.: his own generation in the final stage of (d) - the novel divided into 4 books accord. to G. Vico’s pattern Content: - = a symbolic Irishman’s cosmic dream - gives up realism altogether, changes characters into oth. or into inanimate objects, etc. - opens with Finnegan’s fall, introd. his successor Earwicker: his dream constitutes the novel - Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker = HCE: - his initials symbolise his universality = Everyman (‘Here Comes Everybody’) - his guilty feelings about an indecency he committed symbolise Adam’s Original Sin - Anna Livia Plurabelle = ALP: his wife and also Eve, Ir., etc. - their 2 sons, the very opposite of each oth.: symbolise the basic dichotomy in human nature (introvert x extrovert, etc.) Style: - threatens to become a self-referential series of echoes, puns, acrostics, and dense lit. and historical allusions - invents his own dream language: uses words with several different meanings at once, draws them from several different languages at once, and fuses them in all sorts of ways to achieve whole clusters of meanings simultaneously - derives the pun elements from every conceivable source in history, lit., mythology, and his personal experience - produces a texture of multiple significance: not the plot x but: the punning language bears the main load of meaning D r a m a : Exiles (1918): - = a somewhat mechanical Ibsenesque play - conc.: the conflicting emotions of the Dublin protagonist about his homeland and his question whether or not to remain loyal to Ir. - J.: the Eur. exile = the only solution
‘ B l o o m s b u r y G r o u p ’ - named for the unfashionable London district of Bloomsbury - = an informal group of the Woolfs’ lit. and artistic friends gathering in their house - incl. Lytton Strachey (1880 – 1932, a biographer), John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946, an economist), Roger Fry (1866 – 1934, an art critic), Duncan Grant (1885 – 1978, a painter), E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell (1879 – 1961, V. Woolf’s sister and a painter), and Clive Bell (1881 – 1964, Vanessa’s husband and an art critic) - shared ‘a taste for discussion in pursuit of truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling, contempt for conventional morals’ - the prime ‘Bloomsbury’ texts: (a) L. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918): a coll. of succinct biographies of Cardinal Manning (1808 – 92, an E Cath. Cardinal), Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910, a pioneering nurse), T. Arnold, and General Charles Gordon (1833 – 85, a Br. army officer) (b) R. Fry’s Vision and Design (1920) - their intelligence in conversation equalled their frankness, notably on sexual topics (the sexual life of Bloomsbury provided ample material for discussion)
V i r g i n i a W o o l f ( 1 8 8 2 – 1 9 4 1 ) L i f e : - b. in a respectable, educated, and cultured London family - got acquainted with many eminent Victorians in her childhood - married Leonard Woolf (1880 – 1969, a journalist and essayist), together founded the Hogarth Press (1917 – 46), publ: (a) T. S. Eliot’s Poems (1919) and his Homage to John Dryden (1924) (b) S. Freud’s work (c) her own work, & oth. - lived in an extraordinarily happy marriage x but: fell passionately in love with ‘Vita’ = Victoria Sackville-West (1892 – 1962, a lesbian poet married to a bisexual man) - her marriage withstood this and oth. strains - suffered periods of nervous depression, dreaded WW II, feared she would lose her mind and become a burden on her husband committed suicide W o r k : - conc.: the problems of personal identity and personal relationships, the significance of time, change, and memory for human personality - preocc. with time: her narratives punctuated by clock-readings and clock-soundings, measurement of tides, ageing and dying, etc. - = related to her interest in a dissipation of distinctions within a pattern of change and decay in nature as well as in human psyche - preocc. with women characters, esp. women artists: tends to introd. characters standing for herself - handles the stream of consciousness so that she brings into prose fiction sth of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry E s s a y s : Modern Fiction (1919): = an essay rejecting the ‘materialism’ of Arnold Bennett (1867 – 1931), H. G. Wells, and J. Galsworthy in favour of a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness telling about the real truth of human experience - a lit. work should be based upon the novelist’s feelings x not upon convention, and incl. no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe ‘in the accepted style’ - the task of the future novelist: to convey an impression of life - the new aesthetic of realism: not necessarily new subjects x but: new forms - a new fictional form out of a repres. of the ‘myriad impressions’ daily imposing themselves on the human consciousness A Room of One’s Own (1929): - = a study on the necessity of a private space and private income for the development of a woman writer’s creativity - a tribute to the E novelists who have establ. the tradition of women’s writing: G. Eliot, & oth. Three Guineas (1938): - = a coll. of essays on the position of women, esp. professional women The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932): - coll. of reviews and critical essays - informal and personal in tone F i c t i o n : The Voyage Out (1915): - = a relatively conventional early novel Monday or Tuesday (1921): = a coll. of sketches of technical experiments moves btw action and contemplation, btw external events in time and delicate tracings of the internal flow of consciousness, btw retrospect and anticipation, etc. fully develops her characteristic method in her novels Jacob’s Room (1922) Mrs Dalloway (1925): - = her 1st completely successful novel in the ‘new’ style - her most complete repres. of the life of a woman character’s mind and her most thorough experiment with the technique of interior monologue - conc.: the problem of identity - contrasts the mutual dependence and opposition of: (a) the perceptions of Clarissa Dalloway, the party giver (b) the shell-shocked ramblings of Septimus Warren Smith, the victim of the war To the Lighthouse (1927): - conc.: the contemp. discontinuities, fragmentations, and disintegrations in both the external / the spiritual world - the idea of characters ‘dissipated into shreds’: (a) aims both to ‘dissipate’ character x to reintegrate human experience within an aesthetic form (b) both to repres. the nature of conscious and unconscious mental activity x to relate it to a more universal awareness of pattern - the protagonist (Mrs Ramsay) identifies this pattern in her visionary moment of peace as ‘a stability’, sth ‘immune from change’ Orlando (1928): - = her most light-hearted novel - on her relationship with Vita S.-W. - an extraordinary tribute to the E aristocracy = a sentimental tribute to the aristocratic V. - an exploration of a ‘masculine’ freedom traditionally denied to women The Waves (1931): - complements her insights into the identities of characters by a temporary larger symbol of moving water - the permanent larger symbol of a flickering lighthouse in her To the Lighthouse The Years (1937): - = her longest novel - on the consequences and processes of waiting, learning, and ageing Between the Acts (1941): - = her most stylised novel - the protagonist: an amateur woman writer - women’s sensibility (and sensitivity) x the factual ‘materialism’ of a world dominated by men - the amateur woman painter in her To the Lighthouse - the women’s ‘epiphanies’ x the men left content with a limited grasp, and presumed control, of the physical world
1 8 T h e B i r t h o f M o d e r n i s m a t t h e B e g i n n i n g o f t h e 2 0 t h C e n t u r y (V. Woolf, K. Mansfield, E. M. Forster, F. M. Ford, and E. Bowen)
V i r g i n i a W o o l f [see W. under ‘17 Modernism’]
K a t h e r i n e M a n s f i e l d ( 1 8 8 8 – 1 9 2 3 ) L i f e : - b. Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in New Zealand - received higher education in London, went back to NZ x but: 2 y. later left again for London and never returned - involved in a number of love affairs, married suddenly, and left the man the same evening - got pregnant by another man, went to Ger. to await the birth x but: miscarried [see her In a German Pension] - involved with both John Middleton Murry (1889 – 1957, a critic) and the magazine Rhythm he ed., divorced, and married him - temporary befriended with D. H. Lawrence and his wife x but: came to be hated by him - died of tuberculosis W o r k : - = successful - stimulated V. Woolf’s jealousy rather than critical generosity x but: both developed the post- impressionist principle of suggestiveness and rhythm from a distinctively feminine POV - proceeded through a variety of lit. styles x but: at her best in the last y. of her life - worked determinedly on a small scale, wrote carefully pointed and delicately elusive short stories - combined incident, image, symbol, and structure - comparable with x yet: interestingly different from J. Joyce’s method in his Dubliners - suggested a pervasive atmosphere through establ. a series of evanescent sensations: creaks, yawns, cries, bird-calls, etc. early period: - experimented with different pen names before eventually adopted that of Katherine Mansfield - wrote poems, sketches, and short stories - criticised the narrowness of middle-class life in NZ (at that time a country in the shadow of the Br. Empire) middle period: - experimented with technique - refined her art to perfect the short story of insights into certain kinds of experience achieved through precision of style and imagery, and a symbolic patterning of incidents In a German Pension (1911): - = her 1st publ. book - < her own experience of Ger. - incl. carefully observed sketches full of ironic detail expressing her dislike of Teutonic manners and mannerisms late period: - < the death of her much-loved younger brother in WW I sent her imagination back to their childhood day in NZ - recalled the landscapes and flora of NZ and reworked her NZ experiences: “The Aloe” - aimed to explore the mysterious ‘diversity of life…Death included.’ Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922): - > the succinct narratives ensured her the place of a master of the modern short story “The Garden Party”: - < her own experience of NZ: a fatal street accident of a neighbour from a poor quarter nearby almost spoilt the festive atmosphere of her mother’s party in their house - x but: endows the girl protagonist’s with a sensibility subtler and finer than anything she appears to have felt herself at the time “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”: - = a restrained comedy on the surface x but: a potential tragedy with its sense of wasted lives - uses the technique of suggestion x rather than explicit development - achieves the meaning through the atmosphere, the accumulation of small strokes, each of them seemingly but a piece of realistic detail - manipulates time by the effective use of unobtrusive flashbacks “Miss Brill”, “Prelude”, “At the Bay”, “The Doll’s House”, “Something Childish but Very Natural”
E ( d w a r d ) M ( o r g a n ) F o r s t e r ( 1 8 7 9 – 1 9 7 0 ) L i f e : - travelled Gr. and Ita.: (a) Gr. and Ita. peasant life: contrasted with the stuffy and repressed life of middle-class En. (b) Gr. mythology and Ita. Renaissance art: sough the ‘spontaneity of consciousness’ (M. Arnold) in personal relationships amid the complexities and distortions of modern life - tutored E in Ger., travelled extensively Ind. - associated with the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ - cast a critical and reforming eye on the abuses of the world: an independent liberal suspicious of political slogans and catchwords W o r k : - wrote 6 novels, short stories, and critical, autobiog., and descriptive prose - intermixed a sharp, observant, and sometimes bitter social comedy x a didactic insistence on the virtues of tolerance and human decency - conc.: personal relationships in the Edwardian middle-class, the ‘little society’ we make for ourselves with our friends Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905): - = his 1st novel - conc.: the tragicomic conflicts btw the refined E gentility x the coarse Ita. vitality The Longest Journey (1907): - conc.: the differences btw living x dead relationships - < experienced the tribulations of a day boy at a boarding school - incl. an incidental satire of E public school education and E notions of respectability A Room with a View (1908): - conc.: the nature of love - Ita. = a liberating agent, suggested by the music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827, a German composer) - E visitors to Florence and their smugness, comfortable pretentiousness, and emotional repression x the Ita. freedom of spirit Howards End (1910): - conc.: the relation btw the kinds of reality people get involved in living, btw inward feeling x outward action - the terse epigraph, ‘Only connect!’: a subject to a narrative play, forms and unforms a series of connections btw characters, and btw antipathetic cultures of business and the intellect - x but: aware of its being more easily said than done - incl. an awkward section analysing L. van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (1898) in terms of dancing gnomes A Passage to India (1924): - = his last novel and his most searching and complex exploration of the possibilities and limitations of human relationships - conc.: the relations btw the Br. x the Ind. under the Br. Raj (= Hindu for ‘reign’) - set ‘out of time’ and deliberately free from specific political reference - x but: a distinctly less generous picture of the Raj than that of R. Kipling - the Br. = an élite isolated by its sense of superiority and by sticking to the petty snobberies of ‘home’ - climax: a hiatus = a considered narrative gap, with the assault either happening or not happening or enacted by sb else than the man later accused of it - = this disjuncture enhances oth. disjunctures, silences, and assaults on the reader’s consciousness - F.: orig. meant ‘as a little bridge btw East and West’ x but: his ‘sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable’ - the central question, ‘whether or not it is possible to be friends with an E man’: debated by 3 Ind. in the 2nd chapter, “Mosque”, and followed by a practical demonstration of the difficulties - concl.: ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ – ‘No, not yet.’ Maurice (1914, 1971 posthum. on the author’s insistence): - < Edward Carpenter (1844 – 1929, a libertarian philos.) - conc.: a definition and justification of a homosexual love - x but: in fact rather a nostalgic evocation of his undergraduate friendship with C. - a brave attempt to question contemp. taboos x but: as a work of art not successful Aspects of the Novel (1927): - conc.: the techniques of fiction - a minor classic of criticism
F o r d M a d o x F o r d ( 1 8 7 3 – 1 9 3 9 ) L i f e : - b. Ford Hermann Hueffer W o r k : - founded The English Review (1908) publ.: (a) establ. writers: T. Hardy, A. Bennett, H. G. Wells, H. James, & oth. (b) new writers: the 1st to publ. poems by D. H. Lawrence, & oth. - founded The Transatlantic Review (1920s) publ. modern(ist) lit. The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903): - in collab. with J. Conrad The Fifth Queen (1907 – 8): - = a decoratively ornate trilogy of historical novels - conc.: Catherine Howard (1520/-25 – 42, the beheaded wife of Henry VIII [1491 – 1547, reign 1509 – 47]) The Critical Attitude (1911): - = a series of polemical essays on the state of the novel - orig. publ. in the English Review - contrasts the ‘loose, amorphous, genial and easy-going’ Br. novel of Henry Fielding (1707 – 54, author of Tom Jones (1749)], C. Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, A. Trollope, & oth. x the tighter and more self- consciously artful Fr. novel - praises H. James and J. Conrad for their ‘great attention to their Art’ The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915): - = his fictional masterpiece - provisionally entitled The Saddest Story x but: The Good Soldier a doubtlessly more appropriate title for a novel to appear in wartime - a pre-Modernist technique: (a) Conradian shifts in time and perceptions of betrayal (b) Jamesian conc. with the subtleties of overlapping relationships and emotions - x but: the ambiguous Am. relater John Dowell at times reveals a knowing awareness of the arbitrary nature of is narration Parade’s End (1924 – 28): - = a post-war tetralogy incl. Some Do Not… (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928) - conc.: the gradual break-up of the traditional squirearchical values - continues his exploration behind the disciplined and gentlemanly façade of the characters - the protagonist = an unhappy lover, a largely unsuccessful soldier, and neurotic survivor after the war’s end - begins his post-war career as a restorer of antiques x but: still tries to make sense of the battered old world, now essentially fragmented also wrote: a biography of his grandfather (1896) Ford Madox Brown (1821 – 93, a painter)
E l i z a b e t h B o w e n ( 1 8 9 9 – 1 9 7 3 ) L i f e : - b. and spent her childhood in Ir. (Bowen’s Court) x but: settled in En. W o r k : The Last September (1929): - = her early novel - conc.: the tensions in the history of her landed family, the divided loyalties of the increasingly dispossessed Protestant Ascendancy in Ir. The Death of the Heart (1938): - = her most Jamesian novel - set in the En. of 1930s - conc.: the loss of innocence in the face of shallow sophistication and the glamour of metropolitan values Bowen’s Court (1942): - = her memoir - conc.: the life in Ir. her The Last September Look at all those Roses (1941) and The Demon Lover (1945): - = coll. of short stories The Heat of the Day (1949): - = her masterpiece novel - conc.: London and Londoners changing, adjusting, and adapting under the impact of the Blitz - an upper-class Ir. woman’s perception of the Br. ‘Home Front’ - a finely tuned stylistic tact in deploying and using detail: the lovers meet in the ‘heady autumn of the first London air raids’, and Stella puts down her failure to notice the limp of the invalid Robert ‘to the general rocking of London and one’s own mind’, etc. - = symbolic meanings: R.’s disability, the urban unease, the strangeness, the headiness - concl.: R. turns out to be an enemy spy, a betrayer both of an allegiance to Br. and of the partly bemused, partly detached S. herself - x the Anglo-Ir. S. and her soldier son maintain the allegiance to Br. The Little Girls (1964): - = her penultimate novel - conc.: the sometimes painful difference btw the perceptions of children x adults
1 9 T . S . E l i o t a n d h i s I n f l u e n c e o n M o d e r n E n g l i s h P o e t r y
+ E x c u r s u s : E l i z a b e t h a n L i t e r a t u r e ( 1 5 5 8 – 1 6 0 3 ) - = the period associated with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603) - William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616): a poet and dramatist, popularised the E sonnet (3 quatrains and a final couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg) - Thomas Kyd (1558 – 94), Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 93), and John Fletcher (1579 – 1625): dramatists - Edmund Spenser (1552 – 99), and Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 86): poets - poetry: elaborated language, extensive allusion to classical myths
+ E x c u r s u s : J a c o b e a n L i t e r a t u r e ( 1 6 0 3 – 2 5 ) - = the period associated with the reign of King James I (1566 – 1625) - Ben(jamin) Jonson (1572 – 1637): a poet and dramatist, employed the theory of humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) - George Chapman (ca 1559 – 1634), John Webster (ca 1580 – ca 1625), and Francis Beaumont (1584 – 1616): dramatists - John Donne (1572 – 1631), George Herbert (1593 – 1633), and Andrew Marvell (1621 – 78): Metaphysical poets - The King James Bible (1611): the standard Bible of the Church of En., supervised by the King
