Summary Introduction To The Study of Literature in English English Literature From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century

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Summary Introduction to the Study of Literature in English:

English literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century
Introduction to the study of literature in English (Universiteit Antwerpen)
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ISLE – MIDDLE AGES TO 20th Century

INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Usually literary coursed focus on literature from 1800 till now, why focus on that period?
Reasons:
• 18th C the enlightenment project started:
people started to believe in reason/rationality
people started to believe in progress
people believed they could control nature through science
people believed in the ability to produce happiness
• During that process “literature” became an independent part of culture
literature became an autonomous field and that field has + the same functions that
we contribute to literature today
• These functions are: 1. To learn from lit./lit. as education
2. To entertain from lit./ lit. as entertainment
3. To see the beauty of lit., because its beauty lit. will lift you up
improve you as human beings
= part of the enlightenment: improvement
• If literature can improve you as human being, it can also enable you to be critical
= triumph of reason (conveyer belt replaces the person/the individual, the individual’s
function, the holocaust wouldn’t have happened without the enlightenment)
Nevertheless in this course also focus on literature before that period to get a whole historic
overview: Middle Ages to 20th Century.
Examenvraag : Definition of literature

• We need a definition of literature “working definition of literature”
• Difference between English literature literature in English
English literature = all lit. in English, dominantly UK literature (no longer valid)
Literature in English = includes all literature from UK, Ireland, US, Canada,
various countries from Asia, Africa, Australia and other countries where English is
the first language: always say literature in English
• Several definitions of literature: definition of what our high school teachers told us, or
what we find on the bookshelves of shops or else the publishing houses define
literature for us, the academic worlds defines it for us, etc…
They all define literature to a specific audience, it’s a power question.
• “Literature” = a result of various processes/mechanisms in society, that we can share
• Conclusion: it’s simply impossible to define literature based on the characteristics of
texts, because there are simply too many texts around.
• There’s definitely a link to what we think of literature and the functions of it
(education, entertainment, beauty) it all goes into the experience of literature.
• Literature is created by the mechanisms of the society, eg.: if a publishing house
would bundle 10 newspaper articles and wrap a nice cover around it and plcae it in the
literature shelve in the shop it would be sold as literature.

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Examenvraag : The literary canon

• The literary canon = list of books that are felt at a given time and by a specific group
of people to represent the notion of literature as it functions in that group at that time.
‘that time’: the historic development of literature, we do this by reading
anthologies which provides us with the academic literature.
• This definition of the canon combines the 2 aspects of literature:
1. The contents of the texts
2. The mechanisms of society
• Because we speak of groups in the canon we accept/acknowledge there are different
kinds of literature: high school lit., rechtse partijen lit., academic literary canon, …
THE MIDDLE AGES: 476 – 1485

Middle Ages: collapse Roman Empire to Renaissance & Reformation: art, science and
literature flourished during the MA and was roared in the Christian culture.
• MA = period of enormous historical, social and linguistic change, to emphasize this,

MA period divided in 3 sections: 1. Anglo-Saxon literature
2. Anglo-Norman literature
3. Middle-English literature
• Evolution of English:
in 450: England invaded by the Saxons spoke Old English, kin to other
Germanic languages (Beowulf = Old English, 10th C)
1066: Battle of Hastings, England invaded by WTC, a Norman Norman
conquest linguistic effect: ascendancy of a French speaking ruling class let to
addition of French loan words to the English vocabulary
1336: King Edward III started 100-years war to claim the French throne,
result = English driven from French territory, English became the leading language
Chaucer wrote CT in English = turning point!
Mid 15th C: William Caxton invented the moveable type and book production was
on the rise, books printed in different languages: Latin, French & English
1. Anglo-Saxon literature
History:
• 100-500: England province of Roman Empire
• 476: collapse Roman Empire, Romans back to Rome
• Romans gone Germanic invasion: Angles, Saxons & Jutes invaded England
• Anglo-Saxon occupation of Britain ≠ sudden conquest, took years
• Anglo-Saxons were pagan, Christianity was put aside
• After 75 years Christianity regained power = major impact on literature!
• Before Christianity only oral poetry, Christianity was back = boost of literature!
• 9th Century: Invasion of the Danes war when in war, no time for literature
• King Alfred stopped the Danes and Old English (OE) saved by him = Alfred the Great
• Alfred enthusiastic patron of English literature translated many Latin work into OE

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Literature:
• Old-English poetry: mostly religious subjects (literacy reserved to the church)
• Germanic heroic poetry in alliterative verse and contained in just 4 manuscripts
• Beowulf = most known poem in OE and shows that Christian writers were
fascinated by the Germanic culture and their heroic code, religion and kinship
• Most Anglo-Saxon literature = combo of the Germanic heroic and the Christian
poetry
Overall effect of Old English in literature:

• OE caused for formalized and elevated speech: ≠ straightforward but slow and steadily
pace with indirection
• OE poetic characteristics: ironic (Beowulf), elegiac, special voc., multiplicity of terms,
synecdoche & metonomy as figures of speech (eg: keel=boat, iron=sword), kenning
(compound of 2 words instead of 1: sea=whale-road, body=life-house-, figurative use
of language/playfully expressed
Middle Ages I: Anglo-Saxon literature

BEOWULF (p.26-31, 31-33 lines 1-114, p.96-97 lines 3137-3182)
• The oldest of the great old poems written in English.+/- 800.
• Story really happened during the first invasion of the Germanic tribes (5 -7 C.)
th th
• Linguistic evidence shows that the poem was originally composed in the dialect of
Mercia, the Midlands of England today But converted into the West-Saxon dialect
of the south-west.
• 1731 manuscript seriously damaged in a fire result a number of lines and words
have been lost from the poem
• possible that Beowulf may be the lone survivor of a genre of Old English long epics.
• The poet was reviving the heroic language, style and pagan world of ancient Germanic
oral poetry Already remote for his contemporaries and even stranger for the modern
reader, in many respects, than the epic world of Homer and Virgil.
• Important in Beowulf is the combination of the heroic trend and Christian trend
heroic trend = visible in the content of Beowulf – Germanic heroic code: highest
values, courage and loyalty, vengeance)
Christian trend, elegiac mode, often expresses sadness of a death in the poem
• Oral poetry was spoken by the ‘scop’, the singer for the poet, he recited the poetry for
kings high status poetry created on awe, when Christians wrote down the poetry,
they created the aura of poetry: written poetry : rare = valuable
• The Beowulf poet himself imagines such oral performances by having king Horthgar’s
court poet recite a heroic lay at a feast celebrating Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel.
• Many of the words and formulaic expressions in Beowulf can be found in other Old
English poems. But there are many Hapax Legomena, that is: Words recorded only
once in a language. This poet was clearly a wordsmith.
• The poem is English in language and origin, but refers to the Germanic forefathers
“time reference” = a time after the invasion of England by Germanic tribes but
before the Anglo-Saxon migration was completed.
• The text shows that his audience was clearly familiar with many old stories,
knowledge that we unfortunately not always have.
• Nowadays, it is believed that Beowulf is the work of a single poet who was a Christian
and that the poem reflects well-established Christian traditions.
But the hero Beowulf himself is no Christian = pagan

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Christianity in Beowulf:
• the monster Grendel is said to originate from Cain (Cain and Able)
• allusions to God’s judgement and to fate (wyrd in the poem) but none to pagan
deities.
• there are no references to the New Testament but Hrothgar and Beowulf believe in
a single God.
• The Danes, desperate by the attacks of Grendel pray for help at forgotten shrines. =
the children of Israel’s backslide in their march out of Egypt.
• The Danisch king Hrothgar’s poet sings a song about the Creation (lines 87-98)
reminiscent of Caedmon’s Hymn.
Heroic trend in Beowulf:

• Beowulf and Hrothgar are presented as morally upright and enlightened. they also
affirm the values of Germanic heroic poetry.
• The most important relationship in these warrior societies were those of the knight and
his lord. The relationship was based on the subordination of one man’s will to another
on mutual trust and respect. The knight was not a servant but a voluntary companion.
The knights would take pride in defending their lords, who would look after their
families in return. Great kings were referred to as the shield of their people.
• The relationship between kinsmen (bloedverwanten) was of a deep significance to this
society.
• When one’s kinsmen had been slain, this relative had to be avenged by killing the
killer or obliging the killer to pay a certain “man-price” in promise to keep him alive,
even if the killing was an accident. When you wouldn’t avenge your kinsmen’s killer,
everlasting shame would be yours.
In Beowulf:
• Hrothgar’s anguish ((zielen)leed, smart, lijden, angst) over the murders ( = the murder
of his men by Grendel) is already bad enough, but as a lord he also feels guilty for the
revenge he fails to take. It’s a shame for him not to be able to avenge or to exact a
dead-price.
• IRONY !!! the poet clearly warns us for these everlasting blood-vengeances.
= the Finnsburg episode (the poem sung by Hrothgar’s poet). The poet wants to warn
us that when we always avenge each other, we will finally exterminate all mankind.
Important in Beowulf is the tension between Christianity and the Heroic code:
• The writer realizes that Beowulf is a great hero but he is a pagan and will not go to
heaven IRONY!
• Such feuds, the staple subject of Germanic epic and saga, have only a peripheral place
in the poem. The main focus in the poem lies on Beowulf’s 3 fights against
preternatural evil, which wants to destroy all people.
1. He fights Grendel to save the Danes from the monster and to exact vengeance for
the men Grendel has slain he also wants to demonstrate his strength and
courage more personal glory gifts by Hrothgar.
2. the battle of Grendel’s mother = also for more glory.
3. battle against the dragon. =there is NO other way to save his people.

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Form/style of the poem:

• sober, dignified elegiac mood.
• Verse form: 2 balancing halves with a caesura (eg. So the spear Danes ___ in days)
• Alliteration
• Kenning & poetic riddles: eg. Bone-house = corps, the scope did this to draw
attention, the reader has to be more involved, figure out what the writers wants to say
• Indirection, by an indirect way the author describes reality
• The poem opens and closes with the description of a funeral: Death is everywhere
• Beowulf, as first mentioned in the story is an ambitious young hero, while at the end,
he’s an old king facing a dragon and death.
his people mourn him and praise him (like the poet) for his nobility, generosity,
courage and most of all (which is also less common in Germanic heroes)
kindness to his people.
• Monster couldn’t be killed by weapons Only with bare hands
Conclusion:
The entire poem could be viewed as the poet’s lament (klaagzang) for heroes like Beowulf
who went into darkness without the light of his own Christian faith.
2. Anglo-Norman literature
After the Norman invasion, the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition came to an end.
After Battle of Hastings influence of French on English, French loan words were integrated
into the English language = linguistic exchange
• The word ‘romance’ was derived from the word ‘roman’ written in the French
vernacular1
• Romance became the leading literary from, only later it would deal with topics as love
and others with what we associate ‘romance’ today
• Romance = principal narrative genre for the late medieval readers, centrally concerned
with love and represented psychological interiority with great subtlety (possibilities
for subgenres and questions about love)
3. Middle English literature (14th – 15th century)

During the 13th C English had become influential again and in the 14th & 15th C there was
room for the flowering of Middle English (ME) and Middle English literature.
History:
• 14th C: plague and depression hit society
• 14 C: growth of international trade, influence of merchant class
th
• 14 C: great social, political and economic changes and these are all represented in the
th
literature of the 14th Century

• 4 major writers: - Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
- Dante, La Divina Commedia – secrets of the afterlife
- John Gower, Confessio Amantis – satire, politics and ethical issues
- author of Sir Gawain and the Green knight – Eng. Romance
• 15th C: 1422-1485 War of the Roses, monarchy fighting but religious work were still
being published in the vernacular although strictly guarded by Lancastrian authorities
1
Vernacular = landstaal, inheemse taal writing in Early Middle English depended on both French and English
sources

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• 15th C: plays were being produced and lot of French works were translated to English
due to Caxton’s print technology, books were more accessible to new classes of
readers
Characteristics Medieval English:

• Evolution: Old English Middle English Early modern English
• Old English = almost entirely Germanic
• Middle English = large number of French words introduces
• Middle English differs in 3 aspects from PdE:
1. Pronunciation of long vowels in ME, long vowels are pronounced
2. Final e is often sounded in ME
3. All consonants are sounded in ME
Old & Middle English prosody2:

• poetry in OE same verse form the verse unit is 1 single line with alliteration
(rhyme wasn’t used to link 1 line to another)
• the majority of ME verse is either in alternative stresses rhyming verse or in
alliterative verse
(any vowel may alliterate with any other vowel because the ‘h’sound was silent, words
starting with ‘h’ were treated as they started with the following vowel
Middle Ages II: Middle English literature 14th-15th C

SIR GAWAIN & THE GREEN KNIGHT (p.112-114, 114-124 lines 1-490)
• written around 1380
• Sir Gawain is nice example of Arthurian romance relatively short epic poem,
central character: embodies religious/national ideals
• Arthur and his court important mythical figure, defender of the Celts against the Saxon
invaders important ideology is knights of the round table = example of chivalry,
courtesy (implies a degree of brutality and finesse)
• Reason why it’s part of the canon: a snappy narrative, an interesting motive: the
confrontation with the other very strong link with our own lives + it also transmits
a number of beliefs that were dominant at the time Christian ideology
• The story was found in a single copy. Its manuscript contains a group of poems that
mark their anonymous author as a poet approaching Chaucer and whose formal craft is
in some ways more ambitious than Chaucer’s.
• It is the work of a highly sophisticated provincial court poet, working in a form and
narrative tradition that is conservative in comparison with Chaucer’s.
• The poet uses the alliterative long line, a meter with its roots in Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Within these traditional aspects, however, he achieves a peak in medieval courtly
literature, as a superlatively crafted and stylized version of quest romance.
Info on the story:

• The romance doesn’t want to detach itself from society or history. It opens and closes
by referring to Troy, whose survivors were legendary founders of Britain.
Arthur, their ultimate heir, went on later in his myth to pursue imperial ambitions that,
like those of Troy, were stopped by adulterous desire and political infidelity.
2
Prosody = prosodie: informaties betreffende het ritme, de intensiteit en de melodie van de stem

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• This story also echoes the contemporary world in the technical language of
architecture, crafts and arms. This helps draw in the kind of conservative, aristocratic
court for which the poem seems to be written. Along with the pleasure it takes in fine
armour and courtly ritual, the poem seems to enfold anxieties about the economic
pressure of maintaining chivalric display in a period of costly new technology,
inflation and declining income from land.
• This poem was written at the end of the 14th century and by now Gawain was a famous
Arthurian hero. His reputation was ambiguous: he was Arthur’s faithful servant and
nephew, but also a seducer. Which side of Gawain will dominate in this poem?
Content of the story:

• During Arthur’s ritual celebrations of Christmas and the New Year, a gigantic green
knight interrupts Arthur’s banquet, offering a deadly game of exchanged ax-blows, to
be resolved in one year’s time. At first sight, the green knight seems to be a giant force
of nature itself, but he is in fact a sophisticated knight, beautifully dressed. He knows
how to taunt a young king within courtly boundaries. Gawain takes up the challenge.
• When the year is almost over, Gawain goes off to find the green knight and fulfil his
obligation. But on his way to the green knight Gawain finds a castle and becomes
friends with the castle lord Bercilac.
• Bercilac goes hunting and Gawain stays behind in the castle where he is seduced by
the lady of the castle (happens 3x) after that that the lady gives him a green garter.
• Gawain leaves the castle in search for the green knight, he finds him and the green
knight misses because Gawain flinches, the 2nd time he misses again and the 3rd time
the green knight wounds Gawain and it turns out the green knight is Bercilac.
• Now Gawain can go back to Camelot but has to wear the green garter (sign of failure)
nevertheless all the other knights also start to wear a green because they think that
Gawain has been courageous
Analyses of the story:

• Links to Christian ideology: the shield of Gawain bears a pentacle 5 points = 5
wounds of Christ
• Christianisation of old Celtic material chivalry/courtesy
• L30: try to empathize with the role of contemporary audience
• L37: 2 clear indications of Christian ideology
• L35: the world chivalry occurs
• P120: image of the Arthurian court as seen by the green knight, courtesy = mentioned
• L136: long introduction of the green knight Homeric tradition
• The results of the test of Gawain are not quite clear, not really mentioned, the
Arthurian ideology wants to reinforce itself
• Meaning of the story ≠ really definite author mentions the ideology but doesn’t
give his own opinion = ambiguity: no definite statement about the Arthurian ideology
Middle Ages III:

GEOFFREY CHAUCER – THE GENERAL PROLOGUE, (p. 170-190)
Notes class:
• Arthurian romans meant as form of entertainment for nobility, Canterbury Tales =
contrary meant for all the 3 estates/ social layers of MA.
• Canterbury Tales aimed for larger audience than nobility, also meant for the merchants
• Chaucer was son of a merchant, but social mobility he wanted to climb the social
ladder, experience all lived around + 1343 - 1400

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• At the time the Canterbury Tales were written ≠ a bestseller, still on manuscripts, no
printing press
Genre troubles:
• Eg.: if you want to write a detective story, you’ll need elements of the genre
code
like a murder, an inspector, a plot reader also aware of this code
• How was this genre in time of Chaucer? If he wanted to write about certain
characters, automatically pushed into a genre (eg.: a chivalrous story)
Chaucer wanted to represent different characters
had to combine different genres (eg.: romance, fabliau, Arthurian romance,…)
• Combo if these different genres created high degree of relativization = early
realism up to a certain point !
• Realism because Chaucer gave representation of society at large, but also
Chaucerian complexity because different elements are mixed in the same work, often
making it difficult to extract simple, direct and certain meanings
satire/irony/parody
• It took over 500 years for writers to get rid of certain writing models Chaucer
was the first to take a step to realism by combining the different genres (they clashed
and showed their restrictions) combo visible in The General Prologue of the CT.
Anthology:
• 14th-15th C: society made up of 3 estates:
1. The nobility/aristocracy = to rule and defend the body politic
2. The church = duty to look after the spiritual welfare of that body
3. Everyone else/commoners = were supposed to do the work that provided for its
physical needs
• Late 14thC: these 3 basic categories layered into complex, interrelated strata
among which birth, wealth, profession and personal ability all played a part in
determining one’s status in society CT influenced by these forces, middle class was
becoming important, blurring class boundaries middle class = class Chaucer was
born in
• But through his association (work) with the court and service of the Crown,
Chaucer had attained the rank of ‘esquire’, later to be defined as ‘gentleman’
• His career put him in contact with overlapping bourgeois and aristocratic social
worlds, without his being securely anchored in either.
• Although he was born a commoner and continued to associate with commoners in
his official life, he did not live as a commoner, and although his training and service at
court, his wife’s connections and his poetry brought him into contact with nobility, he
was always conscious of that he did not really belong to that society of which birth
alone could make one a true member
• Situated at the intersection of these social worlds, Chaucer had the gift of being
able to view with both sympathy and humour the behaviours, beliefs and pretensions
of the diverse classes
• Chaucer’s art of being involved and detached from a given situation is peculiarly
his own
• CT meant for listening audience, often irony better expressed when told

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Background Canterbury Tales:

• Chaucer may be inspired to write CT because his house lay on the road of the
pilgrimage to see the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury
• Chaucer may have used Bocaccio’s ‘Decamoron’ as model for his CT
Decamoron was about 10 different narrators each tell a tale a day for 10 days
• Chaucer intended the CT to have 120 tales 30 people/pilgrims on the way to
Canterbury, each pilgrim 4 tales, 2 on the way to Canterbury and 2 on the way back
• Special about CT is that it is meant for all the 3 estates, this may also have been
inspired by Boccacio, because previous work of Chaucer was one sided and limited to
1 genre
• Still CT uses a unique artistic device: Chaucer’s pilgrim narrators represent a
wide spectrum of ranks and occupations this device should however not be
considered as realism unlikely such a group would have joined together and
communicated on such equal terms + the commoners are not represented because they
wouldn’t have had the money to enter in the pilgrimage, but they were still around
• In Ct the 3 states are represented:
nobility = knight, squire
church = priest, nun, friar
working class (social mobility) = merchant, weaver, cook, miller, pardoner,…
• All these types ≠ original, already know from genre estate satire, sets out to
expose and pillory typical examples of corruption at all levels of society BUT what
uniquely distinguishes Chaucer’s prologue from more conventional estates satire is the
suppression in all but few flagrant instances of overt moral judgement
the narrator in fact seems to be expressing chiefly admiration and praise of
the group but also gives negative comments = ambiguous
• In CT Chaucer uses 2 fictions simultaneously:
1. Fiction of the individual tale
2. Fiction of the pilgrim assigned to the tale
• The 2 fictions used together create accord between the narrators and their stories
create rich overtones
Analyses of The General Prologue:

• Great emphasis in clothing and appearance
• Emphasis on general behaviour, aspect of behaviour of the character in question,
that will be repeated several times (eg.: wife of Bath hates it when someone else gives
money to the church before she has given money)
• No realism yet because the inside of the character isn’t described, we only get the
outside, we have to derive the inner character from the external elements
• Narrator’s attitude about the characters is ambiguous, he makes it seem as if he’s
portraying a positive image, but it’s actually quite negative
Eg. p. 181-182:
wife of Bath, he tells she’s deaf = negative
she’s a great clothmaker = positive
she’s very proud but her readiness to offer money is conditional, she has to be the
first to give = negative
they weighed 10 pounds = negative
narrator not going to tell about her love life, but he does = negative
she’s gap-toothed = negative

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• The fact that he mentioned that she’s deaf and gap-toothed is unnecessary
information he’s creating satire = negative
• There’s a satirical attitude on the part of the narrator relates to the estate
satire,
an already existing genre
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 1485 – 1603

Short historic overview:
• The 16th C is also known as the early modern period
• Period starts with the accession of Henry VII = start of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VIII
follows, accession of Elisabeth I and the period ends when she dies in 1603 and James
I of the Stuart Dynasty comes to the throne
• Renaissance: the achievements of the ancient Greek/Romans are more important than
the writers of the M.A.
• Humanism: = the spiritual/intellectual side of the Renaissance
establish a reliable copy of the Bible in the vernacular
• The 16th C = century of the Tudors:
Wars of the Roses (1455-1485)
struggle was resolved by the establishment of the Tudor’s (1485-1603)
Henry VII defeated Richard the 3rd at Bosworth Field + married Elizabeth of the
house of York: united the two rival houses (York/Lancaster)
the barons could not effectively oppose this new power due to the fact that the wars
had impoverished and divided them
Henry VII could impose a much stronger central authority and order on the nation
• Henry VIII = named Defensor Fidei by the pope
Excommunicated by the pope for his marriage to Anne Boleyn
Act of Supremacy (1534): the king is also head of the church of England
3 children: Edward VI, Mary, Elisabeth I
• Elizabethan age: Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe (dokter Faustus)
Elisabeth Cary (the tragedy of Miriam)
Ben Jonson
• But there was a change going on:
flexibility to categories of gender (e.g. Shakespeare writes love poems for men)
religion changes constantly :
Edward VI = Protestant, Mary = Catholic, Elisabeth = Protestant
Elisabeth had to come to a religious settlement
Act of uniformity (1558) = to set down what form the Church of England
would take (e.g. Book of common prayer)
1. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century

• 5 important poets: 1. Thomas More (1478-1535)
2. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
3. Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586)
4. Edmund Spencer (1552-1599)
5. William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

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• 1. Thomas More: 1478-1535

Utopia: an extreme example of a general interest in education
• 2. Sir Thomas Wyatt: 1503-1542

- Diplomat for the king
- Wrote sonnets for the English people based on the Italian Renaissance writers
describe the complexity of feelings
- He introduced the iambic pentameter: offbeat/on beat (5 times)
eg.: They Flee from Me, p.351
- Gave the Petrarchan sonnet a new rhyme scheme and used it in its sonnets
Petrarchan sonnet: abba abba cde cde
Wyatt’s sonnet: abba abba cddc ee
• 3. Sir Philip Sydney: 1554-1586

- A defence of Poesy: most important work of literary criticism in 16th C England
• 4. Edmund Spencer: 1552-1599

- The Faerie Queene & Sonnet 75 the major success in heroic poetry
- He used the new rhyme scheme and experienced with it in sonnets
- Introduced the ‘Spenserian Sonnet’: abab bcbc cdcd ee (couplet)
- Also introduced ‘the Spenserian Stanza’:
9 lines: aba bbc cbc
8 decasyllable lines – iambic pentameter
11 or 12 syllables – iambic pentameter
• 5. William Shakespeare: 1564-1616

- subject = unattainable love + focus on the individual
- models were Dante (Beatrice) and Petrarch (Laura)
- Created his own type of sonnets: Shakespearean sonnet
- Wrote about 154 sonnets (abab cdcd efef gg)
- Also works with a couplet (p. 499), e.g. Sonnet 18
- Can divide the sonnets: 1-17/18-126/127-154
1-17: devoted to a young man
same theme as Spencer: poetry makes a person eternal (but ‘thee’ may be a man:
may be his patron Henry Wriothesley)
18-126: focus on the destructive power of time
127-154: focus on the so-called Dark Lady = an alluring but degrading object of
desire sonnets are different in content as well: a beautiful young man = the
centre of attention/the Dark Lady = a sensuous/promiscuous mistress/the moods
are not confined to that of the despairing Petrarchan lover: they include pride,
delight, melancholy, ...
The Sixteenth Century I :

THOMAS WYATT – THEY FLEE FROM ME, p.351
Analyses of They flee from me:
• I versus they (= females)
• Stanza 1: Line 2: ‘naked foot’ : woman = frail
• Line 3: ‘I’ = seducer
• Stanza 2: the role = reversed: she = seducer
• Stanza 3: line 17: a foreign/un-English way of leaving your loves

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• Ethical problem: what does he have to do with her?

