Professional Documents
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English Literature
English Literature
English Literature
FROM
THE LATE RENAISSANCE
TO
THE RISE OF ROMANTICISM
Obiective:
prelegere teoretica
analiza de text
discutie
eseu.
Tematica generala:
The Restoration
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Introduction
Cavalier Poetry
Metaphysical Poetry
John Milton
Introduction
Though literary history does not lend itself to tidy divisions and the late
Renaissance in England should be seen as a whole movement from Sidney and
Spenser to Marvell and Milton (Vickers 1990, 160), the literary modes, genres or
individual texts included in this survey tend to belong to the historical period
spanning the accession to the throne of James I (1606) and the restoration of
Charles II (1660), at the centre of which there lies the Puritan Revolution which
wrought immense social changes and impinged upon the quality of English
literature.
Throughout the Jacobite and Caroline ages the court remains an undisputed
centre of national authority, influence, power, reward and intellectual
inspiration. As such, the literature produced in this context will tend to reflect
courtly values, favouring an intricate, allusive and decorative writing, where the
emphasis is placed on love (not necessarily marriage), warfare (largely free of
political context) or devotional piety (quite apart from practical morality.) In the
period of the Civil.Wars and Commonwealth, the urgency of crisis dominates
English society, while the court looses its privileged position. Social divisions
(e.g. Puritan / Anglican, or Parliamentarian / Royalist) reflect themselves
within the literary field. If decorative writing survives among cultured
parliamentarians and royalists, new developments are registered with the
growth of a more civic and utilitarian writing favouring plain-style verse or
plain-style prose, particularly within politico-religious controversy.
If the lyric mode is representative for the courtly values that poetry enshrines
and finds expression in the two alternate poetic modes - Cavalier and
Metaphysical - which dominate the first half of the century, John Miltons verse
is not only too varied in tone and scope to be adequately contained by either of
them, but also exemplifies the Puritan ethos and its hostility towards the courtly
culture, remaining thus apart.
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1.2.
The Cavalier are a group of poets associated with the Court as cavaliers, not
only in the sense of being Royalists in opposition to the Puritan Roundheads,
but also as Renaissance Courtiers, having accepted the ideals of the
Renaissance gentleman popularised by Castigliones The Courtier: at once a
lover, soldier, wit, man of affairs, musician and poet. Moreover, poets like
Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick were
fervent admirers of Ben Jonsons lyric verse (hence the other label - The
Tribe/Sons of Ben attached to the group), whose eloquence and elegance they
tried to imitate in their own artful poems.
The characteristic theme of their verse is love. Yet its treatment differs from the
Elizabethan praise of an abstracted and idealised beauty, being more carefree,
flippant, and often sexual. The dichotomy between Art / Nature is also present
in much Cavalier poetry, which often contains pastoral scenery and images,
drawn from a combination of a nostalgic English past and classical mythology.
Most poems are also hedonist, embodying the very essence of the Latin carpe
diem (seize the day) philosophy, while the dark side of the poems is provided
by the sense of impending decay or death implied in the theme of transience.
1.2.1. Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Though primarily remembered as a dramatist, the author of the famous
comedies of humours and Volpone, Jonson was also a scholar, critic and poet,
and it is with the songs and poems in the masques together with the collected
verse of Epigrams and The Forest (both published in 1616) and Underwoods
(1640) that his influence among the Cavalier poets is to be explained.
A classicist by formation, Jonson took the lead from Latin poets like Catullus
and Horace, showing a similar concern for humane, largely secular topics and
the craftsmanship of the verse. The light playfulness of Song: To Celia, a poem
about the act of flirtation, realised, placed and valued, or the brisk and alert
movement of Vivamus, with its outspoken carpe diem philosophy are also proof
of Jonsons command of metrics, verse and stanza forms.
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Song: To Celia
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And Ill not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Joves nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee lat-e a rosy werath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breath,
And sentst it back to me;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
Vivamus
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of Love;
Time will not be ours, for ever,
He at length, our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain:
Suns that set may rise again:
But if once we lose this light,
Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumour are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
Or his easier eyes beguile,
So removd by our wile?
Tis no sin, Loves fruit to steal,
But the sweet theft to reveal:
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
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The second part of the Ode is designed as the Hymn itself and consists
in 27 eight-line stanzas in a more lyric metre. Having been failed by the
Muse, the poet takes it upon himself to glorify Christ as a transcendent
paragon of heroic action, decribing his virtuous deed and victory, while
still in cradle over the pagan gods of the ancient world:
Peor and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twice-batterd God of Palestine,
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The ending, after offering a vision of Lycidas rising to heaven, like the
stars, has Milton himself (as the uncouth swain) utter the final lines
which bring the remarkable optimism of a renewal:
Weep no more, woeful shephers, weep no more,
For Lycidas, you sorrow, is not dead
c) During the period of the Civil wars and the Commonwealth all of
Miltons energies went into the support of radical republicanism, his work
becoming civic and utilitarian. While prose propaganda on topical issues
like the defence of the new state (Defence of the British People; Second
Defence, Eikonoklastes), divorce, education or the freedom of the press
(Aeropagitica) dominates his literary output, the only poems that he wrote
are 24 sonnets, public and political rather than personal, with the
exception of On His Blindness (1652), the poem which records Miltons
reaction at his loss of sight, as he reconciles his own desire to surrender
hope with his faith in Gods will:
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After Eve has yielded to Satans temptation and bitten of the forbidden
fruit, Adams choice to share in the transgression of divine law is
similarly an act of free will: the effect of his choice is one of loss, but a
loss that will later turn to gain the gain of a future for humanity on
earth and, like the ending of Lycidas the final image of Paradise Lost is
profoundly forward-looking:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
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Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
1. The Lyric Mode during the 17th century: Cavalier poetry
Definition of the lyric
Cultural contextualization: the late Renaissance
Definition of Cavalier poetry
Characteristics of Cavalier poetry
Representative poets
Choose a text for illustration
2. The Lyric Mode during the 17th century: Metaphysical poetry
Definition of the lyric
Cultural contextualization: the late Renaissance
Definition of Metaphysical poetry
Characteristics of Metaphysical poetry
Representative poets
Choose a text for illustration
3. John Milton and the Lyric
Overview of Miltons literary career
Miltons lyrical texts:
o Odes
o Pastoral poems
o Sonnets
Choose a text for illustration
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biblical story of Absaloms revolt against his father, David, the king of
Israel. Other contemporary figures are similarly matched to their
biblical counterparts, most notable being the association of the Whig
earl of Shaftesbury, the principal supporter of Monmouths claim, to
Achitophel, Absaloms chief adviser in the Bible. One of the most
impressive features of the poem resides with Drydens skill in
rendering the fragility of the Restoration settlement, while reasserting
his faith in the kings ability to control the situation. Among other
things, this involves a tactical success in the presentation of the main
characters. David is not offered as a simple heroic character at the start.
Dryden is careful to mention the kings faults, but finally transforms
them into qualities, related to principles of warmth and creativity:
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man on man multiplied his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confined;
When nature prompted, and no law denied
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then Israels monarch, after heavns own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
On wives and slaves, and, wide as his command,
Scattered his makers image through the land.
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grand language, lofty style, solemn tone of epic poetry in order to link
Shadwell to a minor poet, Richard Fleckoe, who had been ridiculed by
Andrew Marvell in a previous poem. The ageing Flecknoe is made by
Dryden an anti-monarch, ruling over realms of Nonsense absolute,
who hands on his power (in an absurdly pompous ceremony of
procession and coronation) to his son (Mac) Shadwell:
And pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit,
Cried: Tis resolved; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Sh ---- alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years:
Sh ---- alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh ---- never deviates into sense.
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To the Pious Memory. . .Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686) is an elegy over the
death of the title figure, whose talent for poetry and painting offers
Dryden an opportunity to consider the arts themselves, their present
style, their central role in civilisation.
d) Drydens abiding interests in principle of authority and methods of
government also went into two poetic statements of his religious creed.