+ E x c u r s u s : M e t a p h y s i c a l P o e t s ( 1 7 t h c . ) - = a loose group of Br. lyric poets of the 17th c. - shared an interest in metaphysical conc. and a common way of investigating them - wrote rigorous and energetic verse appealing to the reader’s intellect rather than emotions - employed inventive and elaborate style, learned imagery, paradox, and oxymoron - metaphysics = a branch of speculative philos. conc. with explaining the world
+ E x c u r s u s : I t a l i a n R e n a i s s a n c e ( e n d o f t h e 1 4 t h c. – 1 6 0 0 ) - Renaissance = It. for ‘rebirth’ - = a period of great cultural change and achievement marking the transition btw Medieval and Early Modern Eur. - renewed interest in the culture of classical antiquity after the period of the Dark Ages - Francesco Petrarca = Petrarch (1304 – 74) and Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527, : lit. - Michaelangelo Buonarroti (1476 – 1564) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519): art
T ( h o m a s ) S ( t e a r n s ) E l i o t ( 1 8 8 8 – 1 9 6 5 ) L i f e : - b. Thomas Stearns Eliot in Missouri (USA) - studied Harvard - settled in En. after the outbreak of WW I, became a Br. subject and member of the Church of En. (1927) - founded & ed. of the influential quarterly Criterion (1922 – 1939) - became director of the publishing firm ‘Faber & Faber’ W o r k : influence: - = much of his work self-consciously Br. x but: of cosmopolitan literary roots - < Harvard infl.: Elizabethan and Jacobean lit., Ita. Renaissance, and Ind. mystical philos. > Harvard doctoral thesis: on F(rancis) H(erbert) Bradley (1846 – 1924, an E idealist philos.) - < an arly infl.: Jules Laforgue (1860 – 87, a Fr. poet) > a reticent, ironic, clever, and referential poetry in the form of free-verse dramatic monologues with a wry persona expressing himself rather than acting out the private emotions of the author - < a more lasting infl.: Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 67, a Fr. symbolist poet) > E.: B. = the great inventor of a modern poetry = ‘the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced’ - < a more lasting infl: Dante > E.: D. = a medieval spiritual and a poetic authority addressing directly the modern condition, and a constant reminder for the later poet ‘of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate”’ - < the 19th c. Fr. symbolist poets: Paul Verlaine (1844 – 96), Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 91), and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 98) - < the Jacobean dramatists: Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627), Cyril Tourneur (1575 – 1626), and John Webster (ca 1580 – ca 1625) > flexible blank verse with overtones of the colloquial: style: - against the contemp. tradition of Georgian poetry in favour of a more subtle and at the same time more precise poetry: (a) < his early supporter / adviser Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) and T(homas) E(rnest) Hulme (1883 – 1917, a philos. and an imagist poet) > ‘hard, dry’ images (b) < the Metaphysical poets > wit, allusiveness, and irony (c) < the Fr. symbolists > an image = both absolutely precise in its physical reference and endlessly suggestive in the meanings based on its relationship to oth. images - against the Romantic concept of poetry: (a) uses the suggestive, the symbolist imagery, and the recurring images of the hyacinth girl, the rose garden, etc. = a Romantic element in his poetry (b) x but: adds a dry ironic allusiveness, wit, and colloquial element = not normally found in Romantic poetry - builds up the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images: deliberately omits transitional passages - builds up his own body of references because a common cultural heritage no longer exists: (a) the nature of his imagery manages to set the required tone and the area of meaning (b) even a reader ignorant of the allusions can achieve some understanding - received the Nobel Prize for Lit. (1948) - = the great renovator of the E poetic dialect with an enormous infl. on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally - the poet of the modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition P o e t r y : early poetry: (until the middle 1920s) - conc.: in one way or another the Waste Land = aspects of the decay of culture in the modern Western world Poems Written in Early Youth (1950): - = a coll. of his earliest poems - incl. hearty student graduation songs and tributes to J. Laforgue “The Death of Saint Narcissus” (ca 1911): - an unpubl. experimental poems - > its opening lines later incorporated into The Waste Land “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (ca 1911, 1915): - = his 1st publ. poem, publ. in the Chicago-based magazine Poetry (1912 – present) - a disconcerting and subtly evasive monologue, set in a symbolic landscape - plays with politeness, failures of comprehension, and despair - reinforces the theme by the often ironic echoes of Hesiod (ca 700 BC, a Gr. poet and rhapsode) Dante (1265 – 1321), Michelangelo (1476 – 1564), W. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), F. Dostoevsky (1821 – 81), and the Bible - P.: (a) presents himself as fashionable and sociable x but: suffers an acute self-consciousness about the opinions of oth. (b) indulges social niceties x but: remains aware of the impossibility of saying what he means - builds up meaning from the mutual interaction of the images Prufrock and Other Observations (1917): - = his 1st publ. coll. - incl. 12 specifically Am., often precisely Bostonian, poems - < nods to the example and the titles of H. James - > “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, sets the tone of the whole vol. - > “Portrait of a Lady”, a poem of uneasy social intercourse - > “Preludes”, a poem of bleakly restless urban landscapes - > “Aunt Helen”, a character sketch Poems (1919): - publ. by the Woolfs’ ‘Hogarth Press’ - incl. also 4 poems in Fr.: - > “Dans le Restaurant”, later incorporated into The Waste Land, & oth. - incl. 7 short quatrain poems, the temporary shift from free verse allows for a new sharpness and new variety of tone: - > “The Hippopotamus”, a satire on the pretensions of ‘the True Church’ - > “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (the nightingales = [a] song-birds, [b] prostitutes), exploits the effects of incongruity and historical anomaly in a densely amalgamated reference: the shabby commonplaces and compromises of the modern world dishonour both (a) the murdered Agamemnon, (b) the whole inheritance of history, tradition, and historical lit. - < derives the epigraphs to the coll. from W. Shakespeare, C. Marlowe, F. Beaumont, J. Fletcher, François Villon (1431 – 74; a Fr. poet, thief, and general vagabond; author of the line: ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’), Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC), and St Paul - fascinated with order x fragmentation, and the survival of tradition x the collapse of tradition [see also: his The Waste Land] The Waste Land (1922): - publ. 1st in his Criterion, then in the Am. Dial (1840 – 44, the Transcendentalist magazine; 1880s, a political magazine; 1920 – 29, a Modernist magazine), and then in a book form - Ezra Pound severely ed. the manuscript into 5 interrelated sections (a long introductory one, a terse 4 th one, and a long meditative concl. one), each with a separate title - = a series of scenes and images with no author’s voice intervening - builds up the meaning by the implications developed through multiple contrasts and analogies with older lit. works - explores a desert: (a) physical (b) figuratively urban: the ‘falling towers’ of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London - connects the different settings by the sense of corruption: the wasteland = a landscape in which a quest for healing, fertility, power, and meaning is pursued - achieves the most striking effects by playing with juxtaposition, inconsistency of perception, multiplicity of narration, and fluidity of time and place, as much visual as lexical: the disconcertingly surreal image of a woman drawing out her ‘long black hair’, & oth. - < echoes Dante, Shakespeare, pre-Socratic philos. (the ‘Milesian School’, ‘Pythagorean Schools’, the ‘Eleatic School’, the ‘Atomist School’, Heraclitus, Diogenes, & oth.; rejected the traditional mythological explanation in favour of more rational explanations), major and minor 17 th c. poets and dramatists, works of anthropology, history, and philos., and his private reading - concl.: (a) a series of quotations from Dante, the Pervigilium Veneris (Lat. for the Vigil of Venus, 2nd or 3rd c. AD, an anonym. poem), A. Tennyson, Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 55, a Fr. Romantic poet), Thomas Kyd (1558 – 94, an E dramatist), and the Upanishads (Hindu scriptures on the relig. and philos. of Hinduism) (b) his own line in the midst of these quotations: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ - denies the poem expressed the disillusionment of a generation as ‘some of the more approving critics’ believed (a) should the poem be seen retrospectively but as a series of fragments? (b) should the quotations shore up the ruin of the Western civilisation? (c) should they present the poet need of the shield of tradition as a defence against the hostile world? (d) the poem remains fragmentary and ambiguous Poems 1909 – 25 (1925): - = a coll. of all his earlier poems late poetry: (1927 +, after his formal acceptance of Anglican Christianity) - conc.: searches for spiritual peace ‘beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness’ - echoes biblical, liturgical, and mystical relig. lit., and Dante Ash Wednesday (1930): - = a poem in 6 sections = the ‘Ariel Poems’ - conc.: examines the aspects of relig. doubt, discovery, or revelation in a series of surreal images - presents the quality and pain of revelation in the painful awakening of the spirit in a mysterious landscape haunted by F figures (types of the Virgin Mary) - < echoes the prayers and metaphors of Anglo-Cath. > gives the poems an almost liturgical character - > “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and “A Song for Simeon” (1928), draw on biblical incident, conc. with literal epiphanies = experiences of the infant Christ disturbing or disorienting aged eyewitnesses - > “Marina” (1930), more obviously secular in imagery and subject, conc. with the awed rediscovery of his lost daughter by Shakespeare’s Pericles - celebrates the wonder at the epiphanies of a Christian God Four Quartets (1943): - incl.: “Burnt Norton” (1935), “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942) - the title: from the poems’ effect akin to that of the chamber music - conc.: further examines relig. moods - relates each of the poems to a specific place: (a) East Coker: a village of ancestral significance (b) Little Gidding: a chapel of the relig.-historical associations (c) their urgency reinforced by the threat of wartime destruction: “Little Gidding”, reinforces the idea of change and decay by veiled references to the Blitzkrieg, & oth. - ponders the significance of words and the difficulty of building words into poetry in each of the poems in the opening of their 5th section - concl.: the inherited pain of human sinfulness can be assuaged only by a redemption from time and by a renewal of history ‘in another pattern’ - employs mocking irony, savage humour, and juxtaposition of the sordid and the romantic - x but: gets quieter and no more deliberately shocking moves away from the abrupt shifts of tone of his earlier poetry twd a more consistent classicality C r i t i c i s m : - wrote lit. and philos. reviews - rejected the late 17th c. ‘dissociation of sensibility’ = separation of wit and passion x in favour of the early 17th c. Metaphysical poets and dramatists combining wit and passion - replaced J. Milton by J. Donne in the 17th c., and A. Tennyson by G. M. Hopkins in the 19th c. poetry “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917): - = one of his earliest and most celebrated essays - conc.: defines and prescribes historical, relig., moral, and above all lit. traditions - E.: ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’ x but: only in relation to a larger tradition - shapes his lit. tradition around writers feeding his particular concept of ‘Modernism’: W. Shakespeare, B. Jonson, T. Middleton, J. Webster, Lancelot Andrewes (1555 – 1626, an E clergyman; oversaw the transl. of the King James Bible), A. Marvell, J. Dryden, Virgil, Dante, C. Baudelaire, and W. B. Yeats “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921): - our complex civilisation must produce complex results the poet must be more allusive and more indirect in order to force language into his meaning - justifies the contortions of J. Donne’s poetry: (a) man’s experience = ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’ (b) experiences are ‘always forming new wholes’ (c) perceives a divine order beyond the physical evidence of disorder The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), and For Lancelot Andrewes (1928): - = coll. of his critical essays - For Lancelot Andrewes: claims to be a ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’ and in favour of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity, and authority against individualism - x but: his own poetry = untraditional and highly individual Selected Essays (1932): - = a coll. of most of his earlier essays and some new ones Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964): - = his Harvard doctoral thesis - left unexamined due to his prolonged absence in wartime En. x but: later publ. in a book form - conc.: the relationship of the subjective consciousness x the objective world - B.: of the individual mind correlates with a larger single comprehensive consciousness - E.: the comprehensive consciousness: (a) = a responsive God in one sense (b) = related to a larger human tradition in another V e r s e D r a m a : - aspired to renew poetic drama - examined relig. themes The Rock (1934): - = an unsuccessful church pageant Murder in the Cathedral (1935): - = the most successful x the least experimental - conc.: the murder of the Archbishop Becket - a ritual use of chorus - the central speech in the form of a sermon by B. in his cathedral shortly before his murder The Family Reunion (1939): - conc.: guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class E family - combines choric devices from Gr. tragedy and accents of drawing-room conversation The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959): - = verse ‘comedies’ - combines a serious relig. theme with the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy - his lifetime: politely received x but: received little success on the stage since due to his somewhat laboured attempts to interfuse Gr. myths with modern conditions Sweeney Agonistes (1932): - unfinished and unperformed - inventive, individual, and energetic - W. B. Yeats’s contemp. experiments with ritual, masks, dance, and music - an ambiguous, restless, and death-haunted attempt to create a new drama appropriate to a broken and iconoclastic age
2 0 D . H . L a w r e n c e a s a C r i t i c , N o v e l i s t , P o e t , a n d S h o r t S t o r y W r i t e r
D ( a v i d ) H ( e r b e r t ) L a w r e n c e ( 1 8 8 5 – 1 9 3 0 ) L i f e : - b. in a Midlands mining village - a struggle btw his parents: (a) father: a miner; coarse, and sometimes drunken (b) mother: self-consciously genteel, fought to lift her children out of the working class - after the death of an elder brother became the centre of his mother’s emotional life: frustrated his relationships with women - married Frieda von Richthofen (1879– 1956), went to Ger. x but: returned to En. with the approach of the WW I: (a) troubles with authorities: F.’s Ger. orig., his objection to the war (b) a ban on his next novel The Rainbow: suppressed of indecency (c) a sense of the forces of modern civilisation arrayed against him - searched restlessly for a tolerable community to live in: lived in Ita., Austria, Mexico, and Fr. - died of TBC in Fr. W o r k : - = some 15 novels, many poems, short stories, sketches, and miscellaneous articles - < working-class background: (a) vivid evocations of a working countryside (b) evocations of the mechanical rhythms, the monotonies, and the economic and spiritual deprivations of industrial En. - preferred the rural to the industrial, and the instinctual to the intellectual C r i t i c i s m : - had little understanding for the narrative experiments of Joyce & co. “Study of Thomas Hardy” (written 1914): - = only marginally an appreciation of H. - defines essential maleness and essential femaleness = an ‘antinomy’ btw the principles of ‘Law and Love’: (a) Man = the embodiment of Love (b) Woman = the embodiment of Law (c) form the 2 complementary parts of a living human whole - sees the future for the human race in a sexual and spiritual coming together Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922): - = his most Freud-inspired tracts: (a) theology of the fulfilled and fully integrated personality (b) emphasis on the liberation of sexuality from inherited social repression - sets new definitions of the essential dynamism of the personality - further develops the ideological and critical base for his later fiction establ. already in his “Study of Thomas Hardy” “Surgery for the Novel — or a Bomb?” (1923): - = an essay - the purged novel form should use no abstractions and present the reader with ‘new, really new feelings’ “Why the Novel Matters” (1925): - the novelist should be conc. with life as a whole, ‘Life with capital L’, and ‘Man alive’ - the novelist = superior to the saint, the scientist, the philos., and the poet “Morality and the Novel” (1925): - the novel should reveal ‘true and vivid relationships’ - the novel = a moral work The Man who Died (1927 – 28): - = an erotic fantasy about the resurrected Christ - forges Christian images and metaphors into new shapes - secularises the idea of Holy Spirit, the interrelationships of life and death, and death and resurrection - sexualises the biblical language of possession and enthusiasm - rejects formal relig. x but: remains fascinated by the underlying mysteries, tropes, and patterns of Christianity N o v e l s : (a) early period: - publ. his 1st group of poems, short stories, and novels - regarded a promising young writer on his way to become a pop. Georgian novelist - began in a relatively conventional style and treatment The White Peacock (1910): - = his 1st novel - > received with respect The Trespasser (1912) Sons and Lovers (1913): - = his 1st really distinguished novel - semi-autobiog.: contrasts paternal coarseness and vitality x maternal refinement and gentility - the mother gives up the emotional life with her husband and turns to her sons with a possessive love - contrasts ill-matched parents, clinging mothers x releasing lovers, town x country, mining x farming, working x walking, etc. - > later realises he has misjudged his father’s genuine vitality, though distorted by civilisation, for mere coarseness (b) mature period: - his war against the world of timid convention begins with the suppression of The Rainbow - cannot explain his attitude and lit. technique in a simple expository prose: becomes often irritatingly and vaguely rhetorical when trying to talk about his ideas x explains himself only by performing and a direct projection in art - believes the dark forces of the inner self should not be destroyed by the rational faculties x but: brought in a harmonious relation with them - presents his worldview with orig., an uncompromising honesty, a poetic sense of life, and a keen ear and a piercing eye for nature and people forces the reader to share his vision - his mature work = a record of his explorations of human individuality and of