EDMUND SPENSER – SONNET 75, p.437
Analyses of Sonnet 74:
• Line 2: uses alliteration
• Line 5: she = speaking
• Line 5-8: comparison: she will die just as the written name
• Line 9-14: he will make her eternal thanks to his verse

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE – SONNET 18, p.499
Biography:
• 1564-1616
• Born in Stratford-on-Avon as son of a glove maker
• almost certainly attended the Stratford grammar school
reasonable knowledge of Latin
• legends about his youth but no clear facts:
the only clear fact: at age 18: marriage to Anne Hathaway + 3 children:
• 1590-1610: actor, playwright in London till he retired
• long and fruitful connection to ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s men’
who later became ‘The King’s men’
• He made a career with his company leading playwright & shareholder
• 1599: the troupe began to perform in ‘The Globe’
• He wrote his plays for a specific audience/group of actors/theatre:
for the King’s Men
and for the Globe Theatre
did this to make money !
• the theatre = mix of different social classes with different tastes/education:
- 1 penny audience = groundlings: are standing in the pit
- 2 penny audience = seats or standing spots in the galleries (some good/some bad)
- 3 penny audience = seats or standing spots in the galleries (some good/some bad)
different social groups and classes come together for 1 night’s entertainments
have a different background, so differentiation is necessary
WS made plays for everyone = the greatness of Shakespeare
• How did he do this? = exam
1. Characters of all walks of life are represented: aristocrats, servants and the
various classes interact with each other in the plays, there’s substantial interaction
between them
2. He made sure to let higher classes and lower classes mirror each other
same kind of plot developing on 2 different levels
eg.: Twelfth Night: Malvolio & Olivia fall in love Malvolio = aristocrat,
Olivia = servant also Maria & Sir Toby fall in love Maria = servant,
Sir Toby = aristocrat 2 levels come together
3. He used psychology, psychology of the individual person so that the members of
the audience could relate to it identify/empathise with what is going on stage
everyone in the audience has their own view, angle on the play
• Shakespeare is still popular today because of his clever use of psychology, we are all
humans and we can still relate to it

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• Shakespeare was very talented but he didn’t all do it by himself, he had some help and
sometimes plays were attributed to him even though he didn’t write them
• His plays can be divided into 3 periods but qualitative differences between them:
1. Plays of the early 1590s:
= early history plays e.g. Richard the 3rd/ Titus Andronicus
= early comedies e.g. The taming of the shrew
2. Plays of the middle of 1590s:
= romantic comedies e.g. Twelfth night
= history plays e.g. Richard the 2nd/Julius Caesar
3. Plays after 1600:
= tragedies e.g. Hamlet
= problematic comedies e.g. Measure for measure
different from the earlier comedies: more biting in tone
= romances e.g. The Tempest
define a distinct category: a dream-like sense of plot + a poetic style that
veers from the tortured to the ineffably sweet = the romances
The Sixteenth Century II :

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE – TWELFTH NIGHT, p.510-572
Analyses of Twelfth Night:
• twelfth night = 6th of January
• the feast gave way to rituals of inversion (e.g. young boys were crowned for a day as
bishops)
• Can’t just read a play, you have to imagine it will always use the present day
the best drama speaks to a contemporary audience
• Women did not perform: all the women’s roles were written for adolescent boys
the play depends upon the actor’s ability to transform himself into a young woman
who transforms herself in a young man
• A subtly ironic investigation of the ways in which heterosexual couples are
produced out of the murkier crosscurrents of male/female friendships
• The complex tonal shifts: conveyed by pervasive music/constant oscillation
between blank verse and prose
• The characters in the main/romantic plot speak in the aristocratic register of
verse/the comic subplot: proceeds in prose both high/low get a place in the play
• How does the play appeal to a contemporary audience? = 5 reasons
1) Play about identity change:
- Is there such a thing as identity? Are we the same person every day?
- Viola = Cessario dresses up as a man
- Olivia falls in love with ‘him’
- At that time: no female actors, so men played the female parts
- Today could be play about transgender issues or process of changing ourselves
2) Play about relationship between identity and love:
- Do we fall in love with the real person or with the image of the person?
- But is it a problem if we fall in love with the image of a person?
3) Play about servants & masters:
- Malvolio = crucial character he’s scapegoated
he stands out from the other characters
- He embodies the wish for social mobility his wish for it and the unableness of it

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4) Play about power of language:

- Seduction = linguistic game
- love play between Viola and Olivia, they fall in love through language
5) It’s about ideals of behaviour:
- Sir Andrew/Toby = caricatures
- They try to live up to their ‘function’ of aristocrats, but they can’t
- Also idea of vanity (= very recognizable), Malvolio is the vainest of the whole
group of characters
• How did the play appeal to the audience back then?

1) every class = represented
Feste hovers over the entire play + embodies the fact that the social order gets
turned upside down
the fallen aristocrats: Toby & Andrew are going down, Toby falls in love with
and eventually marries Maria, Malvolio goes up + scapegoated: when he
disappears, the normal order returns
2) mirroring:
equivalent on upper and lower class
lower class: Malvolio is tricked by a letter
upper class: Orsino send Olivia to seduce Viola
language is used a s seduction
language in the letter misguides Malvolio and he buys into the illusion
Olivia also uses language to seduce Vilo, Viola buys into the illusion of language
that Olivia/Cesario presents
3) psychology:
people recognize the specific characteristics of each class
illusions dominate the play e.g. Malvolio’s vanity = psychological +
dominates the play because it’s part of one of the plots
4) the characters are from every walk of life:
F Locals/aristocrats Orsino Olivia Antonio

E Stranded/aristocrats Viola/Cesario Sebastian
S Fallen aristocrats Sir Toby Malvolio Sir Andrew
T Locals/lower class Maria/Fabian
E
Downward mobility Toby & Andrew are looking down Toby relationship Maria
Upward mobility Malvolio is looking up, he thinks Olivia is in love with him
Feste hovers over the entire play, he’s also mobile
on the Twelfth Night social society totally changed!
ACT 1: p.512
• = exposition: introduced to the characters and get the plot going
• 1.2: shipwreck + info on Viola
• 1.3: another location
• 1.3, line 48: pun on the word ‘accost’
• 1.4: Viola = dressed up as a man
• 1.5: Malvolio enters the scene → issue of psychology
• 1.5: line 85: Malvolio = vain

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• 1.5: Line 92: Feste: develops

• 1.5: Line 160-161: encounter between Viola/Olivia
• 1.5: Line 244-249: fickle nature of women = game of language
• 1.5: Line 296-299: seems to surrender (we have no control over ourselves) / has
engaged in the game of love
ACT 2:
• 2nd act: Sebastian/Antonio
• 2.2: about the ring
• 2.3: Toby/Andrew having a good time
• 2.3: line 83-87: Malvolio = scolding Toby/Andrew
• 2.4: at Orsino’s court
• 2.4: line 37-38: generalisation of women
• 2.4: line 99-102: no sophisticated language = problems with the ladies
• 2.5: line 82: Malvolio finds the letter + recognizes is ladies hand because he
wants to
= illusion
ACT 3:
• 3rd act: power of Feste
• 3.1: power of Feste + thematizes language
• 3.1: line 135: issue of identity change + masks
• 3.4: Shakespeare ties up all the strings near the end + follows up on the scene
with the letter
• 3.4: line 225-226: he’s not a real fighter
ACT 4:
• 4.1: line 8: ‘nothing that is so, is so’ = special situation
• 4.3: Sebastian enters
ACT 5:
• 5th act: final act:
• 5.1: about confusion: a lot of language in order to solve the confusion
• Line 374: perhaps indicating a sequel
• Line 375: one of the most famous lines of the play: Malvolio = punished/has
to leave
THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 1603 – 1660
Short historic overview:

• 1603: Death of Elizabeth I = end of Elizabethan period after 4 decades!
accession of James I, first Stuart king of England Stuart dynasty
No coups were attempted and at first the people were happy with their new
king, who also had literary inclinations (new translation bible)
But people not happy for long, problems with James (see state & church)

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• 1605: The Gunpowder Plot, failed effort by Catholic extremists to blow up

parliament and the king James I was from Scotland, different church =
friction Catholics
but people also against James’s absolutist monarchy = problem
• 1607: Establishment of 1st permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia
James kept England out of war and encouraged colonialism and economic
growth
England becomes a colonial power with growing manufacturing and trade
sectors ≠ longer only agrarian culture
England also establishes itself as a maritime nation
• 1625: Death of James I, accession of Charles I, his son James failed to unify
Scotland and England into ‘the empire of Britain’ Tensions increased when
Charles succeeded James and this unification ≠ accomplished
married a French princess wanted England to turn back to Catholicism
Protestants were alienated from church, William Laud, Archbishop of
Canterbury, aligned theory of the English Church & Roman Catholicism
Charles troubles with Parliament, tried to rule without Parliament = trouble!
• 1642: Outbreak of the Civil War : war between the king’s forces and armies
loyal to
the House of Commons monarchy vs democracy
civil war – parliament closes theatres, Cavaliers writers suffered
• 1649: End of the Civil War when Charles was decapitated ≠ monarchy
anymore
beginning of Commonwealth and Protectorate, Oliver Cromwell = Lord
Protector, (OC also rules quiet absolutely), protectorate continues until OC dies
in 1660 and no succession rules were legalized, so no successor
1649-1660 = the Interregnum
• 1660: Parliament invites grandson of James I back from exile: Charles II and he
becomes king The Restoration
restoration of monarchy, royal court, Church of England and the professional
theatre
Important!
Literary periods often fail to correlate neatly with the reigns of monarchs and the period 1603-
1660 can seem especially arbitrary. Many of the most important cultural trends in the 17th C
were in the progress of unfolding slowly over several centuries. From a literary point of view,
1603 can seem a particular capricious/fickle dividing line because so many writers were in
their midcareer. Also 1660 is more a political milestone than a literary milestone BUT
recognizing the years 1603-1660 as a period sharpens our awareness of some important
political, intellectual, cultural and stylistic currents that bear directly upon literary production
helps focus attention upon the seismic shift in national consciousness that, in 1649, could
permit the formal trial, conviction and execution of an anointed king at the hands of his
former subjects (Charles I decapitated).
1. State and church 1603 – 1640

After some time the people of England started to have problems with James I, these problems
were visible in the state and the church.
State:

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• James was from Scotland, a country with different customs, different church,
different institutions of government led to problems
• England seemed as a prosperous nation but James was less wealthy than he believed
Crown supposed to fund the government through its own land revenues,
prerogatives, etc instead of using the regular taxation
But the Crown’s income had been declined by the 16th C inflation of land revenue
Meanwhile innovations in military technology and shipbuilding needed more
funding James had to spend more money than Elizabeth had to
But James became notorious for his financial heedlessness: his court was wasteful
and marked by hard drinking, gluttonous feasting and craze for hunting
• Soon James was in debt and unable to convince parliament to bankroll him by raising
taxes led to frustrations between James & the Parliament
• Especially disturbing to many was James despotism, he bestowed high office on good
looking male favourites, who were chosen for their looks and not their good judgment
gave rumours of homosexuality – complex attitude to homosexuality that time
• James had authoritarian theories of kingship, derived power from God, closeness to
divinity, chosen by God to rule deserves his subjects’ unconditional obedience, saw
himself as Augustus Caesar these ideas were incompatible with the English
tradition of ‘mixed’ government, where the power was shared by the monarch, the
House of Lords and the House of Commons
Church:
• In Elizabeth reign ‘religion’ has also been a problem since the English rules seemed it
to be necessary that all their subjects belonged to a single church Elizabeth had
succeeded to create ‘peace’ by searching for a middle ground between traditional and
reformed views everyone was legally required to attend to the church of England
services, the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer avoided theological controversies
and the language of the services was carefully chosen to be open to several
interpretations and acceptable to both Protestant- and Catholic subjects.
• Both the Protestants and Catholics greeted James’ accession enthusiastically since his
mother had been the Catholic Queen Mary (Queen of Scots), while his upbringing had
been in the Reformed Tradition of the Scottish Presbyterian Church .
• At the start of his reign James held a conference at which a variety of views could be
openly debated. Yet the Puritans failed to persuade him and neither the Catholics fared
well under his reign. At first he planned to lift the sanctions against the Catholics, but
hesitated when he realized how entrenched was the opposition to toleration result
was that both the Puritans/reformist and the Catholics were mad at James.
• 1605 a small group of Catholic extremist planned the gunpowder plot in order to
eliminate much of England’s ruling class so England would be open for an invasion of
a foreign Catholic power.
• The Gunpowder Plot failed and James continued his religious politics along the line
of Elizabeth but he did order to make a new translation of the Bible which became the
standard English scripture.
• 1620s House of Commons developed a sense of independence, debating with the
Crown and attempted to use its power to approve taxation as a means of exacting
concessions from the king.
• 1625 James died and Charles I came to the throne, by 1629 he had dissolved
Parliament 3 times in frustration with its recalcitrance and began to rule without
Parliament for more than a decade he tried to bring back his father’s debts and was
quite a frugal king

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• But even a frugal king needed some funds for ambitious government initiatives, but
without approval of Parliament, any taxes Charles imposed were perceived illegal so
even good initiatives were not able to be executed.
• Also religious conflicts intensified under Charles, since his wife was French and a
Catholic and she tried to persuade others to be as well, when he appointed William
Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the English Church, he alienated the
Puritans even further and this unrest would grow and grow until it was culminated in
the Civil War
• Nevertheless the Civil War did have positive effects:
religious toleration was established
secularism was introduced, separation of church and state
also free press ≠ censorship any more
popular sovereignty was established
social contract: political power transferred by the people to magistrate, no more
absolutism, no more power from god to king
representative government, king ≠ rule alone
republicanism became plausible replacement for monarchy: France, US,…
2. Literature and culture 1603 – 1640: Metaphysical poets

th
In the first part of the 17 C, exciting new scientific theories were in the air, but the
older ways of thinking about nature of things had not yet vanished.
• John Donne, Robert Burton an Ben Johnson often invoked an inherited body of
concept even though they were away that these theories were being questioned or
displaced eg: earth centre of universe, the four elements, …
• They still relied on a system of knowledge founded on analogy, order and
hierarchy the order of nature put God above angels, angels above humans, humans
above animals, animals above plants, etc…
the social order placed the king above his nobles, nobles over gentry, gentry over
yeomen, yeomen over common labourers
• Each level had its peculiar function and each was connected to those above and
beneath in a tight network of obligation and dependency thus a monarch was like
God, but also like a father, the head of the family, etc
• But this conceptual system was crumbling and ideas were starting to change
scientific discoveries and contact new world change of worldview
Francis Bacon stimulated truth to be found by empirical means
William Harvey’s discovery that blood circulates shook the views on the function
of blood, casting doubt on the theory of humours
Galileo’s telescope provided evidence for the Copernican astronomical theory
earth ≠ central, stable position in the universe, revolves around the sun
meant that human ≠ centre = enormous impact !!!
• Many writers such as John Donne and John Milton responded with a mixture of
excitement and anxiety to such new ideas visible in their literature
• Since the ideas were changing, the condition of their dissemination
(verspreiding) were also changing, many writers under a patronage because they
couldn’t make a living out of writing still works on manuscripts and reserved for
few social settings but printing of all kinds of literary works was becoming more
common.

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• Until 1640 strict controls over print publication, licensing system had
responsibility but also ownership of the printed work, so authors made no money
first writer to receive money was John Milton with Paradise Lost
• More promising outlet for writers was the commercial theatre provided first
literary market in English history. In James’ reign Shakespeare was at the height of his
powers: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,…
James brought Shakespeare’s company under royal auspices King’s Men
• Not only strict controls on publication but also strict censorship, authors, printers
and acting companies who flouted the censorships laws were subject to imprisonment,
fines or even mutilation
the effects of censorship on writer’s output were therefore far reaching across
literary genres
• Since criticism or satire was so dangerous, political writing was apt to be
oblique and allegorical. Writers used fables, tales of distant lands or long past-
historical events to comment upon temporary issues
Because of all the social changes, also changes in literary tradition:
• Changes in poetic fashion with writers as John Donne, Ben Jonson and George
Herbert
• Some Elizabethan genres like long allegorical or mythological narratives, sonnet
sequences and pastoral poems fell out of favour shift towards ‘new’ poetic
genres: from Elizabethan writers & genres to Jacobean writers & genres
short, concentrated, often witty poems shift towards love elegy and satire, epigram,
verse epistle, meditative religious lyric, conceits3 and country house poems
• Donne, Jonson & Herbert all differed enormously from each other but had an
important influence on the poets of the next generation
• Jonson distinguished himself as an acute observer of urban manners an
established himself as a great English author. He had great influence upon the next
generation of writers and through them into the Restoration and the 18th C
Johnson mentored a group of younger poets known as the Tribe or the Sons of Ben
• The reign of the first 2 Stuart kings also marked the entry of women into
authorship and publication
• 17th C: 2 kinds of poets: metaphysical poets & Cavalier poets4
• John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell were metaphysical poets:
they rebelled against Petrarchism
were against the metric predictability of poems and against the worship of
unattainable mistresses
they inserted more realism, more sexual realism and interest in retrospective
psychological analyses, contrary to a time where religion was everywhere
tension sex & religion
• Ben Johnson and Robert Herrick were Cavalier poets, royalists writers who
would
live in the second period of the early 17th century
3
Conceit = a far fetched metaphor, eg.: Richard Crashaw describes Mary Magdalena’s eyes as ‘portable oceans’
is an over the top metaphor
4
Kenmerken metaphysical poets: relatief korte vormen, conceits, strong lines, voortdurend appel
aan het intellect, filosofische en theologische thema's, conversatietoon
Kenmerken Cavalier poets: Much of their poetry is light in style, and generally secular in subject.

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3. Literature and culture 1640 – 1660: Cavalier poets

• The Civil War was disastrous for theatre, in 1642 closure of theatres and one of
Parliament’s first acts was to abolish public plays and sports
• As the king’s government collapsed so disintegrated the patronage relationships
that writers profited and many leading poets were loyal royalists, or Cavaliers, who
suffered during the war years they supported King Charles I
• During the 1640-50s the Cavaliers, facing defeat, wrote movingly of the
relationships between love and honor, of fidelity under duress, of like-minded friend
sustaining one another in a hostile environment
• They presented themselves as amateurs, writing verse in the midst of a life
devoted to more important matters: war, love, the king’s service, the endurance of loss
experienced with form and content, content more frankly
eg: more frankly about sexuality
• The Cavaliers poets often deliberately cultivated a strange, self-deprecating
(zelfspot) poetic persona Important cavaliers poets: Ben Johnson & Robert
Herrick
• Writers as John Milton and Andrew Marvell were no Cavaliers but supported
the Parliament, they were republicans and profited to make their opinions clear now
there was no more king
• Some prose works by royalists have become classics, such as Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan promotes any kind of government as long as it has peace as its main goal
and social contract (all citizens willing to give power to 1 sovereign)
Conclusion: 17th C prose, poetry and drama is interesting because of its fusing
intellectual power, emotional passion and extraordinary linguistic artfulness
• 17 C poetry = variety of topics and modes: highly erotic celebrations of sexual
th
desire, passionate declarations of faith and doubt, lavishly embroidered paeans to

friends and benefactors and though-minded assessments of social and political
institutions
• 17th C drama = was at its height of its power, situating characters of unprecedented
complexity in plays, sometimes satiric or achingly moving
• 17 C prose = highly flexible instrument, suited for informal essays, scientific
th
treatises, religious meditation, (auto) biography,…

• Literary forms evolve for the representation of the self: monologues, memoirs,
biographies eg.: in which the author takes himself as example
• Also have in John Milton an epic poet who took the role of inspired prophet,
envisioning a world created by God but shaped by human choice and imagination
Early Seventeenth Century I :

JOHN DONNE –THE SUN RISING, p.606
Biography:
• 1572-1631
• Roman Catholic Catholics prosecuted, so at that time ≠ opportunities
• Converted to the Church of England, became dean in St. Paul’s
• Very important sermons, songs
• Songs and sonnets published posthumously
• Habit of writing in manuscript, work not intented for the mass but for the particular,
educated people sophisticated poetry (more polished than Shakespeare)
• Witty poetry, paradoxes, rhyme ≠ important, verse ≠important, melody ≠ important

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Analyses of The Sun Rising, p. 606:

• Sun = busy old fool who calls upon us: the poet and his lover why is the sun
interrupting them?
• Sun stands for light and time
• Why think the beams are strong? If I close my eyes, the sun is gone but why
doesn’t he close his eyes? then he can’t see his lover
• Whether both th’Indias of spice and mine he’s talking about her breasts
• My love is my whole world she’s all the world to him proved in the 3rd stanza:
the sun shines on us and we are everywhere = he allows the sun in his room he thinks,
but actually other way around men is not the universe, the sun is the centre of the
universe (influence of the new worldviews of that time)
• Tis all in pieces all coherence is gone, old ideas of existence are proved worng by
all the new scientific discoveries at that time it’s a serious poem although its
presented lightly
Form of the poem:

• 3 stanzas, but all different metres makes it a restless poem
• Also the rhyme scheme is irregular restlessness
• To give the feeling of that age, but also against the Petrarchan predictability
• Chiasmus in the poem: she states
all = the bed, he & his lover is the
princes I world
• Because he sees himself and his love as the world, the style is playful arrogance and is
very subtly created in the poem

GEORGE HERBERT – EASTER WINGS, p.661
Analyses of Easter Wings:
• In the middle = God = constant
• I is constand as long as it rhymes with God
Form of the poem:

• Emblem poem: use of images and text to describe an idea or principle
• Special scheme of stressed syllables: 5,4,3,2,1 and then 1,2,3,4,5
• Rhyme scheme: ababa cdcec fbgbg chchc

ANDREW MARVELL – TO HIS COY MISTRESS, p.677-678
Analyses of To His Coy mistress:
• 3 parts part 1: vocabulary = more exotic
part 2: vocabulary = more physical, rather revolting
• 1 part = longest because it’s about time
st
• Admire her for ages

