Ma English – I Year

M.A. ENGLISH – I YEAR MODERN LITERATURE – II SYLLABUS Poetry: Detailed John Milton : Paradise Lost Book II Alexander Pope : Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot Poetry : Non-Detailed John Milton : On His Blindness Thomas Grey : Elegy written in a Country Churchyard William Blake : The Lamb Prose : Detailed Joseph Addison : Selected essays from The Coverly Papers – Of the Club, Sir Roger at Home, Sir Roger at Church Samuel Johnson : Preface to Shakespeare Prose : Non-Detailed Jonathan Swift : Gulliver’s Travels – Voyage to Lilliput Oliver Goldsmith : The Vicar of Wakefield John Bunyan : The Pilgrim’s Progress – Part I Drama : Non-Detailed John Dryden : All for Love Richard Brinsley Sheridan : The Rivals Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Directorate of Distance & Continuing Education, Tirunelveli. 1 MODERN LITERATURE II Milton is regarded as one of the greatest poets in English literature. He is second only to Shakespeare. Apart from John Milton there were other several lyric-writers who have left us sweet songs. One of them was Richard Lovelace, who wrote To Althea, from Prison and To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars. One of the best living lyric poets of that time was Robert Herrick. He writes well about the English country and its flowers. His love songs are also sweet. At about this time Edmund Waller wrote some of the earliest heroic couplets, a form of verse which was widely used in the next hundred and fifty years. In this meter a couplet is a pair of lines, rhyming and of five iambic feet. Waller wrote His Majesty's Escape in the meter and he has been honoured for inventing the heroic couplet, but there are other poets for whom the claim is made. They include Shakespeare, who wrote in Othello, long before Waller's poem. After the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came to the throne, there was a complete repudiation of the Puritan ideals and way of living. In English literature the period from 1660 to 1700 is called the period of Restoration, because monarchy was restored in England, and Charles II, the son of Charles I who had been defeated and beheaded, came back to England from his exile in France and became the King. It is called the Age of Dryden, because Dryden was the dominating and most representative literary figure of the Age. As the Puritans who were previously controlling the country, and were supervising her literary and moral and social standards, were finally defeated, a reaction was launched against whatever they held sacred. All restraints and discipline were thrown to the winds, and a wave of licentiousness and frivolity swept the country. Charles II and his followers who had enjoyed a gay life in France during their exile, did their best to introduce that type of foppery and looseness in England also. They renounced old ideals and demanded that English poetry and drama should follow the style to which they had become accustomed in the gaiety of Paris. Instead of having Shakespeare and the Elizabethans as their models, the poets and dramatists of the Restoration period began to imitate French writers and especially their vices. The result was that the old Elizabethan spirit with its patriotism, its love of adventure and romance, its creative vigour, and the Puritan spirit with its moral discipline and love of liberty, became things of the past. For a time in poetry, drama and prose nothing was produced which could compare satisfactorily with the great achievements of the Elizabethans, of Milton, and even of minor writers of the Puritan age. But then the writers of the period began to evolve Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Directorate of Distance & Continuing Education, Tirunelveli. 2 something that was characteristic of the times and they made two important contributions to English literature in the form of realism and a tendency to preciseness. Next to Dryden, Bunyan was the greatest prose-writer of the period. Like Milton, he was imbued with the spirit of Puritanism, and in fact, if Milton is the greatest poet of Puritanism, Bunyan is its greatest story-teller. To him also goes the credit of being the precursor of the English novel. His greatest work is The Pilgrim’s Progress. Just asMilton wrote his Paradise Lost ―to justify the ways to God to men‖, Bunyan‘s aim in The Pilgrim’s Progress was” ―to lead men and women into God‘s way, the way of salvation, through a simple parable with homely characters and exciting events‖. Like Milton, Bunyan was endowed with a highly developed imaginative faculty and artistic instinct. Both were deeply religious, and both, though they distrusted fiction, were the masters of fiction. Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress have still survived among thousands of equally fervent religious works of the seventeenth century because both of them are masterpieces of literary art, which instruct as well please even those who have no faith in those instructions. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan has described the pilgrimage of the Christian to the Heavenly City, the trials, tribulations and temptations which he meets in the way in the form of events and characters, who abstract and help him, and his ultimately reaching the goal. It is written in the form of allegory. The style is terse, simple and vivid, and it appeals to the cultured as well as to the unlettered. As Dr. Johnson remarked: ―This is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing.‖ The Pilgrim’s Progress has all the basic requirements of the traditional type of English novel. It has a good story; the characters are interesting and possess individuality and freshness; the conversation is arresting; the descriptions are vivid; the narrative continuously moves towards a definite end, above all, it has a literary style through which the writer‘s personality clearly emanates. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a work of superb literary genius, and it is unsurpassed as an example of plain English. Bunyan‘s other works are: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), a kind of spiritual autobiography; The Holy War, which like The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory, but the characters are less alive, and there is less variety; The Life and Death of Mr. Badman(1680) written in the form of a realistic novel, gives a picture of low life, and it is second in value and literary significance to The Pilgrim’s Progress. Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Directorate of Distance & Continuing Education, Tirunelveli. 3 The prose of Bunyan shows clearly the influence of the English translation of the Bible (The Authorized Version). He was neither a scholar, nor did he belong to any literary school; all that he knew and learned was derived straight from the English Bible. He was an unlettered country tinker believing in righteousness and in disgust with the corruption and degradation that prevailed all around him. What he wrote came straight from his heart, and he wrote in the language which came natural to him. Thus his works born of moral earnestness and extreme sincerity have acquired true literary significance and wide and enduring popularity. It is quite true to call him the pioneer of the modern novel, because he had the qualities of the great story- teller, deep insight into character, humour, pathos, and the visualising imagination of a dramatic artist. The works of Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison and John Gay, as well as many of their contemporaries, exhibit qualities of order, clarity, and stylistic decorum that were formulated in the major critical documents of the age: Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711). These works, forming the basis for modern English literary criticism, insist that 'nature' is the true model and standard of writing. This 'nature' of the Augustans, however, was not the wild, spiritual nature the romantic poets would later idealize, but nature as derived from classical theory: a rational and comprehensible moral order in the universe, demonstrating God's providential design. The literary circle around Pope considered Homer preeminent among ancient poets in his descriptions of nature, and concluded in a circuitous feat of logic that the writer who 'imitates' Homer is also describing nature. From this follows the rules inductively based on the classics that Pope articulated in his Essay on Criticism: Those rules of old discovered, not devised, Are nature still, but nature methodized. Particularly influential in the literary scene of the early eighteenth century were the two periodical publications by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Tatler (1709-11), and The Spectator (1711-12). Both writers are ranked among the minor masters of English prose style and credited with raising the general cultural level of the English middle classes. A typical representative of the post-Restoration mood, Steele was a zealous crusader for morality, and his stated purpose in The Tatler was "to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality." With The Spectator,Addison added a further purpose: to introduce the middle-class public to recent developments in philosophy and literature and thus to educate their tastes. The Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Directorate of Distance & Continuing Education, Tirunelveli. 4 essays are discussions of current events, literature, and gossip often written in a highly ironic and refined style. Addison and Steele helped to popularize the philosophy of John Locke and promote the literary reputation of John Milton, among others. Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Directorate of Distance & Continuing Education, Tirunelveli. 5 Poetry: Detailed Paradise Lost Book II by John Milton John Milton Biography John Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608 to John and Sara Milton.

Load more