all hindering or possibly fulfilling it - x but: essentially an artist = not his preaching about life’s meaning x but: his rendering of life in his art matters - his response to life, esp. to the problems of human relationships, comes from the deepest recesses of his being assaults the deepest recesses of our being with a challenge going beyond that normally asserted by a work of art The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920): - = his masterpieces, orig. conceived as a single novel The Sisters - symbolic and dramatic poems in prose: (a) combines psychological precision x intense poetic feeling (b) combines surface realism in a sense of time, place, and a brilliant topographical detail x high poetic symbolism both of the total pattern of action and of incidents and objects within it (c) produces a richly episodic, carefully wrought, and cumulative overall effect - conc.: the relationship btw humans and their environment, btw the generations, btw man and woman, btw instinct and intellect, and the marriage relationship - the marriage = a struggle (inspired by his own relationship with his strong-minded wife) - associates the true human freedom with the untamed might of nature rather than with a repressive will: the characters denying their unconscious, natural, and sexual energies bring about personal or symbolic disasters: (a) (+) Ursula Brangwen’s ecstatic experience when confronting the apocalyptic horses in The Rainbow (b) (+) Rupert Birkin’s resurrection when walking naked through the long grass in Women in Love (c) (─) Gerald Crich, the son of a colliery owner, conceives the ‘will of man’ as ‘the determining factor’, and dies in an Alpine snowdrift in Women in Love (d) (─) a flood purges the stuffy hypocrisies of the world in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) ad The Rainbow: - focus: the evolving perceptions of 3 generations of a single family - set at the Brangwen family farm divided from a mining village by a canal - the M members of the family mystically linked by a ‘blood-intimacy’ to the fertility of the soil they till and to that of the animals they tend ad Women in Love: - focus: the characters’ smooth movement through the stratified E society - set in a far more contained period of time - distinguishes btw nature x anti-nature, freedom x control, and instinct x will - abandons the regular narrative linearity in favour of charged, symbolic, even epiphanic incidents - explores a fragmenting world x but: looks neither nostalgically back to a lost pre-industrial ‘blood- intimacy’ x nor confidently forward to a new social order Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928): - = his final large-scale fictional experiment - set in an En. crushed and emasculated by war - criticises materialism, intellectualism, and priggism - > publ. in a unexpurgated form only in 1960 (c) late period: - tries to give a symbolic fictional form to his own problems and preocc. - explores the ideas of human liberation in a discourse as much psycho-sexual as political - introd. a newly enlightened and emboldened élite: a revitalised social ethic in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent - = symptomatic of his own rejection of his roots and his restless search for new landscapes and new bases for social relationships Aaron’s Rod (1922): - conc.: the struggle for leadership in marriage as well as in politics Kangaroo (1923): - set in Australia - conc.: the rise and the failure of an Australian proto-fascism based on M-bonding The Plumed Serpent (1926): - set in the revolutionary Mexico - conc.: the redemptive potentiality of an Aztec blood-cult of dark gods Travel Sketches: - = in their way as impressive as his novels - combines symbolic incident x concrete reality and interprets each in terms of the oth. Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932) S h o r t S t o r i e s : - conc.: the restrictions of the middle-class conventional live x the forces of liberation = often repres. by an outsider, a peasant, gypsy, worker, or a primitive of some kind - recurring themes: the distortion of love by possessiveness, gentility, or a false romanticism x the achievement of a living relation btw a man and a woman against the pressure of prejudice The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) England, My England and Other Stories (1922) The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird (1923) The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories (1930) “The Odour of Chrysanthemums” P o e t r y : Form: - the ‘stark, bare, rocky directness of statement’ = the only true poetic expression in an age of disillusion and cultural fragmentation imposed by the war - his own poetry ‘direct’ and intense - not the ‘obvious form’ or the subject make poetry x but: the ‘hidden emotional pattern’ Content: - subject: most frequently derived from an observation of nature - at home with cosmic images (as no oth. E writer except for W. Blake has ever been), with the universe, and with all the elemental in the Individual and Nature - at constant war with the mechanical / artificial and with the constraints of civilisation Tortoises (1921) Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923): - incl. his best poetry: concentrated, stark, and unrhymed - attempts to feel himself into the life of an animal or to identify with the intensity of life he observes in growing and moving things - attempts to become familiar with x but: never to domesticate, the exotic Pansies (1929): - seeks the tightness of thought - L.: ‘a real thought, a single thought, not an argument, can only exist easily in verse’ Nettles (1930) “Figs”: - the fruit veers btw the culinary, the botanical, the symbolical, and the sexual “Cypresses”: - the cypresses of Tuscany hold the dark secret of the dead Etruscans “Tortoise Shout”: - a M tortoise screams as it mounts a F: stands for all life crying out in pain or ecstasy - a Sydney kangaroo looks wistfully around: repres. the distinctive quality of the Australian nature, both human and animal “Snake”: - the poet watches a drinking snake: emotions of honour, fear, gratitude, and mystery - frightens the snake away: a new sense of guilt, at once ‘literary’ and primitive - incl. an allusion to ‘the albatross’, perhaps S. T. Coleridge’s D r a m a : - = somewhat static explorations of working-class life A Collier’s Friday Night (written ca 1909, publ. 1934) The Daughter-in-Law (1912) The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914): - the only to receive a London performance - > received a favourable review by G. B. Shaw
2 1 P o l i t i c a l 3 0 s i n P o e t r y : W . H . A u d e n a n d h i s C o n t e m p o r a r i e s (C. Day-Lewis, L. MacNeice, and S. Spender)
‘ A u d e n C i r c l e ’ ( l a t e 1 9 2 0 s – e a r l y 1 9 3 0 s ) - named for the most active member W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden - = a group of young E poets at Oxford in the interwar period - incl. W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender - the neutral Louise MacNeice also sometimes incl. - the Cambridge novelists Edward Upward (b. 1903) and Christopher Isherwood (1904 – 86) also may be associated - aspired to bring new techniques and attitudes to E poetry - shared socialist sympathies with a strongly Marxist hue: socialism = the leading vehicle for social, sexual, and lit. emancipation - sided with the Left in a class-war to purge the inhered guilt of the upper and middle classes, supported the Sp. Rep. in the Civil War: L. MacNeice and S. Spender made investigative visits to the front line, W. H. Auden participated at propaganda broadcasts - [Sp. Civil War (1936 – 39) = the right-wing nationalist General Francisco Franco (1892 – 1975) rebelled against the Republican government and succeeded to establ. a personal dictatorship] - C. Day-Lewis and S. Spender joined the Communist Party - the new school fell soon apart and each poet went his own separate way
W ( y s t a n ) H ( u g h ) A u d e n ( 1 9 0 7 – 7 3 ) L i f e : - sympathised with the Left in the 1930s: went to Sp. during the Civil War as an ambulance driver on the left-wing Republican side x but: disturbed by the gutting of Rom. Cath. churches by the Republicans left his ambition unfulfilled - travelled Iceland and China - became a professor of poetry at Oxford - became an Am. citizen (1946) x but: returned to En. in the last y. of his life - homosexual (like C. Isherwood) W o r k : - < T. S. Eliot > wit and irony - < G. M. Hopkins and W. Owen > metrical techniques - after having his poems publ. in T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion and his coll. Poems (1930) by E.’s ‘Faber and Faber’ experienced a rapid rise to fame - > compared to J. Dryden’s lively intelligence and immense craftsmanship x but: an uneven poet 1 9 3 0 s P e r i o d : (a) poetry: - < the Depression (1929 in Am., soon afterwards in En.) - < K. Marx’s perception of the decay of late capitalist society, S. Freud’s approach to psychic disorder, and a relation of both to the imagined landscapes of E.’s The Waste Land - = the poet of of his times (the Depression) - confronts modern problems directly rather to filter them through symbolic situations like E. - diagnoses the ills of his country = not the metaphorical Waste Land of E. x but: a more literal Waste Land of poverty and ‘depressed areas’ - employs deliberate irreverence, even clowning x but: proves his verbal craftsmanship - produces lively poetry of a nervous force Poems (1930) Look Stranger! (1936): - the title: from the opening line of one of the most sharply focused poems - substituted the title for On This Island for the Am. ed. - later renamed the respective poem “Seascape” - > “Seascape”, contrasts the perspectives of ‘far off’ x ‘stable here’ x but: allows for a free interpretation of the insistent direction ‘Look’ (b) drama: - in collab. with C. Isherwood The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935): - > critically successful The Ascent of F6 (1936): - = a dramatic parable of power and will On the Frontier (1938): - > less well-received (c) prose: Letters from Iceland (1937): - < his trek across Iceland with L. MacNeice - remarkable more for its poetry than for its amateur photographic illustr. - > “Letter to Lord Byron”, reveals his relish for the ‘something light and easy’ (and the ultimately serious) of Don Juan he took with him to ‘humourless’ Iceland 1 9 4 0 s – 5 0 s P e r i o d : - moves from a Marxist alignment to a Christian one: takes a more relig. view of personal responsibility and traditional value, and prefers individual freedoms to the demands of community - removes to the USA (1939), accepts the US citizenship (1946), and breaks with his personal, political, and lit. past to become a reviser of the excesses of his poetic youth - combines elements from pop. art x an extreme technical formality, a colloquial tone x high artifice, etc. - controls his desire to shock and produces poetry of disciplined movement, clarity, and unsentimental feeling Another Time (1940) The Sea and the Mirror (1945): - = a sequence of meditations on W. Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) - celebrates the Islands Nones (1951): - = the best example of the combination / alternation of the grave x the flippant “September 1, 1939”: - the title: from the day of Adolf Hitler’s (1889 – 1945) invasion of Poland and the consequent precipitation of Br. into the WW II - declares independence from the ‘State’ in favour of an alternate dependence on human relationships - revised: the orig. poem attempted to deny the significance of the insular x but: later his continental pull slackened and insular responses predominated [see also his The Sea and the Mirror] “Musée des Beaux Arts”: - claims suffering and ‘its human position’ a key conc. of art - uses the example of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s (ca 1525 – 69, a Flemish painter) painting The Fall of Icarus 1 9 6 0 s – 7 0 s P e r i o d : (a) poetry: - experiences deepening relig. feelings - becomes sceptical of all remedies for modern ills and seeks refugee in love and friendship produces poetry increasingly personal in tone - discovers for himself what Eliot calls an ‘objective correlative’ = ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events’ to become the formula for ‘particular’ emotion About the House (1967) City Without Walls (1970) “In Praise of Limestone”: - presents a landscape as a psychological state [see the ‘objective correlative’] - limestone = typifies his own unpredictability, elusiveness, and his fondness for change - 1930s: subversion and unpredictability troubled him x now: celebrates them as the evidence of the divine (b) prose: - responds to the ‘old masters’ = poets, painters, thinkers, and composers The Dyer’s Hand (1962) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973): - = coll. of critical essays
C e c i l D a y - L e w i s ( 1 9 0 4 – 7 2 ) - > received the post of Poet Laureate (1968) 1 9 3 0 s P e r i o d : - enthusiastic about the prospect of a Marxist transformation of society The Magnetic Mountain (1933) A Time to Dance (1935): (a) poems of heroic celebration: - “A Time to Dance”, celebrates the pioneer airmen (b) poems of the depressed En.: - “A Carol”, a sardonic lullaby (c) socialist poems: - “An Address to Death”, asserts the time to dance to be now and ‘in the rhythm of comrades’ (d) more ambiguous poems: - “The Conflict”, a poet sings on a deck in a sea storm to ‘keep men’s courage up’ = the floundering ship of capitalism? or the Party itself? x but: the poet finds himself ‘between two massing powers…whom neutrality cannot save’ - “In Me Two Worlds”, the poet = a battlefield with past and future meeting to fight = ‘the armies of the dead’ and ‘the men to come’ ( M. Arnold’s ignorant armies clashing by night in “Dover Beach”) 1 9 4 0 s P e r i o d : - retreats from the confident Marxist analyses with the approach of the WW II Overtures to Death (1939) Poems in Wartime (1940) “Regency Houses”: - the faded elegance of a 19th c. terrace: (a) a metaphor for condemned bourgeois society (b) a metaphor for the disillusion of those ‘hoping too much…in younger days’ 1 9 5 0 s + P e r i o d : - transl. Virgil = the poet oscillating btw public celebrations of a national mission x a delight in bucolic retreat The Georgics (1940), The Aeneid (1952), and The Eclogues (1963)
L o u i s M a c N e i c e ( 1 9 0 7 – 6 3 ) L i f e : - b. in Belfast (Northern Ir.) - experienced an unhappy childhood due to his mother’s premature death - travelled to Iceland with W. H. Auden, to Sp. during the Civil War, and to USA at the beginning of WW II - became a lecturer in classics, for the rest of his life worked as a feature writer and producer for the BBC - retained political neutrality x unlike the oth. Oxford poets: L.: ‘My sympathies are Left. On paper and in my soul. But not in my heart or my guts.’ W o r k : - = pioneered radio drama, wrote plays, poetry, lit. criticism, and transl. P o e t r y : - < an Ulsterman by birth and tradition > the geography and the folklore of Ir. haunt his verse x but: no commitment to any political or relig. establishment: neither Protestant nor Cath., neither Unionist nor Nationalist - delights in the surface of the world his senses apprehend, often adds wit and a wild gaiety: “Bagpipe Music” - x but: remains aware of the temporality of all things: incl. an underlying sense of sadness and sometimes tragedy - landscape x townscape poems provide him a focus for his preocc. with ambiguity and for his divided lit. loyalty btw Ir. x En. - recognises his own contradictions as an artist in the external manifestations of human history, in the city as much as in the country - undergoes a process of questioning and balancing those contradictions a remarkable thematic consistency of his poetry - produces open and honest poetry of a consistently high level of craftsmanship: the 2 nd only to W. H. Auden among the poets of his generation “Eclogue for Christmas”, “Eclogue by a Five-barred Gate”, “Eclogue from Iceland”, and “Eclogue between the Motherless”: - = a series of early verse dialogues Poems (1935): - > “Snow”, celebrates ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ - > “Birmingham”, pays a tribute to the city in which he taught after graduating from Oxford, in a series of fragmentary impressions of cars, factories, and half-timbered suburban houses Plant and Phantom (1941): - > “Entirely”, claims no way to be right entirely in the modern reality - > “London Rain”, fluctuates btw a God of discipline x a God of liberty, the ascetic x the sensual Springboard (1944): - > “Prayer Before Birth”, a charm-like demand for the spirit of delight and freedom from those ‘who would freeze’ his humanity - “Neutrality”, a parallel btw the geographical entity ‘the neutral island in the heart of man’ = both ostensibly non-committed x but: both internally vexed in the wartime Holes in the Sky (1948): - > “Woods”, compares his father’s relish for empty Ir. moorlands x his own for the woodlands of the ‘tame’ E landscape The Burning Perch (1963): - > Wessex Guidebook, shaped by his feel for a lush and varied E West Country with archaeological, historical, and lit. associations; concl. with the indifference of Time to men and of men to history in a deliberate and appropriately Hardyan tone also wrote following poems of distinction: “The Sunlight on the Garden”, “Meeting Point”, “Sunday Morning”, “The Suicide” P r o s e : The Strings are False (1965): - = an unfinished autobiog. - < among oth. also describes his enthusiasm as a schoolboy for T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land - also describes his feeling for urban unloveliness also wrote: - a transl. of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (1936), in an often colloquial and distinctly unheroic verse - a transl. of Goethe’s Faust
S t e p h e n S p e n d e r ( 1 9 0 9 – 9 5 ) 1 9 3 0 s P e r i o d : Twenty Poems (1920), Poems (1933), and The Still Centre (1939): - intermixes public, political, and private verse: - > “Beethoven’s Death Mask”, adulates the Romantic hero - > “What I Expected”, un-Romantically analyses himself - > “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum”, points out the cultural anomalies and conflicts of class interest in inter-war Br. - > “A Footnote (from Marx’s Chapter, The Working Day)”, shows his sense of historical injustice in his evocation of the voices of Victorian slum-children - achieves the most effective balance of personal response and public engagement in the poems of his Sp. Civil War experience: - > “Two Armies” and “Ultima Ratio Regum”, develop erotic implications of the intimacy of huddled sleeping soldiers sharing ‘a common suffering’ and of a boy’s corpse being ‘a better target for a kiss’ - > “Fall of a City” and “Thoughts During an Air Raid”, gives a mosaic of impressions of defeat and the sense of an already fragmentary ‘I’ threatened with physical dissolution - > “Port Bou”, confesses his failure to convey a sense of the heroic at the ‘still centre’ both of the war and of the poet’s consciousness: the speaker sits ‘at the exact centre’ of the town, solitary except for some dogs, and unable to identify himself either with the embattled townspeople or with the dogs, neither disillusioned nor capable of maintaining the illusion of courage - > “I think continually of those who were great”, “In railway halls”, “Seascape”, “The Pylons” - preface to The Still Centre, explains why the poems had not struck a more heroic note: S.: ‘a poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience’ 1 9 4 0 s P e r i o d : - continues with the inconclusiveness enhanced by a new evocation of the destructive energy of battle in his poems of WW II “Air Raid across the bay at Plymouth” “Epilogue to a Human Drama”: - set in the blitzed London 1 9 5 0 s + P e r i o d : - retreats from his short-lived attempt to marry Liberalism and Marxism - puts an increasing stress on private emotions and relationships World Within World (1951): - a prose autobiog.