• Line 1 an ‘if then’ construction but undermined by the subjunctive ‘had we’
• Lines 20-32 = most powerful part, faster, more pressured time is running out
winged chariot hurrying near quite negative because if no more time, death is near
and ends the time they have together
• 3rd part = message is to enjoy the time they have together

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Early Seventeenth Century II :

JOHN MILTON – PARADISE LOST, book 1: lines 1-26 & 752-798, p. 725, 742
book 10: lines 720-765, p. 840
With Milton it’s important to know his life, know his historical context to understand his
poetry, especially when reading Paradise Lost
Biography:
• 1608-1674
• Born into a bourgeois, cultured, Protestant family
• Had private tutors at home and also attended one of the finest schools in the land, St.
Paul’s Milton very grateful to his father for his education, he was never forced to
work and always received the best education possible
• Good education in languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch
he would write great poems in Latin
• In 1625 entered College in Cambridge, graduated in 1629 and was made Master of
Arts 3 years later
• But he was disappointed inn his university education he entered university with
serious intention of taking orders in the Church of England, but by his fellow-students,
‘clergymen-to be’ and the lack of reformation in the church under William Laud, he
abandoned this idea of vocation
• Milton came to believe he was destined to serve his language, his country and his God
as a poet
• He wrote some of the century’s best Latin poems, but in 1628 announced his
determination to glorify England and the English language in poetry
• After university he undertook a 6-year program of self-directed reading in ancient and
modern theology, philosophy, history, science, politics and literature did this in
preparation for his poetic career, had big influence
• After these years of private study he went on a 15-month grand-tour of France, Italy
and Switzerland
• 1641: came back to the UK and married Mary Powell, a woman of 17, while his was
33 inexperienced with woman and idealistic about marriage: union of minds and
spirits Mary left him, troublesome marriage
• 1643-1645: were years in which he wrote tracts about divorce and tracts vigourously
advocating divorce on the grounds of incompatibility and with the right to remarry
unheard at the time!
• These tracts could not be licensed and were denounced in Parliament Milton wrote
Areopagitica in 1644 as a response: it’s an impassioned defence for free press and the
free commerce in ideas reaction to a Parliament that was determined to restore
effective censorship
• In 1649 after King Charles I was executed, Milton became Latin Secretary to the
Commonwealth Government in (1649-53) and to Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in
1654-58
• During these years Milton suffered a series of agonizing tragedies:
1645 Mary returned to him but died in childbirth in 1652, leaving 4 children, of
which the only son died a few months later
That same year Milton became totally blind
1656 Milton remarried but his new wife died 2 years later along with their infant
daughter
• 1645-1656 Milton had little time for poetry, but his few sonnets revolutionized the
genre, overlaying the Petrarchan metrical structure with an urgent rhetorical voice and

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using small sonnet forms, hitherto confined mainly to matters of love, for new grand
subjects
• OC’s death in 1685 led to chaos and growing belief that a restored Stuart Monarchy
was inevitable Milton held out against that tide, and was from his early till his last
days a fierce Republic defender of the ‘Good Old Cause’ of the Revolution, he
wanted broad toleration, church disestablishment, republican government and was
among the first to attack the power of the bishops
• Milton published these ideas and was forced to go into hiding for several months, also
had to go to prison but was pardoned thanks to the help of Andrew Marvell
• He lived his last years in reduced circumstances, plagued by ever more serious attacks
of gout and grateful for the domestic comforts provided by his 3rd wife whom he
married in 1663 (age 55) and who out lived him
How his life influenced his literary career:

• As young man he proclaimed himself the future author of a great English epic
he promised a poem devoted to the glory of the nation with reference to king
Arthur or some other ancient hero.
• When Milton finally published his epic 30 years later, readers found a poem about the
Fall of Satan and humankind, set in Heaven, Hell and the Garden of Eden, in which
traditional heroism is disintegrated and England not once mentioned.
• What lay between the youthful promise and the eventual fulfilment was a career
marked by private tragedy and public controversy
• In his poems and prose Milton often explores or alludes to crisis in his own life:
worries about fleeting time, the choice of vocation, early death, painful
disappointment in marriage, catastrophe of blindness, manifesting in this the 17th C
concern with the self
• Milton also deeply concerned with ‘great questions’ and political crises of his times
questions like: What should be the relationship between Church and state?
or What should/is the ultimate source of political power?
• It is impossible to treat Milton’s career separately from the history of England in his
lifetime, not only because of his active involvement in affairs of church and state, but
also because many of his works helped construct some basic Western institutions,
concepts an attitudes that were taking on modern form in his lifetime:
eg: companionate marriage, the new science and the new astronomy, freedom of press,
religious liberty and toleration, republicanism and more.
• Milton saw himself as the prophetic bard, spokesman of the nation and often signed
himself with ‘John Milton, Englishman’
• In conditions such as dismayed by the defeat of his political and religious cause,
totally blind and often ill, threatened by the horrific plague of 1665 and the Great Fire
of 1666, and entirely dependent on friends to transcribe his dictation, he completed his
great epic poem: Paradise Lost (1667-74)
• In his final years and final poems Milton sought to educate his readers in moral and
political wisdom and virtue. Only through such inner transformation, Milton now
firmly believed men and women would come to value en perhaps reclaim, the
intellectual, religious and political freedom he so vigorously promoted in his prose and
poems
Analyses of Paradise Lost:

• 1667: 1 edition
st
10 books

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• 1674: 2nd edition 12 books, split into chapters to have 12 books, he wanted 12
books to live up to the example of Virgil, he also added summaries and arguments
• It offers a sweeping imaginative vision of Hell, Chaos, Heaven, prelapsarian life in
Eden, the power of the devil’s political rhetoric, the psychology of Satan, Adam and
Eve and the high drama of the Fall and its aftermath
• Book I:
- p. 726, line 6: muse = he calls upon a muse, just like the ancient writers did
- p. 726, line 27 and further: about Satan’s disobedience and revolt, his revolt to be
above his peers, he felt better, Satan is kicked out of Heaven with his crew and
spends 10 days on lake of fire and then goes to hell on p.740
- p. 740, line 651: there went a fame = rumour is that God is creating a new generation
of man, Satan wants to go and check it out, he calls a council in the building of
Pandemonium on p.742
- p. 742, line 752: description of Satan’s council of Pandemonium Pandemonium

was a new word created by Milton and was an inversion of Pantheon
- p. 743, line 767-777: Pandemonium is described by the image of a beehive
= a metaphor but why compare the devil to the bees? bees have a queen bee
and is again a reference to the monarchy, Milton is not satisfied with the monarchy
and uses the metaphor of the beehive as an indirect criticism on the monarchy
monarchy = the devil
- p. 743, line 778: Earth’s giants sons, devils seemed to be giants, but shrink and are
now tiny as dwarfs just like the power is now bounded by the Parliament after the
restoration, so the giants are now dwarfs = again indirect message
• Book X:
- p. 840, lines 700-720 is summary of what happened in the previous 9 books, and
now in book X the judgement has happened
- p.840, lines 720: Adam addresses God so that he would be forgiven
- p. 841, lines 743: Did I request thee, Maker from my clay = also a line used by
Marry Shelley in her Frankenstein
- p. 841, lines 743-748: for modernists like Beckett, Satan was the true hero, they
read it differently than that Milton had intended
Form of the poem:

• Why is Paradise Lost so important? = unconventional form
he used pentameters but without rhyme, did this to justify ways of God to man =
focus of the poem
content is also innovative because he reconceives the epic genre and epic heroism,
choosing as protagonists a domestic couple rather than martial heroes, no military
glory but a domestic couple and patience
• This neglect of rhyme can be taken for a defect and may seem vulgar to readers but it’s
rather to be seen as an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to
heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming
in (what was to Milton) a barbarous age they came up with rhyme to hide a bad
metre he’s going to neglect rhyme on purpose to make a statement he’s
revolutionary no more rhyme = no more bondage bondage under a king a
monarch he’s breaking free from rhyme, he’s braking free from the king

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RESTORATION & 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE 1660 – 1785

The Restoration starts when Charles II is restored to the English throne, in 1699-1989 The
Glorious Revolution takes place disposition of James II and William of Orange comes to
the throne. In 1707 The Acts of Union unite Scotland & England and Great Britain is
established
Overview:
• The canon = extensive list of books/texts that functions as Literature for a specific
group of people, in a specific place/time
= result of number of mechanisms ≠ chosen = always developing
• Current take of the canon comes with a variety of concerns:
1. Try to insert as many female authors as possible
2. try to embody an interest in multiculturalism
these 2 concerns come together in Oroonoko
• Great Britain: became a single nation after 1707 Act of Union joined Scotland to
England and Wales.
• After the prolonged civil strife: change came most dramatically to cities absorbed
much of the national population that nearly doubled to 10 million
• Theatres reopened reflecting/stimulating this: an expanded assortment of printed
works to interest literate women and men (included most of the middle classes)
1. Religion and politics during the Restoration and the 18th Century
• Restoration of 1660: brought hope to a divided nation + people were eager to
belief that the king would bring order and law/spirit of mildness
• Church also established Charles was willing to pardon many former enemies
• 1673: Test Act: required all holders of civil/military offices to take the sacrament
in an Anglican church + to deny belief in transubstantiation
Protestant Dissenters/Roman Catholics: largely excluded from public life
Catholics: regarded as potential traitors and thought to have started the Great Fire
that destroyed much of London in 1666
• Still constitutional issues that had divided Charles I and parliament
• 1678: the report of the Popish Plot = Catholics would rise and destroy protestant
foes terrified London
Charles was forced to exclude his Catholic brother James from succession to the
throne
Charles defeated this Exclusion Bill by dissolving Parliament
• The Tories supported the king:
King was supported by the landed gentry and country clergy
conservative values
• The Crown and Anglican church are the pillars of social and political stability.

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rejected the rising influence of money.

• Whigs supported parliament:
progressive and diverse
supported by powerful nobles (jealous to the powers of the Crown), merchants,
low-church clergy, the Dissenters.
Believed in their policies of toleration and the support of commerce
• However neither party could live with James II
• 1685: James II came to the throne:
claimed the right to make his own laws
suspended the Test Act
began to fill the army/government with fellow Catholics
• 1688: birth of a son in: brought matters to a head confronted the nation with
the possibility of a Catholic dynasty
• William of Orange & Mary = James’s Protestant daughter marched towards
London
• James fled to permanent exile in France, but more than half a century: the
Jacobites in Scotland supported the Stuarts as the legitimate rulers of Britain last
rising in 1745
• 1688: Glorious Revolution: William & Mary ascended the throne
• 1689: Bill of Rights: revoked James’s actions: limited the powers of the
Crown/reaffirmed the supremacy of parliament/guaranteed some individual rights
• 1701: Act of Settlement: Sophia and descendants put in the line for the throne
• After the Glorious Revolution: both Tories and Whigs survived
Tories defined themselves as traditional
Whigs: supported the new ‘moneyed’ interest
• 1702-1713: war of the Spanish succession: England defeated France/Spain
England got asciento = contract to supply slaves to the Spanish empire
• 1756-1763: 7-years-war: fought between Britain/France for the control of
Canada
Britain = becoming an empire
• 18th C.: monarchy = marked by the 3 Georges
George I
George II little interest in England monarchy = dwindling prime minister
becomes more important e.g. Robert Walpole
George III: long reign, dominated by 2 great concerns:
1) the emergence of Britain as a colonial power
2) the cry for a new social order (based on liberty/radical reform)
2. Context of ideas during the Restoration and the 18th Century

• The most powerful writing after 1660 exposed the divisions in the nation’s
thinking derived from the tumult of earlier decades
• The possibility of a great Christian commonwealth receded
Paradise Lost by John Milton/Pilgrim’s process by John Bunyan
• Opposite to that: an aristocratic culture (led by Charles II himself) celebrated
pleasure/the right of the elite to behave extravagantly
• 1660: Charles authorized 2 new companies of actors
the King’s players
the Duke’s players)

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• Scientific revolution: 2 wonderful inventions:

telescope
microscope
• Also other evolutions going on:
Naturalistic arguments for absolutism
a distrust of human capacities = compatible with religious faith
this affected religious attitudes: natural phislosophy = implied God’s hand in the
design of the universe as a watch implied a watch maker = deism
• Encounters with foreign societies in Africa, America and the far East:
enlarged European’s understanding of human norms as well
e.g. Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift
• Battle of the books erupted between champions of ancient & modern learning
empiricism = the dominant intellectual attitude of the age
all knowledge = derived from experience/our senses
e.g: Francis Bacon/David Hume/John Locke
• But also scepticism = our senses do not represent the world accurately
reliable knowledge = impossible to obtain
e.g. Michel de Montaigne
• Powerful feminism: arguing for the establishment of women’s educational
institutions dissolving the power that husbands legally had over their wives
thinkers (male/female) began to advocate improving women’s education as part of
a wider commitment to enhancing/extending sociability
• New passions of that age: charity & curiosity e.g. Watt’s steam engine
• New forms of religious devotion: e.g. Methodism
sentimentalism/evangelicalism pursuits of wealth and luxury: placed a new
importance on individuals = gratification of their tastes, ambitions and yearning
for personal encounters with each other or a personal God
the writing of letters/keeping of diaries/the novel = example of the growing
importance of the individual life
• Thomas Hobbes (human being is not good by nature) versus sentimentalism
(follows a doctrine of natural goodness)
• Conclusion: many issues of politics and law: revolve around rights not
traditions!
2. Conditions of literary production Restoration and the 18th Century

• Publishing boomed as never before
• 1662: the new Printing Act a loosening of legal restraints on printing
• 1737: the Stage Licensing Act = reduced the number of London theatres to 2
• But nevertheless this age has a freedom allowing the building of an exemplary
version of the public sphere = a cultural arena that is free from direct government
control, consisting of published matters and the public venues such as coffeehouses,...
• After 1695: the legal status of printed matter became ambiguous + in 1710: the
1st copyright law in British history not tied to government approval of works’ contents
• 1712: Stamp Act: put a tax on all newspapers/advertisements/....: all printed
matter had to carry the stamp indicating the taxes had been paid
• The 1st true professional class of authors, the lower echelon was called Grub
Street
a new practice = publication by subscription created the century’s most spectacular
authorial fortunes

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the story of virtually every woman author in the period is one of self-education and
courage and extraordinary initiative (some of the most considerable achievements
by female authors came in the novel)
• Limits on readership:
1) illiteracy: in 1600 just 25% of adult men could read, 1800 between 60 and 70%
2) cost: few of the labouring classes would have disposable income to buy literature
circulating libraries partly solved the problem
3. Literary principles during the Restoration and the 18th Century

• Literature between 1660-1785: divided in 3 periods:
1) extended to the death of Dryden in 1700
= effort to bring new refinement
2) ending with the deaths of Pope & Swift in 1744-1745
= effort to extend to a wider circle of readers through sarcasm
• 3) concluded with the death of Johnson in 1784
= confronts the old principles with new revolutionary ideas
• The desire for an elegant simplicity: Augustans, tried to imitate the Ancients
• Poets: mostly tried to see/represent nature + studied the ancients
• Poem = a wok planned in of the classical genres: e.g. epic/tragedy/comedy,... + to
choose the right language/style/tone/rhetorical figures
• The test of a poet’s true mettle = language: many poets did employ a special language
characterized by personification and versification
• Most popular style: heroic couplet & blank verse
• 1st time: tension between high/low art
4. Restoration literature
• Prose = clearly indicated a desire to reach a new audience but kept its ties to an
aristocratic heroic ideal ideals lived on in French prose romances/Oroonoko
• Drama: comedy! eg.: comedies of manner
5. Eighteenth Century literature

• Swift = cesura: will still rely on the muse for inspiration but will hammer on
originality comes from within
• Battle of the books: battle between the ancients/modernists
bee = ancients who rely on the muse, a bee finds its nourishment elsewhere
spider = modernists who want to do it alone, a spider builds its web from within
• Swift: claims to be an ancient because at least he admits that they get their inspiration
elsewhere whereas the modernists won’t admit that
• A new/brilliant group of writers emerged e.g. Siwft, Pope, Addison...
consolidate/popularize the social graces of the previous age
birth of the modern novel: Daniel Defoe
• Theatre also began to change its themes and effects appeal to a wider audience
eg.= sentimental, weeping = new pleasure
• Readers also craved less crowded works and longed for more meditative works
6. The emergence of new literary themes and modes during Restoration and
the 18th Century
• Great prose dominated the age!
until the 1740s poetry tended to set the standards of literature

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• The growth of new kinds of prose took the initiative away from verse
• Novel: united availability to the common reader + seriousness of artistic purpose
eg:. Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding
• Invention of the Gothic novel: due to a medieval revival
eg.: Horace Walpole - Castle of Otranto
eg.: Matthew Lewis - The Monk
Anne Radcliffe - The Mysteries of Udolpho
William Godwin - Caleb Williams
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
• Laurence Sterne: the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy
abandons clock time for psychological time
• Concern of the novel towards the end of the 18th C = depictions of characters’
intimate feelings dominated the tradition of domestic fiction (e.g. Austen, Scott)
7. Continuity and revolution during Restoration and the 18th Century

• History of 18th C. Literature :
1st composed by the Rmtc poets
later the novel became the most important part of literature
• Restoration/ 18th C. Literature: passed on a set of unresolved problems
• Age of Enlightenment also held on the older beliefs/customs
• Age of population explosion = also age of increased individualism
• Age that developed the slave trade = also age of abolitionist movement
• The 18th Century = the last classical age = 1st modern age!
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century I :

APHRA BEHN – OROONOKO, fragment, p.927-954
Biography:
• 1640-1689
• Not much known of her life: hard facts are elusive (e.g. we don’t know where she
grew up, no record of her birth/family name,...)
• Many references to nuns/convents: perhaps she has been raised as a Catholic educated
woman + educated in a convent abroad
• She was a woman writer who boldly signed her plays and talked back to the critics
• In a dozen years: turned out at least as many plays/she turned to field of emerging
prose
• She was a professional writer money !
• 1664: was in Surinam: shows up in the circumstantial detail in Oroonoko
• Travelled to the low countries on a spying mission for king Charles the 2nd
was in need of payment from the king and so turned to writing plays for a living
• 1682: was placed under arrest for abusive reflections on the king’s illegitimate son
• Her presence in the canon:
1) she became professional female writer, wrote for money
she was a model for other female writers eg.: Woolf
2) Her stories are partially situated in Surinam, she visited the country, but Oroonoko
was written much later

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3) Oroonoko was important for ‘prose-narrative’

it was one of the 1st stepping stones to that genre: memoir, travel narrative and
romance, biography all combined in Oronooko creates new genre
4) Oroonoko became very popular: people loved adventures, romance and exoticism
1688: expandism interest in new cultures colonialism
• She combines the attraction of 3 older forms in this novel:
1) presents the work as a memoire = a personal account of what she has heard and
seen
2) it’s a travel narrative in 3 parts:
turns west to a new world
then east to Africa and then
finally west again
3) it’s Oroonoko’s biography
Summary of the story:

• Oroonoko is a relatively short novel whose full title is Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave.
The novel concerns Oroonoko, the grandson of an African king, who falls in love with
Imoinda, the daughter of that king's top general.
• The king, too, falls in love with Imoinda. He gives Imoinda the sacred veil, thus
commanding that she become one of his wives. After unwillingly spending time in the
king's harem (the Otan), Imoinda and Oroonoko plan a tryst with the help of the
sympathetic Onahal and Aboan. However, they are discovered, and because of her
choice, the king has Imoinda sold as a slave. Oroonoko is then tricked and captured by
an evil English slaver captain. Both Imoinda and Oroonoko are carried to Surinam, at
that time an English colony based on sugarcane plantations, in the West Indies. The
two lovers are reunited there, under the new Christian names of Caesar and Clemene,
even though Imoinda's beauty has attracted the unwanted desires of the English
deputy-governor, Byam.
• Oroonoko organizes a slave revolt. The slaves are hunted down by the military forces
and compelled to surrender on Byam's promise of amnesty. However, when the slaves
surrender, Oroonoko is whipped. To avenge his honor, and to express his natural
worth, Oroonoko decides to kill Byam. But to protect Imoinda from violation and
subjugation after his death, he decides to kill her. The two lovers discuss the plan, and
Imoinda willingly agrees. Oroonoko's love forbids him from killing his dear one and
compels him to protect her, but when he stabs her, she dies with a smile on her face.
Oroonoko is found mourning by her body and is kept from killing himself, only to be
publicly executed. During his death by dismemberment, Oroonoko calmly smokes a
pipe and stoically withstands all the pain without crying out.
• The novel is written in a mixture of first and third person, as the narrator relates
actions in Africa and portrays herself as a witness of the actions that take place in
Surinam. In the novel, the narrator presents herself as a lady who has come to Surinam
with her unnamed father, a man scheduled to be the new deputy-governor of the
colony. He, however, dies on the voyage from England. The narrator and her family
are put up in the finest house in the settlement, in accord with their station, and the
narrator's experiences of meeting the indigenous peoples and slaves are intermixed

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with the main plot of the love of Oroonoko and Imoinda. At the conclusion of the love
story, the narrator leaves Surinam for London.
Analyses of Oroonoko:
• Oroonoko = the royal slave
• The role of the author is ambiguous: she lacks the power to save Oroonoko and might
even be viewed as implicated in his downfall/only as a writer can she preserve the
hero in her work
• enlisted in the long battle against slave trade
• Conventions of long prose narratives:
• Behn says that the book = a factual report but there are already 24 years between when
she was in Surinam and when she wrote the book
• p. 930: more info about the slaves: narrator develops a degree of respect for Oroonoko
but he remains a slave
• p. 931: solves the problem by telling that Oroonoko is not a usual slave / he is a prince
among men + also gives us a clue as to why he is so interesting: already had a
lot of contact with the Western people (he has been civilized)
has to make it explicit for interpretation
• Close look: 1st paragraph: ‘I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this royal
slave,...’ direct address
• 2nd paragraph: tries to convince that it is not fantasy = the framework of the memoire
• 4th paragraph: ‘ just before ‘em, as Adam and Eve did the fig leaves’: imposition of
the Western culture
• 8th paragraph: Oroonoko = one of the slaves who are transported from Africa to
America (Surinam) = the middle passage
Form of the story:

• Long prose narrative: communicative framework:
reader is directly addressed either to empathize of take a distance
eg.: p. 927
• Distinction between facts & fiction:
it’s presented a s a fact, not as fiction
doesn’t pretend to entertain
without addition of invention
it’s a factual memoir = framework framework = memoir
eg.: p. 327-928
• According to Hermans the text was implied to entertain, not be boring
• There are three significant pieces to the narrative, which does not flow in a strictly
biographical manner:
1. The novel opens with a statement of veracity, where the author claims to be
writing no fiction and no pedantic history.
She claims to be an eyewitness and to be writing without any embellishment or
theme, relying solely upon reality.
What follows is a description of Surinam itself and the South American Indians
there.
She regards the locals as simple and living in a golden age (the presence of gold
in the land being indicative of the epoch of the people themselves).
It is only afterwards that the narrator provides the history of Oroonoko himself
and the intrigues of both his grandfather and the slave captain, the captivity of
Imoinda, and his own betrayal.