While Religio Laici (1684)
defends the middle-way of the Anglican Church, The Hind and the
Panther (1687), written after his conversion to Catholicism, is a beast
fable in which a milk-white Hind (standing for the Roman Church)
debates theology with the intelligent, carnivorous and spotted Panther
(representing Anglicanism).
e) Drydens literary criticism is represented by the various essays,
prefaces, dramatic prologues and epilogues in which he expressed his
opinions on literature and art. Some of the best known ones are:
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Medley: I find, Sir Fopling, in your solitude you remember the saying
of the wise man, and study yourself.
Sir Fopling: Tis the best diversion in our retirements.
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same time, the the play remains memorable for the classic jousts of wit
into which the two lovers - in the tradition of the Shakespearean comic
lovers like Beatrice and Benedick engage, with Millamant
demonstrating great poise and a sense of appropriate modern
behaviour:
Millamant: Ill never marry, unless I am first made sure of my will and
pleasure.
Mirabell: Would you haveem both before marriage? Or will you be
contented with the first now, and stay for the other till after
grace?
Millamant: Ah, dont be impertinent My dear liberty, shall I leave
thee? My faithful solitude, my darling contemplation, must I
bid you then adieu? Ah-y adieu my morning thoughts,
agreeable wakings, indolent slumbers, all ye douceurs, ye
sommeits du matin, adieu I cant do it, tis more than
impossible. Positively, Mirabell, Ill lie a-bed in a morning as
long as I please.
Mirabell: then Ill get up in a morning as early as I please.
Millamant: Ah! Idle creature, get up when you will And dye hear, I
wont be called names after Im married; positively, I wont be
calld names.
Mirabell: Names!
Millamant: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart,
and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their
wives are so fulsomely familiar, - I shall never bear that. Good
Mirabell dont let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks,
like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis: not go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and
whispers; and then never be seen there together again; as if we
were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one
another ever after. Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together, but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as wellbred as if we were not married at all.
Mirabell: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.
Millamant: Trifles, - as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from
whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to
have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I dont
like, because they are your acquaintance; or to be intimate with
fools, because they may be your relations. Come to dinner
when I please, dine in my dressing-room when Im out of
humour, without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate;
to be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never
presume to approach without first asking leave. And lastly
wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you
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provided her with experiences that allowed for a more unique and
daring sense of possibilities for women characters.
Leaving home at 16, the future playwright lived part of her youth as a
boy. In drag as Cousin Jack she frequented the university, attending
classes in fencing, grammar, logic, rhetoric and the like. Living in a
cross-gender role must have provided her not only with an education,
but also with a set of adventures that were to prove useful in her
writing career. Indeed, Centlivre devised scenes for women in drag,
and though this was no novelty on the English stage, Shakespeare
having excelled at it, they are not derivative of the great master (as
some critics hurried to label them.) These are not happy, witty scenes
set in forest such as Arden, but rather they are dark, desperate ones in
which women cross dress in order to gain the power of freedom to
express their wills. For example, in The Perjurd Husband (1700),
Centlivres first play, Placentia dresses as a men because she wants to
gain access to her husbands new mistress. Only when she determines
that the woman is guilty of consciously stealing her husband, the
heroine reveals herself as a woman, but also stabs her rival to death. As
different from Shakespeare, the use of drag in Centlivres play does not
resolve the social issues (such as it happens for Portia in The Merchant
of Venice.), but demonstrates the anger and desperation of the female
characters. Though life in drag was not uncommon for women in the
17th century London (as documented some of the ages texts), the
necessity of male disguise must have caused in many privation and
anxiety, as they experienced the fear of discovery and the social distaste
for their roles. Yet, in order to gain access to education or daring
physical actions, women were certainly required to do mens apparel.
The same role reversal in Centlivres real life must have also provided
her with the viewpoint of an independent woman, living outside the
social order. This may be the explanation for the series of independent
female characters that appear in her plays, characters who invent
unusual social roles for themselves. Sometimes, as it happens in The
Beaus Duel, the heroine adopts the role of the sexual pursuer, a social
role identified with men. But perhaps her most memorable character is
Viola, the heroine of The Basset Table (1705). Valeria, a philosophical
girl, is both the brunt of the plays humour, but also the victorious
exception to the social code. She makes her first entrance in pursuit of a
fly, worrying that she will lose the finest insect for dissection, a huge fresh
fly, which dr. Lovely sent me just now, and opening the box to try the
experiment, away it flew. Though the other characters on stage berate
her for the unwomanly pursuit of such studies, Valeria manages to
defend herself well. Finally, one lady advises her to found a college for
the study of philosophy, where none but women should be admitted; and to
immortalize your name, they should be called Valerians. Once more, the
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The masterpiece of the earlier part of Popes career is, nevertheless, The
Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). It is a mock-heroic poem on an actual
episode which involved two prominent families of the day, and its aim
to laugh the two out of the quarrel that resulted after Lord Petre had cut
off a lock from Miss Arabella Fermours hair. Pope elaborated the trivial
event into the semblance of an epic in miniature, which abounds in
parodies and echoes of The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, forcing
thus the reader to constantly compare great things with small. Even if
the familiar devices of the epic are observed, the incidents or characters
are beautifully proportioned to the scale of the mock epic: the war
becomes in the poem the drawing room one between the sexes, the
heroes and heroines are the beaux and the belle of the day, supernatural
characters are present in the Sylphs (the souls of the dead coquettes),
the epic journey to the underworld becomes a journey undertaken to
the Cave of Spleen. As such, the poem traces the course of the fateful
day when Belinda, the society beauty, wakes up, glorifies her
appearance at a ritualistic dressing-table, engages into a game of cards,
sips coffee and gossips and finally has her hair ravaged. As in the
pastoral tradition, the action is set in the wider circle of time itself: at
the close of the poem, the violated lock is transported to heaven to
become a new star, an attractive trap for all mankind.
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Pope returned once more to the question of literary ambition with The
Temple of Fame (1715), a poem modelled distantly on Chaucers The
House of Fame. Written in the form of a dream vision, it presents the
fantastic visions induced by sleep in the mind of the poet, at the centre
of which there stands the presiding deity of the poem, the Goddess of
fame:
When on the Goddess first I cast my Sight,
Scarce seem'd her Stature of a Cubit's height,
But swell'd to larger Size, the more I gaz'd,
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In the temple, the poet faces the statues of the various heroes that
populate its interior. The first to be described is that of Homer:
High on the first, the mighty Homer shone
Eternal Adamant compos'd his Throne;
Father of Verse! in holy Fillets drest,
His silver Beard wav'd gently o'er his Breast;
Tho' blind, a boldness in his Looks appears,
In Years he seem'd, but not impair'd by Years.
The Wars of Troy were round the Pillar seen:
Here fierce Tydides wounds the Cyprian Queen;
Here Hector glorious from Patroclus' Fall,
Here dragg'd in Triumph round the Trojan Wall
Motion and Life did ev'ry Part inspire,
Bold was the Work, prov'd the Master's Fire;
A strong Expression most he seem'd t'affect,
And here and there disclos'd a brave Neglect. (182-95)
There follow those of Virgil, Pindar, Horace and Aristotle, each of them
representing a classical ideal (of poetry, wisdom, or patriotism), which
they embody it and shadow forth.
Nevertheless, these are the ideals of fame, and, as such, they are further
opposed to its reality - presented in the dramatic procession of
suppliants who crowd around the Shrine of Fame, and in the Mansion
of Rumour, placed next to the Temple, where lies and truth contend
until "At last agreed, together out they fly, / Inseparable now, the Truth
and Lye" (494). But the allegory somehow reconciles these extremes,
and the poet decides neither to seek nor to reject the reward of Fame,
but to follow virtue rather than the fickle Goddess.
A different sideline to Popes literary activity is represented by his
translation of Homers famous epics, the Iliad (1715, 1720), and the
Odyssey (1725-6). A less distinguished project was, nevertheless, his
editing of Shakespeares Works (1725), which prompted a pamphlet by
a contemporary scholar and playwright, Lewis Theobald, in which the
latter was pointing out Popes scholarly deficiencies. In response, Pope
turned Theobald into the hero of his Dunciad, a satire and mock-epic
reply to the poets critics. In the final version of the work, another
contemporary, Colley Cibber, a playwright who, in the meantime, had
earned Popes disapproval, was moved into that position.