2 2 C o l o n i a l E x p e r i e n c e i n t h e W o r k s o f 2 0 t h C e n t u r y B r i t i s h A u t h o r s (J. Conrad, , R. Kipling, E. M. Forster, D. Lessing, G. Orwell, and G. Greene)
J o s e p h C o n r a d [see C. under ‘13 Neo-Romanticism’]
R u d y a r d K i p l i n g [see K. under ’13 Neo-Romanticism’]
E ( d w a r d ) M ( o r g a n ) F o r s t e r [see F. under ’18 The Birth of Modernism’]
‘ N e w M o r a l i t y ’ ( 1 9 6 0 s – 7 0 s ) - = an abstraction of the general change of attitudes in society, esp. twd women - incl. also new patterns in women’s employment, esp. professional employment Germaine Greer (b. 1939), The Female Eunuch (1970): - stimulated a newly outspoken and often provocative feminism - G.: the ‘first feminist wave’ incl. genteel suffragettes, the 2nd wave as repres. by the novel incl. ‘ungenteel middle-class women…calling for revolution’ Doris Lessing (b. 1919), The Golden Notebook (1962): - one of its M characters: ‘The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution – they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.’ - the rev. begins with a heightened alertness to the narrow repres. of women’s roles and women’s consciousness in society and its lit.
D o r i s L e s s i n g ( b . 1 9 1 9 ) E a r l y P e r i o d : - conc.: the growth of political awareness amongst native blacks and white settlers in colonial East Af. Children of Violence (1952 – 69): - = a 5-vol. novel sequence - conc.: the developing political commitment and the later disillusion of the F protagonist Martha Quest - M. carefully placed as: ‘adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; Br., and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class; F, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past’ - M. learns her radicalism in colonial Af. x but: also unlearns the Stalinist assumption about world rev. - > The Four-Gated City (1969): - = the last and the most experimental vol. in the sequence - opening: amid the fragmented political aspirations of Br. anti-nuclear campaigners - concl.: in the y. 1995 and 2000 after a devastating atomic war - M. discovers a hope for the future on a remote Scott. island settled by a group of mutant children with its mental powers enhanced and its social vision reintegrated by the effects of radiation M a t u r e P e r i o d : - conc.: the rejection of conventional realism in favour of what she called ‘inner space fiction’ The Golden Notebook (1962): - relates the concept of mental fragmentation to the disintegration of fictional form - attempts to come to terms with an intelligent woman’s sense of private and public diffusion - shapes the narrative around a series of notebooks, the Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue, kept by a woman writer Anna Wulf to analyse different aspects of her life and order her life accord. to neat categories, both private and public - A.’s evolving perceptions of herself produce an inevitable and welcome formlessness: (a) finds herself incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests her = ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life’ (b) finds the private and public diffusion symptomatic not of social, mental, or ideological disease x but: of personal liberation - concl.: (a) gives up the struggle against the ‘banal commonplace’ that ‘women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists’ (b) finds her bid for freedom fulfilled in the new, if still insecure, value of a woman’s creativity
G e o r g e O r w e l l ( 1 9 0 3 – 5 0 ) L i f e : - b. Eric Blair, in Ind. - sent to En. for education, won a scholarship to the foremost private boarding school - > 1st became aware of the difference btw his own background x the wealthy background of his schoolmates - joined the Imperial Police in Burma - > 1st gained a sense of guilt about Br. colonialism and a feeling he must make some kind of personal expiation for it: (a) accepted a pseudonym as a way of escaping from the class position in which his birth and education had placed him (b) underwent an extremely difficult experience as a teacher in Pairs and a tramp in En. x did not have to suffer the dire poverty, had influential friends to help him x but: did so because ‘part of my guilt would drop from me’ - retained his characteristic independence of mind on political and social questions: scorned ideologies, never joined a political party x but: regarded himself a man of the uncommitted and independent left - disillusioned with the Soviet Communism: Stalin betrayed the human ideal for him - saw a social change necessary and desirable for the capitalist countries of the west x but: the ‘socialism’ in Rus. = a perversion of socialism and a wicked tyranny W o r k : - due his independence consid. politically misfit x but: a brilliantly orig. writer F i c t i o n : - began with fictional analyses of the narrowness and idiocies of the Br. at home and abroad - saw the Br. as smug imperialists and even smugger domestic tyrants Down and Out in Paris and London (1933): - < his own experience of a dire life in ill-paid jobs and common lodging-houses - x but: manages to find delight in the comfortable and familiar En. of “bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, [and] beer made with hops” Burmese Days (1934): - < his own experience of Burma - = a fiercely anti-colonialist novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) The Road to Wigan Pier (1937): - < his own experience of the unemployed in the north of En. - set in a singularly uncomfortable and unfamiliar En. - explores the untidy ugliness of industrialism, the urban life scarred by unemployment and poverty, and the contrasts btw the rich x the poor Homage to Catalonia (1938): - < his own experience of the Sp. Civil War on the Republican side - strongly criticises the Communist part in the Civil War - > roused a great indignation on the left: leftists believed they should support the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the struggle against international fascism Animal Farm (1945): - = an animal fable - satirises the manifest failure of Communist ideals in Rus. against the background of a fictional speculation of how a perversion of socialism could develop - sentimentalises the working class strength and good nature (the carthorse Boxer) x but: makes a fine choice of pigs as the undoers of the animals’ rev. - pigs = at times look suspiciously human, traditionally associated with greed and laziness, and proverbially supposed to be incapable of flight - their rev. remains earthbound, their aspirations too much resemble those of their enemies - incl. the corruptions and distortions of language serving Napoleon to his dictatorial ends [see also his Nineteen Eighty-Four] - > banned in the USSR and its satellites until after the rev. of the late 1980s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): - = a savagely powerful dystopia - set in a totalitarian En. in which the government uses the language of socialism to cover the tyranny systematically destroying the human spirit - language = one of the principal instruments of oppression, controlled by the Ministry of Truth, and conc. with the transmission of untruth into ‘Newspeak’ - the slogans of the party on the facade of the Ministry = ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’ - makes purges and vaporisations ‘a necessary part of the mechanics of government’ to create the world with no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement - blends: (a) the Stalinist Rus. (b) the bomb-scarred post-war Br. (c) Franz Kafka’s (1883 – 1924) dark fantasies of incomprehension and impersonal oppression (d) Aldous Huxley’s (1894 – 1963) dystopian vision of an ordered scientific future - < C. Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend > an individualist society obsessed by the power of money and typified by the phrase ‘scrunch or be scrunched’ (was among the 1st modern critics to take D.’s fiction seriously) N o n - f i c t i o n : - an outstanding investigative social journalist, regularly publ. in left-wing periodicals - an acute observer, generaliser, and an open-eyed crosser of class boundaries “Shooting an Elephant” (1936): - = an anti-colonialist essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943): - < his own experience of personal discomfort and political disillusionment in Sp. - criticises both intellectual pacifists x those who dismiss as sentimental his contention that ‘a man holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him’ - provokes those insisting on a division of history into right causes defended by heroes x wrong cause supported by villains - concl.: his escape not from victorious Fascists x but: from persecution by one of the warring fractions of the split Sp. Left “Politics and the English Language” (1946): - = one of his most influential essays - explores the decay of language and the ways to its improvement - dismisses political language as ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’ - argues for the plain E as ‘an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought’ “Why I Write” (1947): - claims every line he had written since 1936 had been ‘directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism, and for democratic socialism’
G r a h a m G r e e n e ( 1 9 0 4 – 9 1 ) L i f e : - experienced a singularly unhappy and suicidal adolescence - entered the Rom. Church (1926) W o r k : - wrote 26 novels, 9 vol. of short stories, and many miscellaneous articles - blamed for seemingly ‘un-English’ prejudices in his time: a semi-devout x but: believing Rom.-Cath., a devout anti-imperialist, and a critic of both Br. and new Am. imperialism - recurring themes: (a) a colonially wounded world beyond Eur. (b) a gloomy sense of sin and moral unworthiness (c) a commitment to outsiders and rebels 1 9 2 0 s – 3 0 s P e r i o d : The Man Within (1929): - the title: from Sir Thomas Browne’s (1605 – 83): ‘There is another man within me that is angry with me.’ - introd. the recurrent 2-sidedness of his protagonists, complicated by dangerous self-destructiveness Brighton Rock (1938): - the protagonist = Pinkie, a Cath. and a gangster - fascinated by the conc. of ‘Hell, Flames, and damnation’ x but: seems to be intent on courting his own eternal destruction in the face of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’ 1 9 4 0 s – E a r l y 1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d : - = his finest work - < the WW II > added sharpness to his fictional perspectives and preocc. - the angry and self-destructive ‘other man’ moved his fiction in a more distinctively agnostic direction - the Cath. Christianity: (a) for him: a single ray of heavenly hope over the dark abysses of human depravity, despair, decay, and pain (b) for his characters: God and his Church as distant as evidently ‘appallingly strange’ - characteristic settings: troubled and disorienting topographies - characteristic protagonists: Cath., all of them ruins, or at best ruinous The Power and the Glory (1940): - set in the violently restless Mexico - the protagonist = a whisky-priest in the anti-clerical Mexico - conc. as much with doubt and failure as with faith - > enriched the E language with the phrase ‘whisky-priest’ The Ministry of Fear (1943): - set in the phantasmagoria world of the twilit, blitzed London - incl. the tormented protagonist’s frenetic hallucinations when hiding underground during an air-raid The Heart of the Matter (1948): - set in a flyblown, rat-infested, and war-blighted West Af. colony - the protagonist = Scobie, a suicide - accuses God of ‘forcing decisions on people’ and blames the Church for having all the answers The Third Man (1951): - set in the precarious, ‘smashed, dreary’, and partly subterranean Vienna - the Cath. Vienna, its citizens, its displaced refugees, and its military occupiers = all wrecked, divided, and guilt-ridden - > coexists with its more brilliant variant of a film-script written by G. himself The End of the Affair (1951): - set in the blitzed London “The Destructors” L a t e 1 9 5 0 s + P e r i o d : - = more ostensibly political novels - x but: none of them of quite the same edgy power as his former writing The Quiet American (1955): - set in Vietnam Our Man in Havana (1958): - set in Cuba The Comedians (1967): - > provoked an international scandal: the Haitian Government brought a case against it for is having damaged the Rep.’s tourist trade A Sort of Life (1977): - = an autobiog. memoir - claims with a characteristic note of pessimism: ‘Success is only a delayed failure.’ - x but: achieved both commercial and critical success and became by far the best known and most respected Br. novelist of his generation
2 3 T h e A n g r y Y o u n g M e n (K. Amis, J. Osborne, J. Braine, and J. Wain)
‘ A n g r y Y o u n g M e n ’ ( 1 9 5 0 s – 6 0 s ) - the 1944 Education Act made uni education available for the working-class students and produced a new breed of articulate uni graduates - = a group of young radicals bitterly opposing the Br. Establishment and conservative elements of society in their time - aimed to communicate rather than to experiment, and did so often in a comic mode - shared their preocc. with the awkward self-consciousness of provincial, lower-middle class En., and the upward mobility of a grammar-school educated intelligentsia - neither a uni education nor a marriage to a wealthy girl allowed for the integration into the conservative genteel upper-class society - incl. Kingsley Amis (1922 – 95), John Osborne (b. 1929), John Braine (1922 – 85), John Wain (b. 1925), Alan Sillitoe (b. 1928), & oth. - > often annoyed by The Angry Young Men label = sometimes referred to as The New University Wits - all turned more serious after their initial work and the group fell apart
‘ C a m p u s N o v e l ’ ( 1 9 7 0 s – 8 0 s ) - develops the line establ. in Br. fiction by Philip Larkin’s Jill (1946) - shares the uni or college setting or the conc. with wayward academics in wider world (a) the campus novel of the Angry Young Men (b) the campus novel of their less radical contemporaries, incl. Tom Sharpe (b. 1928), Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932), and David Lodge (b. 1935): reflects the academic ambitions and tensions of the rapidly expanding world of higher education in the period - reforms of the late 1980s and 1990s had changed the once relatively leisurely culture of academe x but: the 1970s and 1980s academics / authors of the ‘campus fiction’ then had sufficient time to write and produce telling period pieces