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2. The next section is in the narrator's present

Oroonoko and Imoinda are reunited, and Oroonoko and Imoinda meet the
narrator and Trefry.
3. The third section contains Oroonoko's rebellion and its aftermath.
• There’s an implied author that is the source for the norms and the values in the text
• The implied author = result of the projection on the part of the reader
17th C audience ≠distinction between author/narrator
• so Aphra Behn was also seen as the narrator instead of hust the author
• Story is not told chronologically:
beginning starts with a lot of info
norms & values are displayed Western Christian life is imposed on them
eg.: p. 928-929
The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century II :

JONATHAN SWIFT – A MODEST PROPOSAL, p.1114-119
Biography:
• 1667-1745
• Born in Dublin of English parents (born posthumously)
• Educated at Kilkenny School and Trinity college thanks to an uncle
• Troubles that followed abdication + subsequent invasion of Ireland
drove him to England
• 1689-1699: member of the household of Sir William Temple (= kinsman)
read widely + reluctantly chose the church as a career
took orders + discovered his gifts as satirist
• 1696/1697: wrote ‘A tale of the tub’ and ’The battle of the books’ = powerful satires
on corruptions in religion/learning
• At the age of 32: returns to Ireland as chaplain to the lord Justice
• Devoted his talents to politics & religion: most of his works were written to
further a specific cause
• First followed the Whigs but later turned to the Tories (because Whigs wanted to
repeal the Test Act)
• He was welcomed by the Tories , became the most brilliant political journalist of the
day (was editor of the party organ: the Examiner)
• 1713: became dean of St. Patrick’s cathedral
• 1724: leader of Irish resistance to English oppression
• Wrote under the pseudonym M.B. Drapier: published series of public letters
• Became venerated as a national hero
• Suffered from Ménière’s disease affects the inner ear: causing dizziness, nausea and
deafness
• After 1739: the disease cut him off from his duties: social life dwindled
• Had a gift for friendship (e.g. Pope/Addison/Lord Bolingbroke/...)
• Didn’t believe in the fact that human nature is essentially good + believed that
human beings were capable of reason but constantly refusing to live up to their
capabilities

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• Was a master of prose: defined a good style being clear, simple and concrete diction:
uncomplicated syntax/ economy and conciseness of language
also shows in his poetry = also satiric in purpose but not without moments of
comedy and light-heartedness
• Definition of satire: = a sort of glass wherein beholders generally discover
everybody’s face but their own (so are not offended)
Analyses of A modest Proposal:

• Paragraph 1: ‘great town’ = Dublin
• Paragraph 3: explains the ambition of Swift + states that man is no animal rationale
• Paragraph 6: has shown how bad the situation is right now = directed to the ‘absentee
landlords’
live in England and never come to Ireland, they just collect their money
• Paragraph 17/18/19: digression
• Paragraph 21: starts enumerating all the advantages
• Paragraph 29: ‘other proposals’ = the real proposals he wants to make/that should be
done (= serious)
• Paragraph 30: is almost exactly the same as the opening sentence (putting it in
between brackets = irony)
• Paragraph 33: underlines the fact that this is indeed an honest proposal)
THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 1785 – 1830
Overview:
• Name given later to the period writers didn’t see themselves as Romantics, just
wanted to distinguish themselves from the previous period
• Concept of Rmtc: derived from the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats
• Age before Rmtc = the Age of Enlightenment the age of reason
• Rmtc is a counter reaction to the enlightenment
reaction against the reason more sensibility
Immanuel Kant: ‘Sapere Aude’ dare to know, understand your own reason
troublesome time due to the tension between the old and the new
• 2 important revolutions:
1. American Revolution (1776)
2. French Revolution (1789)
• American Revolution grew out of the American Revolution War
America wanted to break with the mother county
• Declaration of independence: Thomas Jefferson
all man = equal same rights pursuit of happiness
• 1789 year of George Washington and the French Revolution
• 14th of July: storming of the Bastille and Declaration of the rights of men:
varied reactions in Britain toward the French Revolution:
mainly positive reactions: Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, …
later less radical support of the French Revolution and a more nuanced support
• Socio-economic changes:

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First movement of women: e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the rights of

woman yet the same rights as men
women: not entitled to education Wollstonecraft put emphasis on education,
but was still very careful in uttering her critique
• Great Britain lost US, but still had India
most wealthy people were industrialists steam engine
machine vs hand labour
lot of people of the land moved to the city for work opportunities
resulted in Mill Towns, people went to live there
1830 Reform Bill = redistribution of power less power in the land more
power to the city
policy of non-interference – Smith – laissez faire
prevented from unionizing
0. Art in the Romantic period

• previous birth of the novel, more important in the Victorian Age
• also poetry was very important
• the number of people that could read grew: women, working classes Great Britain
didn’t know what to do with this
• the Romantic Age also famous for its essays
• the familiar essay dealt with a range of topics
• romantic about the assay was that it was written like the thought of the poet, very
personal
1. Poetry in the Romantic period

• 1st generation romanticists = Blake, Wordsworth & Coleridge
• 2nd generation romanticists = Byron, Shelley & Keats the canon
not until the 20th C. that they were grouped together
didn’t see themselves as a group (only Wordsworth & Coleridge)
but all of them are sensitive about the spirit of the age
• esp. Wordsworth was sensitive preface to Lyrical Ballads
• Lyrical Ballads: 1798: anonymous publication, reprinted later in full form
distances itself from the former rules concerning poetry
no more rules for poetry, people had to be able to relate to it
it should be about everyday reality and nature
the poet should look at it with a fresh pair of eyes
ordinary becomes extra-ordinary
• Source of the poetry according to Wordsworth = poet himself:
inspiration comes from within + poet takes step back and contemplates about those
feelings
so the source lies not in outside of the poet, like a muse but in the psychology and
emotions of the individual poet
lyric becomes a major Rmtc form
• Wordsworth a very sensitive poet and thought it his task to share this sensitivity with the
common people
• Subject: common, everyday people,
• Language: easy accessible, everyday language

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• Poetry is personal reflections, recollections of the autobiographies of the age

lot of poetry was very personal
• New = the ‘I person’ in poetry
• Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge &Shelley = the poet-prophet
• Wordsworth (nature) & Blake (supernatural) see themselves as elevated bards
• Wordsworth = nature & how it’s experienced by the poet
• Coleridge = interest in the supernatural, very idealistic
2. Prose & Fiction in the Romantic period

• History books, philosophy, economic books, reviews, pamphlets & essays
• Familiar essay: various range of topics + the character of the essayist is also very
important personal take on a number of things
• Gothic fiction: an escapist genre, get away from from reality
distant regions, distant pasts, passions,…
uncanny setting ≠ present day reality
gothic fiction was very popular: Anne Radcliff
• Novels of history (Scot)
• Novels of manner and concerned with women (Austen)
3. Drama in the Romantic period

• mainly used for entertainment (strict political governing)
• Not really that interesting for poets
The Romantic period I:

WILLIAM BLAKE– THE TYGER, p.1420-1421
Biography:
• 1757-1827
• Corporeal life = simple, limited, unadventurous
• Age 14: entered apprenticeship with engraver: learned by drawing sketches of
historical monuments and began reading/trying his hand at poetry
• Age 24: married Catherine Boucher = illiterate: perfect wife for a genius
• 1800 moved to Felpham for the wealth of a patronage
• 1803 event that left permanent mark: he was accused of uttering sedition = an
hanging offense/was acquitted but trial haunted him
soldiers became demonic characters who would play an important role in Jerusalem
complicated the symbolic and allusive style he used for veiling his opinions in his
poems
• Located sources of poetic inspiration in archaic/native tradition (ended 16th C), during
his time: future of British culture = recovering archaeological and literary past
‘Poetical sketches’ = only book according to the customary methods
• 1788: began experimenting with relief etching: ‘illuminated printing’
Produced very few copies of his books
• His books and paintings express a relationship
Blake: ‘contrary states of the human soul’
• 1790s ardent supporter of the French revolution, according to him the revolution =
purifying violence that portended the imminent redemption of humanity (cf.
Wordsworth/Coleridge)
• 1795-1820: prophetic books e.g. The four Zoas = entire new mythology
• Mythmaking: see Norton pupil 1408-1409
• In his 60s: devoted himself to pictorial art

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• At the time of his death: not famous at all

Pre-Raphaelites: became admirers
20th C: seen as a unique artist/poet
• Extremely idealistic poet
• Tried to live of his art e.g. engraver/painter
• Wrote: The marriage of heaven and hell = reaction to Milton’s Paradise Lost
Satan is represented as interesting Blake’s interest in the supernatural
• 1794: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
about the different ways in which children and adults see the world
SOI = children SOE = adults
SOI = about social injustice by the authorities: King and church
SOE = uses conventional form, but the content ≠ conventional
Analyses of The Tyger:

• Response to ‘the lamb’
• Still uses rhyme (seems conventional) but content ≠ conventional
• 3 trochees + each line ends in a stresses syllable
• 3rd stanza: the poem gets a heartbeat
• Lamb/tiger: does joy always joins up with pain?
Blake doesn’t know the answer to that
• Symmetry: ‘sublime’ = compared with beauty but it is also terrifying
pain and pleasure in one
• Capture the sublime, but could be more than trial
• Creates a feeling of awe
• A2 in Norton = manuscript of the poem
• Only in the final version ‘could’ instead of ‘dare’ in the 1st stanza dissimilarity!
The Romantic period I:

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH – PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS, p.1495-1505
Biography:
• 1770-1850
• After death of mother went to school in heart of the Lake District
roamed the country at will
read a lot of books
• 1787: entered St. John’s College at Cambridge
• 1790: journeyed on foot through France/the Alps: French where celebrating the
anniversary of the fall of the Bastille + After Cambridge: walking tour in Wales
• 1792: Spent a year in France
• Became supporter of the French Revolution
• Fell in love with Annette Vallon
→Had a daughter: Caroline
→Was forced to return to England because of lack of money
• On the verge of an emotional breakdown:
Outbreak of war made it impossible to rejoin his wife/daughter
Guilt over the abandonment
Divided loyalties between England/France
Gradual disillusion with the course of the French revolution
= the basis of many of his greatest poems
• 1795: thanks to inheritance of a friend: could live from his poetry

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• Settled in a Dorsetshire with sister Dorothy

• Met Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• 1797: moved to Somersetshire to be closer to Coleridge
• Age 27: the springtime of his poetic career
the 2 poets talked for hours + had a close association:
Coleridge completed a few unfinished poems of Wordsworth/freely traded
thoughts and passages/...
People became convinced that they were political plotters
Wordsworth lost his lease
• 1798:‘Lyrical Ballads’ = one of the most important books of the era
was published anonymously
3 poems by Coleridge, some lyrics of Wordsworth and a number of verse anecdotes
drawn from the lives of the rural poor
• Book closes with ‘Tintern Abbey’ = written in blank verse
• Start of Wordsworth’s ‘myth of nature’ = interaction between the inner world of the
mind and the shaping force of external Nature = growth of his mind
• The book owed to the folk ballads that were being transcribed and anthologized in the
later 18th C by e.g. Robert Burns
• Critics: because of their simple language/subject matter: the poems risked vulgarity
and silliness
• Wrote preface to the 2nd edition explaining the meaning of the poems
• Late 1799: moved back to the Lake District
• Settled in Grasmere in Dove Cottage, Coleridge lived nearby
• 1802 Finally came into the inheritance of his father
• Married Mary Hutchinson after arranging a settlement with Anne
• Life after 1802: many sorrows:
His favourite brother drowned
Death of 2 of his 5 children
Growing rift with Coleridge => culminated in a bitter quarrel
Dorothy’s physical/mental illness
• But he also became increasingly famous/prosperous + displayed a political/religious
conservatism
• 1813: became a stamp distributor (= revenue collector) = concrete evidence of his
recognition as a national poet
• 1843: poet laureate of Great Britain
• 1850: died at the age of 80
• After death: his masterpiece ‘The Prelude’ was published = autobiographical poem
= poet of remembrance of things past
= ‘emotion collected in tranquillity’: some object/event in the present triggers a
sudden renewal of feelings he had experienced in youth
result = a poem exhibiting the discrepancy between what he called the
‘Two consciousness’s’ = himself as he is now/as he once was
Analyses of Preface to Lyrical Ballads:

• “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species
of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears and is gradually produced, and
does itself actually exists in the mind. In this mood successful compositions
generally begins,...” “emotion recollected in tranquillity”

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The Romantic period II:

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE – THE RHYME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER,
p.1615-1632
Biography:
• 1772-1834
• Born in Devonshire but sent to London after death of father
• Lonely, eloquent and learned
• 1791: entered Jesus College at Cambridge
• Was an accomplished scholar: found little intellectual challenge at university
• Enlisted in the Light Dragoons but was brought back to London
• 1794: left Cambridge without a degree, met Robert Southy: they planned to establish
an ideal democratic community in America = ‘Pantisocracy’
• later: became a moderate democratic/staunch Anglican
• 1797: start of collaboration with the Wordsworth’s = golden time for Coleridge:
got an annual allowance of 150 pounds
• 1798: spent a winter in Germany with Wordsworth
• Went to the university of Göttingen
• Began lifelong study of the German philosophers: altered his thinking about
religion/philosophy/aesthetics
• 1800: Followed the Wordsworths to the Lake District
fell in love with Sara Hutchinson (Williams sister in law)
• Suffered from physical ailments took great amounts of laudanum/opium
• 1806: returned home after a two year journey to Malta: was a broken man:
A drug addict
Estranged from his wife
Suffering from agonies/remorse
Had terrifying nightmares
• 1808 debuted as a speaker at one of the new lecturing institutions
Lectures: part of the social calendar for fashionable Londoners
• Wrote for newspapers and a periodical: ‘The friend’
• 1813: Tragedy ‘Remorse’
• 1816: took up residence at Highgate with Gillman = a physician
• Next 3 years were Coleridge’s most sustained period of literary activity:
Lecturing and writing for the newspaper
• Published ‘Biographia Literaria writes how Lyrical Ballads came about
• 2 collections of poems
Several treatises on philosophical/religious subjects
Showed him to be heir to the conservatism of Edmund Burke = an opponent
secularism/defender of the Anglican Church/unapologetic intellectual elitist with an
ambitious idea of the role the elite should play
• 1828:by then: had come to an understanding with his wife
reconciled with Wordsworth + toured the Rhineland together
Rooms at Highgate became a centre for the London literati
• After death:
Has been accused with plagiarism because couldn’t commit to a poem for long
Revolutionized the political thought of the time

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Raised the stakes for literary criticism: made it a kind of writing that could
address the most difficult abstract questions
• One of his major legacies: notion that culture (= the nation’s artistic/spiritual
heritage) represents a force with the power to combat the fragmentation of a
modern/market-driven society and restore a common/collective life
Analyses of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner:

• title: distancing to the past = de-familiarization
• theme = consequences of man’s alienation of nature and God
• nature = represented by the Albatros
• the mariner wants to tell his story to wedding guests
• Coleridge loved to write in the margins of works (these are added in 1817)
• Margins were written in Old English to create distance between time and space
• Coleridge often wrote about the supernatural, ature, creation of poetry & imagination
• line 82: famous sentence + stands out a bit because it’s the last sentence of part 1
Analyses of Kubla Khan:

• unfinished poem = essential !
• Stanza1: pleasure-dome stands for art made by humans versus nature
the dome is created by man ≠ nature
• a reasonable structure, inside there’s something incontrollable = imagination
• imagination - chasm
• the river Alph has no source: a chasm + mighty fountain = flow of imagination
• part 1: lines 1-36: tells about the pleasure dome
• river = dynamism of nature
• something uncanny in the dome
• part 2: lines 37-54: adds a 1st person narrator + speaks in the subjunctive
different tone: has more potential (something you could do/build)
• Power/danger of a creative mind
• Cryptic
The Romantic period II:

JOHN KEATS – ODE TO A GRECIAN URN, p.1847-1848
Biography:
• 1795 – 1821
• No privileged background
• 1 year prior to the death of his father: was sent to the Reverend John Clarke’s private
school at Enfield
• Noisy/high-spirited boy + distinguished in sport/fist-fights
• Charles Cowden Clarke = mentor who encouraged Keats’ passions for reading +
introduced him to Spencer/other poets/music/theatre
• 1810: Mother dies of tuberculosis
• Never got any inheritance: the law suit lasted his entire life
• at age 15: Keats = orphan

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• Was taken out of school by his guardian: Richard Abbey, became apprentice to a
surgeon/apothecary
• 1815: Carried on medical studies at Guy’s hospital, London
Qualified to practice one year later
Almost immediately abandoned medicine for poetry
• His development => has no match because of the rapidity/sureness
• 1816: Already found his voice after only 2 years of writing poetry
• Applied himself with desperate urgency felt an early death?
• 1817: Composed ‘Endymion’ (ambitious undertaking of more than 4000 lines)
• Also started working on ‘hyperion’→Abandoned the epic because of fear of becoming
to imitative/losing his originality (modelled it on ‘Paradise Lost’)
Wanted to write independently
Wanted to become a natural genius
• 1818:Negative spiral that would lead to his death:
Financial distress → brother George lost all his money
Short of funds + needed to support his family => started writing plays/articles
Brother Tom: contracted TB => John nursed him but Tom died
Had taken a burdening walk in the Lake District/Scotland/Ireland
Came back from his walks with chronically ulcerated throat
Fell in love with Fanny Brown but couldn’t marry her
= peek of poetic career
• 1819: Annus mirabilis several masterpieces
• Works characterised by slow/gracious pace, multisensory concreteness (= all the
senses are combined to give total apprehension of an experience), evocations of self-
loss, felicity of phrasing, inseparable but irreconcilable opposites
• Began to rework ‘Hyperion’into form of dream vision: ‘The fall of Hyperion’
• 1820: Started coughing up blood + series of haemorrhages
• Moved to Italy for the milder climate
• 1821: died in Rome
• Reputation = Exceptionally gifted
No other writer composed so much high standing works before the age of 25
Kept his high spirits although life wasn’t kind to him
• Literary legacy:
• Whilst reading: always the idea of the tragic waste of such an intellect dying so young
• Poetry when stopped writing at age of 24: exceeds the accomplishments of
Chaucer/Shakespeare/Milton ate age of 24
Analyses of Ode to a Grecian Urn:

• The urn = classical image (glory of Greece trumps that of Rome)
• But something is strange question marks in the stanza, like Blake’s The Tyger
• p.1871: negative capability: man = capable of being in uncertainties
• Line 49-50: because of the quotations: lot of discussion around those lines (is the urn
saying: ‘beauty is ...’ and is the poet just commenting on that?) = negative capability
• A lot of questions: confusion
• Imagination, obscurity the sublime
• Wild ecstasy = the sublime
• The artist has made the love eternal
• Part 1 : who is the artist of the urn?
• Part 2: ‘those unheard are sweeter’ = the heart of the imagination

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• Part 3: Line 26: ‘still’ has 2 meanings: 1) it’s fixed

• 2) has the potential to become something = enormous tension!!!
• Part 4 : the question marks = obscure = sublime
• Part 5 : line 44-45: similarities with ode to a nightingale
• Line 49-50: beauty = everything
• What is the significance of art?
The Romantic period III:

WALT WHITMAN – SONG OF MYSELF, hand-out
Biography:
• 1819 – 1892
• Born on Long Island as son of a farmer
• 1823: Moved to Brooklyn during building boom
• Age 11: Left school to become office boy in a law firm, went to work for a doctor
• Age 12: Working in the printing office of a newspaper/contributed sentimental items
he created himself
• Age 15: tried his own hand to poetry, rich fantasy life: fuelled by numberless Rmtc
novels
• Age 16: Compositor in Manhattan = a journeyman printer
• 1835: 2 great fires disrupted the printing industry
• At age 17: returned home to his family
• Taught at schools for 5 years but stopped when started a newspaper of his own in 1838
• Was very active in debating societies/envisioned himself as a writer
• Before turned 21: returned to Manhattan + began working on ‘Park Benjamin’s new
world’ = literary weekly that pirated British novels
• 1840s:Started the series ‘Sun down papers’
• Worked for several magazines, worked as a journalist/reviewer/editor
• 1851: became a house a house builder/student of astronomy
• 1853-1855: Gave up newspaper for carpentry and later gave carpentry up for writing
• Spring of 1855: published ‘leaves of grass’ + received immediate response from
Emerson Wrote his own reviews to launch himself
• 1856: Met with Emerson/Thoreau... in his house
• Continued to do miscellaneous journalism/explicitly renounces old role of public poet
Wanted to get rid of the image of the poet seeking knowledge/celebrating the Am.
land + its heroes
Chooses to be happy with a man (open homosexual manifesto)
• Found soul more important than money/forerunner of the hippie movement and flower
power →paid visits to prisoners/to sick stage drivers
• During Civil War: deepest emotions/energies: reserved for hospital work + wrote
series of war poems several years: continued as a clerk in attorney general’s office
• 1873: suffered from a paralytic stroke
• Became dependent on occasional publication in newspapers/magazines
• 1892: died of bronchial pneumonia + egg-sized abscess had eroded his ribs
• Reputation: Humanist + part of transition between transcendentalism/realism
(incorporated both views in his work)
• Among the most influential poets in the Am. canon: father of free verse
• Controversial works ‘leaves of grass’ = overt sexuality
• Becomes a controversial sage: sexuality is still being debated: homo- or bisexual

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• Concerned with politics throughout his life: supported Wilmot Proviso + opposed
extension of slavery generally
• Poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races + at one point called for abolition of
slavery later saw abolitionist movement as threat to democracy
• Literary legacy: has been claimed Am. 1st poet of democracy: reflects ability to write
in a singularly Am. character
• Considered himself a messiah-like figure in his poetry
Analyses of Song of Myself:

• Large part of ‘Leaves of Grass’
• Top of page 2130: very clear illustration of the poet being a strong individual
• persona =speaker in a poem, who is very straightforward = “I contain multitudes”
• The readers are submitted to the persona: we are made of the same material but there’s
a power situation
• the persona = more powerful than the reader
• not ironic/no relativisation
• Bottom of page 2132: connected to the question : what is grass?
• Initial reaction of the persona: false modesty
• p. 2133:
set of efforts on the part of the speaker to reach for a definition of grass: will result
in some kind of meaning but depends on the reader (no effort on the speaker’s part
o come up with a definition of grass)
• ‘I’ appropriates reality explains the existence of grass as being made of a divine
being the persona is turning/inserting the question into his own world = sign of how
strong the individual is when it comes to the world out there
• No biological answer: the strong individual appropriates the world around him
• Use of imaginative language in order to help you to an experience of beauty
• Speaker tries to convince us of his power
• ‘I’ perceive: doesn’t try to give an objective answer (it just matters that he is doing it)
• ‘Translate’: translate into what? Doesn’t really need to because he has his language
• Becomes almost a cliché of time progressing (all the former efforts: come together in
this cliché)
• p.2136: ’28 young men’: a woman is watching the bathers (she’s a voyeuse)
• The homeliest’: the meaning is not clear
• The persona is still there : ‘for I see you’
• She is only there in her imagination
• Focalizer: who’s perspective is this?
1) the woman’s
2) what the speaker imagines
3) the speaker’s perception
attempt to evoke sensuality (but who’s?)
• ‘An unseen hand’: who’s hand is this? (the speaker’s = homo-erotic sensuality)
seen as an obscene part but it’s hard to tell why
• The woman doesn’t matter: the speaker will take over anyway
• ‘They do not know’: whom are they sousing with spray? Again a number of
possibilities: talk about the 29 bather (in her imagination, she is there)
is this about masturbation? (if the answer is yes: the reader is overcome by the
rhetoric of the speaker →not at all clear)

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THE VICTORIAN AGE 1830 – 1901
Long period named after Queen Victoria, period starts 7 years before she comes to the throne
in 1837 and period ends when she dies in 1907. During this age shift from rural tu urban
economy because of the industrialization effect of the rapid industrialization: social and
economic problems, colonization and alienation: loss of connection as a labourer, Marx
Short overview:
• During Victoria’s reign dramatic change England: brought England to its
highest point of development as a world power
• Previously the centre of Western civilization had been Paris, but by the half of the
19th Century the centre of influence had shifted to London
• The rapid growth of London is one of the most important developments of the
age: shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban
economy based on trade and manufacturing: England’s industrialization
• England’s industrialization: steam power exploited for railways, iron ships,
looms, printing presses
• Also other innovations: telegraph, photography, compulsory education, …
• But because England was the 1st country to become industrialized, its
transformation was painful: it experienced a host of social and economic problems
due to rapid and unregulated industrialization
• England also experienced an enormous increase in wealth as it began to capture
markets all over the globe and developed their own colonies
• By 1890 more than a quarter of all territory on earth was subject of Queen
Victoria.
• The reactions of Victorian writers to the fast-paced expansion of England were
various:
some were enthusiastic (Trollope), glorified everything, overlooked the problems
other writers as Dickens, felt that leadership in commerce and industry was being
paid for a terrible process in human happiness, social progress had been gained
only by abandoning traditional rhythms of life and traditional pattern of human
relationship melancholy
• Although many Victorians had a sense of satisfaction in the industrial and
political pre-eminence of England, many other had an anxious sense of something
lost, a sense of being displaces in a world made alien by technological chances
Queen Victoria and the Victorian temper:

• Queen Victoria’s long reign from 1873-1901, defines the historical period that
bears her name question is = whether the distinctive character of those years
justifies the adjective Victorian?
• Victoria herself encouraged her own identification with the qualities we associate
with the adjective also through aid of photography, she became an icon
• The 3 Victorian qualities are:
1. Earnestness
2. moral responsibility
3. domestic propriety (family = centre universe, brings forward specific attitudes:

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eg.: marriage = 1 partner, but these were ethics on the surface, in reality men had
different relationships with multiple women)
• But Queen Victoria as a mother of 9 kids and the black-garbed widow, 40 years
after her husband’s death, she represented the domestic fidelities her citizens
embraced
• She came to the throne in a decade that marks a different historical consciousness
among Britain’s writers: shift from Romanticism to Realism
writers felt they were in an age of transition: the old has passed, the New appears
in its stead and the Time is still in pangs of travails with the New (Thomas Carlyle)
writers of the 1830s had a new sharp sense of modernity because of all the
historical changes.
1830s writers had a break with the past, a historical self-consciousness and
responded to their sense of the historical moment with a strenuous5 call to action
so they self-consciously distinguished from the attitude of the previous generation
they were done with the over-the-top romanticism
• Thomas Carlyle said: “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe” he was saying
they had to abandon the introspection of the Romantics and turn to the higher moral
purpose that he found in Goethe
• This sense of historical self-consciousness, of strenuous social enterprise and of
growing national achievement led writers as early as the 150s-1860s to define their
age as Victorian
• The fact that Victoria lived and reigned for so long, reinforced the concept of a
distinctive historical period that writers defined even as they lived it
• And when she died a reaction developed against many of the achievement of the
previous century, also reinforcing the sense that the Victorian age was a distinct period
when she died backlash of morals, although they had already been different from
the surface ethics
• In the 20th C writers wanted to separate themselves from the Victorians,
Georgian writers took delight in puncturing overinflated Victorian balloons, even
Virginia Woolf did this, but she and her generation mocked their predecessors to make
them less intimidating
• The Georgian reaction against the Victorians = matter of the history of taste
term can be used in a pejorative sense but today historians and critics find the
Victorian period a richly, complex example of society struggling with the issues and
problems we identify with modernism
• It is a period of almost 70-years and generalizations are not uniformly applicable
so the period is divided into 3 phases, but in reality they were not so well defined as
they are represented in the Norton
• Victorian age: 3 phases: 1. The early Victorian period 1830-1848
2. The mid Victorian period 1848-1870
3. The late Victorian period 1870-1901
• After these 3 phases it is also helpful to consider the final decade, ‘the nineties’,
as a bridge between 2 centuries
1. The Early Victorian period (1830-48): a time of troubles

Overview:
5
Strenuous = inspannend

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• In the 1830s 2 important historical events occurred with momentous

consequence for England: the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway &
the Reform Bill
• When the LM Railway opened, it was the 1st steam-powered, public railway line
in the world: change of mind no longer stuck in 1place, speed to transportation
the train supported the growth of England’s commerce
shrank the distances between cities
had increased the pressure for parliamentary reform
• Despite the growth of manufacturing cities (Industrial Revolution), England was
still governed by an archaic electoral system, whereby some of the new industrial
cities were unrepresented in Parliament, while ‘rotten boroughs’, depopulated places
still sent nominees to Parliament had to be a more democratic representation!
• By 1830 economic distress brought England close to revolution, fearing the kind
of revolution that had happened in Europe, Parliament passed a Reform Bill in 1832
that transformed England’s class structure
• The Reform Bill of 1832: give voting right to all males owning property worth
£10 or more in annual rent now the voting public included the lower middle
classes, but not yet the working classes (1867 second Reform Bill: also the male
working class)
• This first Reform Bill broke up the monopoly of power that the conservative
landowners had long enjoyed and caused a redistribution of parliamentary
representation:
The Reform Bill represent the beginning of a new age, in which middle-class
economic interest gained increasing power !
• But the economic and social difficulties with the industrialization were so severe
that even the new Parliament couldn’t solve all the problems and the 1830-1840s
became known as ‘the Time of Troubles’
• 1832-1836 = time of prosperity
1837 = crash: bad harvest, unemployment, poverty & rioting, terrible working
conditions the Hungry Forties
• The Chartists, a large organisation of workers, wanted to do something about all
these problems 1838 drew up a ‘People’s Charter’ advocating the extension of
the right to vote, the use of secret balloting and other legislative reforms (early form of
a union/labour party)
• For 10 years the Chartist leaders engaged to have their program adopted by
Parliament, sometimes even creating fear s of revolution
• Lord Alfred Tennyson also inspired by the Chartists
• Although the Chartist movement had fallen apart by 1848, it had created an
atmosphere open to reform one of the most important reforms was the abolition of
the Corn Laws: abolition on the high tariffs on imported grains.
These high tariffs had been established to protect English farmers from competition
from abroad but they kept the tariffs so high the rest of the population suffered
• In 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed and the way was paved for a system of free
trade didn’t solve all the problems but it helped relieve the major crisis of the
Victorian economy the next 2 decades were relatively calm & prosperous
Literature in the early period:

• This Time of Troubles left its mark on some early Victorian literature
• Thomas Carlyle & Lord Alfred Tennyson were influenced by this period and the
results are clearly visible in their literature

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• The most marked response to the industrial and political scene is represented in
the ‘Condition of England’ novels, 1840-50s by writers such as Charles Kingsley,
Elizabeth Gaskell & Benjamin Disraeli
• Disraeli was a novelist who became prime minister and described England as
‘The Two Nations’: a phrase that pointed out the line dividing the England of the rich
from the other nation, the England of the poor
2. The Mid-Victorian period (1848-70): economic prosperity, the growth of

empire and religious controversy
Overview:
• This second phase of the Victorian period had many harassing problems, but it
was a time of prosperity, period of + contentment, the problems continued, but
people grew adapt at looking the other way
• There was a growing sense of satisfaction that the challenging difficulties of the
1840s had been solved or would be solved by English wisdom and energy:
The monarchy was proving its worth in a modern setting: the queen and her
husband Albers were models of middle-class domesticity and devotion to duty
The condition of the working classes also improved gradually
The aristocracy discovered that free trade was enriching rather than impoverishing
• The Mid Victorian Period is called The Age of Improvement and has a sense of
Victorian complacency, stability & optimism
• In 1851 the Great Exhibition, with the opening of the Crystal Palace
symbolized the triumphant feats of Victorian technology, modern industry and science
• England’s technological progress, together with its prosperity led to an enormous
expansion of its influence around the globe the British colonies, investment of
people, money & technology created the British Empire (India, Australia, Canada…)
• Britain’s motives in creating its empire were many:
seek of wealth
markets for manufactured goods
sources for raw material
world power & influence
• The expansion of the empire was also seen as a moral responsibility, ‘to protect
the poor natives and advance civilization’ spreading Christianity
• But although Britain was on a missionary enterprise in its colonies; there was an
crisis of beliefs , a spiritual, religious crisis back home: religion vs
science/utilitarianism
increasing debate about religious belief back on the home front
by the mid-Victorian period the Church of England had evolved into 3 major
divisions: 1. Evangelical
2. Low Church/ Broad Church
3. High Church
rationalist challenges versus religious belief: Utilitarianism6
• But after the challenge of religious belief to Utilitarianism, there was another shift
from Utilitarianism to science: religion utilitarianism science
6
Utilitarianism = where all human beings seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain
should judge a morally correct action, to the extent to which it provides the greatest pleasure to the
greatest number
Utilitarianism was widely influential in providing a philosophical basis for political and social reform but it
had opposition of those who felt that it failed to recognize people’s spiritual needs

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• Thomas Henry Huxley popularized the theories of Charles Darwin and the
impact of their scientific discoveries were consistently damaging to established faiths
• In this mod-Victorian period Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ reduced human
kind even further into nothingness
• Darwin’ s theory of natural selection conflicted not only with the concept of
creation derived from the Bible but also with ling established assumptions that
humanity
had a special role in the world
• Darwin’s theories made the Victorians feel isolated by the 1860s the great
iron structures of their philosophies, religions and social stratifications were beginning
to look dangerously corroded to the perspicacious
• Disputes about evolutionary science and religion are a reminder that beneath the
placidly prosperous surface of the mid-Victorian age there were serious conflict
and anxieties
Literature in the mid-Victorian period:

• Mid-Victorian period = period after the troubles
writers had various reactions
• Charles Dickens continued to make critical attacks in the shortcomings of the
Victorian social scene, just as John Ruskin did they still fought against the
unfairness of the of the English society and its problems
• The realistic novels of Anthony Trollope, are a more characteristic reflection of
the mid-Victorian attitude toward the social & political scene: comfortable tolerance &
equanimity (gelijkmoedigheid) he glorified everything, overlooked the problems
and looked the other way
3. The Late-Victorian period (1870-1901): Decay of Victorian values

Overview:
• Climax of imperialism, economic and military competition
• Difficult phase to categorize
first glance merely an extension of mid-Victorianism, Jubilee years (1887-1897):
anniversaries of the Queen’s 50th & 60th accession
second glance, time in which troubles would come again and led to the decay of
Victorian values
• For many this was a time of serenity and security industrial revolution,
London’s delights: commodities, inventions, products that were changing the texture
of modern life the wealth of England’s empire provided the foundation on which its
economy was built
• The final decades of the century saw the apex7 of British imperialism the
cost of the empire became increasingly apparent in t rebellions, massacres and bungled
wars
eg: The Anglo-Boer War, in which England engaged in a long, bloody and
unpopular struggle to annex 2 independent republics in the south of Africa,
controlled by Dutch settlers called Boers
• But also outside the British empire, other developments challenged Victorian
stability and security
• 1873-74 = severe economic depression
7
Apex = top

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• 1867, under Disraeli the second Reform Bill had been passed
working classes also had the right to vote now
made labour a powerful political force that included a wide variety of socialism
• Labour leaders influenced by revolutionary theories of Marx and Engels
Literature in the late-Victorian period:

• In the final phase of Victorianism we can sense an overall change of attitudes
• Some late Victorian writers expressed the change openly by simply attacking the
major mid-Victorian idols
• Proof of this is for example Samuel Butler who demolished Darwin and
Tennyson:
in his novel ‘The way of Al Flesh’ (1903) Butler satirized family life, in particular
the tyrannical self-righteousness of a Victorian father, using his own father as
model
• Other writers expressed melancholy and said they had to enjoy the fleeting
moment s of beauty
4. The Nineties: melancholy & decay of Victorian values

After these 3 phases it is helpful to consider the final decade, ‘the nineties’, as a bridge
between 2 centuries
Overview:
• The changes in attitude became more conspicuous in the final decades and gave
the 90s a special aura of notoriety8
• In the empire’s outpost in India and Africa, the English were building railways,
administering governments with the same energy as in the mid-Victorian period
• But back in England, Victorian standards were breaking down on several
fronts
• Example of this was Prince Edward son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert:
contrary to his father he was not hard working and many of his favourite carryings-
on were great topics for newspaper articles, including how this father of 5 had openly
maintained scandalous relations with ballet dancers and chorus singers
Literature in the nineties:

• Much of the writing of the decade illustrates a breakdown of a different sort:
the characteristic in now melancholy ≠ more gaiety
• Writers of the 90s (aesthetic movement) were very much aware of living at the
end of a great century and often deliberately created a ‘fin de siècle’ pose/attitude
(end-of-the century)
• A studied languor/fatigue, a weary sophistication and search for new ways of
titillating jaded palates9 can be found both in the poetry and prose of that period
• From our perspective the nineties can be seen as the beginning of the modernist
movement in literature ! (a number of great writers of the 20th C were already
publishing back then: Yeats, Conrad, Shaw,…)
• 45-years later Oscar Wilde’s comedy ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’
(1895) turned the typical mid-Victorian word ‘earnest’ into a pun, a key joke in this
comic spectacle in which he turned Victorian values upside down complete
opposite of Victorian values
8
Notoriety = beruchtheid, bekendheid
9
titillating jaded palates = zinnenprikkelende afgestompt fijnproevers

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5. The role of women

• England had done much to extend its citizens’ liberties, but women did not share
in these freedoms
• Petitions to Parliaments advocating women suffrage were introduced in the
1840s, but women did not get to vote until 1918
• Works like Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’
(1792) brought the issue to pressure
• By the end of Victoria’s reign, women could take degrees at universities and
university colleges and could study, although not earn a degree at Oxford and
Cambridge
• Also improved employment opportunities for women, but still difference between
middle class women and lower class women
• Novels such as Jane Eyre show that Victorian society was not only preoccupied
with legal and economic limitations on women’s lives, but also with the very nature of
women
• Also Henry James, with ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ addresses the question of
woman’s vocation by the 1890 the ‘New Woman’ is emerging, emancipated
womanhood, and was endlessly debated in a wave of fiction and magazine articles
• Victorian text illustrates that the basic problem was not only political, economic
and educational, but it was how women were regarded, regarded themselves as
member of society
6. Literacy, publication & reading

• What was the attitude towards literature in the Victorian age?
• Literacy increased significantly during the Victorian period
• By the end of the century, basic literary was almost universal, the product in part
of compulsory national education required by 1880 tot the age of 10
• Also explosion of things to read because of the technological changings in
printing presses powered by steam, paper made from wood pulp instead of rags and
towards the end of the century, typesetting machines publication less expensive
• Most significant development in publishing was the growth of the periodicals
first 30 years of the Victorian century, 170 new periodicals were started in London
only
• Periodicals = magazines for every taste: cheap and popular magazines that
published sensational tales: religious monthlies, weekly newspapers, satiric periodicals
with political cartoons, etc...
• Periodical publication had effect on literature: novels and long works of prose
were published in serial forms serial publication began in the late 18th C
• Serial publication created a sense of community for readers, a sense encourages
by the practice of reading aloud in family gatherings
• Prose writers such as Carlyle, Arnold and Ruskin achieved status as ‘sages’
• Readers shared the expectation that literature would not only delight but instruct,
that it would be continuous with the lived world and that it would illuminate social
problems

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• By the 1870s the sense of a broad readership, with a set of social concerns, had
begun to dissolve, writers had begun to define themselves in opposition to general
public and Pre-Raphaelites pursued art for art’s sake
• By the end of the Victorian reign, writers could no longer assume a unified
reading public
7. The novel in the Victorian age

• The novel was the most dominant form in Victorian literature
• Mainly published in serial form, ‘three-deckers’
• Victorian novels = realism novels
seek to represent a large and comprehensive social world, with the variety of
classes and social setting that constitute a community
Victorian novels contain a multitude of characters and a number of plots, setting in
motion the kinds of patterns that reveal the author’s vision of the deep structures of
the social world eg.: Middlemarch
• Victorian authors attempt to convince the readers that the characters and events
they imagine resemble those we experience in real life
• The experience that Victorian novelist most frequently depict is the set of social
relationships in the middle-class society developing around them
• Most Victorian novels focus on a protagonist whose effort to define his/her
place in society is the main concern of the plot
• The novel constructs a tension between, surrounding social conditions and the
aspiration of the hero/heroine, whether it’s for love, social position, or life adequate to
his/her imagination
• This tension makes the novel natural form in portraying woman’s struggle for
self-realization in the context of the constraints upon her
• For both male and female writers, the heroine is often the representative
protagonist whose search for fulfilment emblematizes the human condition
• The Victorian novel was very various wealth of styles and genres from the
extravagant comedy of Dickens to the Gothic romances of the Brontë sisters, from the
satires to the probing psychological fiction of Eliot, from the social and political
realism of Trollope to the sensation novels
• Later in the century a couple of popular genres developed: crime, mystery,
horror novels, science fiction & detective stories
• For the Victorians the novel was both a form of entertainment and a spur to social
to social sympathy
8. Poetry in the Victorian age

• Victorian poetry developed in the context of the novel
• Novel was most popular so poets sought new ways of telling stories in verse
• Victorian poetry also developed in the shadow of Romanticism
when Victoria ascended the throne, all the major Romantic poets were dead
all the Victorian poets show strong influence of the Romantics but they can’t
sustain the confidence that the Romantics felt in the power of the imagination
• The Victorian poets often rewrite Romantic poems, with a sense of belatedness
and distance
• Victorian poets build upon this sense of belated Romanticism in a number of
different ways:
embrace an attenuated Romanticism, art pursued for its own sake
reaction against the state of one’s own mind as the basis of poetry

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others had a more fruitful reaction and began writing dramatic monologues,
eg.: Tennyson developed a more lyric form of the dramatic monologue
• The idea of creating a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically distinct
from the poet is the great achievement of Victorian poetry would develop
extensively in the 20th C
• The formal experimentation of Victorian poetry, both in long narrative form and
dramatic monologue, may make it seem eclectic, but Victorian poetry shares a
number of characteristics:
pictorial poetry: using details to construct visual images that represent the emotion
or situation the poem concerns
picturesque: combining visual impressions in such a way that they create a picture
that carries the dominant emotion of the poem this aesthetic brings poets and
painters closer together see Norton C11 – Ford Maddox Brown
Victorian poetry also uses sound in a distinctive way they use sound to convey
meaning eg.: beautiful cadenced, alliteration and vowel sounds
• Victorian poets felt ambivalent to the didactic mission the public expected of the
man of letters
9. Prose in the Victorian age

• Victorian prose = very didactic, aimed specifically to instruct
• ‘Nonfictional prose’ quite a clumsy term Victorian prose referred to history,
biography, theology & criticism
• The indicated the centrality of argument and persuasion to Victorian intellectual
life
• This combination of a new market position for nonfictional writing and an
exalted sense of the didactic function of the writer, produced the quintessential
Victorian form
10. Drama & theatre in the Victorian age

• the Victorian age is known for its greatness of poetry, prose and novels bit
difficult to make such a high claim for its plays until at least the last decade of the
century
• Must distinguish between playwriting and theatrical activity
• The popularity of theatrical entertainment made theatre a powerful influence on
other genres
• 1850-1860 the number of theatres build throughout the county was doubled
• In 1890s Shaw and Oscar Wilde transformed British theatre with their comic
masterpieces they did not like each other’s’ work, but they both created a kind of
comedy that took aim at Victorian pretence and hypocrisy
Victorian Age I :
THOMAS CARLYLE – CAPTIANS OF INDUSTRY, p.1916-1920
Biography:
• 1795-1881
• Was 40-years old when Victoria became queen
• He was born in Scotland and educated at Edinburg University, his subject of interest
was mathematics, but he left without a degree
• Although his age he’s linked with the early generation of Victorian writers such as
Dickens, Browning and Ruskin to this early generation of Victorian writers he

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became ‘the great teacher of the age’, for it was Carlyle’s role to foresee the
problems that were to preoccupy the Victorians and early to report in his experiences
in confronting these problems
• He was one of the most influential figures of the age, affecting the attitudes of
scientists, statesmen and especially of writers
• His exposure to sceptical writers as Hume and Voltaire had undermined his faith
• He gave up his Christian faith and his proposed career as a clergyman
• While he was thinking about his religious position he was teaching in Scotland and
tutoring private pupils
• From 1824 to the end of his life he relied exclusively on his writings for his livelihood
• His early works consisted of translations, biographies and critical studies of Goethe
and other German authors to whose view of life he was deeply attracted
• In 1826 he married Jane Welsh Carlyle a witty, intelligent and intellectually ambitious
woman, she was the daughter of a doctor and her friends and family were shocked
when she accepted this peasant’s soon proposal, but to her he was a genius
• When they moved to London Jane enjoyed the intellectual and artistic circle that
surrounded her husband
• Carlyle was however a difficult man to live with his stomach ailments, irascible
nerves and preoccupation with his writings left him with little inclination for domestic
amenities of for encouraging his wife’s considerable talents (although he was the great
teacher of the age and she had great talent for writing)
• During his residence in London Carlyle wrote many historical works and pamphlets
concerning contemporary issues best pamphlet = Past & Present
• In 1836 he wrote ‘Sartor Resartus’ a novel in which he tells the readers that he is
depressed and that depression is a problem of the Victorian time and the British nation
‘Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe’ = stop thinking about yourself all the time,
stop the introspection (rmtc) and look for a higher moral, look for action
• Following the death of his wife he wrote very little
• For the remaining 15 years of his life, he confined himself to reading or to the stream
of visitors who called at Cheyne Walk to listen to ‘the Sage of Chelsea’
• 1881 he died and was buried in Scotland with his family
Analyses of Captains of industry:

• Captains of Industry = part of a larger work: ‘Past and Present’
• Pamphlet deals with Mammonism = worship of money, work = person becomes
totally associated with the money you make = negative
• You lose the joy in work and feel alienated from your work (influence of Marx)
• Carlyle says we have to male work attractive again, he proposes solution, although
they are not perfect
• p.1916: ‘A Human Chaos in which there is no light, you vainly attempt to irradiate by
light shed on it: order never can arise there’ The Captains of Industry will need to
impose this order
• Carlyle introduces the term ‘Captains of Industry’ he means we need leaders to
bring the order back that we’ve lost as effect of the industrialization
• p.1917, 2nd paragraph work becomes more important, new upper class, the
captains of industry become the new aristocracy and therefore have to take
responsibility
• p. 1918: war & strife : important focus
• p. 1918 ‘Love of men…Fighting world’ the world according to Carlyle is in strive,
the captains need to control it, avoid anarchy by organising the workers

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• p.1919: ‘awake, ye noble workers … live wholly!’ you are working, but not
enjoying it, let the captains bring you back to life, let them make you enjoy work again
• p. 1920: ‘Ye shall reduce them to order’ + is the central line!
Carlyle is a fascist! he creates an entire theory in which a couple of wise ones
will order the rest he’s glorifying work, but it’s all about capitalism he
sees the labour parties coming, but he wants to control the masses so they can
work for the 2 nations: the rich nation of England and the poor nation of it.
• it’s not a pamphlet supporting the labourers and the unions, but it’s a pamphlet
addressed to the new aristocracy forcing them to create order
Victorian Age I :
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON – THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE,
p.2023-24
Biography:
• 1809-1892
• In his own lifetime Tennyson was the most popular of poets, just as Byron had been
• But such popularity also provoked a reaction in the decades following his death
Edwardians and Georgians made fun of Tennyson’s achievements
• This attitude of dismissal is no longer fashionable, today Tennyson’s stature as one of
the major poets of the English language seems uncontroversial today
• During much of his career he isolated himself, but he did not live a sheltered life in
the real sense of the word
• He came out of a household full of friction since his dad, the Reverend Dr. George
Tennyson had ben disinherited in favour of his younger brother and had to make
livelihood by joining the clergy
• This brooding sense of dissatisfaction led to increasingly violent bouts of drunkenness
• But nevertheless he acted as his sons’ tutor in classical and modern languages to
prepare them for enter university
• Tennyson went to Cambridge and was encouraged by a group of gifted
undergraduates, called ‘the Apostles’ to devote his life to poetry
• Tennyson didn’t finish his career at Cambridge due family dissensions and financial
needs and he returned home to study and practice the craft of poetry
• His early volumes (1830-32) were attacked as ‘obscure’ of ‘affected’ by some
reviewers Tennyson suffered acutely under hostile criticism, but he also profited
from it
• In 1842 his volume demonstrated a huge leap forward and in 1850 he at last attained
fame and full critical recognition with ‘In Memorian’
• In the same Year he also became poet laureate in succession to William Wordsworth
• His life thereafter was a comfortable, earning his living from his writings, enabled him
to buy a country house and enjoy the kind of seclusion that he liked
• For many Victorian readers he was not only a great poetical phrase maker and a
striking individual (huge and shaggy in cloak) but also a wise man whose occasional
pronouncements on politics or world affairs represented the national voice itself
• In 1884 he accepted a peerage
• In 1892 he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey
• In his later poems dealing with national affairs, there is also an increased shrillness
of tone – a mannerism accentuated by Tennyson’s realizing that he ; like Dickens, had
a vast public behind him to back up his pronouncements