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But Bayes decision is made up for him, because, like the aged Flecknoe, in
Drydens Mackflecknoe, the Goddess Dullness, contemplating her realm of
confusion and bad poetry, anoints the Hero king of the Dunces, his domain
being the empire of Emptiness and dullness. The celebrations which follow
his enthronement are described as a burlesque of the funeral games for
Anchises in the Aeneid in the second book, while the third book presents
Bayes, asleep in the goddesss lap, dreaming of the past and future triumphs
of the empire of Dullness, extended to all arts and sciences, the theatre and
the court. The last book sees the dream realized, describing how the
Goddess comes to substitute the kingdom of Dull upon the Earth and
closing on a bleak vision of cultural chaos:
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th'ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
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Steele, in his turn, has the same educational purpose that he believes
can be achieved by insinuating moral or other teachings under the
guise of entertainment:
Though the other papers which are published for the use of the
good people of England have certainly very wholesome effects, and
are laudable in their particular kinds, they do not seem to come up
to the great design of such narrations, which, I humbly presume,
should be principally intended for the use of political persons, who
are so public spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into
transactions of State. Now these gentlemen, for the most part, being
men of strong zeal and weak intellects, it is both a charitable and
necessary work to offer something, whereby such worthy and wellaffected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after
their reading, what to think; which shall be the end and purpose of
this paper: . . . I have also resolved to have something which may be
of entertainment to the fair sex, in honour of whom I have taken the
title of this paper.
As can be seen, they both clearly point out the new social ideal of
balance between the morality and respectability of the old, rather
Puritan middle-class and the wit, grace and enlightenment of the
aristocracy, stressing moderation, reasonableness, self-control, urbanity
and good taste.
The Tatler (1709-11) was first launched by Steele (hiding behind a
pseudonym, Isaac Bickerstaff) with the contribution of Addison and its
title was meant as a bid for female readers. It provided the readers with
a mixture of news with personal reflections that made it highly
popular. Steeles essays applied his ideal to any topic that suggested
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For a long time he was considered merely a mad misanthrope, but that
critical opinion convenient for the tastes of his own day could now
be seen to do less then justice to a writer who used satire with great
originality and wit to highlight what he saw as the faults and
hypocrisies of his age. His literary personality was aggressive in
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In a period when horses were one of the main servants of man, Swifts
examination of roles seems intended to provoke and offend, but in fact
it was dismissed as fantastic comedy and its satiric power was blunted.
As the above given quotation shows, his prose style is clear, simple,
characterized by concrete diction, uncomplicated syntax, economy and
conciseness of language, that shuns amazement and grows more
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teasing and controlled the more fierce the indignation that is called
upon to express.
Gulliver is banished and returns to England, where the impression
made on him remains so strong that he prefers the company of horses
to that of his own family. That determined many critics to see his work,
for a long time, as a deeply pessimistic judgment on human nature.
Nevertheless, it will continue to exert its influence on twentiethcentury writers like James Joyce in The Holy Offer (written in Swiftian
verse), Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence, and George Orwell in his
Animal Farm.
Swifts literary career is remarkable for the way in which his artistic
energy both sewed and transcended ideological conservatorism,
mindful, in all he wrote, of the public and political responsibilities of a
writer. Through satire, parody and other kinds of literary
impersonation, Swift diverts attention away from his own limited yet
consistent principles towards the distortion of reason and sanity which
he detects in his enemies. His ambiguous art is reflected in the
anonymous and pseudonymous forms he habitually employed (he
very rarely spoke in his own voice or signed his name), largely a
stylistic preference (something of a legal safeguard). Consequently, his
most memorable works are based solidly on the intrinsic exploitation
of a seemingly innocent persona whose character eventually becomes
part of the satirical strategy of rebuking the readers complacency.
Swifts elusive literary identity illustrates an ambivalent sense of
national loyalty. Although he repeatedly referred to himself as
Englishman born in Ireland, he came to feel increasingly alienated
and vengeful towards England.
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Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
1. Neoclassical Satire
Definition of satire
Cultural contextualisation: neoclassicism
Types of neoclassical satire
Representative authors:
o Verse satires: John Dryden and Alexander Pope
o Prose satires: Jonathan Swift
Choose a text for illustration
2. The Essay during the 17th- and 18th- centuries
Neoclassicism: characteristics and favourite literary
genres
Forms of essay-writing:
The prose essay: John Dryden
The verse essay: Alexander Pope
The periodical essay: Addison and Steele
Choose a text for illustration.
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Thus, the first person narration unravels Molls dissolute life as thief,
prostitute and incestuous wife, while also containing much social
comment on the gaols, the conditions of the poor, and the suffering of
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so much as half-penny of it left for a half-penny roll, and I was a hungry, and
then I cried again: then I came away in despair, crying and roaring like a little
boy that had been whipped, then I went back again to the tree, and up the
tree again, and thus I did several times.
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ways and finally rapes the young woman while she is under the
influence of drugs. Filled with remorse, he then wants to marry her, but
Clarissa refuses and, very slowly, dies a martyr to the combined cruelty
of her lover and her family. The novel handles the interplay of its
characters psychology with more subtlety and complexity than the
previous Pamela, mainly due to a development of Richardsons
epistolary technique which employs two main sets of correspondents:
Clarissa and her friend, Anna Howe, and Lovelace and his friend,
Belford. This arrangement allows Richardson to take the readers into
the inner thoughts of the main characters. It also allows him to present
the action of the novel through the eyes of each of them, and while one
of them is explaining what is happening, to keep the reader in suspense
about what the other is thinking and feeling.
The excerpt, taken from one of Clarissas letters in which she describes
how her sister Bella broke the news that the family decided that the
heroine must marry Mr. Solmes, proves that the novel is essentially
dramatic in form:
Obedience without reserve is required of you, Clary. My papa is
justly incensed that you should presume to dispute his will, and to
make conditions with him. He knows what is best for you; and as your
own matters are gone a great way between his hated Lovelace and
you, they will believe nothing you say; except you will give the one
only instance, that will put them out of doubt of the sincerity of your
promises.
What, child, are you surprised? Cannot you speak? Then, it seems,
you had expected a different issue, had you? Strange that you could!
With all your acknowledgements and confessions, so creditable to
your noted prudence!
I was indeed speechless for some time: my eyes were even fixed, and
ceased to flow. But, upon the hard-hearted Bellas proceeding with her
airs of insult, indeed I was mistaken, said I; indeed I was! For in you,
Bella, I expected, I hoped for, a sister What! Interrupted she, with all your mannerly flings, and your
despising airs, did you expect that I was capable of telling stories for
you? Did you think that when I was asked my own opinion of the
sincerity of your declarations, I could not tell them how far matters had
gone between you and your fellow [Lovelace]? When the intention is to
bend that stubborn will of yours to your duty, do you think I would
deceive them? Do you think I would encourage them to call you down,
to contradict all that I should have invented in your favour?
Well, well, Bella; I am the less obliged to you; thats all. I was willing
to think that I had still a brother and a sister. But I find I am mistaken.
Pretty Mopsa-eyed soul, was her expression! And was it willing to
think it had still a brother and sister? And why dont you go on, Clary?
(mocking my half-weeping accent) I thought too I had a father and
mother, two uncles and an aunt: but I am mis-taken thats all - come, Clary,
say this, and it will be in part true, because you have thrown off their
authority, and because you respect one vile wretch more than them all.
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How have I deserved this at your hands, sister? But I will only say, I
pity you.
And with that disdainful air, too, Clary! None of that bridled neck!
None of your scornful pity, girl! I beseech you!
This sort of behaviour is natural to you, surely, Bella! What new
talents does it discover in you! But proceed - if it be a pleasure to you,
proceed, Bella. And since I must not pity you, I will pity myself: for
nobody else will.
Because you dont, said she Hush, Bella, interrupting her, because I dont deserve it - I know you
were going to say so. I will say as you say in everything; and thats the
way to please you.