K i n g s l e y A m i s ( 1 9 2 2 – 9 5 ) L i f e : - received uni education and became a lecturer of E at Cambridge - served in WW II - youth: a radical member of the Communist Party x middle age: a conservative anti-Communist, disillusioned with the USSR - father of Martin A. - a lifelong friendship with P. Larkin - knighted to Sir K. Amis (1990) W o r k : A n g r y Y o u n g M e n F i c t i o n : - = a gifted comic and satirist - preocc. with the upward mobility in uni environment - got increasing vehement in One Fat Englishman + - increasingly supplanted comic exuberance by gloomy farce in The Old Devils + Lucky Jim (1954): - = his 1st novel, dedicated to P. Larkin - a seminal work [= a work from which oth. works grow]: the 1st E novel to feature an ordinary man as anti-hero - a comic account of a young would-be-radical lecturer’s resistance to the earnestly pretentious and complacent culture of a provincial uni - the protagonist = Jim Dixon, a typical ‘angry young man’, himself of middle-class orig. x but: an estranged critic of the middle-class social and cultural pretentiousness - to get well along with his repudiating professor attends his would-be-cultural party, pretends to be writing a scientific thesis, etc. - x but: the class distinctions prove unbreakable and he fails - concl.: leaves with an attractive blonde for his new job in the capital city - > won him wider pop. recognition That Uncertain Feeling (1955), I Like it Here (1958), Lucky Jim’s Politics (1968): - resuscitated the comic character of Jim Dixon Take a Girl Like You (1960) One Fat Englishman (1963): - an account of a Br. visitor’s experience in an Am. college - the M protagonist = a typical example of an Englishman attempting to resist the Am. way of life Ending Up (1974) Jake’s Thing (1978) The Old Devils (1986): - an account of the life of a group of retired friends and their wives - > won him the Booker Prize The Russian Girl (1992) S c i e n c e - f i c t i o n : - interested in sci-fi, esp. in dystopia, as a critic - > coined the term ‘comic inferno’ for humorous dystopia The Green Man (1969): - = a supernatural horror-novel - > adapted by BBC for TV The Alteration (1976): - = an alternate history novel [= a sub-genre of sci-fi set in a world in which history has diverged from history as it is generally known] - set in a parallel contemp. Br. in which there has been no Reformation and the Papacy still wields supreme power Russian Hide and Seek (1980): - = an alternate history novel - set in a near-future Br. conquered by Rus. after WW II also wrote: - poetry, associated with ‘The Movement’: author of Bright November (1947), A Frame of Mind (1953), A Case of Samples (1956), & oth. - non-fiction: author of a critical study (1975) and a biography of R. Kipling (1956) - detective fiction: author of a study of Ian Fleming’s (1908 – 64) spy James Bond and of a fictional Bond adventure novel
J o h n O s b o r n e ( 1 9 2 9 – 9 4 ) L i f e : - expelled from public school after striking the headmaster - > outbursts of anger occurred throughout his whole life - became an actor, a stage manager, and playwright W o r k : - freed the theatre of the formal constraints of the former generation - shifted emphasis on the language, theatrical rhetoric, and emotional intensity 1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d : Look Back in Anger (1956): - < largely autobiog.: his living and rowing with the 1st of his 5 wives in their cramped accommodations while she was betraying him with another - = a new kind of drama challenging the middle-class virtues of ‘the well-made play’ - revolutionary not in form or politics x but: in its conc. with ‘the issues of the day’, its rancour, its language, and its setting - no more the country drawing-rooms with its platitudes and its sherry x but: the provincial bed-sitters with its noisy abuse and its ironing-board - no more the theatrical illusion of a neat, stratified, and deferential society x but: the dramatic repres. of untidy, antagonistic, and disenchanted characters grating on one another’s, and society’s, nerves - the protagonist = Jimmy Porter, the only character of the Angry Young Men to embrace anger as his life philos. - succeeds to marry a wealthy girl, ends up in an uneven marriage, and gives way to his anger in a tyranny of his wife - the play polemic rather than realistic, puts emphasis on the language: verbal attacks on the uni graduates employed in second-rate jobs, their unfulfilled emotional life, the society, etc. - produced by the E Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre (London) - > shocked its 1st audiences into responsive attention - > supplied the name for the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement - > won him the award for the most promising writer of the y., and turned him from an indistinctive playwright struggling for his living into a wealthy and famous ‘angry young man’ The Entertainer (1957): - < Brecht-inspired - employs the metaphor of the dying music-hall tradition the moribund state of the Br. Empire - > filmed The World of Paul Slickey (1959): - = a musical - satirises the tabloid press 1 9 6 0 s P e r i o d : - his reputation begins to decline x but: his successful plays still outnumber the failures Luther (1961): - conc.: the life of the archetypal rebel Martin Luther (1483 – 1546, leader of the Reformation) - [Protestant Reformation = a 16th c. movement to reform the Cath. Church in western Eur.] Inadmissible Evidence (1964): - conc.: a frustrated solicitor at a law firm - uses his characteristically soaring rhetoric venom to powerful effect - endows the story with complexity, ambiguity, and richness x but: criticised for lacking the immediacy of his earlier plays A Patriot for Me (1965): - conc.: the turn-of-the-c. homosexuality - > won him the prize for the best play of the y. The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968): - > won him the prize for the best play of the y. 1 9 7 0 s P e r i o d : - his social vision gets out of fashion, his plays decline in quality ends up as a writer having lost both his way and his audience also wrote: A Better Class of Person (1981) and Almost a Gentleman (1991): - = his 2-vol. autobiog. - revives the familiar acidity of language to lay low all his enemies in the theatre, his family, or society at large
J o h n B r a i n e ( 1 9 2 2 – 8 6 ) L i f e : - left grammar school without a School Certificate (obtained it later) - employed in various odd jobs, became a librarian - got involved with a local theatre - > inspired the themes of his Room at the Top & oth. novels - suffered from TBC, treated in a sanatorium - > inspired his The Vodi - determined to become a writer, left his librarian job, and contrib. to various periodicals x but: struggled for his living until his Room at the Top - > won him fame and fortune W o r k : - author of some 15 books of fiction and some non-fiction - x but: chiefly remembered for his 1st novel 1 9 5 0 s P e r i o d : Room at the Top (1957): - = his 1st novel - < the Faustian theme of a young man selling his soul for riches and paying a terrible price - puts emphasis on writing from observation / experience: rejects exotic ‘literary’ environments in favour of a less glamorous setting and instead emphasises the psychology of the protagonist - offers a sharp picture of Northern life in the period obsessed with wealth and social status - set immediately in the post-WW II y. x but: narrated in retrospective - the unscrupulous and opportunistic protagonist chooses to marry wealth and success rather his true love and has to come to terms with the disenchantment by the spiritual emptiness he finds in the ‘top’ society - concl.: the death of both his true love and his ‘true and authentic self’ - > won him immediate recognition - > successfully filmed (1959) Life at the Top (1962): - = a sequel 1 9 6 0 s P e r i o d : - none of his subsequent work attracted comparable attention The Vodi (1959): - < draws heavily on the time he spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium The Jealous God (1964): - < also strongly autobiog. The Crying Game (1968), First and Last Love (1981), The Two of Us (1984), & oth.
‘ T h e I n k l i n g s ’ ( 1 9 3 0 s – 5 0 s ) - = a loose discussion group mostly of Oxford academics, mostly Christians - held for the purpose of reading and discussing the members’ unfinished lit. compositions - emphasised the value of narrative in fiction, the values of Christianity, and encouraged the writing of fantasy - incl. John Wain, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien (1892 – 1973; author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898 – 1963; author of The Chronicles of Narnia), Warren Lewis (1895 – 1973, C. S. Lewis’s brother), & many oth.
J o h n W a i n ( 1 9 2 5 – 9 4 ) L i f e : - received Oxford education - became a freelance journalist and author - held the lectureship post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1973 – 78) & oth. W o r k : - a poet, novelist, playwright, and lit. critic: (a) poetry: author of dry, cerebral, and witty poems associated with ‘The Movement’ (b) prose: novels and short stories (c) drama: radio plays (d) criticism: studies of Samuel Johnson (1709 – 84), Arnold Bennett (1867 – 1931), W. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), & oth. (e) also author of many nwsp and radio reviews - member of ‘The Inklings’ Hurry on Down (1953): - = his 1st and most famous novel - an account of the picaresque career of an unsettled uni graduate’s deliberate flight down the social scale into increasingly unpropitious occupations (a window-cleaner) - = turns his life against conventional society - > together with K. Amis’s Lucky Jim and J. Braine’s Room at the Top a leading example of the fiction produced by the ‘Angry Young Men’ The Contenders (1958) Strike the father dead (1962): - the title: the lower-case letters indicate his non-conventional manner - a jazzman rebels against his conventional father The Smaller Sky (1968) A Winter in the Hills (1971): - = a rampageous comedy - a linguist makes researches in North Wales Young shoulders (1982): - = a sensitive study of juvenile bereavement - a young boy faces the death of loved ones Where the river meets (1988) and Comedies (1990): - = Bildungsromanen - < draws on his knowledge of Oxford
2 4 P o s t - W a r E x p e r i m e n t a t i o n i n D r a m a (H. Pinter, A. Wesker, J. Orton, and T. Stoppard)
D r a m a S i n c e t h e 1 9 5 0 s - London-based - initially dominated by the realistic ‘kitchen sink’ drama (a) the ‘National Theatre’ (1963 – 88) = the ‘Royal National Theatre’ (1988 +): - a subsidised national theatre, home to the ‘National Theatre Company’ - its inaugural production of Hamlet produced in the ‘Old Vic’ [the name: from Princess Victoria] - the Company moved to the new building on London’s South Bank only 13 y. later (1976) - cautious in choice of plays and directors - Sir Laurence Olivier (1907 – 89, directorship1963 – 73): the 1st director, a former actor (b) the ‘Shakespeare Memorial Theatre” (1933 – 61) = the ‘Royal Shakespeare Theatre’( 1961 +): - Statford-upon-Avon - a subsidised theatre, home to the ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’ - establ. an enviable record of experiment in the 1960s – 70s - worked on the principle of an authoritative director = ‘director’s theatre’ - startled audiences out of any sense of stability and complacency (c) the ‘Royal Court Theatre’ (1956): - a commercial theatre, home to the ‘English Stage Company’ - encouraged, commissioned, and produced the work of new dramatists - the most experimental in choice of plays
‘ K i t c h e n S i n k R e a l i s m ’ ( l a t e 1 9 5 0 s – e a r l y 1 9 6 0 s ) - = a distinctive E cultural movement in pictorial art, film, drama, and fiction - sometimes regarded the successor of the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement - the name: from an expressionist painting by John Bratby (1928 – 92) containing an image of a kitchen sink - focused on social realism relevant to the audience of the time - found new interest in domestic scenes with stress on the banality of life (a) drama: - a quarrelsome domestic drama epitomised by John Osoborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) - a more realistic repres. of social life: no more country houses and tennis courts x but: ironing boards and minor domestic squalor instead - a reaction against Noel Coward (1899 – 1973; an E actor, playwright, and pop music composer) & co. style of dramatic setting (b) fiction: - use of North En. situations, accents, and themes - frankness about sex - a more political content
H a r o l d P i n t e r ( b . 1 9 3 0 ) L i f e : - son of an East End Jewish tailor - an actor - the Nobel Prize for lit. (2005) W o r k : - < the ‘theatre of the absurd’ of esp. Samuel Beckett (1906 – 89, an Ir. dramatist) and Eugène Ionesco (1912 – 94, a Fr. dramatist) - = the most orig. and challenging of the new dramatists of the 1950s - a sense of the dramatic effect of pacing, pausing, and timing (< his experience as an actor) - a excellent ear for the rhythms of the colloquial, repetitive, London E - language: striking and sometimes disturbing - conc.: a dramatic repres. of a world of seeming inconsequentiality - = inconsequential conversation, dislocated relationships, and undefined threats - setting: typically a room (refuge, prison cell, or trap) - = symbolic of the world of its occupants - characters: their ritualised relationship with its rules and taboos disturbed by a stranger on to whom they project their deepest desires, guilts, and neuroses - concl.: the final breakdown mirrored in the breakdown of language - a master of pauses and silences to communicate a secondary level of meaning often opposed to the 1st The Room (1957): - = his 1st one-act play The Dumb Waiter (1957) The Birthday Party (1957): - 2 articulate characters, a Jew and an Irishman, break an inarticulate man with their monstrous staccato barrage of unanswerable questions and half-associated ideas The Caretaker (1959): - < S. Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (1952) - < F. Kafka > the air of menace - < T. S. Eliot > the dialogue pattern - > won him the 1st of his many prizes for drama The Homecoming (1964): - opens typically with a one-sided conversation in an undistinguished room in a London house - x but: shifts away from comedy = a turning point in his career - characters: possibly a Jewish family, apparently with a tradition of unfaithful women - the dead x but: adulterous mother her living daughter-in-law, treated by the M members of the family as an adulteress - everything in the play rendered unspecific: incl. inexplicit frictions btw generations and btw the uneducated family members x the homecoming son, an uni professor - > leaves a residual sense of sourness and negativity Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978): - further develop the uncertainty and hints of menace and ominousness of his The Homecoming - play with the disjunctions of memory and with unstable human relationships - > ad Old Times: an open triangle determined not only by its members, 2 women and 1 man, but also by its silences and indeterminacies - > ad No Man’s Land: the shifting relationship to one another of 2 elderly x 2 younger men - > ad Betrayal: a middle-class adultery in literary London One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988): - shift away from the repres. of uncertainty twd a more political drama: (a) from indeterminacy twd moral definition (b) from the individuals threatened by an unspecific menace twd the individuals threatened by the oppression of unnamed modern states - conc. with language = the means of power to be defined and manipulated to suit the ends of those actually holding power [see also his The Birthday Party] also wrote: - a number of screenplays: for John Fowles’s (1926 – 2005) The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), for his own play Betrayal, & oth.