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Analyses of The Charge of the Light Brigade:

• This is a poem about the Crimean War
• Tennyson read a newspaper article about it and wrote the poem as a response
• He wrote it as a reaction and he’s insisting on the negative aspect of this event
the poem is about the meaningless, the attack was unnecessary
someone had blundered
• Connection between Captains of Industry and The charge of The Light Brigade
= that both cases are submission of large groups of people and also about chivalry
• Contrary to Carlyle, Tennyson is pointing out the bad directly, where Carlyle is
deceiving people, he’s a fascist
Carlyle organizes large groups in such a way that they become useful for economy
With Tennyson the 600 are organized to submit to something, they do it without
obeying, questioning it and they die
• classes in charge: new aristocrats, the commanders of the army order people
= theme of Victorian literature: order
• the 600 obey to the Victorian moral
• last stanza: although the attack was unnecessary, Tennyson still not wants it to be
totally unimportant they were killed by a mistake but we can save the day by
thinking it was an honourable thing to do, honourable to obey
• ‘Noble 600’: despite the fact that he insists on the negative dimension of the
Victorian era, he still holds on the Victorian ethics/moral
Form of the poem:

• 6 stanzas
• dactylic metre __.__. (long-short, long-short)
Victorian Age II :
HENRY JAMES– DAISY MILLER: A STUDY, hand-out
Overview:
• Second half of the Victorian age = realism !
• 3 important features of Realism:
1. The illusion of reality on the part of the audience
≠ have to be realistic for everyone realism = illusion ≠ objectivity
2. Realism always has an ethical angle, there’s a mental reality experienced by
the character these characters struggle with norms and values to come to
terms with the situation we see their mental picture/struggle through the
narrator
3. Realism = always a degree of drammaticality and melodrama
strong individual life as in rmtc, but less excess
still about feelings, but difference of degree in expression of emotions
Analyses of Daisy Miller: A Study:

• Is Daisy Miller in love with Winterbourne?
• Reality = it’s a slippery slope, realism is merely an invitation to an active moral
participation of the reader in the story
• Who is responsible for Daisy’s death? Winterbourne or Giovanelli?
• In the beginning there’s a clear narrative voice:
- line 1: ‘ at the little town’ knowledgeable narrator, conscious of space and time

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• Narrator also has a certain interest: description of the hotel he’s all about distinction
he sets this image because the entire story will be about distinction
• The hotel-remark isn’t an innocent remark perhaps the narrator also want to be
distinguished and belong to a distinguished family
• Some examples of the ‘I-narrator’:
- p.1526: ‘Winterbourne coloured…’
- p.1531: ‘at the risk…’
- p.1534: ‘as I already had occasion to relate
some examples of the ‘I-narrator’ but he’s slowly giving up his perspective for
Winterbourne
• p. 1503: ‘it seemed to Winterbourne …aware’ example of free indirect discourse
and a lot of internal focalisation we clearly get Winterbourne’s take on the situation
= use of perspective in this story use of internal focalisation leads to a whole
bunch of perspectives
• p. 1504: 2nd half of the page = a lot of verbs of perception, a degree of sensitivity,
over sensitivity (there are examples of realism where this isn’t the case and that are
more objective)
• We can’t get into Daisy’s mind so we’ll have to use winterbourne’s perspective of her,
even though this perspective might be wrong
• p.1506: ‘she talked pleasant … chat’ it’s Winterbourne’s perspective that she
chatters = element of negativity
• p. 1507: ‘He was inclined to think … she was only a pretty American flirt .. formula’
= very negative, doesn’t mean we want nothing to do with this character, but even
though he thinks of her negatively, he’s still attracted to her Why? We don’t
know, he doesn’t know himself, he’s very passive
• But maybe he feels himself distinguished the others/other ‘class’ has a different
‘code of behaviour’ the new have money, but they lack distinguishment
• p.1510: ‘she’s completely uncultivated … take her to the chateaux’ he occupies his
point of distinguishment, but doesn’t keep him from seeing her
• p.1511: ‘if therefore … expected of her’ there is titillation in the part of
Winterbourne, he’s a boring chap, but Daisy holds a degree of attraction to him and he
likes it, although it might be wrong
• Winterbourne always describes Daisy with 1 positive and 1 negative description:
- p.1512: ‘mixture of gallantry & ’ 1st instance of a formula in which Winterbourne
combines 2 nouns to qualify Daisy
- p. 1518: ‘mixture of innocence & cruelty’ 2nd instance of the formula
- p.1524: ‘combination of audacity & innocence’ 3rd instance of the formula
- p.1531: ‘mixture of audacity & 4th instance of the formula
• Winterbourne’s image of Daisy is that she’s an ambivalent woman, but difference in
terms of social behaviour
• But the result of Daisy’s ambivalence is Winterbourne’s passivity he’s fascinated
by her, so why doesn’t he act upon his feelings? Why? we don’t know, not stated
explicitly in the text
• Many things in the text are implied if we want to understand the character we need
to think about the values
• Who is responsible for Daisy’s death? Whose fault is it that she dies? that’s the
question that James is trying to elicit
• Winterbourne is quick to blame Giovanelli for taking her to the Colosseum fever

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• Winterbourne however blames others so he doesn’t have to blame himself, if he would

have acted, she might not have died, but now that she’s dead he can return to his
former live in Geneva
• When Winterbourne blames others, he can try to forget her
• p.1526: work was an important value in Victorian age, with this story we learn about
the other norms & values: distinguished and also already a mention of earnestness
(Oscar Wilde would satire this Victorian earnestness later in his satirical play)
Form of the poem:

• Henry James gives us a history of the representation of consciousness, this is
something he’s very good at
rd
• 3 person discourse, still controlled by narrator but the perspective of the character
can be heard := free indirect discourse
• Most of the time we get Winterbourne’s perspective has influence on how we see
the other characters
• What we know about Daisy, we get through Winterbourne the narrator constantly
guides us into Winterbourne’s mind
• ≠ reality, but illusion: it calls for an active reader to complete the representation
• Reader has to be able to disconnect from Winterbourne or we’ll miss some important
things
• Winterbourne sees Daisy as a riddle he has to solve, the reader also has to do this with
the text: who is the narrator, etc…
• Both the reader and Winterbourne have to solve the riddle the text offers
• Henry James occupies an important position in the history of representation of
consciousness, later in modernism the trend would be continued by Joyce & Woolf
Victorian Age III :

OSCAR WILDE – THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, p. 2221-2263
Biography:
• 1854-1900
• Was born and raised in Dublin
• Studied at Trinity College in Dublin and won a scholarship to Oxford, where he
established a brilliant academic record
• 1878 he graduated and moved to London
• Here he established himself quickly as a writer and as a spokesperson for the school of
‘art for art’s sake’ art needed no functionality, it’s beautiful and that’s enough!
• Wilde was an aesthete the aesthetes were a movement in favour of art for art’s
sake, inspired by Pre-Raphaelites: Rosetti, Morris & Dante
• The French artist Joris-Karl Hysmans wrote the novel ‘A rebours’ which means
‘Against the grain’ this novel served as a bible for the aesthetes
> the protagonist in the novel lived a life that the aesthetes took over
• 1882 he visited America for a long and successful lecture tour, where he startled
audiences by airing the gospel of the ‘aesthetic movement’
• For his role as spokesperson for aestheticism, Wilde had many gifts:
he was a dazzling conversationalist
delighted his listeners by his polished wordplay and by uttering opinions that were
both outrageous and incongruous
• He also had the gifts of an actor who delights in gaining attention

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• He soon discovered that a flamboyant style of dress was one of the most effective
ways of gaining attention
• He favoured colourful costumes in marked contrast to the sober black suits of the late-
Victorian middle classes he was a dandy
• A green carnation in his buttonhole and a velvet knee breeches became his badges of
his youthful iconoclasm
• Wilde’s campaign quickly gained an amused response from the middle class quarters
but his successes for 17 years in England & America were of course not only due to
his self-advertising stunts as a dandy
• In his writings he excelled in a variety of genres: critic of literature and society,
novelist, poet and dramatist
• As a poet he felt overshadowed by his Victorian predecessors and he had trouble
finding his own voice
• His most outstanding success was as a writer of comedies: especially ‘The
Importance of Being Earnest’
• 1895 his success suddenly crumbled when he was arrested and sentenced to prison
for homosexuality after he had begun a romance with the handsome young poet Lord
Alfred Douglas
• Wilde sued for libel (smaad) but lost the case and was sent to prison
• After leaving prison he was a ruined man and emigrated to France where he lived out
the last 3 years of his life under an assumed name
• Before his departure to France he had been divorced and declared bankrupts and in
France he had to rely on friends for financial supports
• Wilde is buried in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery
• In his comedy ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ the character Ernest Worthing dies
in a Paris hotel and his death is reported by the manager Wilde also died in a Paris
hotel and his death was reported by the manager
this coincidence seems a curious paradigm of Wilde’s career, for the connections
between his life and art were unusually close
Analyses of The Importance of Being Earnest:

• Story about 2 friends who lead a double life:
- country = Jack = Ernest 1
- city = Algernon = Ernest 2
• Because of the double life, confusion occurs
• Just like Shakespeare, Wilde also creates parallel plots:
the parallel activity here is that love occurs on the high and the low level
Chasuble and Miss Prism = the lower class (priest & teacher ) who fall in love
Jack and Gwendolen = the higher class who falls in love with each other
• Confusion is all around and there’s need for a solution what is going to be found
out at the end? Jack and Algernon are brothers but their origin is to be found out
Act 1:
• p.2262, middle of the page:
Lady Bracknell tells jack he has a brother
Jack says he always knew he had a brother
Algernon said he did his best to become someone else
Gwendolen: never changes in her affections means she changes all the time!
Cecily: what a noble nature

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Jack: what is my name? look for my name

= mistaken identity, foundlings = comedy = melodrama
• Wilde doesn’t invent new elements, very traditional to take up melodrama
• p.2263: is about origin:
Jack: ‘the army lists … naturally is Ernest’
Jack: ‘it’s a terrible thing…nothing but the truth’
= counter intuitive line = key element throughout the entire play
• Now how do we have to read the ending?
does it not matter when you lie? = no
• What are the particulars of this scene?
is he speaking the truth when reading the book of Army lists? We don’t know
because he doesn’t hand the book out the question of truth is left in the middle
• The beginning of the play also has an important role the butler stands in for the
timing, they need to be perfect in timing to create the right dynamics on stage
• p.2226, 1st act: ‘You invented…tonight’
• p.2228: parody
• p.2230: Jack proposing ‘how long you’ve been about it’ = certain degree of relativism
to stage conventions he’s only been on stage for 10 min but already proposes
• p.2231: ‘I feel to tell you…mother requires…do you smoke?’ the intuitive reaction
is to say no, but he doesn’t follow his intuition
• p.2231: Lady Bracknell ‘education produces no effect whatsoever’ satirical which
creates a looser atmosphere through the entire play
• p.2233: ‘acquire as soon as possible’
• p.2234: ‘my dear fellow…behave to a woman’ the surface morality is being
mocked but it’s a hopefully entertaining way to consider the aspects of Victorian
norms & values not meant to undermine them
Act 2:
• p.2237: about deceit
• p.2238: Chasuble stands for a kind of morality because he’s a priest, but love is more
important he forgets the rules for a while
• p.2239: Algernon is in the city/country confusion, all sorts of problems that need to
be solved
• p.2249: Gwendolen ‘Well to speak…deception’ the necessity of being honest, Jack
is all about deception but as matters progress that’s not so important
hypocrisy = part of life and everybody seems to accept this
the marriages in the end are therefore just on the surface
Form of the play:

• 3 acts the story is relative easy
• Is ‘ The Importance of Being Earnest’ also art for art’s sake?
• Does it have no deeper meaning than to be a piece of art? -
No it certainly has a meaning: parody of the Victorian norms & values
• The play has become part of the canon of literature in English
• Why would Wilde produce a play like this?
hypocrisy? = part of life
art for art’s sake? = no, Wilde had the gift of the ‘gap’, he knew how to spun a
sentence to give it the right meaning, he’s a great comedian

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• Hypocrisy = still a part of life, but do we as an audience need to empathise with what
is going on on the stage?
is that possible with this play?
what’s the environment in which this takes place?
there’s a lot of exaggeration, conceits
but there’s a different problem Who are these people?
they are a high society and without that setting the satire would be hard to create, ≠
work
• Clear difference from the 1st scene between our experience and what tis shown on
stage: aristocrats
• With this play the aristocrats seem to act more realistically, so that we might want to
connect with them, but because they are aristocrats it also may act as a hindrance
Victorian Age III : extra info added by Luc Herman

OSCAR WILDE – THE DECAY OF LYING (essay by Oscar Wilde)
• 2 guys – 1 gives represents the thoughts of Oscar Wilde:
1. Art never expresses anything than itself = art for art’s sake
2. All bad art comes from returning to life and nature and from elevating these 2
into ideals anti romanticism and anti realism
3. Life imitates art for more than art imitates life importance of artistic
4. Lying = the telling of beautiful untrue things = the proper aim of art
this elevates the activity of lying into a basic tenet of art
honesty/earnestness was 1 of the basic Victorian values
Wilde had a view opposite of this Victorian value
• Earnestness is an important topic in the work of Henry James, with Oscar Wilde it
becomes the main topic
• Earnestness was the most vulnerable norm, because it’s really hard to act correctly to
what we think
• We’re all exposed to hypocrites and hypocrisy = fact of life
• In Wilde’s play this hypocrisy is exposed by the 2 central male characters
• Although there’s fancy footwork in the play to make it seem innocent (the 2 guys ≠
punished for lying) the subject is being raised
• The 1st audience to come and see the play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ might
have been slightly taken aback by this play, but there was still a moral issue for them
on offer: although the play was rather confronting than entertaining
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER
Overview:
• The roots of modern literature are in the late 19th C
• The aesthetic movement with its insistence on ‘art for art’s sake’, assaulted
middle-class assumptions about the nature and function of art
• Rejecting Victorian notions of the artist’s moral and educational duties,
aestheticism helped widen the breach between writers and the general public
• This widening breach between the writers and the general public resulted in the
‘alienation’ of the modern artists from society
• This alienation is evident in the lives & work of the French symbolists and other
late 19th C artists who repudiated conventional notions of respectability and it

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underlies key works such as James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and
T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’
• In 1870 the Education act had made elementary schooling in England compulsory
and universal led to the rapid emergence of a mass literate population
• Because of this mass literate population, new mass-produced popular literature
and new cheap journalism was produced the ‘yellow press’
• The audience for literature split up in 3 sections:
1. The highbrows
2. The middle-brows
3. The lowbrows
• This segmentation helped widen the gap between popular art and sophisticated
art
• This gap became still bigger with the 20th Century emergence of modernist
iconoclasm and avant-garde experiment in literature, music and the visual arts
• For many Victorians the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the end of an era
• The reaction against middle-class Victorian attitudes that is central to modernism
was already under way in the 2 decades before the Queen’s death in 1901
eg.: Samuel Butler’s ‘The Way Of All Flesh’
• The pessimism of imaginative writing in the last decade of the 19th C- and the 1st
decade of the 20th C was widely spread
• Also Stoicism (a stiff-upper-lip determination to endure whatever fate may bring)
also characterizes the literature written in the transitional period between the Victorian
era and modernism
• By the dawn of the 20th C: traditional stabilities of society, religion and culture
seemed to have weakened and the pace to be accelerating
• The unsettling force of modernity profoundly challenged traditional ways of
structuring and making sense of human experience
• Because of the rapid change, the mass dislocation of populations by war, the
rapidly expanding cities,… modernity disrupted the old order threw ethical and
social code upside down cast doubt into previously stable assumptions about the
self, community, the world and the divine
• Early, 20th C writers were keenly aware that powerful concepts and vocabularies
were emerging in anthropology, psychology, philosophy and the visual arts
reimagined human identity in radically new ways
• Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ was published in 1900 and soon
psychoanalyses was changing how people saw and described rationality the self and
personal development
• Also other works of anthropology were altering basic conceptions of culture,
religion and myth eg: Nietzsche: death of God and deeply tragic conception of life:
‘people look deeply into the true nature of things and realize that no action of theirs
can work any change’
• These profound changes in modern intellectual history coincided with the
changes that were going on in everyday life
• In the first years of the 20th C everyday life was also undergoing a rapid
transformation:
electricity was spreading
cinema and radio were on the rise
new pharmaceuticals such as aspirin were being developed
labour was increasingly managed & rationalized

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more people crowded into the cities

communication & transportation globalized space and accelerated time
• Early 20th C was a period of scientific revolution Einstein’s theory of
relativity
• The early 20th C also brought countless advances in technology:
the 1st wireless communication across the Atlantic
Wright brother flew the first plane in 19
Ford introduced the Model T, the 1st mass-produced car, …
• Because of all these changes, literature could not stand still !
• Modern writers sought to create new forms that could registers these profound
alterations in human experience
• Many modern writers were paradoxically repulsed by aspects of modernization
is visible in their literature (eg. T.S. Eliot ‘The Waste Land’ revolts against the
gramophone and canned goods)
• Because scientific materialism and positivism said they could find empirical
explanations for everything, they were weakening the influence of religion
• Many writers took to literature and looked into it as an alternative of science
• Whether or not they welcomed the demise of tradition, habit and certitude in
favour of the new modern writers articulated the effects of modernity’s relentless
change, loss and destabilization10
• As Yeats wrote: ‘things fall apart – the centre cannot hold’
• The modernist drive was ‘to make it new’ Ezra Pound’s famous slogan
• This ‘make it new’ arose out of the ambivalent consciousness of the non-stopping
changes brought by modernization
• The modernists wanted to mark the end of the Victorian era and mark the
beginning of a new era with this
however this wasn’t necessarily the case
actually slow gradation from the Victorian era to the 20th Century
but the artists just wanted to be different
• We have to see it from their historical perspective:
death Queen Victoria, decay of the Victorian values
Edward VII = vulgar flashiness
George V = equilibrium WWI
return of the oppressed: Anglo Boer War
the edges of the British Empire stated to revolt
Irish war and Irish wish for independency Yeats and Joyce
• The Anglo-Boer War took place during Victoria’s reign (+1901) and Edward VII
reign (1901-1910)
• This latter decade is known as the Edwardian period, and the king stamped his
extrovert and self-indulgent character upon it:
the wealthy made it a vulgar age of enjoyment
most writers and artists kept away from involvement from involvement in high
society
• From 1910-1914 George V came to the throne the Georgian period
• Edwardian = term that applies to English cultural history and suggests a period
in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age – country houses with
10
Of ze nu de ondergang van de traditie, gewoonte en zekerheid ten gunste van het nieuwe verwelkomden of
niet de moderne schrijvers verwoordde de effecten van de meedogenloze verandering, verlies en
destabilisatie die de moderniteit teweeg bracht

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numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class, a strict hierarchy of

social classes – remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas a sense of change
and liberation existed
• Georgian = term that refers largely to the lull before the storm of WWI
• The position of women was also rapidly changing in this period suffragettes
the shift in attitude towards women and the roles they played in the national life,
and the relations between the sexes = reflected in a variety of ways in literature of
the period
• In 1914 outbreak of WWI:
Britain achieved a temporary equilibrium/balance between Victorian
earnestness and Edwardian flashiness
in retrospect the Georgian period seems peculiarly golden the last phase of
assurance and stability before the old order broke up in violence throughout Europe
But even in this golden period there was restlessness and experimentation under the
surface
• Also experimentation with poetry T.S Eliot, James Joyce & Virginia Woolf
created radical new forms of fiction
• Because of WWI some poetry of that time is very sceptical and antiheroic
• WWI produced a major shift in attitude towards Western myths of progress
and civilization
• The post-war disillusion of the 1920s resulted part from the sense of utter social
and political collapse during a war in which unprecedented millions were killed
• By the beginning of WWI nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface was under
British dominion, some of the colonies were settler nations with large European
population Canada, Australia & New Zealand
• In 1907 the empire granted them the new status of dominions, recognizing their
relative control over internal affairs these largely independent nations came to be
known as the British Commonwealth, an association of self-governing countries
• The 20th C witnesses the emergence of internationally acclaimed literary voices
from these dominions
• The rest of the colonies in the British empire consisted primarily of indigenous
populations that had little or no political power but nationalist movements were
gaining strength in the early years of the century India
• In Britain imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiments often met head on in
Parliament and the press
• Also steady rising Irish nationalism resulted into increasingly violent protest
against the cultural, economic and political subordination of Ireland to the British
Crown and government
• During the Easter Rising of 1916, Irish rebels in Dublin staged a revolt against
British rule the British killed 15 Irish leaders as reaction the drive for
independence for Ireland intensified
• In 1921-22 the independence was finally achieved when the southern countries
were declared as the free Irish state ( the 6 counties of North Ireland remained part of
GB)
• No one can fully understand Yeats or Joyce without some awareness of the Irish
struggle for independence, and the way in which the Irish literature had a revival in the
late 19th C & the beginning of the 20th C
• This Irish literary revival reflected a determination to achieve a vigorous national
life culturally, even if the road seemed blocked politically

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• Early 1930s: depression and unemployment followed by the rise of Hitler

and the shadow a fascism and Nazism over Europe
• This treat of another war deeply affected the emerging poets and novelists of the
time the face of Fascism combined with economic dislocation turned the majority
of
young intellectuals in the 1930s to the political left
• 1930 = the so-called ‘red decade’ only the left seemed to offer any solution
in various forms of socials, communism and left liberalism
• Although the younger writers of the period expressed the up-to-date , radical
political views of the left, they were less technically inventive than the 1st generation
of modernists (Eliot, Joyce & Woolf)
• The outbreak of WWII in 1939 shocked and disillusioned many of the young
left-wing writers so that they subsequently moved politically to the centre
end of the red decade
• WWII brought inevitable exhaustion and diminished the British political power
• Also its secondary status to the US as a player in the Cold War brought a painful
reappraisal of Britain’s place in the world
• In winning a war, Great Britain lost an empire !
the largest, most powerful, best organized of the modern European empires had
expropriated enormous quantities of land, raw materials and labour from its widely
scattered overseas territories
• In 1947 ‘the jewel of the imperial Crown’: India, won its independence
starting the post-war wave of decolonization
• Post-war decolonization encouraged post-colonial writing that would bring about
the most dramatic geographic shift in literature in English since its inception
• Writers from Britain’s former colonies published influential and innovative
novels, plays and poems hybridizing their local traditions and varieties of English
with those of the empire
• Britain was decolonizing its empire but the former empire was colonizing
Britain: encouraged by the postwar labour shortage in England and the scarcity of
work at home, waves of Caribbean migrants journeyed to and settle in ‘the
motherland’
• In the 1960s the immigration laws became more restrictive but Britain was
already transforming into a multiracial society and infusing energy into British art and
literature
• Although the migrants came from British colonies they felt they were not being
welcomed as full-fledged members of society
this friction between colour-blind and ethnically specific notions of Englishness
caused for a large-scale and on-going rethinking of national identity in Britain
• By the end of WWII, + 1960: London was no longer culturally dominating
regional dialects and cultural accents were admitted to the airwaves/radi0
• The Arts council also supported regional art-councils after WWII ant this gave
new confidence to writers and artists outside of London (Beatles were from Liverpool)
• 1979 Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and led the Conservatizes to
power
• she ruled for 12 years and pursued a vision of a ‘new’, more productive Britain:
she curbed the power of the unions
began to dismantle the ‘welfare state’
privatized national industries and utilities in the interest of an aggressive free-
market economy