Then say, Lovelace is a villain.
So I will, when I think him so.
Then you dont think him so?
Indeed, I dont. You did not always, Bella.
And what, Clary, mean you by that? (bristling up to me) Tell me
what you mean by that reflection?
Tell me why you call it a reflection? What did I say?
Thou art a provoking creature - but what say you to two or three
duels of that wetchs?
I cant tell what to say, unless I knew the occasions.
Do you justify duelling at all?
I do not: neither can I help this duelling.
Will you go down and humble that stubborn spirit of yours to your
mamma?
I said nothing.
Shall I conduct your ladyship sown? (offering to take my declined
hand)
What! Not vouchsafe to answer me?
I turned from her in silence.
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In order to achieve this end, the novelist becomes an active shaper and
manipulator of the narrative, an omniscient and intrusive narrator who
not only controls the lives and destinies of his characters, but can
intervene, explain, move away from the detail of the story to the general
truths which it was intended to illustrate. As such, Fielding places his
novel before the reader, as if inviting him to engage in a deeply serious
game, where the distance between its three participants (the narrator,
the narrative, and the reader) is often altered: now the actions of the
characters completely occupy the readers attention, now the narrator
acts as commentator, quietly describing what is going on, now narrator
and reader confront one another talking about the game and its
implications, like in the following fragment where the reader is
challenged to visualise Lady Boobys surprise at Josephs recoil from
her advances by following the narrators instructions:
You have heard, reader, poets talk of the statue of Surprise; you
have heard likewise, or else you have heard very little, how
Surprise made one of the sons of Croesus speak, though he was
dumb. You have seen the faces, in the eighteen-penny gallery,
when, through the trap-door, to soft or no music, Mr
Bridgewater, Mr William Mills, or some other of ghostly
appearance, hath ascended, with a face all pale with powder,
and a shirt all bloody with ribbons - but from none of these, nor
from Phidias or Praxiteles, if they should return to life - no, not
from the inimitable pencil of my friend Hogarth, could you
receive such an idea of surprise as would have entered in at
your eyes had they beheld the Lady Booby when those last
words issued out from the lips of Joseph. Your virtue! said the
lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; I shall never
survive it!
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Smolletts last novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) differs from the rambling
narratives of his other fictions by adopting the old-fashioned form of
the epistolary novel. Through the interplay of several letter-writers
outlook, the readers find out the story of the Brambles, a family who
tries to achieve health and social harmony as they travel round Britain.
It also bears witness to the cult of sensibility, which had already entered
fiction several decades earlier, and had brought about an interest in the
analysis, indulgence and display of the emotional life, prompting a real
flowering and display of humanitarian ideals and philanthropic action.
As such, the health in question is not just the health of the principal
character, Matthew Bramble, a benevolent elderly hypochondriac, but
of the nation and of all society, from the semi-literate servant Win to the
frustrated spinster aunt Tabitha, from the young Oxford student Jery to
the young and impressionable Lydia. And, significantly, the farthest
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point of the journey - where the family finally reach a kind of utopia - is
a Scottish paradise at Loch Lomond, not far from Smolletts own
birthplace, at Dumbarton.
5.6. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and the anti-novel
The tradition of the English novel, after less than a century of existence,
started to lend itself to subversive experimentation once Laurence
Sternes Tristram Shandy made its entrance onto the literary scene,
upsetting previous notions of time, place and action and extending thus
the boundaries of what fiction meant, beyond a mere observation of
human actions with moral overtones.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a highly original 8-volume
novel published between 1760 and 1767, is the first to parody the
existing conventions of the form. If plot was supposed to follow the
natural order of things, having thus a beginning, a middle and an end,
Sterne was addressing his readers even at the outset of his work
pointing up the absurdities, contradictions and impossibilities of
relating time-space-reality relationship in a linear form:
Nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or
tedious in its telling. Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you
should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting
out bear with me, - and let me go on, and tell my own story my own
way: - Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, -r
should sometimes put on a fools cap with a bell to it, for a moment or
two as we pass along, - dont fly off, - but rather courteously give me
credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside; and as
we jog on, either laugh with me, or laugh at me, or in short, do
anything, only keep your temper.
As such, the novel, which is narrated in the first person, begins on the
night of Tristrams conception, but does not allow its character to be
born until the fourth volume, to finally end some four years before his
birth, becoming thus a parody of the autobiographical novel, with the
story of Tristrams life never getting told. The author deliberately
hinders all movement, for his narrators thoughts ramble forward,
backward, sideways, describing a wide range of characters and their
peculiarities, covering every subject under the sun, but never able to
carry a story to its end.
Influenced by John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) - which viewed mental life as a stream of ideas, linked together
by chance and flowing on beyond the control of the human being which
were its hosts - the novel attempts to imitate what passes in a mans
own mind, with the narrator being led from one topic to another in an
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which the two face at Udolpho and which eventually lead to the aunts
death are proven to have been engineered by Montoni himself, who
has, in the meantime, turned his attentions to Emily. Nevertheless, in
the nick of time the heroine manages to escape and the resolution seals
the triumph of good, with Emilys return to her native Gascony where
she is happily reunited with the Chevalier de Valancour, her first and
faithful lover.
Frankenstein, the novel published by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in 1818,
is not properly Gothic if compared to The Castle of Otranto and The
Mysteries of Udolpho, where the virginal female victim is subjected to
increasingly exaggerated horrors. Here the horror element of the story
is related to the unsuccessful experiment of the hero, the young doctor
Victor Frankenstein, who, instead of creating a perfect human being,
gives birth to a monster, an eight-foot hideous creature who will
become responsible for the death of his family, fiancee, as well as his
own eventual destruction. During the 20th century, mostly due to the
Hollywood film industry, the subject of Mary Shelleys novel was
raised to the level of universal myth, while its title is liable of giving a
new word to the language. Nevertheless, many modern readings have
reacted against the cinematic image of the monster, preferring to read
the tale as a psychological exploration of creation, childbirth and
responsibility, with a corresponding emphasis on the creature as an
outcast - an innocent who has had human life thrust upon him and who
is destined to roam the icy waters (a vision of 20 th-century wastelands)
in solitude.
To support this view, one may often cite the creatures own point of
view, which is given full voice in the epistolary form of the novel,
balancing with pathos the horror which other narrative voices describe,
such as is the case in the following fragment in which the monster
utters his first words to another human being:
My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial which
would decide my hopes or realise my fears. The servants were gone to
a neighbouring fair. All was silent in and around the cottage; it was an
excellent opportunity; yet, when I proceeded to execute my plan, my
limbs failed me, and I sunk to the ground. Again I rose; and, exerting
all the firmness of which I was master, removed the planks which I
had placed before my hovel to conceal my retreat. The fresh air revived
me, and, with renewed determination I approached the door of their
cottage.
I knocked. Who is there? said the old man - Come in.
I entered; Pardon this intrusion, said I, I am a traveller in want of a
little rest; you would greatly oblige, if you would allow me to remain a
few minutes before the fire.
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Then we were all bustle in the house, which made me keep out of the way,
for I walk slow and hate a bustle, but the house was all hurry-skurry,
preparing for my new master. - Sir Murtagh, I forgot to notice, had no
children, so the Rackrent estate went to his younger brother - a young
dashing officer - who came amongst us before I knew for the life of me
whereabouts I was, in a gig or some of them things, with another spark
along with him, and led horses, and servants, and dogs, and scarce a place
to put any Christian of them into; for my late lady had sent all the featherbeds off before her, and blankets, and household linen, down to the very
knife cloths, on the cars to Dublin, which were all her own, lawfully plaid
for out of her own money. -So the house was quite bare, and my young
master, the moment ever he set foot in it out of his gig, thought all those
things must come of themselves, I believe, for he never looked after any
thing at all, but harum-scarum called for every thing as if we were
conjurers, or he in a public-house. For my part, I could not bestir myself
any how; I had been so used to my late master and mistress, all was upside
down with me, and the new servants in the servants hall were quite out of
my way; I had nobody to talk to, and if it had not been for my pipe and
tobacco should, I verily believe, have broke my heart for poor Sir Murtagh.