A r n o l d W e s k e r ( b . 1 9 3 2 ) L i f e : - son of an East End Jewish tailor ( H. Pinter) W o r k : The Kitchen (1959): - master of visual theatre: alternates periods of action and inaction in a restaurant - uses the kitchen and camp setting as a metaphor for an unfair and hierarchical society Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959), and I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960): - = ‘The Trilogy’ - an acute sense of place: captures distinctive ways of speaking (London Jewish, rural East E ) and distinctive rhythms of urban and rural domesticity - relates his respect for working-class community to a social, historical, and political perspective: (a) from the anti-Fascist protest in the Jewish East End (1936) (b) through the failure of a project to establ. a New Jerusalem (c) to a new idealist-socialist lifestyle in East En. (1950s) Chips with Everything (1962): - < a fictional development of his own experience with ‘National Service’ [= army conscription] - contrasts moments of concerted physical action by the group of recruits x the sense of conscription being no leveller, despite official pretensions to the contrary also founded the ‘Centre 42’
‘ C e n t r e 4 2 ’ ( 1 9 6 0 – 6 1 ) - founded by Arnold Wesker, author of 42 plays (the name?) - aimed to write plays not simply ‘for the class of people who acknowledge plays to be a legitimate form of expression’ x but: also for the low-brows, for everyone - attempted to eliminate the old-fashioned ‘sweetness and light’ and instead to forge links btw art x socialist action x and society at large - the pop. taste proved more resistant to his ideals than he expected soon failed
J o e O r t o n ( 1 9 3 3 – 6 7 ) L i f e : - distrusted the political system under which he lived, and, by extension, all systems of authority and control - lead an active homosexual life (a criminal offence in his time) - sent to prison on grounds of a relatively trivial charge of stealing and defacing library books - a sense of the potential of the state to oppress the citizen ( H. Pinter) - brutally murdered by his long-term companion and collaborator W o r k : - (a) fought back against authority with an anarchic verbal comedy calculated to outrage - (b) wrote to the press and theatre managers under a F pseudonym: parodied the bourgeois respectability and complained of his own work = an ‘endless parade of mental and physical perversion’ - structured his comedy not simply to expose the folly of the fool, the double standards of the hypocrite, etc. x but: to disrupt the very status quo - made his villains no fools, his fools no innocents, and his innocents no wronged paragons: innocence can never be a defence - used a sordid camp (see his The Erpingham Camp) or a private psychiatric clinic (see his What the Butler Saw) setting as a metaphor for an over-organised and explosively revolutionary state - exploited x but: also dangerously transformed the traditional forms of comedy and farce = made the old morality and the old social order vanish x but: left a space both amoral and, by extension, apolitical - took an anarchist’s delight in fostering disorder x but: none in reclaiming order - > criticised for never exploring the consequences of the social questions he raises Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) Loot (1966) The Ruffian on the Stair (1967) The Erpingham Camp (1967) What the Butler Saw (1967)
T o m S t o p p a r d ( b . 1 9 3 7 ) L i f e : - b. in Czechoslovakia - accepted his step-father’s surname on his mother’s remarriage W o r k : - frequently used plays by oth. playwrights as launching pads for his own - appealed to the pragmatic and speculative alike: delighted in parallels, coincidences, and convergences - x but: his carefully plotted plays systematically found their ends in their beginnings - symmetrical and logical plays x J. Orton’s explosive, untidy, and unresolved ones - also wrote for radio and TV: alternated a serious handling of political themes x arabesques of exuberant fantasy The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and M Is for Moon among Other Things (both 1962): - = early short radio plays If You’re Glad I’ll be Frank (1966): - = a short radio play - a bemused husband desperately tries to reclaim his wife subsumed into a speaking clock Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966): - < playfully rereads W. Shakespeare’s Hamlet accord. to Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives, and Beckettian principles - < S. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot x but: B. focuses on hopelessness x S. celebrates the gaiety and perverse vitality generated from despair - renders everything relative, deheroises x but: never expels the sense of death of the title - marginalises the Prince x makes the 2 attendant lords take on the weight of a tragedy they neither understand nor dignity - transforms W. Shakespeare’s 2 toadying gentlemen into 2 prosy commoners with 20th c. sensibilities their tragedy lies in their awareness of convergence, concurrence, and consequence of the inescapable pattern of Hamlet, necessarily ending with their death The Real Inspector Hound (1968): - < rereads Agatha Christie’s (1890 – 1976) play The Mousetrap (1952) into a hilarious parody on the classic country house murder-mystery play - the subplot satirises the pomposity of theatre critics whose lives become entangled with those of the characters in the play they are supposedly reviewing - brilliantly demonstrates the indistinct frontier btw life x art Jumpers (1972): - a moral philos. prepares a lecture on the existence of God and the problem of the objectivity of good x evil - confronts him by the murder of an acrobat at a party in his own home forces him to intellectual gymnastics suggested by the title, the making of mental and moral jumps Travesties (1974): - < rereads O. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest - shapes the play around echoes, parodies, and inversions of: (a) O. Wilde’s comedy above mentioned (b) J. Joyce’s Ulysses, to a lesser extend - analyses political and lit. history in a complex and totally speculative way Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977) and Professional Foul (1978): - = his excursions into explicitly political drama - the persecution of intellectuals by Communist regimes of Eastern Eur. - > ad Every Good Boy Deserves Favour: a script for actors and symphony orchestra - > ad Professional Foul: a clever TV play Hapgood (1988): - suggests a return to his old whimsy x but: a singularly menacing whimsy Arcadia (1993): - = his masterpiece - a subtle, allusive, and brilliant fusion of complementary oppositions - set in a country house room: remains constant for scenes set in Byron’s En. and his own time x but: the language shifts - on nature, lit. history and historians, truth and time, and the disruptive infl. of sex = ‘the attraction which Newton left out’ Indian Ink (1993) The Invention of Love (1997): - on the conflicting strands in the life and culture of A(lfred) E(dward) Housman (1859 – 1936, an E poet) - Housman brought together in 1 galaxy with O. Wilde and High Victorians
2 5 P o l i t i c s a n d R e l i g i o n i n P o s t - W a r B r i t i s h N o v e l (G. Orwell, G. Greene, A. Burgess, and M. Spark)
G e o r g e O r w e l l [see O. under ‘22 Colonial Experience’]
G r a h a m G r e e n e [see G. under ‘22 Colonial Experience’]
A n t h o n y B u r g e s s ( 1 9 1 7 – 9 3 ) L i f e : - b. John Burgess Wilson to a Cath. mother and a Protestant father, on his confirmation received the name Anthony - lapsed formally from Cath. as a teenager x but: did not break with the Church completely - received uni education in E language and lit. - served as a teacher in the Br. colonial service in Malaysia and Brunei [= the island of Borneo] - learnt the Malay language, and also spoke: Rus., Fr., Sp., Ita., Ger., and Welsh W o r k : - versatile and extremely prolific: novelist, poet, playwright, lit. critic, scriptwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, composer, librettist, broadcaster, transl., and educationalist Non-fiction: (a) lit. critical studies of W. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961), J. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, & oth. (b) treatises on linguistics Fiction: - his central theme: theology and sociology of sin The Long Day Wanes = ‘The Malayan Trilogy’ (1956 – 59): - = his 1st publ. fictional work - a single-vol. publ. of the orig. trilogy on the dying days of Br.’s empire in the East - oth. Eastern fictional explorations: (a) R. Kipling x J. Conrad (b) G. Orwell’s Burma in Burmese Days (c) E. M. Forster’s Ind. in A Passage to India (d) G. Greene’s Vietnam in The Quiet American - unlike J. Conrad and G. Greene x but: like R. Kipling and G. Orwell learnt the local language - his linguistic command results in an impressive verisimilitude and understanding of indigenous conc. in the trilogy The Wanting Seed (1962): - = a futuristic fantasy - the cyclical process of human moral history: (a) ‘Gusphases’ = Augustian ages: the concept of Original Sin paramount (b) ‘Interphases’ (c) ‘Pelaphases’ = Pelagian ages: the triumph of liberal humanism A Clockwork Orange (1962): - = a dystopian vision of the technological future, his most brilliant and experimental novel - a cult exploration of the nature of evil - from the POV of the London delinquent Alex (15): fantasises about rape, assault, and murder while listening to Mozart - distinct challenges to the reader: (a) A. brainwashed into conformity questions the almost sentimental ideals of freedom and social responsibility on the background of the liberal 1960s (b) A. rendered sympathetic his geniality and vitality x the society’s numbness and soullessness produces A.’s reaction - lexical rebellion: A. uses ‘nadsat’ = a Rus.-rooted argot, abbreviated, aggressive, rich, and strange - suggests sth of J. Joyce’s linguistic ingenuity - uses Rus. possibly as a reaction to the danger of Communism - > Stanley Kubrick’s (1928 – 99, an Am. film director and producer) film Earthly Powers (1980): - = a panoramic Tolstoyan saga of the 20th c. - an entertaining exploration of moral antinomy - an autobiog. narrator = a Cath., homosexual, and successful writer - knows the power of pop. story-telling, loves effects and ‘cunning’ - travels the 5 continents: (a) gets acquainted with Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945), Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945, in office 1922 – 43; an It. PM and creator of the Fascist state), ‘and the rest of the terrible people this terrible century’s thrown up’ (b) befriends J. Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, R. Kipling, and Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957; a Br. painter, writer, and co-founder of the ‘Vorticism’) (c) finds himself the brother-in-law of a saintly and fictional Pope (d) x but: does not seek the status of a colossus himself Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life (1964): - = the classic speculative recreation of W. Shakespeare’s love-life and the sources of his imaginative vision Napoleon Symphony (1974): - = an ambitious modernist fictional expedition - shapes the novel’s structure on the 4 movements of Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770 – 1827, a Ger. composer and pianist) Eroica Symphony (1804; = Ita. for Heroic) - the title: from the symphony above mentioned, orig. dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte - incl. a superb portrait of an Arab and Muslim society occupied by a Christian western power (= Egypt occupied by a Cath. Fr.) Abba Abba (1977): - about the last months in the life of J. Keats - the title: to become his epitaph on the marble memorial stone behind which the vessel with his remains is kept “The Enderby Tetralogy” (1963 – 84): - = a cycle of comic novels - about a reclusive minor poet struggling with his muse
M u r i e l S p a r k ( b . 1 9 1 8 ) L i f e : - of Jewish descent, Scott. birth, and Cath. religion (a convert) W o r k : (a) the theological problem of evil (b) moral issues in relation to fictional form (c) the narrative problems of self-consciously lit. texts N o n - f i c t i o n : Child of Light (1951): - = a critical study of Mary Shelley’s work - significant of her own future career as a Gothic novelist - continues the Scott. tradition of R. Burns, James Hogg (1770 – 1835, a Scott. writer), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 94, a Scott. writer) x but: also shifts the Gothic form into new directions Curriculum Vitae (1992): - = her autobiog. - suggests her intention to explore the potential of light to dispel darkness and illuminate the thoughts, motives, and sins dwelling there F i c t i o n : The Comforters (1957): - the protagonist = a neurotic woman writer - has to come to terms with her new-found Cath., her hallucinations, and her God-like status of a creator - works on a study of contemp. fiction entitled Form in the Modern Novel - intents to write a novel about writing a novel Memento Mori (1959): - = a wry, blunt, and provocatively funny narrative - the characters = a diverse group of London geriatrics - receive anonym. phone calls to remind them of their impending deaths - concl.: one of the characters, paralysed by a stroke, recalls the causes of his friends’ mortal sicknesses - the 3rd person narrator breaks his litany and turns on the reader with the words of a children’s catechism The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961): - = Gothic novels of a distinctively comic chill - conc.: possession ad The Ballad of Peckham Rye: - conc.: the necromancy in a London suburb in the 1950s ad The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: - conc.: the exercise of psychological power in a girls’ school in the 1930s - Miss Brodie’s superbly poised and precisely defined moral sway over her favourite pupils: (a) compared to God by one her pupils (b) compared to Mussolini by the narrator (c) emphasises her fondness for pointing out the common Lat. root of the words ‘educate’ and ‘Duce’ The Driver’s Seat (1970): - = a carefully ordered present-tense Gothic narrative - contrasts the aberrance of what happens x its cool and precise delineation by the narrator’s dispassionate, sometimes ironic, and sometimes disingenuous tone - the protagonist = a woman with a death-wish, plots the circumstances of her own violent murder - challenges ideas of authorial authority and control Not to Disturb (1971): - = a Gothic novel in the traditional sense of term x The Abbess of Crewe The Abbess of Crewe (1974): - = a non-traditional Gothic novel - completely avoids the excessive interest in the sexuality traditionally inspirational to earlier Gothic novelists - set in an ‘upper-crust’ E convent - the Abbess rules the convent and uses all the technological and propagandist skills of the 20th c. to manipulate her sisters to suit her ends - finds interest in secular lit., incl. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527, an Ita. Political philosopher), and a wide range of poetry: believes ‘all good art needs not be plausible, only hypnotic’ - an artist herself, gives orders ‘for the selection…of the transcripts of her tape-recording’ and incl. at certain points the explanatory instruction ‘Poetry deleted’ - = a more elegant x but: no less politic than the orig. Richard Nixon’s (1913 – 94, in office 1969 – 74; a US President to resign as a result of the ‘Watergate Scandal’) phrase: ‘Expletive deleted’ - [‘Expletive deleted’ = an ironic expression to indicate a profanity has been omitted, orig. in connection with N.’s internal tapes made public after the ‘Watergate’]
2 6 N e w T r e n d s i n B r i t i s h F i c t i o n i n t h e 1 9 7 0 s a n d 1 9 8 0 s (M. Amis, I. McEwan, D. Lessing, A. Carter, K. Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, etc. [S. Rushdie, G. Swift, J. Barnes, T. Mo, P. Ackroyd, J. G. Farrell, A. S. Byatt, and J. Winterson)
R e c e n t B r i t i s h F i c t i o n (a) develops the well-establ. Gothic tradition (b) seeks a newly distinct feminist expression (c) tries out new varieties of historical writing (d) widens the horizons to incl. writers and subjects of the old colonies and wider world (e) the areas largely overlap: A. Carter’s use of the new Gothic to suit her feminist ends, etc.