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• Initially her policies seemed to have a bracing effect on a nation still sunk in
postwar torpor, but many writers and filmmakers protested that the Conservatives
reforms widened the gap between the rich and the poor (2 nations), black and white,
north and south (GB & Ireland) and between the constituent parts of the UK
• In 1990 Thatcher was deposed (afgezet) by her own party
• Tony Blair, the new Labour Prime Minister, moved to restore the rundown of
Health Service and system of state education
• Meanwhile the Labour governments made significant progress toward solving
the bitter and problems of Northern Ireland
• Since the late 1960 the IRA (Irish Republican Army) had started a violent
campaign against British rule and met violent suppression by the British Army
• In 1998 ‘The Good Friday Agreement’ also known as ‘the Belfast Agreement’,
led to elections of a Northern Ireland Assembly, which met for the first time in 1999
and the leaders of the main Roman Catholic and Protestant parties were awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize but it didn’t last long
• In 2002 the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive Committee was suspended
because of disagreements between the parties over IRA weapons and alleged spying
1. Poetry in the Twentieth Century and after

• The years leading up to WWI saw the start of a poetic revolution
• The imagist movement oversimplified the 19rh C aesthetics against which they
defined their own artistic ideal, while scanting underlying continuities 1st influence
• The movement developed initially in London where the American modernist poet
Ezra Pound was living
• Imagists insisted on direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective
on the avoidance of all words ‘that did not contribute to the presentation’
• Contrary to the Victorian discursiveness, the imagists wrote short, sharply etched,
descriptive lyrics but they lacked a technique for the production of longer and more
complex poems
• Next to the Imagist movement there was also a revived interest in metaphysical
poetry 2nd influence
• The revived interest in Metaphysical ‘wit’ brought a desire on the part of
pioneering poets to introduce into their work a much higher degree of intellectual
complexity than had been found among the Victorians and Georgians
• 3rd influence the French symbolist poetry that also became appreciated in
the early 20th C for its more dreamy suggestiveness than for its imagistic precision and
complexity
• Modernist writers wanted to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to those of
conversations
• Irony was therefore a characteristic of metaphysical poetry together with wit and
the use of puns (which had been banned from ‘serious poetry’ for more than 200
years)
• A new critical movement and a new creative movement went hand in hand
with T.S. Eliot as the high priest of both
• Eliot extended the scope of imagism by bringing the English Metaphysicals and
the French symbolists to the rescue by adding new criteria of complexity and
allusiveness to the criteria of concreteness and precision stressed by the imagists

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• Eliot also introduced into modern English and American poetry the kind of irony
achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal colloquial, or by oblique allusions to
objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with the surface meaning of the poem
• But Eliot and his peers weren’t alone in their efforts to reinvent poetry
a major revolution occurred in English/American poetic theory and practice, one
that determined the way in which many poets now think about their art
• This modernist revolution was by no means an isolated literary phenomenon
writers on both sides of the English Channel were influenced by the French
impressionists, postimpressionists and cubist painters’ radical examination of the
nature of reality
• Another important poet was Yeats, whose remarkable oeuvre stretched across
the whole modern period
reflecting varying developments of the age with an unmistakable individual accent
beginning with the ideas of aesthetes, he turned to a tougher and sparer ironic
language without losing its characteristic verbal magic
using notions of symbolism, his mature poetry turned into rich symbolic and
Metaphysical poetry, with imagery both shockingly realistic and movingly
suggestive
• Yeats’s work encapsulates a history of English poetry between 1890 and
1939
• The young poets of the early 1930s were the first generation to grow up in the
shadow of the 1st -generation modern poets
• These younger poets also had to distinguish themselves from the still living
eminences in poetry did so by writing poems more low-pitched and ironic or more
individually responsive to and active in the social
• When WWII began the neutral tone gave way poetry concerned itself with the
operation of the unconscious mind
• Since the 1950s a new generation of poets emerged ‘The Movement’ and
aimed once again for a neutral tone, a purity of diction
• Since the 1980s the spectrum of Britain’s poets had become more diverse in
class, ethnicity, gender and region than ever before bringing new voices into
literary tradition
• Post-war Ireland was amongst the productive spaces of poetry in the 2nd half of
the 20th C as also were the former colonies
• The former colonies and the Commonwealth expanded the range of possibilities
in English-language poetry by hybridizing the tradition of the British Isles with their
iamges and speech rhythms, creoles and genres
Conclusion: A century that began with a springtime of poetic innovation drew it’s close to
the full flowering of older poets and the 21st C opened with welcome signs of fresh growth in
English-language poetry
2. Fiction in the Twentieth Century and after

• Although the three-decker volume defied prescriptions and limits
• its variety converges on persistent issues such as the construction of the self
within society, the reproduction of the real world and the temporality of human
experience and of narrative
• The novel's flexibility and multivoicedness enabled writers to take advantage of
modernity's global dislocation and mixture of peoples, while meeting the challenges to

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the imagination of mass death and world war, of the relentless and rapid changes in
modern cultures and societies and in evolving knowledge and belief
• 20th C novel can be divided in 3 main sub periods:
1. High modernism: 1920s, celebrating personal and textual inwardness,
complexity and difficulty the reaction against modernism, involving a return
to social realism & moralism
2. 1930s-1940s-1950s: period after the collapse of the British empire in in which
the fictional claims of various realism were asserted alongside the enduring
legacy of modernism
3. By the end of the century modernism had given way to the pluralism of
postmodernism and post colonialism
• The high modernists wrote in the wake of:
the shattering of confidence and the old certainties about the deity and the
Christian faith they expanded this general shaking of belief in their novels, by
founding assumptions that the world, things and selves were knowable, that
language was a reliably revelatory instrument
the author’s story gave history meaning and moral shape, that narratives should fall
into ethically instructive beginnings and endings
• Trying to be true to the new scepticism and hesitations, the modernists also
attempted to construct credible new alternatives to the old belief systems
• The once prevailing 19th C notions of ordinary reality were under serious attacks
• In her 1919 essay ‘Modern Fiction’ Virginia Woolf explicitly assaulted the
‘materialism’ of the realistic Edwardian heirs of Victorian naturalist confidence
• For Woolf and other modernists what was knowable and thus representable,
was not out there as some given, fixed , transcribable essence
reality existed rather only as it was perceived
Woolf’s subject would be an ordinary mind on an ordinary day
the real was offered, refracted and reflected in the novel’s representative
consciousness
not even through an ‘unreliable’ narrator, who had his own perceptions
• A marked feature of the new fictional selfhood was a fraught condition of
existential loneliness sense of loss
• Language & textuality reading and writing were now central to these highly
metafictional novels, which were often about writers and artists, and surrogates for
artists
• The sceptical modernist linguistic turn and inward turn, the rejection of
materialist externality and of the Victorian’s realist project, left traces on later fiction,
but modernism’s revolutions were not absolute or permanent
• Despite the turn to documentary realism in the 1930sn the modernist emphasis on
linguistic self-consciousness did not disappear instead the new writers politicized
the modern novel’s linguistic self-consciousness
• Late 20th C and early 21st C ‘English’ fiction would have looked startlingly thin
and poverty-stricken were it not for the large presence in Britain of writers of non-
European origin
3. Drama in the Twentieth Century and after

• Late Victorians as Oscar Wilde can also be seen as early, modern forerunners
of the 20th century’s renovators of dramatic form

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• The wit of Wilde’s drawing-room comedies is combative and generative of

paradoxes , but beneath the glitter of his verbal play are serious, if heavily coded,
reflections on social, political and feminist issues
• Over time the desire to unsettle, to shock even to alienate the audience became
one hallmark of modern drama
• Wilde was born in Dublin and it was there where the century’s 1st major
theatrical movement originated
• To nourish Irish poetic drama and foster the Irish Literary Renaissance, Yeats
and Lady Gregory founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899
• In England T.S. Eliot attempted with considerable success to revive a ritual
poetic drama
• Despite the achievements of Yeats, Eliot and others it cannot be said of Irish and
British drama (contrary to poetry & fiction), that a technical revolution changed the
whole course of literary history
• The major innovations in the first half of the 20th C were on the continent:
German expressionist drama developed, also epic drama made its entrance introducing
viewers to the Verfremdungseffekt: alienation – break the illusion of reality
these influences contributed to the shattering of the naturalistic convention in
drama, making the theatre a place where linear plot gave way for to fractured
scenes and circular action and transparent conversation was displaced by
misunderstanding and verbal opacity (duisternis) and a predictable and knowable
universe was unsettled by eruptions of the irrational and absurd
• In Britain the impact of these Continental innovations was delayed by a
conservative theatre establishment until the late 1950s-1960s
• The person who played the most significant role in the Anglophone absorption
of modernist experiment was the Irishmen Samuel Beckett
• He changed the history of drama with his first produced play: ‘Waiting for
Godot’
‘En attendant for Godot’ and ‘The Endgame’
• In the shadow of WWII and the mass death of it, the plotlessness, the minimal
characterization and setting, the absurdist intimation of an existential darkness without
redemption, the tragicomic melding of anxiety, circular wordplay, and slapstick action
in Beckett’s plays gave impetus to a seismic shift in British writing for the theatre
• Other writers also broke with the genteel proprieties and narrowly upper-class set
desings in one unadventurous drawing-room comedy after another that had dominated
the British stage for decades
• While plays of social and political critique were one response to the postwar
period, Beckett and the theatre of the absurd inspired another group of Royal Court
writers to refocus language, symbolism and existential realities
• Postmodernist plays show reflections on art, language and performance
• This enjoyment and exploitation of self-conscious theatricality arises partly out of
the desire to show theatre as smt different from film and television
• In 1968 a new ‘Theatres Act’ abolished the fact that writers for public stage had
to submit their play scripts to the government for state censure this intensified the
postwar ferment in British theatre
• Now writers were able to write challenging studies of violence, social
deprivation, political and sexual aggression, often using mythical setting and epic
stories to construct austere tableaux of power and oppression
• The post 1968 liberalization also encourages the of new emergence groups
addressing specific political agendas, inspired by the epic form of Brecht

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• Also ethos of collaboration and group development helped women dramatist to

break through onto mainstream stage
Conclusion: the century that began with its 1st great dramatic movement in Ireland was
followed by a century that began with English-language drama more diverse in its accents and
styles, more international ain its bearing and visions than ever before
Twentieth Century and After I :

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS – EASTER 1916 & THE SECOND COMING,
p. 2397-99 & p. 2402-03
Biography:
• 1865-1939
• Born in Dublin and spent his childhood in Sligo, the west of Ireland
• The family moved to London in 1874 and returned to Dublin in 1880
• He attended high school and then art school, which he soon left to concentrate on
poetry
• Yeats’s father was a religious sceptic, but he believed in the ‘religion of art’
• Yeats himself was not religious, but religious by temperament spent all his life
searching to compensate for his lost religion
• His search led him to t various kinds of mysticism, folklore, theosophy, spiritualism
and Neo-Platonism
• He said he made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition
• He spent his young manhood between Dublin, London & Sligo and these places
contributed to his poetic development:
London: in the 1980s he met the most important poets of the day and started the
Irish Literary Society, and acquired late-Romantic and Pre-Raphaelites ideas of
poetry believed poetic language should be dreamy, evocative and ethereal
Sligo: he gained knowledge of the life of the peasantry and folklore
Dublin: he founded the National Literary Society and was influenced by Irish
nationalism became an important impulse for his art he was looking for
the facts of Irish life although he didn’t agree with those who wished to use
poetry for political ends, he came to see his poetry as contributing to the
rejuvenation of Irish culture
• Yeats was looking for 1 image to work with
• Yeats vigorously hybridizes Irish and English traditions and eventually draws into this
potent intercultural mix East and South Asian cultural resources
• Resolutely Irish he imaginatively reclaims a land colonized by the British imposes
Irish rhythms, images, genres and syntax on English-language poetry and revives
native myths, images, genres and consciousness
• Irish nationalism first sent Yeats into a search of consistently simpler and more
popular style to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations
• But later other forces such as Nietzsche worked on him and intensified his search for a
more active stance, a more vigorous style
• At the start of the 20th C Yeats wearied of his early languid aesthetic, declaring his
intentions were to make ‘everything hard and clear’ and to leave behind ‘sentiment
and sentimental sadness’ he wished for poems not to be disembodied beauty but
that could carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole
• Also Ezra Pound influenced him to make his style less mannered and more stripped
down
• In 1889 he met Maud Gonne, a beautiful Irish actress with Irish nationalism fervour

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• He was desperately in love with her but also mad about her self-sacrifice to political
activism visible in his poetry: love poems and poems regretting her death
• Another important influence for his work was his acquaintance with Lady Gregory
she was an Anglo-Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature
• In 1896 Yeats spent many holidays at her aristocratic country house and developed
the ‘country house ideal’
• under her influence Yeats began to organize the Irish dramatic movement in 1899 and
together they founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904 she also led Yeats to politics
• Yeats disliked the moneygrubbing middle classes and looked for his ideal characters
either below them (to peasants and beggars) or above them (to the aristocracy), for
each of these had their own traditions and lived accordingly to them
• Yeats’s long-cherished hope was ‘to bring the halves together’: the Protestants and the
Catholic church through a literature infused with Ireland’s ancient myths and
cultural riches before the division of faiths
but a sting of national controversies led him to turn his back on Ireland and moved
to England
• With the Easter Rising of 1916 he returned back to Ireland
• The rising was led by men and women he had long known, some of whom were
executed or imprisoned by the British it was this tragic dignity that dram him back
to Ireland (Maud Gonne’s estranged husband was one of the leaders executed)
• As a poet his culturally nationalist work had helped inspire the revolutionaries and he
asked himself if his work had led certain men to the English shot
• Yeats’s nationalism and antinationalism, his divided loyalties to Ireland and to
England, find powerfully ambivalent expression in “Easter 1916’ and other poems
• In 1925 he wrote a book ‘A Vision’ a result of his esoteric studies
It said: ‘The system was a theory of movements of history and of the different
types of personality, each movement and type being related to a different phase of
the moon. At the centre of the symbolic system were the interpenetrating cones or
‘gyres’, that represented the movement through major cycles of history and across
antitheses of human personality’
in his poems of 1920s-30sn winding stairs spinning tops & ‘gyres’ are important
symbols, serving as a means of resolving some of the contraries that had arrested
him from the beginning (paradoxes of time and eternity, spirit and body,…)
uitleg Van Hulle: according to Yeats, each cone stands for 2000 years of history
that succeed each other ‘The Second Coming’ refers to this 2nd period of
history, a 2nd gyre
Once we reach the top of the gyre
a new era will start
according to Yeats this will be a violent era
• If his early poetry was static and full of symbols of inners states, his late poetry
was more dynamic, its propulsive syntax and muscular rhythms more suited to his
themes of lust, rage and the body
• One key to Yeats’s greatness is that there are many different Yeatses:
a hard-nosed sceptic and esoteric idealist
a nativist and a cosmopolitan

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an Irish nationalist and an ironic antinationalist

a Romantic brooding on loss and desire and a modernist mocking idealism,
nostalgia and contemporary society
• Also in his poetic innovations and consolidations, he is both a conservative and a
radical:
literary traditionalist working with inherited genres such as love poetry, elegy,
sonnet, poem on public themes
restless innovator who disrupts generic conventions, breaking up coherence of the
sonnet, de-idealizing the dead mourned in elegies, bringing into public poems an
intense personal ambivalence
• Also in matters of form he was a was a combination of a traditionalist and an
innovator:
he rhymes often in off-rhyme, uses standard metres but bunches or scatters their
stresses
employs elegant syntax but has urgency of colloquial speech,..
all this led to unpredictable and fascinating poetry
• Influenced by lady Gregory he was briefly drawn to politics but returned quickly
from this and was eventually appalled by all political ideologies
the grim prophecy of ‘The Second Coming’ seemed to him increasingly apt
• Yeats’s last poems were written in a rugged, colloquial and concrete language
and have a controlled, yet startling wildness
• His return to life to ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ is one of the most
impressive final phases of any poets career
• 1939 he died in France just before the outbreak of WWII
Analyses of The Easter 1916:

• Britain was at war with Germany
• Ireland acted up against the British oppression
• Yeats knew some of the Easter Rising rebels
• He supported the Irish independence
• ‘Easter 1916’ was only published in 1920 4 years later
• Yeats wrote the poem after the leaders of the rising were trialled and shot
• He knew that as Ireland’s nr.1 bard he had to give response to this
• He saw the serious effects of the risings
• He felt obliged to give response because he thought had put the idea of ‘Ireland as a
nation’ into the heads of the Irish
• Stanza 1-3 is about looking backwards
• Stanza 4 is about looking forward
• Stanza 1 is about different individuals interacting with each other
• Lines 6 & 8: ‘polite meaningless words’ everyday words and everyday life
• Lines 15 & 16 something is about to happen
• Stanza 2: even more emphasis on the individual, he singles out 4 people:
- line 17: that woman
- line 24: this man
- line 27: this other , his helper and friend
-line 31-32: this other man, a drunken lout
• Stanza 1 & 2 = half of the poem is on the comedy of the individual
• Line 40: ‘a terrible beauty’ romantic notion, notion of the sublime - beauty
connected to awe and terror

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• Stanza 3: line 41: ‘purpose alone’ single minded

• Stanza 3: beauty only comes at the expense of life to transcend normal life is at a
price hearth turns to stone = mutability
• Stanza 4: have to keep up with the complexity, you have to deal with it
• Stanza 4: how terror emphasizes over beauty it’s a complex poem, very ambiguous
= typically modernism
• Line 57-58: heart turning into stone, thinks this is what happened to Maud Gonne
• Line 60-61: he realises it’s his own opinion, but it’s heaven’s part to judge upon the
people who acted in 1916
he’s a poet, his task is only to observe, murmur their names and write them out in
verse
• The poem expresses negative capability
Analyses of The Second Coming:

• Was written in 1919, the end of WWI
• Inspired after John Donne – all coherence is gone after Copernicus
• Line 1: the gyre also this feeling after WWI, all coherence is gone, things don’t
hold together and he expresses this feeling by the symbol of a gyre
• Line 2: ‘the falcon cannot hear the falconer’ the falconer is on the ground and the
falcon is up in the ear, near the top of the gyre
• Line 14: he describes the second coming as a sphinx like figure
• Line 19: ‘twenty centuries’ refers back to his coins which contains 2000 years of
history
• Line 21: ‘rough beast’ What is he talking about? Don’t expect Jesus to be a rough
beast
• Clearly this is an abstract poem but this poem connects to the Easter Rising the new
era will be a violent era the Easter Rising = violent
Twentieth Century and After I :

JAMES JOYCE – ARABY, p. 2503-2507
Biography:
• 1882-1941
• Born in Dublin
• Much of his younger life can be recollected from his novel ‘A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young man’
• His primary education was catholic, he went to Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere
College and later studied modern languages at the University College of Dublin
• From a young age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel against shabbiness and
philistinism of Dublin
• At Belvedere college he rejected his Catholic faith in favour of a literary mission that
he saw as involving rebellion and exile
• He refused to play part in the nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow
student, yet all his work would centre itself around Dublin

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• Joyce went to Paris after graduation but he returned to Ireland when his mother was ill
and taught there for a short while
• After the death of his mother he went on exile to Zurich and Trieste with Nora
Barnacle, with who he lived in devoted companionship until his death
this exile was very important for his writing
• In 1920 they settled in Paris but in 1940 they were forced to take refuge in Switzerland
because of the war
• He died in Zurich a few week s later
• Although he left Ireland he wrote only about Dublin for him Dublin was kind of a
microcosm of human history, geography and experience
• Joyce began his career by writing ‘Dubliners’ short stories etching the
extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life, they are sharp realistic sketches of what
Joyce called the ‘paralysis’ that beset the lives of people in the then-provincial Ireland
• The language is crisp, lucid and detached, and the details are chosen and organized so
that carefully interacting symbolic meanings are set up
• Joyce had an artistic awareness and this view of art is what Stephen Dedalus will come
to at the end of ‘ A Portrait’
• In the portrait Stephen works out a theory in which art moves from the lyrical form
(the simplest, the personal expression of an instant of emotion) through the narrative
form (no longer purely personal) to the dramatic (the highest and most nearly perfect
form), where the artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond
or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails
• This view of art, which involves objectivity, even the exile, of the artist overlaps with
the emphasis on masks, impersonality and ironic detachment in the work of other
modernist writers such as Pound, Yeats and Eliot
• From the beginning it was difficult for Joyce to get his work published because he
didn’t want publisher to delete sentences of his work
• Ulysses was even banned from the Us for a long period, because of its obscenity
• Joyce thought his art was as a looking glass/a mirror for the Irish people and it
they wouldn’t have a look in this mirror (if ‘Dubliners’ wasn’t published) the
Irish people would retard because they couldn’t have a good look at themselves
Analyses of Araby:
• The 3rd of 15 short stories in Dubliners
• Is about the frustrated quest for beauty in the midst of drabness
• The tale is both meticulously realistic in tis handling of details of Dublin life and the
Dublin scene and highly symbolic in that almost every image and incident suggests
some particular aspect of the theme
• Eg: the suggestion of the Holy Grail in the image of the chalice in the 5th paragraph
• Joyce used his own childhood experiences and the uncle in the story is a reminiscence
of Joyce’s father
• But the child lives with its aunt and uncle, a symbol of that isolation and lack of proper
relation between ‘consubstantial’ (in the flesh) parents and children that is the major
theme in Joyce’s work
• Line 1: blind
• Line 5: brown brown = paralyses, no future in Dublin = blind reason he went
into exile

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• p.2504: 2nd paragraph: ‘I bore my chalice’ he sees his life as a chalice (kelk), a
cradle
• p.2504: 4th paragraph: ‘at last she spoke to me’ she mentions Araby and it sounds
exotic but it wasn’t exotic, because it was in Dublin
• p.2505: line 5: ‘I’ll bring you smt’ his quest starts here, but he is kept waiting
because his uncle doesn’t come and his quest ends in a disillusion
• p.2506: 4th paragraph: vases and tea-sets this ordinary conversation serves as an
epiphany the vulgar speech = the epiphany he’s on a quest for a chalice, but he
only finds vases an tea-sets = disillusion
• epiphany = sudden spiritual manifestation, and like here it can even occur just through
vulgar speech
• p.2507: last line: ‘I saw myself’ he himself is mirrored looking-glass
Twentieth Century and After II :

T.S. ELIOT – TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT, p. 2639-2644
Biography:
• 1888-1965
• Born in Missouri, New England
• Eliot is the godfather of ‘new criticism’, he’s a forerunner of this brand because he
want us to put focus on the poem itself, not its context, not its poet, but the poem itself
• He entered Harvard in 1906 and was influenced by anti-Romanticism
• He also studied literature and philosophy on France and Germany, before going to
England shortly after the outbreak of WWI in 1914
• He studied Greek an d philosophy at Oxford, thought school in London and then
obtained a position with Lloyd’s bank
• When he came to the UK he started writing literary and philosophical reviews for
athenaeum magazines and was assistant editor of ‘The Egoist Magazine’ and he
founded his own magazine ‘The Criterion’
• His first poetry appeared in 1915 when at Pound’s urging ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ was printed in a magazine
• His 1 published collection of poems was ‘Prufrock and Other Observation’ 1917
st
• Later he published the ‘The Waste land’ in 1922