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The first sentence, without explicitely interpellating the reader with the
address dear reader, like in Fielding, manages, nevertheless, to
effectively give him the premise on which the author will work. The
reader is invited to share it before proceeding with the reading of what
subsequently happens to the members of the Bennett family once their
interest in the new tenants at Netherfield is aroused, and thus colludes
with the author/narrator in the telling of the tale.
At other times, Austen uses free indirect speech or adjectives that
represent her characters own opinions and attitudes rather than those
of the author/narrator. In this case the reader is silently manipulated
into a situation of plural points of view, represented by the interplay of
that of the author/narrator and character, or an explicit and implicit
one.
The following excerpt represents the beginning of Emma, the novel
published in 1816 which tells the story of a rich and clever girl, whose
confidence in her own understanding of people and her well-meaning
desire to manipulate the lives of her social inferiors as well as some of
her equals will involve her in a number of delusions:
.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable
home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best
blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the
world with very little to distress or vex her.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate,
indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sisters marriage,
been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had
died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance
of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent
woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in
affection.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouses family,
less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but
particularly fond of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of
sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office
of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to
impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long
passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend
mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly
esteeming Miss Taylors judgement, but directed chiefly by her own.
The real evils indeed of Emmas situation were the power of
having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little
too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened ally to
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After subtly setting the heroine for a fall in the first sentence by means
of the series of three epithets which encapsulate the deceptiveness of
Emmas seeming contentment, the narrator rapidly summarises the
circumstances likely to breed her arrogance: deprived of her mothers
guidance at an early age, she had assumed the role of mistress of the
house due to an indulgent father and a governess who had supplied her
with a mothers affection and not discipline. In the third paragraph, the
exact nature of Emmas relationship with Miss Taylor, the governess, is
rendered more emphatic by means of a shift of point of view between
the author/narrator and the heroine herself, though the latter is not
allowed to appear entirely in the light of her own point of view because
the reports of her thinking are still in the third person.
This narrative strategy, in which the narrative is carried by author and
character together, is the one which Jane Austen refined, enabling her to
reveal a characters feelings more directly, while still providing readers
with her own (often ironic) view of character.
Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
1. The 18th - century novel
Definition of the novel
Conditions for the rise of the novel in the 18th
century
Characteristics of the 18th-century novel
Representative authors and narrative techniques
Choose a text for illustration
2. Women writers of the 17th-, 18th and early 19th
centuries
Playwrights: Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre and
the comedy-of-manners
Novelists: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and the
Gothic novel, Maria Edgeworth and the regional
novel, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen and the novel of
manners.
Choose a text for illustration and analysis
3. Pre-romantic attitudes in prose
Cultural context: the Age of Sensibility
The sentimental novel;
The Gothic novel.
Choose a text for illustration
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6.2.3. George Crabbe (1754 - 1832) in The Village (1783) reacted against
the view of rurality as that of a lost golden age, attempting to show that
country life was not idyllic, not a romantic dream, but a continual trial.
By vividly painting the squalor and poverty of the lives of humble
farmers, fishermen, agricultural laborious, Crabbe was attacking both
the Arcadian ideal as well as the complacency with which towndwellers viewed their lot:
Ye gentle souls, who dream of rural ease,
Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please;
Go! If the peaceful cot your praises share,
Go, look within, and ask if peace be there:
If peace be his - that drooping weary sire,
Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire,
Or hers, that matron pale, whose trmbling hand
Turns on the wretched hearth thexpiring brand.
Nor yet can time itself obtain for these
Lifes latest comforts, due respect and ease;
For yonder see that hoary swain, whose age
Can with no cares except its own engage;
Who, propped on that rude staff, looks up to see
The bare arms broken from the withering tree,
On which, a boy, he climbed the loftiest bough,
Then his first joy, but his sad emblem now.
6.3.1. James Thomson (1700 - 1748) is the first poet of the age who chose
to reject the heroic couplet and use, instead, a quasi-Miltonian blank
verse in his four long poems, published season by season between 1726
and 1730. The Seasons aim to describe the countryside at different times
of the year, often interlarding the descriptive passages with meditations
on man. Thomsons vision of nature as harsh, especially in winter, but
bountiful, stresses the pure pleasures of rural life, with no denial of the
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6.4. Proto-Romantics
6.4.1. William Collins (1721 - 1759) foreshadows the concerns of the
Romantic poets in his Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects
(1746), which are visionary and intensely lyrical. Among these, Collins
Ode on the Poetical Character ranks as an early dramatic engagement with
one of the central topics of the Romantic age, i.e. the origin and role of
the creative imagination, which is the poet himself:
The band, as fairy legends say,
Was wove on that creating day,
When He, who called with thought to birth
Yon tented sky, this laughing earth,
And dressed with springs, and forests tall,
And poured the main engirting all,
Long by the loved Enthusiast wooed,
Himself in some diviner mood,
Retiring, sate with her alone,
And placed her on his sapphire throne;
The whiles, the vaulted shrine around,
Seraphic wires were heard to sound,
Now sublimest trimph swelling,
Now on love and mercy dwelling;
And she, from out the veiling cloud,
Breathed her magic notes aloud:
And thou, thou rich-haired Youth of Morn,
And all thy subject life was born!
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15th century poets writing in Scots and combining skilful artifice with natural
diction, concision and "quickness" of expression.
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6.4.
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The Tiger
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
[. . . ]
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Task
Consider the following topic to defend in oral or written form:
1. The Movement from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in
Poetry
Cultural context: the Age of Sensibility
Samuel Johnson and the Neoclassical legacy
Nature poetry: Oliver Goldsmith and John Thomson
Graveyard poetry: Edward Young, Thomas Gray, James
MacPherson.
Regional poetry: Robert Burns
Romantic poetry: William Blake.
Choose a text for illustration
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APPENDIX 1
THE NOVEL
DEFINITION: An extended fictional prose narrative, often including
the psychological development of the central characters and of their
relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and
inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character
which became popular in the late 13th century. As the main form of
narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified
according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel,
detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.
DEVELOPMENT: A major period of the novel's development came
during the late Italian Renaissance, when the stimulus of foreign travel,
increased wealth, and changing social patterns produced a greater
interest in the events of everyday life, as opposed to religious teaching,
legends of the past, or fictional fantasy. The works of the Italian writers
Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello (1485-1561) were translated into English
in such collections as William Painter's Palace of Pleasure 1566-67, and
inspired the Elizabethan novelists, including John Lyly, Philip Sidney,
Thomas Nash, and Thomas Lodge. In Spain, Cervantes' Don Quixote
1604 contributed to the development of the novel through its translation
into other European languages, but the 17th century was dominated by
the French romances of Gauthier de Costes de la Calprende (16141663) and Madelaine de Scudry (1607-1691), although William
Congreve and Aphra Behn continued the English tradition. With the
growth of literacy, the novel rapidly developed from the 18 th century to
become, in the 20th century, the major literary form.
INTRODUCTION TO NARRATOLOGY
NARRATOLOGY: a term used since 1969 to denote the branch of
literary study devoted to the analysis of narration, and, more
specifically, of forms of narration and varieties of narrator.
NARRATIVE: a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected
sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee. It consists of
a set of events (the story) recounted in the process of narration
(discourse); the events are selected and arranged in a particular order
(Plot).
NARRATOR: one who tells, or is assumed to be telling the story in a
given narrative, i.e. the imagined voice transmitting the story.
NARATEE: the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be
addressing in a given narrative.
ELEMENTS OF ANALYSIS: PLOT; SETTING/SPACE; TIME;
CHARACTER; FOCALISATION/POINT OF VIEW.
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1. PLOT
The pattern of events and situations in a narrative, as selected and
arranged both to emphasise relationships (usually cause and effect)
between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader
(through surprise or suspense.) A simpler definition would be: the
authors design for a novel, in which the story plays a part, as well as
the authors choice of language and imagery.