M a r t i n A m i s ( b . 1 9 4 9 ) L i f e : - son of Kingsley A. - attended a number of different schools, travelled extensively (due to his father’s lit. success) x but: managed to graduate from Oxford - underwent a period of ed. work, became a full-time writer W o r k : - a novelist, short story writer, and lit. critic - conc.: the absurdity of the post-modern condition, the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, and the grotesque of its caricatures - his vision of the modern world = a frenetic cosmopolitan city full of sex and violence - style: a characteristic ‘terrible compulsive vividness’ (K. Amis), reinforced by his use of a violent slang D e k a d e n t F i c t i o n : - intensely witty x but: a somewhat filthy and sexual kind of humour - satires on the modern-day metropolitan torpor and cultural trendiness The Rachel Papers (1973): - = his 1st novel, the most traditional - < autobiog.: a bright, egoistic teenager and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the y. before going to uni Dead Babies (1975): - more flippant in tone - a typically ‘sixties’ plot: a house full of characters abusing various substances - establ. a number of his characteristics: a mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist [= Ger. for ‘the spirit of the time’], authorial invention, defiant casualness, and a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations Success (1978) Other People (1981): - = a fragmented and nightmarish psychological thriller Einstein’s Monsters (1986): - = a coll. of short stories on nuclear destruction F i c t i o n M a s t e r p i e c e s : Money: A Suicide Note (1984): - = an ambitious longer novel - revives his taste for gross and excessive comedy - set in high-life Am. - the protagonist = John Self, a successful director of commercials and an archetypal hedonist [= Gr. for ‘pleasure’], arrives to N.Y. to shoot his 1st feature film - despite the subtitle x the introd. makes clear that the protagonist’s suicide attempt will be unsuccessful - concl.: S. loses all his money (if it ever existed) x but: still able to laugh at himself and be cautiously optimistic about his future - the author writes himself into the novel as an arrogant overseer and confidant in S.’s final breakdown London Fields (1989): - = a dystopian novel somewhat in a Gothic manner - revives his disgusted affection for urban low life - set in a London underworld, in a not far away future - the social system collapses, the condition of the environment and the climate gets critical, diseases and body distortions spread, etc. - the protagonist: a woman on her way to the inevitable violent death - assisted by one (seemingly?) respectable man and another vulgar working-class youth = alcoholic and gambler using an idiosyncratic language of half-understood gestures and the language of tabloid sports columns Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991): - = a much acclaimed shorter novel - sensitive to the enlarged perspective resulting from forsaking the conventionally linear narrative - time runs backwards during the entire novel, incl. the actual dialogue being spoken backwards - narrates the autobiog. of a doctor who helped torture and murder Jews in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust - x due to the backward narration the doctor returns the dead to life: the dead from the Holocaust revive, return to their homes, become children, then babies, and then re-enter their mothers’ wombs where they cease to exist N o n - F i c t i o n : The Moronic Inferno (1986): - a coll. of essays on contemp. Am. Experience (2000): - = a memoir, largely on his relationship with his famous author-father - Kingsley A. famously showed no interest in his son’s work: complained of his ‘breaking the rules’ and ‘drawing attention to himself’
I a n M c E w a n ( b . 1 9 4 8 ) L i f e : - = ‘Ian MacAbre’ (from the nature of his early work) - spent much of his childhood in Far East, Ger., and North Af. (due to his father’s occupation as an army officer) - received uni education, became the 1st student of Malcolm Bradbury’s (1932 – 2000, a Br. writer and academic) pioneering postgraduate course of ‘Creative Writing’ W o r k : - = a distinctly urban writer - contrasts repudiating horror subjects x a precise, matter-of-fact style F i c t i o n : (a) Early Period: - notoriously controversial in subject matter - preocc. with dark, perverse, even gothic material: violence, murder, incest, paedophilia, etc. - reinforced by a troubling narrative framework: the conventional moral perspectives disrupted x but: the reader drawn into involvement with the characters and into complicity with their crimes First Love, Last Rites (1975): - = his 1st publ. work, a coll. of short stories - > attracted immediate attention In Between the Sheets (1978): - = his 2nd coll. of short stories - incl. claustrophobic tales of childhood, deviant sexuality, and disjointed family life - > remarkable for their formal experimentation and controlled narrative voice The Cement Garden (1978): - = a sexually explicit novella - preocc. with perversion and obsession: the private disposal by orphan children of the corpse of their mother under domestic cement - the 4 children bury their mother in the basement to avoid being taken into care, and attempt to carry on as normal a life as possible x but: an incestuous relationship develops btw the 2 eldest children as they seek to emulate their parents roles - the cement = symbolical of the uniformity of a London of concrete tower blocks on the ‘cracked asphalt’ with ‘weeds…pushing through’ - > establ. his characteristic disconcerting x but: chaste prose style: perfectly modulated, cultivated, and precise The Comfort of Strangers (1981): - = the most mature novel of the period, his early masterpiece - < its location and claustrophobic concentration indebted to Thomas Mann’s (1875 – 1955) Death in Venice (1912) - a more substantial investigation of psychopathology: a haunting tale of fantasy, violence, and obsession - a striking portrayal of an E couple murdered during their holiday in Venice and their dreamlike collusion with their charismatic assassin (b) Mature Period: - moves away from the most disquieting of his early themes - x but: continues to explore the impact of unusual or extreme situations on ordinary people - turns to broader themes: examines how social and political issues determine our personal lives The Child in Time (1987): - = an intense and sober study of the devastating effects of the loss of a child through abduction - the infant daughter of young parents kidnapped and never found - a further subplot examines the psyche of a fictitious senior politician The Innocent (1990): - conc. with the espionage in the post-war Berlin during the 1950s - examines an absurd love triangle against the background of the Cold War Black Dogs (1992): - investigates the nature of evil - incl. the most significant events of modern Eur. history: the Nazi death-camps, the post-war Fr., the collapse of the Berlin Wall, etc. Enduring Love (1997): - = widely regarded his mature masterpiece - conc. with a person with ‘de Clerambault’s syndrome’ [= ‘erotomania’, a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief of another person, usually of higher social status, being in love with him/her] Amsterdam (1998): - = M.: a ‘contemporary fable’ - the characters = 3 men: a composer, a nwsp ed., and a politician - meet at the funeral of their former lover and spark off a bitter feud - > won him the Booker Prize [= Br.’s most prestigious lit. award] - x but: lacks the moral menace and disconcerting mood of his previous tales - the award seemed to signal the integration of a radical presence into the comfortable contemp. mainstream Atonement (2001): - = again a challenging and ambitious novel - the narrator = an elderly novelist, writes from the perspective of her own younger self shortly before and then during the WW II - the atonement = the goal of both her life and her text: destroys the harmony of her childhood home due a crucial error of perception (may have been an act of malice) and struggles to make amends for the irrevocable damage she has caused: (a) questions the possibility of achieving such a grace (b) expresses a troubled awareness of the complexities of responsibility and agency, both in writing and life Saturday (2005): - follows a single x but: an especially eventful day in the life of a neurosurgeon D r a m a : The Imitation Game (1981): - = a clever TV play - conc. with a code-breaking centre in WW II - also specifically addresses the position of women in contemp. society The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985): - = a screenplay - satirises political complacency in the time of restlessness
D o r i s L e s s i n g [see L. under ‘22 Colonial Experience’]
A n g e l a C a r t e r ( 1 9 4 0 – 9 2 ) - magic realism: (a) preocc. with an extravagant fictional world of magic and theatre (b) reinvented the fairy-tale for a knowing adult public (c) infused her narratives with macabre fantasy and erotic comedy N o n - f i c t i o n : The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979): - = a deft and suggestive essay - claims a pornographic fantasy too would have its legitimate place in lit. once it could be moulded to the service of women and once women had ceased to be consid. mere commodities - x but: scarcely a pornographer herself - renegotiates the elements shaping the traditional accounts of M-F relationships with a startling vividness - x but: rarely a polemical writer F i c t i o n : The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972): - the protagonist = a man divided btw a harmonious / infertile calm x a disharmonious / fertile storm, btw the stable / colourless world x the fragile dream-world - significant of the author’s own narrative attraction to the margins of the imagination The Passion of New Eve (1977) Nights at the Circus (1984): - = a theatrical novel, together with her Wise Children consid. her masterpiece - set in the golden age of escapist entertainment: the late 19th – early 20th c. - the protagonist = a cockney bird-woman, hatched from an egg the offspring of Leda and Jove - experiences a foster-childhood in a brothel, miraculously sprouts wings at the age of puberty, and becomes a star of the London music-hall and the circus in St Petersburg - survives an attempt at seduction by a Rus. Grand Duke x marries an Am. journalist in the wastes of Siberia - concl.: literary has the last laugh as her husband discovers she is not ‘the only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world’ Wise Children (1991): - = a theatrical novel - set in the golden age of escapist entertainment - the characters: (a) the theatrical twins, both dancers with successful careers (b) the illegitimate offspring of an eminent Shakespearian actor = a pillar of the ‘legitimate’ theatre - conc.: (a) in part an exploration of sisterhood and interchangeable identity (b) in part an autobiog. quest to justify this Shakespearian descent - the narrator = the chatty and digressive twin, both creates and subverts: forges links btw ‘theatre’ and ‘literature’, threatens to undermine neat gender definitions Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979): - = coll. of Gothic short stories
K a z u o I s h i g u r o ( b . 1 9 5 4 ) L i f e : - b. in Nagasaki (Japan) x but: moved to En. when 6 y. old - a Br. author of Japanese orig. - received uni education, became a student of M. Bradbury’s course ‘Creative Writing’ (and a course-mate of I. McEwan) W o r k : - a novelist, short story writer, and screenplay writer - a highly subjective narration: his 1st person narrators often exhibit human failings and reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative x but: rendered as sympathetic - frequent setting in the past: his delicate, historically accurate descriptive technique captures the details and atmosphere of a period - no sense of resolution: the issues of his characters remained buried in the past and unresolved - concl. with a melancholic resignation: the characters accept their past and their present and find comfort in their relief from mental anguish A Pale View of the Hills (1982): - the protagonist = a Japanese widow settled in En. - recalls the end of the WW II and the destruction and rehabilitation of Nagasaki An Artist of the Floating World (1986): - set in Nagasaki, in the period of reconstruction following the detonation of the atomic bomb (1945) - a delicate fictional study of an ageing painter’s awareness of, and detachment from, the political and cultural development of 20th c. Japan - the narrator haunted by his military past: forced to come to terms with his part in the WW II - accused by the new generation of being a part of Japan’s misguided foreign policy: confronted with the ideals of the modern world repres. in his grandson The Remains of the Day (1989): - set in the large country house of an E lord, in the pre-WII and post-WWII period - the protagonist = a typical elderly E butler - recalls in his last days his life in the 20th c. En. and evaluates whether or not it was necessary always to retain his loyalty: failed to reconcile his sense of service and his personal life and so failed to act on his romantic feelings twd the housekeeper - depicts the personal disillusionment against the broader background of WW II - asks delicate and carefully framed x but: none the less demanding cultural questions - > won him the Booker Prize The Unconsoled (1995): - set in an unnamed Eur. city - the protagonist = a concert pianist - struggles to fulfil a schedule of rehearsals and performances When We Were Orphans (2000): - set in Shanghai (China) in the early 20th c. - the protagonist = a private detective - investigates his parents’ disappearance in the city some 20 y. earlier Never Let Me Go (2005): - set in the late 1990s, in an alternate x but: very similar world - digresses into the sci-fi genre, employs a futuristic tone
V ( i d i a d h a r ) S ( u r a j p r a s a d ) N a i p a u l ( b . 1 9 3 2 ) L i f e : - b. in Trinidad (the E -speaking Caribbean) in a family of Ind. descent x but: settled in En. - received uni education - received the Booker Prize for In a Free State (1971) - knighted (1990) - received the Nobel Prize for Lit. (2001) W o r k : - a novelist, short story writer, travel book writer, and author of non-fiction, essays, and criticism - a wide range of settings: carries readers to En., Ind., Af., or Am. - a J. ‘Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings’ F i c t i o n : (a) Early Period: - a starkly satiric vision of the world - comedies of manners: comic portraits of Trinidadian society The Mystic Masseur (1957): - set in a Trinidad viewed with an exile’s acute and ironic eye Miguel Street (1959): - = a coll. of short stories A House for Mr Biswas (1961): - < semi-autobiog., draws on his father’s life in Trinidad - described by one of its critics as ‘a tender tragi-comedy’: (a) follows the declining fortunes of the protagonist from cradle to grave (b) traces the disintegration of a traditional way of life in the post-colonial world (c) approaches an epic scale - the protagonist = an Indo-Trinidadian man, strives for success and mostly fails - concl.: marries into a family only to find himself dominated by it, finally sets the goal of owning his own house (b) Mature Period: - a more modulated tone - preocc. with colonial and post-colonial societies in the process of de-colonisation - develops political themes The Mimic Men (1967) In a Free State (1971): - = his masterpiece, won him the Booker Prize - consists of 3 stories and 2 liking diary entries - an ironic, searching, bleak x but: emotionally engaging study of what it means to be enslaved x to be free Guerrillas (1975): - = one of his most complex novels, and most suspenseful: incl. ‘a series of shocks, like a shroud slowly unwound from a bloody corpse, showing the damaged – and familiar – face last’ - set on an unnamed 3rd World Caribbean island - populated by a mix of ethnicities x but: dominated by post-colonial Br. - an infertile, crowded place, marred by gas fumes and the dust from the bauxite plant A Bend in the River (1979): - set in an unnamed Af. country after gaining its independence - the protagonist = an Ind. Muslim, brought up during the colonial period as neither Eur. nor fully Af. - observes the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider’s distance (c) Later Period: - a more compelling tone - a darker and more pessimistic vision of the human condition: exploits the insensitivities and disconnections marring the relations among individuals, races, and nations - preocc. with an individual’s struggle with cultures: exploits the desperate and destructive conditions of the struggle The Enigma of Arrival (1987): - = a personal account of his life in En. N o n - f i c t i o n : - author of a number of books about Ind., the Caribbean, and the Islamic societies - also author of coll. of essays on a variety of themes An Area of Darkness (1964): - conc. with Ind. Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) - = a ‘cultural exploration’ [= study] of Islam Literary Occasions (2004): - = a coll. of essays
+ B e r y l B a i n b r i d g e ( b . 1 9 3 4 ) - a novelist, short story writer, and non-fiction writer - sardonic, even at times macabre wit merciless black comedies with eccentric characters - a great observer of human folly and self-deception: preocc. with the shabbiness of human behaviour, esp. in domestic warfare btw the sexes The Bottle Factory Outing (1974): a grotesque comedy of manners An Awfully Big Adventure (1989): her own experience as an actress The Birthday Boys (1991): Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s (1868 – 1912, a Royal Naval officer and Antarctic explorer) ill-fated Antarctic expedition [beaten by Roald Amundsen & his party, himself & his party died on the return]
+ J o h n F o w l e s ( 1 9 2 6 – 2 0 0 5) - a novelist, poet, and non-fiction writer - highly self-conscious: realises the fictiveness of fiction itself - presents the consciousness of the author as a figure within his own books, at certain points comments on the action and explains how things might have been different - = sometimes consid. a forefather of Br. postmodernism - = in some ways ‘a modern Thomas Hardy’, esp. as a chronicler of his beloved Dorset (himself settled there), and as the ed. of Thomas Hardy’s England (1984) The Collector (1963): a young clerk, butterfly coll., kidnaps a young woman The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969): - a Victorian palaeontologist gets involved with the notorious and enigmatic Sarah Woodruff (= a disgraced woman ill-used by a sailor who then married another woman) - formally experimental: the device of ‘alternative endings’ - > filmed with a screenplay by H. Pinter (1981) Daniel Martin (1977): a scriptwriter scouts locations for a film in Af. and takes up again with his former lover; incl. elements tempting to be read as semi-autobiog Mantissa (1982): takes place entirely in the mind of a novelist recovering in hospital from a stroke A Maggot (1985): a brilliant recreation of the 18th c. mind, incl. the ‘fowlesian’ shifting of identity before our eyes during the teasing progression of the plot: the submissive F prostitute protagonist undergoes a transformation to become a fearless Quaker
+ S a l m a n R u s h d i e ( b . 1 9 4 7 ) - b. in Bombay (Ind.) x but: settled in En. a Br. author of Ind. orig. - a novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and author of travel books, books for children, non-fiction, essays, and criticism - magic realism: blends myth and fantasy with real life - postmodernism: accompanies historical fact with several interpretations to challenge what is consid. the truth and the only possible solution - a self-conscious immigrant outlook Midnight’s Children (1981): - key events in the history of Ind. through the story of the protagonist = one of the children (incl. the author himself) b. the y. Ind. won independence from Br. (1947) - > won him the Booker Prize (1881) - > won him the ‘Booker of Bookers’ (1995) [= the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its 25-y. history] The Satanic Verses (1988): - > the novel violently criticised by radical Muslims - > accused of blasphemy against Islam, sentenced to death, and forced into hiding under the protection of Br. government and police The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995): - the history of an Ind. family and the history of Ind.
+ G r a h a m S w i f t ( b . 1 9 4 9 ) - a novelist and short story writer - complex narrative strategies: non-linear narrative - preocc. with the ideas of narrative, history, conflicts btw the generations, and the place of an individual in the larger scale of events Shuttlecock (1981): - the protagonist: obsessed with his father’s experience in the WW II, struggles to identify how much reality there is in his father’s self-declared heroism Waterland (1983): - < the Lat.-Am. magical realism - a dramatic monologue novel: a history teacher addresses his classroom, describes his youth spent in Norfolk fens during WW II , and weaves his personal memories into a greater history of the area - debates the very nature of history and the relationship btw past x present Last Orders (1996): - a journey began in a London pub by 4 friends intent on fulfilling a promise to scatter the ashes of their dead drinking-partner in the sea - > won him the Booker Prize - x but: controversial due to its plot indebted to William Faulkner’s (1897 – 1962) As I Lay Dying (1930)
+ J u l i a n B a r n e s ( b . 1 9 4 6 ) - a novelist, short story writer, and author of detective novels, non-fiction, essays, and transl. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984): - narrated by a retired doctor, obsessed with Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 80; author of Madame Bovary [1856]) - combines lit. criticism, biographical digression, and a tragic personal narrative - develops a postmodernist approach: unreliability of the narrative voice, linguistic self-consciousness, etc. x but: retains the unifying motif of the quest for historical truth
+ T i m o t h y M o ( b . 1 9 5 0 ) - b. in Hong Kong x but: settled in En. a Br. novelist of mixed Anglo-Chinese orig. Sour Sweet (1982): narrates the story of a Chinese immigrant family living in London; filmed with a screenplay by I. McEwan An Insular Possession (1986): set during the Opium wars btw Br. x China in the 1st half of the 19th c.
+ P e t e r A c k r o y d ( b . 1 9 4 9 ) - a prolific novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist, and author of non-fiction, lit. criticism, biographies, and essays - formally diverse and inventive: blends past and present, fact and fiction, … The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983): written as O. Wilde’s autobiog. Hawksmoor (1985): juxtaposes then x now, the career of a murderously necromantic church architect of the end of the 17th c. x the latter-day detective work of a policeman called Hawksmoor Chatterton (1987): explores plagiarism and forgery
+ J ( a m e s ) G ( o r d o n ) F a r r e l l ( 1 9 3 5 – 7 9 ) The Siege of Krishnapur (1973): - an account of Br. common sense, eccentricity, and arrogance in a besieged and crumbling Residency during the Mutiny at the end of the 19th c. - the events seen from the perspective of the rules, not the rebels x but: allows for hints illuminating the ‘perplexing’ question of the imperial mission and of Br. pretensions to cultural superiority The Singapore Grip (1978): set during the WW II
+ A ( n t o n i a ) S ( u s a n ) B y a t t ( b . 1 9 3 6 ) - the elder sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) - a novelist, short story writer, and critic The Virgin in the Garden (1978): set in the y. of the coronation of Elizabeth II (1953), around the performance of a celebratory drama conc. with the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I Possession (1990): alternates the accounts of the modern researches of 2 young academics and a reconstruction of the once secret love-affair of the objects of their academic research, two Victorian poets (loosely based, supposedly, on R. Browning and C. Rossetti)
+ J e a n e t t e W i n t e r s o n ( b . 1 9 5 9 ) Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985): a bitingly perceptive study of a provincial childhood passed within the narrow, women-dominated confines of an evangelical Christian sect The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989): fantastic, quasi-historical novels fusing the M x the F, the past x the present, etc.