• When he settle in London he saw poetry in English as exhausted, with no verbal
excitement or original craftsmanship he sought to make poetry more subtle, more
suggestive and at the same time more precise
• Eliot was a poet and a critic with interest in in history and interest in the
Metaphysical poets whose poems are characterised by complexity and urban
sensation like the imagists he emphasized the necessity of clear and precise
images
• The poet must thus become more and more comprehensive, allusive and indirect in
order to force, to dislocate id necessary language into meaning
• In 1915 he married the English Writer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was
not a success she suffered from poor emotional and physical health and it laid a
great strain on Eliot
• By 1921 the distress and worry had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown
and on medical advice he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanatorium in Zurich
• Between 1916-1921, right after WWI, he wrote + 100 essays and reviews and later
published these as ‘The Sacred Wood’, which includes ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’

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• In his poetry he aimed for the reestablishment of that ‘unified’ sensibility which e
found in Donne and earlier 17th C poets, but which was lost in the late 17th C with the
‘dissociation of sensibility’
• He considered himself a ‘classicist’ in literature, yet his own poetry is in many
respects untraditional and certainly highly individual in tone his conservative and
even authorial habit of mind, his anti-Semitic remarks and missionary zeal, alienated
some who admire – and some whose own poetry has been much influenced by – his
poetry
• He was also a playwright, addressing religious themes, however critics differ on the
his capacities of playwriting
• But there is no disagreement on his importance as one of the great renovators of poetry
in English, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics and intellectuals
was enormous
• In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature and his literary qualities were
fully recognized his poetic cunning, fine craftsmanship, original accent, and his
historical importance a s ‘the’ poet od modern symbolist-metaphysical tradition
Analyses of Tradition and Individual Talent:

Part 1:
• Tradition
• Individuals focus on those aspects in which we don’t represent anyone else but just
ourselves
• Last line of paragraph 1: ‘You can…archaeology’ = metaphor
• p.2640: prejudice, but
• p.2640: 1st paragraph if we do that we’ll be discouraged, don’t look at tradition in
this particular way
• p.2640: 1st paragraph: line 6: ‘labour’ work for tradition, to gain it you have to have
historical sense! has a simultaneous existence
• p.2640: 2nd paragraph: ‘No poet’ a poet’s relation to the dead poets compare
himself to them
• p.2640: ‘simultaneously…preceded it' this is very strange because for example when
reading Araby it changes your perception on for example Beowulf
• p.2640: 3rd paragraph: ‘I say judged…the dead’ art ≠ improved but judged
differently
• p.2641: 2nd paragraph: ‘the metier of poetry’ poetry = a metier, a skill, you can’t
learn to wrote poetry
• p.2641: 3 paragraph: last line
rd
extinction of personality = depersonalization
• p.2641: last paragraph: depersonalization reoccurs
Part 2:
• line 6: ‘point out the importance .. to other poems’ this is what has been explained
in part 1
• line 9: ‘the other aspect…relation of the poem to its author’ this is what the 2nd part
is about impersonal poetry the poet is a medium, a catalyst, platinum
poet isn’t a person
• because of the transforming catalyst a new compound had to be formed, a bowl to
contain it in
• there’s pressure, confusion the poet has no personality to express

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• p.2644: ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is an exact formula’ = Eliot is criticising

how Wordsworth looked at poetry be able to make this link on the exam
and give Eliot’s definition of poetry
Part 3:
• in this 3rd part, part 1 and part 2 are translated into criticism
• people took the life and personality of the poet into account Eliot doesn’t agree and
says we should only focus on the poem new criticism !!!
Twentieth Century and After III :

VIRGINIA WOOLF – MODERN FICTION, p. 2429-2434
Biography:
• 1882-1941
st
• Belonged to the 1 generation of modernists
• Daughter of a Victorian critic and philosopher
• After his death she settled in London and became part of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, an
intellectual coterie (kliekje) and thrived a the centre of the middle-class, upper-middle
class intelligentsia
• Their intelligence was equalled by their frankness, notably on sexual topics and the
sexual life of Bloomsbury provided ample material for discussion and contributed to
Woolf’s freedom of thinking about gender relation she was bisexual
• She married Leonard Woolf and together they founded the ‘Hogarth Press’
• 13 years after her marriage she fell in love with the poet Vita Sackville-West
her relationship with this aristocratic lesbian inspired the most light-hearted and
scintillating of her books, ‘Orlando’ (1928)11
• Woolf advocated the creation of a literature that would include women’s’ experience
and ways of thinking but instead of encouraging an exclusively female perspective,
she proposed literature that would be ‘androgynous in mind’ and resonate equally
with men and women
• But underneath Woolf’s liveliness and wit lay psychological tension created partly by
her childhood (abused by her brother) and partly by her perfectionism , she being her
own most exacting critic
• She had been subject to periods of severe depression and in 1941 she drowned
herself in a river, an influenced act by her dread of WWII (she and Leonard would
have been arrested by the Gestapo if the Nazi’s had invaded England)
• As a fiction writer Woolf rebelled against what she called the ‘materialism’ of the
novelist such as her contemporaries, who depicted suffering and social injustice
through gritty realism Woolf sought to render more delicately those aspects of
consciousness in which she felt the truth of human experience lay
• In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ she defines the task of the novelist as looking within,
as conveying the mind receiving ‘a myriad impressions’, as representing the ‘luminous
halo’ or ‘semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness tot the end’
• In her novels she abandoned linear narratives and experienced with interior
monologues and stream of consciousness narration , exploring with great subtlety
problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of
time, change, loss and memory for human personality
11
Orlando 1928: a novel about a trans historical androgynous protagonist, whose identity shifts from
masculine to feminine over centuries

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• These techniques are visible in her books ‘To the Lighthouse’ & ‘The Waves’
Analyses of Modern Fiction:

• Woolf asks if the new writers, the 2nd generation of modernists, are making an
improvement she doesn’t think so
• p.2430: 2nd paragraph: the older generation were materialists they were concerned
with the body (= material) and not with the spirit
• p.2431: line 1: ‘His characters…live for?’ she would like to deal with the ‘for’
• p.2431: 2 paragraph: = short paragraph in which she makes a summary of her
nd
concerns the unimportant things are related to the body and not to the mind
• p.2431: ‘Mr Bennet…reality’ realism they say they deal with reality but that’s
not what they capture
• p.2431: ‘ill-fitting vestments’ she means ill-fitting customs/conventions
• p.2431: ‘The writers seems constrained…tyrant…air or probability’ writer is
constrained by the customs, the conventions
• p.2432: 1st paragraph: ‘look within’ first words of a new paragraph = scope !
look at the spirit, the inward turn
• p.2432: 1st paragraph: line 2: ‘ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ reference to James
Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Blooms’ mind
• p.2432: last line of 1st paragraph: ‘we are suggesting…’ she’s suggesting, she’s
speaking for all the modernists contrast between modernism and realism she
wants to do something different from the realists, talk about what is going on in
someone’s mind scope it’s however an overstatement
• p.2432: ‘Mr James Joyce is the most notable…closer to life’ aim is to come closer
to reality than the realists did : aim of modernism = stream of consciousness, a mind
doesn’t work orderly
• p.2432: ‘Mr Joyce is spiritual…the brain’ spirit, consciousness, mind/brain =
inward flame = the inward turn
• p.2433: ‘its incoherence’ purpose of modernism = incoherence because it reflects
the mind and often the mind is incoherent
• p.2434: we can glue 2 separate sentences of this section together into 1 sentence:
‘if we want understanding of the soul…no experiment, even of the wildest – is
forbidden’
• Just like Pound, Woolf also wants to make it new reality as it is perceived by a
person (eg. Leopold Bloom) is important for the modernists
• They stick a label on themselves by wanting to be different frm the realists
eg: Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake has a circular pattern
the last sentence of the novel has no full stop and leads back to the first sentence of
the novel
Twentieth Century and After III :

W.H. AUDEN– MUSEE DES BEAUX_ARTS, p. 2693
Biography:
• 1907-1973
• Belonged to the 2nd generation of modernists
• Born in York, England and son of a doctor and a former nurse
• Educated at private schools and Oxford
• After graduation from Oxford he travelled abroad and finally settled in the United
States in 1939

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• Most of his later life was shared between residences in NYC and in Europe Italy and
Austria
• Auden was the most prominent of the young English poets who in the late 1920s-
1930s saw themselves bringing new techniques and attitudes to English poetry
• His early poetry was influenced by the depression that hit America in 1929 and soon
after wards hit England
his work reflect ‘the age of anxiety’ in which he lived, WWII
his works have a different tone than the 1st generation of modernists works have
his tone is the survival of literary language
his poems are + old fashioned because of the rhyme and regular metre but he does
this to defy the feeling of anxiety that he’s living in
eg.: Pound ≠ rhyme = different time = different tone of poetry
• His later poetry sought to clarify his imagery and syntax of his early poetry and in the
late 1930’s he produced ‘Musée de Beaux Arts’ a poem of finely disciplined
movement, pellucid clarity and deep, yet unsentimental feeling
• It was in the 1930s that he also wrote the fantastic poem for the remembrance of
Yeats: ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’
• He also wrote ‘Funeral Blues’ in which he created a special rhythm pattern so that
there are 2 clashes:
a clash between the poetic language
and a clash with reality
• Although Auden was gay he married E. Mann to protect himself from political
prosecution because he was gay
• The poems of Auden’s last phase are increasingly personal in tone and combine an air
of offhand informality with remarkable technical skill in versification
• In the last years of his life he went back to Oxford, feeling the need to be part of a
university community as protection against loneliness
• Auden is now generally recognized as one of the masters of the 20 C English poetry,
th
a thoughtful, seriously playful poet, combining extraordinary intelligence and

immense craftsmanship
Analyses of Musée des Beaux Arts:

• Again a poem about suffering
• Connection between ‘Funeral Blues’ and this museum he sees all the paintings of
Breughel depicting the everyday life
• The old masters realized that suffering takes place in everyday life
eg.: ‘opening a window’ is visible in ‘The Numbering of Bethlehem’ by Breughel
• Line 11-13: also depicted in Breughel’s ‘The massacre of the innocents’
• Line 14: ‘In Breughel’s Icarus’ he zooms in on a particular scene of the painting
• Line 21: ‘sailed calmly on’ he zooms out again
Twentieth Century and after III : extra info added by Van Hulle Dirk
st
• The 1 generation of modernists
Ezra Pound, W.B Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (and James Joyce)
Pound and Eliot came from the US to Europe to develop their literary skills
they found that everything important was going on in Europe
They expressed, through the new themes and techniques introduced by Modernism,
a realistic and symbolical description of the western civilization during the
difficult years that followed the World War I.
Through their psychological novels, they explored and analyse the unconscious

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and the mental processes
• The 2nd generation of modernists

W.H. Auden and George Orwell are the most important members group
Auden went from England to the US = shift of influence, importance
The main aspects of the Second Generation of Modernists are the involvement in
World War II and the interest in politics and social problems.
They also promoted a return to the traditional forms and the use of a less obscure
language.
With the first generation they shared the use of myth and classical tradition..
Twentieth Century and After IV :

SAMUEL BECKETT– ENDGAME, p. 2662-2688
Biography:
• 1906-1989
• Born near Dublin from an Anglo-Irish protestant family
• Received education in Trinity college and went to teach English in Paris
• 1932: gave up teaching + produced an insightful essay on Finnegan’s Wake
worked as Joyce’s amanuensis (= secretary) and translator
uses the structure of Finnegan’s Wake: movement = circular instead of linear
• 1933: his father dies: has an enormous impact: get’s depressed
• 1936-1937: visits Germany
• 1937: settles permanently in Paris during WWII: joined an underground group in
the anti-Nazi resistance escapes into unoccupied France
• From the mid 40s: writes his works in French and then translates into Irish-inflected
English
• Major novels: Murphy/Watt/Molloy/Malone dies / the unnameable
hailed as masterpieces/precursors of postmodern fiction
• Best known for his plays: Waiting for Godot & Endgame
• 1950-1954: mother/brother dies: goes back to Dublin (is waiting there for his brother
to die: connection to Endgame = the slowness of the approaching end)
+ is re-reading the ‘book of Genesis’: story of Noah’s ark
Hamm= name of Noah’s son)
• -Beckett’s plays:
Not much happens: little plot/incident/characterization
No progression/development/resolution
Enact the lack of a fixed centre/meaning/purpose
The characters go on existing
• Focuses on fundamental questions of existence/non-existence, the mind/body, the self
known from within/as seen from the outside or in retrospect
• Influence of Joyce’s artistic integrity/stream-of-consciousness technique
• Beckett’s writing process:
Waiting for Godot = written in 1 go + 2 parts
Endgame: much harder to write (also 2 parts but put them together: there’s a
moment where you can see that: ‘our rivals are now ended’)
Analyses of Endgame:
• About the vexed relationship between Hamm (the master) and Clov (his servant)
→ don’t end but continue repetitively in their peevish ways

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• Live inside a room with 2 high windows (ambiguous view of the exterior world
reminds us of a prison/the inside of a skull) = connection with Virginia Woolf (look
within) → perhaps a parody of that idea
• Juxtaposes vaudeville/slapstick/... with the intellectual/grotesque
• Provides laughter (even at the audience’s expense)
• Reduced to bare essentials: raises unsettling questions about meaning/absurdity,
power/dependence, time/repetition, language/the void
• p. 2665:‘There are no more bicycles’ (now Beckett is going to use just 1 cycle)
• Another symbol : the stancher (to staunch the blood: circulation of blood)
= circular structure
• framework modernism: something is lost: the centre of hi plays = a void
• p. 2662: starts with stage directions
• Inside ‘this head’ are 4 characters:
1) Hamm: sounds like Hamlet (he is also constantly in doubt) or maybe sounds like
hammer
he cannot stand
• 2) Clov: sounds like the French word for nail cannot sit really need each other
• 3) Nagg: German word for nail
• 4) Nell: German word for nail
• Relationship between Hamm and his father (Nagg):
• p. 2665: ‘accursed progenitor’ cf. Paradise Lost (Adam complains that God has made
him without asking him (also cf. Frankenstein: the creature call Victor Frankenstein an
accursed creator)
• p. 2667: ‘I had it yesterday’ = said in an elegiac tone (kind of nostalgia): Nell/Nagg
yearn for the structure of the old days
• Important objects:
stancher
Dog: importance because of the word itself: read it backwards and you will read the
word God + symbolize 1 of the animals of Noah’s ark (they pray to it but Hamm says:
‘the bastard doesn’t exist’
a telescope: invented in 1609: invention = the beginning of modernity (the object
stands between observer/observed: acts as a symbol of objectivity + looking at the
horizon: you yearn for it but you will never get there) → the idea that we are moving
forward = illusion cf. Peter Sloterdijk: modernity = movement for the sake of movement
(symbol = escalator: if you’re up the escalator, you’re high up the ladder of evolution
but it’s all an illusion)
• Action: p. 2666: ‘something is taking its course’: very simple but so
• Profound: it’s not going anywhere, it’s just going on
• p. 2681: ‘keep going, keep going, can’t you’: Hamm has said it before = circularity
that seeps through
Twentieth Century and After V :

ALAN GINSBERG– A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFRONIA, hand out
Analyses of A Supermarket in California:
• Combines the 3 answers: play/thematization/revolt
• Supermarket: huge but also an everyday place
• Line 1: Walt Whitman = prime intertextual reference (plays around with what already
exists in Am. lit.)
connection between Whitman/supermarket: are both grandiose/have an epic quality

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• ‘for’ : because: connection between all that/Walt? (maybe we will find out in the rest
of the text) ‘dreaming of enumerations: Walt was famous for his enumerations (the
enumerations contain alliterations: Ginsberg also does this
• Line 2: ‘shopping for images’: there’s a need on the part of the speaker to have im-
ages: wants to provide himself with a meaningful experience = images (at a time when
TV is at its infancy = visual culture)
• Line 3: connection between Lorca/Walt: both gay (Allen Ginsberg = gay as well)
revolt/play: a gay poem that tries to bring something out in the open in a very play
ful way (raises a subject = revolt)
important that Lorca is there: a gay persona projecting his own thoughts on to the
activity of certain people in a certain environment + playing around with literary
history ‘penumbra’ = partial shadow so that you can grope grocery boys in the
shadows ‘isles full of husbands’ : no accident that they appear first possibilities
arise: play around with them
• Line 4: Walt is only there in the poet’s imagination (after the link between enumera-
tions/supermarket/Walt is made, it goes haywire)
• Line 5: first 2 questions are fairly normal, the 3rd question isn’t (the text is supposed to
be funny)
• Line 6: ‘in my imagination’: is saying it out loud that it’s all his imagination
Why would he be followed by a detective? Order = embodied in the detective + he
is there so that people can’t steal/can’t grope the grocery boys
• Line 7: ‘never passing the cashier’: don’t pay for what they are doing
‘Solitary fancy’: going to lead up to the thematization of loss: his imagination needs
to be fulfilled
• Line 8: Walt was famous for his beard
• Line 9: ‘I touch your book’: it’ about ‘leaves of grass’ = the only book Walt ever pro-
duced + reference point for the speaker’s imagination
the idea of wandering around with Walt + his epic stature = almost grotesque
• Line 10: ‘we’ll both be lonely’: hits the wall of truth: they are both alone (reference to
the feeling that is underlying this whole poem)
original: the way this idea is offered to us
• Line 11: ‘home to our silent cottage’ + ‘the lost America of love : thematization of loss
(maybe even a cliché)
• Line 12: relatively complicated + reference to mythology: use of myth in pomo = quite
hollow/empty (at the very end of the poem: the reference to mythology isn’t doing
much) no relevance to this comparison and the rest of the poem + there’s no an-
swer: suggestion that something has gone lost ‘dear father’: Walt = father of American
poetry
Extra info added by Luc Herman:

• Both modernism/pomo: loss of identity/insight/truth/...
difference = degree: they both have a lot of features in common but pomo: features
these elements to a higher degree
• Fundamental difference between modernism/pomo: the way in which they respond to
the feeling of loss:
modernism: try to compensate for this feeling of loss by consciously creating
beauty (cf. Rmtc) e.g. Ulysses/Waste Land: myth inserted into the lit. so as to over
come the feeling of loss
pomo: doesn’t try to compensate/looks loss straight in the face

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• If you don’t want to compensate, what are you going to do as an author?

1) PLAY = related to an essay by John Barth: ‘the literature of exhaustion’
we’ve pretty much done everything, the only thing left to do = to play
around with what is already there (not a new idea!)
result of that attitude: INTER-TEXTUALITY (constantly referring to
already existing texts/genres e.g. the detective story)
2) THEMATIZATION = turn loss into the prime subject
(in the 50s/60s: annihilation due to atomic war)
cf. Pynchon: ‘the crying of lot 49’: in the end, there’s no solution: Oedipa
remains lost (not a new idea!)
3. REVOLT = an idea of Bloom: 1973: the anxiety of influence: look at lit.
history as a whole = authors revolting against the former generation
(not unique to pomo, not new!)
1+2= unique to pomo combination of the 3 = hallmark of pomo
quite new!
• Revolt: attitude of writers/essential part of lit. history
Jack Kerrouac/Allen Ginsberg/...= group of young poets in the 1950s: for them the
50s were defined by a strict family ideology/organized religion/clear-cut gender
roles/emphasis on heterosexuality
reading/writing = form of liberation
able to sell their revolt to an audience but ultimately became part of the
establishment
Twentieth Century and After VI :

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON – NO NAME WONMAN FROM THE WOMAN
WARRIOR, hand out
Extra info added by Luc Herman:
• Another instance of the literary revolt = find an answer to the question ‘then what’? (=
the feeling of loss that doesn’t need compensating)
• People who feel left out of the literary system:
1) Former British colonies
2) Belonging to various non-white ethnic groups
3) Female writers
• Salman Rushdie the empire = the British empire with all its colonies authors
were trying to find their own voice = fight against the dominance of the literary centre
(= London) Rushdie = brightest representative of post-colonial literature in English
• Post-colonial literature = cover term for all the literature written in English by people
who come from/live in former colonies
• 2 kinds of colonies:
1. settler colonies no major conflicts (e.g. Australia/Canada)
2. ‘real colonies’ of conquest (e.g. India)
• writers are writing back to the centre after the centre has been writing to them = Lon-
don dictated certain rules which you had to follow (hard to find your own voice)
• revolt against certain central literary methods (e.g. 70s: realism: was rejected by those
new writers in favour of magic realism: e.g. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie)
• on the surface: clash between centre and periphery BUT very often: post-colonial
writers are 1st/2nd generation of immigrants → have received their education on Britain
so have been part of the centre all along

lOMoARcPSD|6330589
• HYBRIDITY: combination of elements (people who represent that which is strange to

a culture that considers itself to be homogenous (= proof that we have become really
multicultural → it has become very fashionable although its heydays are over)
• Ethnic literature = books in which the author insists on his/her affiliation with a non-
dominant culture (can be very much present on the local scene) → authentic voices
started to be heard in rather homogenous voices) e.g. ethnic literature in Am. : Viet-
namese-Am./Japanese-Am./...
• Typical editor/writer at the beginning of the 90s = male but a growing number of
women (=’the other’) into that whole system → a lot has been done to correct the view
of history (women don’t really play an important role)
Analyses of No Name Woman from The Woman Warrior:

• Kingston combines a double otherness: woman/Chinese
• In 1975: wrote ‘The woman warrior’ = huge hit in USA (to that point ethnic literature
consisted mainly of African-Am./Jewish-Am. literature)
= starting point for a lot of ethnic writing
• Emphasis on story-telling (looks like a meta-fictional element that stops people from
empathizing but is not true) → if these texts are having to become popular: emphasis
on one’s own ethnicity)
• Shocking story in the text: a woman who commits suicide with her new born baby →
attraction of the text: ethnicity + shocking story: makes the text exotic (of course there
are also shocking stories in our world as well)
• Page 13: address to fellow members of the group
• Hybridity question: can you categorize all the aspects of the ethnic experience?
• Tries to understand what happened in China but hard to understand due to the current
Am. values the narrator has narrator is going to side with the aunt: doesn’t see her
aunt as a terrible creature (sees her as having a lot of individuality: p.16)
• Page 18: the sexuality that the aunt lived out is seen as positive through the eyes of the
narrator because she is an American feminine
• Page 22: is interesting to non-Chinese speakers as well (just speaks about immigrant
issues)

Summary Introduction To The Study of Literature in English English Literature From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century

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Summary Introduction to the Study of Literature in English:

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ISLE – MIDDLE AGES TO 20th Century

Examenvraag : Definition of literature

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Examenvraag : The literary canon

THE MIDDLE AGES: 476 – 1485

• MA = period of enormous historical, social and linguistic change, to emphasize this,

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Overall effect of Old English in literature:

Middle Ages I: Anglo-Saxon literature

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Heroic trend in Beowulf:

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Form/style of the poem:

3. Middle English literature (14th – 15th century)

literature of the 14th Century

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Characteristics Medieval English:

Old & Middle English prosody2:

Middle Ages II: Middle English literature 14th-15th C

Info on the story:

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Content of the story:

Analyses of the story:

Middle Ages III:

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Background Canterbury Tales:

Analyses of The General Prologue:

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THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 1485 – 1603

1. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century

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• 1. Thomas More: 1478-1535

• 2. Sir Thomas Wyatt: 1503-1542

• 3. Sir Philip Sydney: 1554-1586

• 4. Edmund Spencer: 1552-1599

• 5. William Shakespeare: 1564-1616

The Sixteenth Century I :

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• Ethical problem: what does he have to do with her?

The Sixteenth Century I :

The Sixteenth Century I :

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The Sixteenth Century II :

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4) Play about power of language:

• How did the play appeal to the audience back then?

4) the characters are from every walk of life:

F Locals/aristocrats Orsino Olivia Antonio

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• 1.5: Line 92: Feste: develops

THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 1603 – 1660

Short historic overview:

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• 1605: The Gunpowder Plot, failed effort by Catholic extremists to blow up

1. State and church 1603 – 1640

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2. Literature and culture 1603 – 1640: Metaphysical poets

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