The concept of plot was first developed by the Greek
philosopher, Aristotle, to describe the properties of drama. His
formulation introduced concepts such as the protagonist, or hero, whose
fate is the focus of the audiences attention. The hero may be in conflict
with an antagonist in the form of a human opponent or of some abstract
concept such as fate; or the conflict may be in his own mind.
As the plot progresses, it arouses expectations in the reader
about the future course of events and how characters will respond to
them. A concerned uncertainty about what is going to happen is known
as suspense. If what in fact happens violates the readers expectations, it
is known as surprise.
A plot has unity of action if it is perceived by the reader as a
complete and ordered structure of actions, directed towards the
intended effect, in which none of the component part (incidents) is
unnecessary. Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified plot
to present a series of episodes which are strung together because they
happen to a single character. Many picaresque narratives, nevertheless,
such as Defoes Moll Flanders, have held the interest of the readers for
centuries with such an episodic plot structure.
A successful development which Aristotle did not foresee is the
type of structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, where a
subplot - a second story that is complete and interesting in its own right
- is introduced to broaden our perspective on the main plot and to
enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The subplot may have
either the relationship of analogy to the main plot, or of counterpoint
against it.
The order of a unified plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is a
continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end, and develops
through the stages of exposition, amplification, climax, denouement. In
many plots the denouement involves a reversal in the heros fortunes,
which frequently depends on a discovery, i.e. the recognition by the
protagonist of something of great importance hitherto unknown to him
or to her.
Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore
the reader's expectation of a causally linked story with a clear
beginning, middle, and end, with no loose ends. James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf wrote novels that explore the minutiae of a character's
experience, rather than telling a tale. However, the tradition that the
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novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for the most
part intact.
English novelist E M Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, defined it
thus: The king died and then the queen died. The king died and then the queen
died of grief at the king's death. The first is the beginning of a series of
events; the second is the beginning of a plot.
2. SETTING/SPACE
Setting refers to the part which may be played by location or milieu
or historical time in the design of the novel. This is most commonly a
reflective or supporting role; it underlines or enhances the nature of the
action or the qualities of the characters which form the substance of the
novels. Setting may be a means of placing a character in society which
allows scope for the action his nature is capable of, or it may generate
an atmosphere which has a significant function in the plot.
In simple terms, the relations between setting on the one hand
and character and events on the other, may be causal, or analogical:
features of the setting may be either cause and effect of how characters
are and behave; or, more by way of reinforcement and symbolic
congruence, a setting may be like a character or characters in some
respects. While the examples above tend towards the broadly
personifactory, the more conventional, undramatised settings play an
important part in promoting verisimilitude and indirect
characterization.
3. TIME
The amount of time which is allotted in the narrative to the various
elements of the story is determined with respect to the amount of time
which these elements take up in the story.
One must distinguish here between the moment in history when
the story is supposed to take place, and the time-span covered by the
story, i.e. the fictional time taken up by the action (e.g. a whole
generation, a single day.)
The most influential theorist of fictional time is Gerard Genette,
who isolates three aspects of temporal manipulation or articulation in
the movement from story to narrative/text:
a) order (refers to the relations between the assumed sequence of events
in the story and their actual order of presentation in the text.) Any
departures in the order of presentation in the text from the order in
which events evidently occurred in the story are termed anachronies, i.e.
any chunk of text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its
natural or logical position in the event sequence. They naturally divide
into flashbacks and flashforwards. The first (called analepses by Genette) is
an achronological movement back in time, so that a chronologically
earlier incident is related later in the text; the second (prolepses)is an
achronological movement forward in time so that a future event is
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related textually before its time. The two types of anachrony entailed by
them are called correspondingly: retroversions and anticipations.
b) Duration (concerns the relations between the extent of time that
events are supposed to have actually taken up, and the amount of text
devoted to presenting those same events.) Maximum speed is said to
constitute ellipsis (no text space is spent on a piece of story duration);
the opposite situation is a descriptive pause (text without story duration.)
Related terms are summary and scene. In summary the pace is
accelerated through a textual compression of a given story period into a
relatively short statement of its main features. In scene, story and text
duration are conventionally considered identical (e.g. purely dialogue
passages.)
c) Frequency (how often something happens in story compared with
how often it is narrated in text.)it may be: singulative (telling n times
what happened n times); repetitive (telling n times what happened
once); iterative (telling once what happened n times.)
4. CHARACTER
A personage in a narrative (or dramatic work): it is normally expected
of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferable
several characters shown in processes of change and social relationship.
CHARACTERIZATION: the representation of persons in narrative and
dramatic works. It may include direct methods (narrative), like the
attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or
dramatic) methods inviting the reader to infer qualities from
characters actions, speech or appearance. A distinction was made by
Forster made between FLAT and TWO-DIMENSIONAL characters
(which are simple and unchanging) and ROUND characters which are
complex, dynamic (i.e. subject to development) and less predictable.
Another classification was advanced by W.J. Harvey (Character and the
Novel), including protagonists, background figures, intermediate figures.
5. POINT OF VIEW/ FOCALISATION
POINT OF VIEW: The way a story gets told - the mode or perspective
established by the author by means of which the reader is presented
with the characters, actions, setting, and events that constitute the
narrative in a work of fiction.
A broad division is established between THIRD-PERSON and
FIRST-PERSON narratives. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is
someone outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters in the
story by name, or as he, she, they. In a first person narrative, the
narrator speaks as I, and is himself a participant in the story.
a) Third-person points of view:
1) the OMNISCIENT point of view: the convention in a work of
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about the agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and
place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or
conceal) their speech and actions; and also that the narrator has
privileged access to the characters thoughts and feelings and
motives, as well as to their overt speech and actions. Within this
mode, the narrator may be INTRUSIVE (not only reports, but
freely comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the
characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human
life in general: e.g. Dickens and Hardy), or UNINTRUSIVE
(IMPERSONAL or OBJECTIVE) (i.e. describes, reports, or shows
the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own
comments or judgements, e.g. Hemingway.)
2) the LIMITED point of view: the narrator tells the story in the
third-person, but within the confines of what is experienced,
thought, felt by a single character (or at the most by very few
characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this mode,
described such a selected character as his focus or mirror, or
centre of consciousness. In a number of Jamess later works all
the events and actions are represented as they unfold before and
filter to the reader through the particular awareness of one of his
characters. Later writers developed this technique into STREAMOF-CONSCIOUSNESS narration, in which we are presented with
outer observations only as they impinge on the current of thought,
memory, feelings, and associations which constitute the observers
awareness (e.g. Joyce, Virgina Woolf.)
b) First-person points of view: This mode naturally limits the point of
view to what the first-person narrator knows, experience, infers, or
can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between
the narrative I who is a fortuitous witness of the matters he relates,
or who is a minor or peripheral participant in the story, or who is
himself or herself the central character in the story (e.g. Mark Twain,
Salinger.)
FOCALISATION: Term used in narratology, covering broadly the
same semantic sphere as point of view (i.e. the interpretation of the text
as grounded, or anchored, coming from a particular speaker at a
particular place at a particular time.)The basic contrast is established
between external/internal focalisation. External focalisation occurs
when the focalisation is from an orientation outside the story (i.e. the
orientation is not associable with that of any character within the text.)
Internal focalisation occurs inside the represented events, and involves
a character-focaliser.
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APPENDIX 2
POETRY: GENERAL CONCEPTS
(ADAPTED from www.ucea.courses/outlines/introd.poetry)
Poems often try to capture a feeling (love, death, fear, joy etc.).
Poems often try to express the inexpressible: what the mind can't
rationalize.
Poems often try to make abstract concepts concrete.
Poems often deal with contradictions and uncertainties.
Poems often try to answer the deepest questions about the
human experience.
Poems often try to express their anger, pessimism, criticism, or
hope about a moment in time (especially historical events) and
how that impacts the human condition.
Poems often try to make the seemingly unimportant experience,
important. (John Donne even wrote a poem entitled, "The Flea"!)
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When:
Why does the event take place? What prompts the speaker to make the
poetic statement? love; memory; death etc.
Who does the speaker address?