2 7 P o s t - W a r P o e t r y : M o v e m e n t s a n d P e r s o n a l i t i e s (The Movement [K. Amis, J. Wain, D. Davie, T. Gunn, D. J. Enright, E. Jennings, and R. Conquest], The Group [P. Hobsbaum, E. Lucie-Smith, and M. Bell]; P. Larkin, T. Hughes, S. Heaney, and S. Smith)
‘ T h e M o v e m e n t ’ ( e a r l y 1 9 5 0 s ) - = a loose group of young poets and novelists - the name: from the designation of the lit. ed. of The Spectator (1828 +) J. D. Scott for a group of essentially E poets x poets in Scot. / Wales not generally incl. - reacted against the extreme romanticism of ‘The New Apocalyptics’ (overlapping with ‘The Scottish Renaissance’) and their irrationality, deliberate incoherence, outrageousness, and controversy x in favour of anti-romanticism, rationality, and sobriety (almost constituting a form of neo-classicism) - generally retreated ‘from direct comment or involvement in any political or social doctrine’ - shared antipathy to the cultural pretensions of Bohemia and ‘Bloomsbury’, to the élitism of much Modernist writing, and to the post-imperial Welfare State Br. - also shared (x but: not emphasised) their class orig - incl. Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, D. J. Enright, Elizabeth Jennings, and Robert Conquest - > New Lines anthology (1956), ed. by R. Conquest: the introd. sets the aim of avoiding ‘bad principles’ = excesses both in terms of theme and stylistic devices, and criticises implicitly the 1940s poets, incl. Dylan Thomas & oth. - > New Lines 2 (1963) - ‘The Movement’ collapsed to be succeeded by ‘The Group’
+ K i n g s l e y A m i s [see also: A. under ‘23 The Angry Young Men’] - not particularly distinguished as a poet Bright November (1947), A Frame of Mind (1953), A Case of Samples (1956)
+ J o h n W a i n [see also: W. under ‘23 The Angry Young Men’] - Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1973 – 78) - author of dry, cerebral, and witty poems A word carved on a sill (1956), Weep before God (1961), Poems for the Zodiac (1980)
+ D o n a l d D a v i e ( 1 9 2 2 – 9 5 ) - a poet and lit. critic - author of philosophical, abstract, and landscape poems - author of much theoretical writing about the technique of poetry
+ T h o m G u n n ( 1 9 2 9 – 2 0 0 4 ) - free verse on society’s increasingly liberal views of drugs, homosexuality, and poetic form - classic verse forms on modern anxieties Fighting Terms (1954): his 1st coll. Touch (1967): the title poem on the intimacy shared with his sleeping lover (and the cat) Jack Straw’s Castle (1976): shifts from the dream-like rather to the nightmare-like
+ D ( e n n i s ) J ( o s e p h ) E n r i g h t ( 1 9 2 0 – 2 0 0 2 ) - an academic, poet, novelist, and critic - ed. and co-ed. of many anthologies and lit. critical works Bread Rather then Blossoms (1956), Some Men Are Brothers (1960), Man is an Onion: Reviews and Essays (1972)
+ E l i z a b e t h J e n n i n g s ( 1 9 2 6 – 2 0 0 1 ) - clarity of style and simplicity of lit. approach - marked by her Rom. Cath. belief and her mental illness A Sense of the World (1958), Song for a Birth or a Death (1961), Consequently I Rejoice (1977)
+ R o b e r t C o n q u e s t ( b . 1 9 1 7 ) - a poet and historian - best known as the writer on the Soviet Union The Great Terror (1968): his classic prose account of Stalin’s purges in 1930s
‘ T h e G r o u p ’ ( m i d 1 9 5 0 s – m i d 1 9 6 0 s) - often consid. the successor of ‘The Movement’ x but: exercised more practical criticism and mutual support than its predecessor with only little tangible public existence - founded by Philip Hobsbaum, then a Cambridge student, as a poetry discussion group for students dissatisfied with the way poetry was read aloud in the uni (1952) - H. moved to London, the group reconstituted itself there = ‘The Group’ (1955) - = an informal group of poets meeting once a week to ‘discuss each other’s work helpfully and without backbiting’, with ‘no monolithic body of doctrine to which everyone must subscribe’ - followed the principles of the ‘New Criticism’ (mid 20th c.) = the dominant trend in E and Am. lit. criticism in 1920s – 60s, advocating close reading and attention to texts themselves x rejecting criticism based on extra-textual sources, esp. biography - incl. Edward Lucie-Smith, George Macbeth (1932 – 92), Peter Redgrove (1932 – 2003), Alan Brownjohn (b. 1931), Peter Porter (b. 1929), Martin Bell, and occasionally Ted Hughes - H. left London for study, the group moved to Chelsea under the chairmanship of E. Lucie-Smith (1959) and incl. Fleur Adcock (b. 1934), Taner Baybars (b. 1936), Edwin Brock (1927 – 97), Nathaniel Tarn (b. 1928), and Zulfikar Ghose (b. 1935) - H. moved to Belfast and establ. a similar group there = ‘The Belfast Group’ (1962) - > The Group Anthology (1963), ed. by P. Hobsbaum & E. Lucie-Smith: the foreword sets the aim of writing ‘frank autobiographical poems’ and a ‘poetry of direct experience’, the epilogue emphasises the importance of discussion and the writer’s need for ‘community to keep him in touch with his audience’ - publicity associated with the anthology increased the number of attendants, made the meetings no more workable, and restructured the orig. group into a more formal one under the chairmanship of M. Bell = ‘The Poet’s Workshop’ (1965)
+ P h i l i p H o b s b a u m ( 1 9 3 2 – 2 0 0 5 ) - an academic, poet, and critic - known principally as the founder of ‘The Group’ and co-ed. of The Group Anthology (1963) - author of several vol. of poetry and vol. of lit. criticism: incl. reader’s guides to C. Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, and Robert Lowell (1917 – 77)
+ E d w a r d L u c i e - S m i t h ( b . 1 9 3 3 ) - a poet, art critic, curator, and author of exhibition catalogues - succeeded P. Hobsbaum in organising ‘The Group’ - author of several vol. of orig. poetry and of some poetry transl. - author, co-author, and ed. of many books on art
+ M a r t i n B e l l ( 1 9 18 – 7 8 ) - a poet, prominent esp. in satire - < infl. by T. S. Eliot and Jules Laforgue (1860 – 87) > use of complex ironies - “The Enormous Comics”, “Letter to a Friend”
T e d H u g h e s ( 1 9 3 0 – 9 8 ) L i f e : - b. in Yorkshire, son of a WW I veteran - married the Am. poet Sylvia Plath (1932 – 63) x but: 7 y. later she committed suicide - appointed Poet Laureate (1985) W o r k : - conc. with nature = the world of raw sensation - views the nature through the eye of the predator x S. Plath’s view through the eye of the victim - plays tender games with mortality The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960): - < D. H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923) - incl. electrifying descriptions of jaguar, thrushes, and pike - fascinated with animal energy and independence - relates the predators through metaphors to forces underlying all animal and human experience: human aspirations to freedom and power x the instinctive animal achievement of both - presents the decay of wild animals caused by their restraint: a caged jaguar, a macaw in a cage, etc. - > “Hawk Roosting”, repres. the consciousness of an animal x but: expresses the animal single- mindedness with an unmistakably human arrogance - > “The Bull Moses”, contrasts the intense physicality x the ‘spirituality’ in the bull’s quietness when returned to his stall, with his leisure founded on some vision of future ( Moses) - [Moses = “I drew him out of the water”, adopted by a Egyptian princess; ordered by God to lead His people out of the Egyptian bondage in the divine revelation of a burning bush; parted the Red Sea to allow an escape route for the Israelites from the Egyptian army; received the Ten Commandments from God on 2 stone tablets on the Mount Sinai ‘the lawgiver’; and saved His people from destruction as God intended to destroy them due to their disobedience] Wodwo (1967): - mingles prose and verse Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) and Gaudete (1977): - abandons realism and the traditional metrical pattern in favour of extravagant mythic structures ad Crow: - culminates his experiments conc. with the violent animal and human world - = a gnomic sequence of poems about the crow = a survivor and a blackly comic speculator about the inadequacy of the old definitions of the relationship of the Creator x his Creation - creates new myths about God, refuses to learn the word ‘love’, and re-enacts aspects of the stories of Adam, Oedipus, Ulysses, and Hamlet - redefines establ. ideas by intense, even brutal stabs at meaning - > “Crow Blacker Than Ever”, “Crow Goes Hunting” Moortown (1979), Remains of Elmet (1979), River (1983), and Flowers and Insects (1989): - returns from the wilder shores of myth - renders the natural world with a delicacy and tenderness as arresting as his earlier ferocity Tales from Ovid: Twenty-Four Passages from the Metamorphoses (1997): - = a brilliant recreation rather than transl. of the Rom. poet’s work - his fascination with violence and the fusion of the wild x the human takes on a new, sensuously charged power - incl. a particularly agonised transformation of Myrrha from woman to a weeping tree - [Myrrha in Ovid’s version = daughter of the king of Cyprus, committed incest with his father in disguise as a new concubine, punished not for her unnatural lust x but: for her practise of deception] Birthday Letters (1998): - = a sequence of poems all but 2 addressed to his late wife - celebrates their love and precisely recalls what was lost, what gained, and what survived the 35 y. of his dignified silence about his marriage - introd. a newly demanding introspective poetry of readjustment
P h i l i p L a r k i n ( 1 9 2 2 – 8 5 ) F i c t i o n : - < early period: W. B. Yeats - < mature period: T. Hardy > a pessimistic preocc. with loneliness, age, and death - x but: the many negatives in the poems imply positives, out of reach of the ironic and self-deprecating speaker, available perhaps to oth. more fortunate Jill (1946): - set in an Oxford forced into a dispirited egalitarianism by the war - introd. the common theme for the lit. of the 1950s – 60s, anticipated ‘The Angry Young Men’ A Girl in Winter (1947) P o e t r y : - = the dominant figure of ‘The Movement’ Form: - makes use of his novelist’s sense of place and of his skill in the handling of direct speech - frees himself from both the mystical and the logical, takes an empirical attitude to all that comes - ed. a controversial poetry anthology: opposes the imported modernist tradition (T. S. Eliot and E. Pound) x in favour of the native E tradition (G. Chaucer, W. Wordsworth, and T. Hardy) - produces his mature poetry to bypass the Modernist experiment and high-flown language x in favour of traditional metrical forms and a precise and plain diction Subject: - analyses the welfare-state world of post-imperial Br. - views human history and human experience as no occasion for rejoicing - alienates him from both an uncomfortable past and a cheerless Godless present The North Ship (1945): - = his 1st coll. of poems - < the strong enchantment of W. B. Yeats XX Poems (1951) The Less Deceived (1955): - < T. Hardy > his poetic restraint - H. seems to be echoed even in the title The Whitsun Weddings (1964): - a sharp ear for the inflexions of his own age - a deliberately provocative frankness - > “The Whitsun Weddings”, his contemp. En. of false cheer, cheap fashions, and joyless wedding parties High Windows (1974): - < an admiration for D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover - a private penchant for ‘four-letter words’ - > “High Windows”, the colloquial (= offensive) language stresses its contemporaneity - > “Annus Mirabilis”, an old man’s sing-song ballad: the publication of Lady Chatterley marks a wider shift in pop. culture and manners “Church Going”: - a ‘bored, uninformed’ post-Christian narrator with an ‘awkward reverence’ in a country church frets at the prospect of a future with relig. shrunk to a fear of death “An Arundel Tomb”: - = perhaps his most delicate and lyrical poem - fuses history, time, uneasiness about death, and human hope into new wholes - a medieval funerary monument to a husband and wife shows them lying side by side and hand in hand x time both marred the sculptural image and altered the way to read and interpret all the images “To Failure” “Water”
S e a m u s H e a n e y ( b . 1 9 3 9 ) L i f e : - b. in Ulster into a Rom. Cath. family [Ulster = the Protestant Northern Ir. x Eire = the Rom. Catholic Ir. Rep.] - received both Cath. and Protestant education - establ. as a political poet x but: felt constrained by this role and left Ulster for the Ir. Rep. - received the Nobel Prize (1995) W o r k : - H.: the ‘defensive love of their territory’ in the work of P. Larkin and T. Hughes once shared only by the ‘colonial’ poets consid. himself one of the ‘colonials’ - speaks and writes in E x does not share the perspectives of an Englishman the doubleness of his inheritance - his native rural Ulster figures delicately, richly, and painfully in his poetry - < P. V. Glob’s (a Danish archaeologist) The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved > conc. with deeper levels of mythic and historical congruence - G.: the preserved human bodies found in the bogs of Jutland = ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess - H.: this rite = an archetypal pattern of the Ir. political and relig. martyrdom to Mother Ir. (= symbolised by the mythic figure Kathleen Ni Houlihan) - the Ir. bog = ‘a memory bank’, also preserves everything thrown into it “Digging”: - = the 1st poem of his 1st coll. - defines his territory by digging into his memory to uncover his father, then his grandfather - aims to give a voice to the silent and oppressed Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969): - recalls a familiar childhood landscape peopled by farmers, labourers, and fishermen Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), and Field Work (1979): - incl. less of a private remembered landscape, more of the Northern Ir. of the ‘troubles’ - the history still continues to determine the present perceptions ad North: - = his most obviously political coll. - incl. the powerful bog poems: - > “Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication” (‘Mossbawn’ = the Heaney farm), memorial lyrics prefacing the coll. and extending the perspective from his father’s farm to the larger troubled Ulster = the history of that province related to the history of Ir. as a whole - > “Belderg”, the history emerges from the soil as haunted by the prehistoric, the Gaelic, the Norse, and the E strains - > “Freedman”, a direct treatment of the present x the rifts in Ir. life rooted in its history of occupation and imperial infl. the subjugation to the culture of the Rom. Church x the ancient Rom. slavery - > “North”, a sharp look back to Norse enterprise and its ruthlessness and a reflection on how a poet can use an ‘alien’ language on his native soil: ‘dictions’ and ‘past philology’ = an inheritance obliging an Ir. poet to come to terms with the Teutonic roots of the E imperial language Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and The Spirit Level (1996): - continues to explore the landscape, language, and memory of the troubled Ir. - x but: finds a new harmony and chastity of expression x the sharpness of his North x the sensuousness of his earlier poetry Opened Ground: Poems 1966 – 1996 also wrote: a noteworthy transl. of Beowulf
S t e v i e S m i t h ( 1 9 0 2 – 7 1 ) L i f e : - b. Florence Margaret Smith, nicknamed ‘Stevie’ for her resembling a jockey of that name - developed TBC peritonitis as a child, remained off and on in a sanatorium for several y. - > distressed at being sent away from her mother, preocc. with death - died of a brain tumour W o r k : - = ostensibly simple poetry: uses subjects and expressions oth. poets might reject as trifles - sentimentally attached to the Church of En. x but: denounces its doctrines and priests - immerses herself in mortality x but: whimsically greets Death as a ‘gentle friend’ and dwells almost gaily on the effects of physical and mental decay F i c t i o n : Novel on Yellow Paper (1936): - = one of her 3 publ. novels, all of them lightly fictionalised accounts of her own life - > got her into trouble as people recognised themselves P o e t r y : A Good Time Was Had By All (1937) and Tender Only to One (1938): - = early coll. of poetry, illustr. by her own naive drawings Not Waving But Drowning (1957), Selected Poems (1962), and The Frog Prince (1966): - = mature coll. of poetry - > won her reputation “Not Waving but Drowning”: - = her most pop. poem - < autobiog.: the fundamental isolation of the poet from her audience via the medium of a misapprehension relating to a swimmer dying at sea - the drowning man’s gesturing misunderstood: moans he was ‘much too far out all my life’ “Do Take Muriel Out”: - presses Death to take the lonely Muriel on a last outing “Come Death” I (1938): - uses an Elizabethan title x avoids the echoes of Elizabethan melancholy and the mortal ambiguities of J. Donne - longs for extinction with an admixture of archaism and easy modern frankness “Come Death” II (1971): - written in her final illness - a far more lyrical form and punchy simplicity than the former poem of that title