Word Choice as Poetic HOW
Since poems often have so few words, every word contains meaning.
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implied metaphor
extended metaphor= ranges over part or whole of poem
controlling metaphor
The Sonnet:
structure : 14 lines
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Italian / Petrarchan:
1 octave : abbaabba
1 sestet: cdecde OR cdcdcd OR
cdccdc
English / Shakespearean
3 quatrains: abab cdcd efef
1 couplet: gg
quatrain: 4 line stanza
94
95
Blank verse
assonance
o
consonance
o
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onomatopoeia
o
o
enjambment
end stopped
punctuation
punctuation can also shape how one reads a poem and therefore,
shape its meaning.
Many commas may suggest parallelism or equality
Dashed suggest rupture, long pauses
spacing
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APPENDIX 3
The Movement from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in Poetry (2)
PRE-ROMANTIC POETRY: Robert Burns and William Blake
(excerpted from Eugenia Gavriliu, A Course in English Literature
Galati, 1999)
The significant transition through which the Age of Reason
modulated gradually into the Age of Sensibility continued throughout
the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The feeling for nature, the haunting love of ruins and the past,
the melancholy and musing attitudes and, above all, the need to reveal
the inner self, became the prevailing features in the poetry of the preRomantics in which tradition and the new trends are closely
intermingled.
ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796). Generally placed among the
English pre-Romantic poets, Burns holds a place apart. Revered as a
national poet by the Scottish nation, he is a considerable lyric poet
whose talents were largely based on a native ballad tradition. He came
in the wake of remarkable predecessors (Allan Ramsay and Robert
Fergusson) who gave him a lesson in realism, humour and lyricism
which never loses sight of reality. On the other hand, his debt also
extends to the literature south of the Border. Far from being an
unlettered peasant, he was well read not only in the Bible, Shakespeare
and Pope, but also in the SPECTATOR essays, Richardson and Sterne,
while Thomson, Gray and Young taught him the discipline necessary to
check and direct the spontaneous expression of his poetry. In Burns the
influence of a half-foreign nationality and the vigour of a son of the
Scottish soil quickened the germ of originality.
The poet was born at Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland as the eldest
among the seven children of a poor Scottish cotter. Educated by his
father and the local schoolmaster, he received little schooling but he
reaped the benefit of the literary traditions of his country, and of
England. He worked on his fathers farm from an early age becoming a
skilled ploughman by the age of fifteen. His inclination for literature
developed early and at sixteen he wrote his first song and embarked
upon his first love affair. His father dying from tuberculosis in 1784,
Robert and his brother Gilbert salvaged what they could to buy the
farm of Mossgiel. His affair with Jean Armour resulted in a child but, at
her familys insistence, the two separated and Robert turned to Mary
Campbell. During this period he wrote some of his best work: THE
COTTERS SATURDAYS NIGHT, THE TWA DOGS, HALLOWEEN,
THE JOLLY BEGGARS, TO A MOUSE, TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY. The
work on the farm being meagrely successful, Burns decided to emigrate
to Jamaica with Mary Campbell, and in order to get the necessary
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money he printed the first edition of his poems in 1786. Thus, the socalled Kilmarnock edition made him famous and took him to
Edinburgh where his modesty and conviviality made him very popular.
The appreciation of literary Edinburgh helped Burns forget the
death of his dear Mary while the second edition of his poems brought
him 500, enabled him to settle down on a small farm at Ellisland and
to marry Jean Armour. Farming proving unsuccessful again, he secured
the office of excise man at the Dumfries customs in 1791. His
enthusiasm with the French Revolution brought him in conflict with the
authorities and nearly cost him his place when he brought two cannons
and sent them as a present to the French Republic.
Meanwhile he contributed some 200 songs to James Johnsons
SCOTS MUSICAL MUSEUM, among which the famous AULD LANG
SYNE, SCOTS WHO HAE, A RED, RED ROSE. No other single poet in
literature produced so many lyrics that compulsively sing themselves.
Burns died at the age of thirty-seven broken in health and fortune,
leaving behind him a literary work of unique value.
All the elements of Romanticism: sensibility, personal effusion,
love of nature, wealth of imagination, sympathetic interest in the
humblest things in nature are to be found in the work of Burns.
However, he has none of the romantic pangs of the mind and soul. His
strong, robust self renders him immune from any excesses either of
melancholy or ecstasy.
Most of Burnss verse appeared in POEMS, CHIEFLY IN THE
SCOTTISH DIALECT, of which three gradually expanding editions
appeared successively in 1786, 1787 and 1793.
Any attempt at analysing Burnss poetry has to face the
abundance and variety of his poetic achievements. A classification
according to the major themes adopted here for didactic purposes
causes the poetry of Burns to fall into the following divisions:
a) Social poetry. A sense of liberty is the animating force of his
poetic genius which ranks Burns in the same line with such proletarian
writers as William Langland and John Bunyan5. Burns is deeply aware
of the dignity and equality of men and voices the conviction that social
rank does not determine mans real worth. The poets attitude varies
from the glorification of the simple and humble life in THE COTTERS
SATURDAY NIGHT, through the vivacious mock-heroic animal tale in
THE TWA DOGS, to the wild bravado song in THE JOLLY BEGGARS,
to culminate in the pathetic cry for equality in FOR ATHAT AND
ATHAT.
THE COTTERS SATURDAY NIGHT follows the current taste
for sentimentalism in its pictures of rural simplicity, homely virtues and
praise of unaffected rural life. Burns reveals himself as a rustic poet
who wrote when Scotland was on the verge of the Industrial
Revolution, hence the irresistible temptation to sentimentalise over an
idealised country-life. The principle that inherent worth determines the
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rank of man is voiced in the often quoted line: An honest mans the
noblest work of God.
THE TWA DOGS relates, in the manner of a beast mediaeval
fable, a conversation between Caesar, a gentlemans Newfoundland
dog, and Luath, a poor mans mongrel, on the social inequality in the
country. This dogs eye view of mans world is carefully handled so as
to make the latter appear the more contemptuous and abusive. The two
dogs part in the end rejoicd they were na men, but dogs.
THE JOLLY BEGGARS, published after the poets death in 1799,
depicts the sturdy independence and courageous defiance of all social
conventions of a group of beggars carousing in an ale-house. Brief
descriptive moments are linked together in challenging songs
resounding with revolutionary motifs. All institutions, all conventions,
anything that limits the freely chosen human intercourse, are
abandoned in roaring professions of anarchist independence.
FOR ATHAT AND ATHAT voices the equalitarian cry of the
French Revolution, looking forward to the days when class
discriminations will end and all men will be brothers.
b) Satirical poems. Burnss poetry breathes a spirit of irreverence
which spares neither church nor clergy. With peculiar verve he pokes
fun at the devil, makes free with the theme of eternal damnation and
laughs at the secret troubles which haunt the Puritan conscience.
ADDRESS TO THE DEIL reduces Miltons Satan to the folklore
devil in an attack against the rigid Calvinism of the Scottish church. The
poem is a fine example of Burnss technique of criticising theological
dogmas by translating them into the realities of daily, ordinary
experience.
HOLY WILLIES PRAYER, one of Burnss greatest satirical
poems, is a monologue in which Willie, a parish elder, is overheard at
his prayers. Willie is convinced that he is one of Gods elect and that his
salvation is assured regardless of his moral conduct. Willies filthy soul
and his hypocritical religion are laid bare in solemn, biblical rhythms6.
The target of Burnss satire here is again the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination and of salvation of predestined grace regardless of
mans behaviour but, as the poem proceeds, it acquires generalising
force, Willie standing for universal religious hypocrisy and selfishness.
TO A LOUSE, ON SEEING ONE ON A LADYS BONNET AT
CHURCH is another satirical approach to the old theme of social
inequity. The ladys aristocratic airs are confronted with the vulgar
louse which reveals pretence and hypocrisy in their true light. Her airs
and graces are stripped away in a tone of kind amusement and the
poem concludes with a simple, epigrammatic note: O wad some lowr
the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!/ It wad frae monie a blunder
free us/ An foolish notion;/ Wat airs in dress an gait wad laee us,/ An een
Devotion!
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c) Patriotic lyrics. Burnss love for his native land calls forth
various responses on the part of the poet.
MY HEARTS IN THE HIGHLANDS voices a Scots intense love
for his native hills though Burns was a native of the Lowlands.
SCOTS WHA HAE also known as BRUCES ADDRESS BEFORE
BANNOCKBURN celebrates the Scottish victory over the English at
Bannockburn in the 14th century. Burnss hostility at contemporary
reactionary forces is obvious in the prose conclusion to the poem: So
may God defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did that day!
THE TREE OF LIBERTY echoes the ideals of the French
Revolution which are contrasted with the life of the oppressed people:
A scene o sorrow mixed wi strife.
Burnss devotion to the Stuart pretenders expressed in such
poems as CHARLIE, HES MY DARLING should be interpreted as a
longing for the national independence of the by-gone patriarchal days
rather, than an attachment to monarchy, which was so alien to his
spirit.
d) Nature poems. The poetry of Burns is in close touch with all
the human element in life. The keen love of nature intermingles with a
sympathetic interest in the humblest things in it.
TO A FIELD MOUSE bridges the gap between the world of men
and that of the animal in the similar unexpected misfortune befalling
both. The poet expresses his regret to the mouse, the wee, sleekit,
cowrin, timirous beastie, on turning her up with the plough, and muses
over the hostile forces that thwart the ideals of both animal and man.
This fellow-feeling is conveyed in well-controlled, proverbial lines: The
best laid schemes o mice an men/ Gang aft a-glay,/ An leae us nought but
grief an pain/ For promisd joy.
TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY displays a similar disposition
towards a flower. The poets crushing of the blossom with his plough
becomes symbolic of mans fate in a hostile environment. The poem
bears the stamp of Burnss complying to the new sensibility since he
was here posturing as a man of feeling, one that Melancholy has marked
for her own as Gray whom he thought highly of, had described in his
ELEGY.
THE AULD FARMERS NEW-YEAR MORNING SALUTATION
TO HIS AULD MARE MAGGIE recounts a farmers thoughts as he
brings the traditional extra food to his animal at the start of the new
year. The poem displays a realistic unsentimental sense of the shared
labour of animal and man which remained unequalled in Romantic
poetry.
e) Lyrical songs. The poet of good-natured frankness, Burns has
made of his poetry a full and open confession of himself. His private
life, his friendships, his love affairs, his marriage and his paternal
feelings are all reflected in his lyrical poetry.
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Cabbala = a mediaeval system of Jewish theosophy, mysticism and magic (the origination of the world
by a series of hierarchically descending radiations from the Godhead through intermediate stages to
matter) marked by belief in creation through emanation and a cipher method of interpreting Scripture.
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drivn away;/ And mournful lean Despair;/ Brings me yew to deck my grave:/
Such end true lovers have.
SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789) represents a poet who is wholly
himself seeking his own visions of life. The poems in SONGS OF
INNOCENCE deal with childhood as the symbol of untarnished
innocence that ought to be, but which in modern civilisation cannot be,
part of the adult response the world. There is a sense of everything in
its proper place, of content and order and spontaneity ruling together
enhanced by the elemental simplicity of the language, by the regular
rhythmic patterns. The poems display an imaginative picture of the
state of innocence derived from the Bible, pastoral tradition and the
growing Romantic fascination with childhood and a supposed
primitive condition of human perfection in innocence.
The universe in SONGS OF INNOCENCE is seen through the
eyes of a child, felt through his senses, judged through his mind; and
this child is the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuition of
the human mind, just like the soul of a peasant in those moments of
sober exaltation which will be with Wordsworth the very source of
poetry.
THE LAMB sees the innocence in the child as kindred to that of
the lamb of Christ.
NURSES SONG praises the happiness of the uninhibited
childhood freely playing. The final lines in THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm, far from being versified
moral platitudes, are a half-ironic, half-yearning vision of a world in
which all men behave as Blake would have them behave.
The SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794) are in a marked contrast
with the precious collection. The theme in these poems is the notion
that the conventions of civilisation represented intolerable restrictions
on the individual personality and produced every kind of corruption
and evil. There is no road back to innocence, since innocence, by its
very nature, is easily led astray, only a road forward, through
experience, to a comprehensive vision. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE are
clearly the product of disillusion and present a sad picture of what man
has made of man10. The brightness of the earlier work gives place to a
sense of gloom and mystery and of the power of evil. They depict the
actual world of suffering mankind by means of concrete, evocative
symbols. Many of these poems are deliberate responses to the similar
pieces in SONGS OF INNOCENCE.
NURSES SONG counters the identical poems in SONGS OF
INNOCENCE. The nurse contemplates her own ruined life and
concludes with the idea that the innocence of childhood is followed by
the hypocrisy of mature age.
THE TIGER counters THE LAMB. The tiger is a symbol to the
fierce forces in the human soul and in the universe. Blake sees in the
apparent evil and malevolence of the tiger another manifestation of the
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unity of God displayed here in its power and energy. Power and energy
are necessary to achieve final fulfilment.
There is both beauty and terror in the elemental forces of nature
as later works of Blake proclaim. That section of THE MARRIAGE OF
HEAVEN AND HELL entitled PROVERBS OF HELL in which Hell is
the symbol of liberty and spontaneous energy provides a clue to the
meaning of the symbol of the tiger:
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy
sea, and the destructive sword,
Are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.
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a full story line and contains Blakes proclamation that an old age is
dying and a new one is coming to birth.
THE BOOK OF THEL (1789) presents for the first time the theme
that will prevail in all Blakes subsequent works: the soul is eternal but
must pass through the wheel of Destiny, through Generation (Blakes
symbol for the physical world we live in) to surge up to Eden, i.e. the
state of imaginative power and balanced harmony.
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL (probably printed c.
1790-95) considers good and evil as synonymous for passivity
and energy, both of which must be fully developed to achieve life.
Analysing PARADISE LOST in terms of his concepts,
Blake sees Miltons God as Urizen, the great forbidder, and Miltons
Satan as Los, energy, inspiration and revolt. Self-restraint is considered
not strength of will, but weakness of desire.
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION (1793)
insists that everyone is entitled to the most ideal union that he or she
can secure despite such frequent obstacles as jealousy, hypocrisy,
abusive authority. Blakes Albion is the sleeping self composed of the
harmonious balance of all elements. The indebtedness to Macphersons
OSSIAN can be easily traced in the similarity of names.
Though Blake was a visionary influenced by the main
undergrounds of European mystical thought, he was also a man of his
time who responded characteristically and sometimes violently to the
main political and social events of his age, notably the French
Revolution and the American War of Independence.
A SONG OF LIBERTY (c. 1793) considers the current unrest
throughout Western Europe, the prelude to the momentous toppling
over of all repression by the powers of innate energy.
AMERICA (1793) represents Blakes vision of the American
Revolution as the wild upsurge of Orc (another name for Luvah, Blakes
personification of Emotion) against Albions Angel (the repressive
George III.)
EUROPE (1794) figures Orc as the spirit of the French Revolution
freeing himself from Asia, the symbol of oppression.
THE BOOK OF URIZEN (1794) is Blakes first attempt at an
overall explanation of mans total psychic problems. Blake personified
the four functions which he identified in each human being as: Los
(Intuition), Urizen (Reason), Luvah (Emotion) and Tharmas (Sensation).
Blake sees the struggle between Urizen and Los as taking place
simultaneously within the individual soul and within the entire spirit of
mankind. Reason usurps the world of inspiration (Los) and his lack of
imaginative power results in terrible errors imposing superstitions and
restraint in order to maintain his dominance. Los establishes an
evolutionary cycle through Revolt personified as Fuzon that will
eventually bring the new age of perfection.
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APPENDIX 4
Cavalier
vs
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary:
Ioana Mohor-Ivan, English Literature in the 17th and 18th
Centuries: Texts, Contexts and Critical Readings, Galati
University Press, Galati, 2011.
Ioana
Ioana Mohor-Ivan