Iconos Apuntes Examen

Grado en Estudios Ingleses
1º Mañana
Profesora: María José Chivite

Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
UNIT 2 – BEFORE ENGLAND
2.1. The Celtic and Roman World

❶ The earliest human begins in the British Isles were hunter (200000 BC)
❷ The British Isles were probably overrun by Indo-Europeans1. (2000 BC)
❸ The Bronze Age in Britain was inaugurated by invaders from France and the
Low Countries (2000 BC)
❹ Celtics invaded the island in successive waves from 600 BC.

Language: They were divided in Brythonic (Welsh, Breton, Cornish)
and Goidelic (Erse and Gaelic). But they are generally
called Britons.
Later conquerors of Britain borrowed a few words from the
Celts. But some words survive until our days like the name
of some rivers (The Thames) and place names such us
York and London.
Religion: Similar to polytheism.

Druidism appears to have been the religion of the pre-Celtic
natives of Britain and it was in some cases carried over into
the Celtic tradition
❺ Caesar mad raids into Britain in 55 and 54 BC, but until 43 BC it wasn’t
conquest and incorporated into the Roman Empire.
Religion: Constantine the Great made Christianity the Official religion
of the declining Roman Empire; the Celts of Britain
embraced the new faith. St. Patrick transported Christianity
to Ireland, turning the populace there from paganism.
❻ There were internal dissensions. The wall built by the Emperor Adrian in 123
was breached by the Picts descending to the south from what is now Scotland.
Britain was invaded for the Germans and the Scots from Ireland, so in the latter
half of the third century the Romans began the stationery of naval and land
forces on the east coast.
❼ All the empire was crumbling, so the Romans were re-deployed from Britain
in 407 to hold the Rhine-Danube line.
❽ Britain was left to its fate. The Celts hired swordsmen of the Angle, Saxon,
and Jute tribe of Germans as mercenary troops against Scots and Picts. They
were said to have turned upon their employers and to have exacted not their
estipulate pay but the whole island for themselves.
1
Indo-Europeans is the enormous language group to which with a few exceptions all European
languages belong.
Página |2
2. Before England Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
2.2 The Christian and Germanic contribution

Celtic Irish Church: Different organization that of Rome. Provinces were
divides in monasteries and ruled by abbots. The Irish
missionary was the bishop.
Anglo-Saxon were tubes originally located in an area in northern Germany and

like other Germanic tribes, had absorbed Latin words trough trading with
Roman merchants.
 Celts were forced into the corners of the island

 The Jutes set up an independent kingdom in Kent.
 The Saxons settled the area around the city of London and South of
Thames.
 The Angles were in the rest of central and northern England.
In 597, St. Augustine landed at Kent in England, sent by Pope Gregory to

convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. St. Augustine became the first
Archbishop of Canterbury. In this kingdom the Roman Church would come into
contact with Celtic Christianity.
The Celtic church differed from the Roman Church in ritual and symbolism. The
Celtic church disclaimed papal authority and permitted marriage of its clergy.
After Anglo-Saxon conquest, the Synod of Whit by decided to follow the Roman
Church.
The Christian Monasteries became equal to any other European centre of

learning of the era. And Christianity was a written language using the Latin
alphabet. But Latin characters are not wholly ideal for the English Language.
But English was strongly resistant to borrowing words from other languages, but
Old English absorbed a host of Latin Words with the new culture.
Página |3
UNIT 3 – ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE AND LITERATURE (450-1066)
3.1. A general view of Anglo-Saxon world and Literature

❶ Celts  Mediterranean Civilization
❷ Anglo Saxon  Norse Culture
The Scandinavian Culture emphasized the military virtues of courage,

endurance and obedience to leaders.
The organization of the Anglo-Saxons was the typical warrior band or a

heroic age. The Germanic band was termed comitatus. At its head was
the king. He distributed booty to his followers the thengs (thanes), who
followed him loyally to the death.
LAW = Anglo-Saxon considered each case individually, bearing in mind

previous rulings on similar cases. To prevent interminable blood feud, the
Anglo-Saxons worked out to elaborate a system of wergild (man money).
CITY LIFE = Romano-Celtic cities dwindled and the agriculturist made

tribal associations.
Trade was unknown for generations, but there was a fertile agriculture.
The early Germans respected for their ability to do things and putted the
woman in a high position.
3.1.1. Old English

English belong from the western part of Low German. Old English (the name
given to the language, while Anglo-Saxon is the name for its speakers) was
used till the twelfth century.
There were four main dialects: Northumbrian  Scotland

Mercian  English Midlands
Kentish  Canterbury
Wessex  South of the Thames. Most of
the surviving literature Anglo-
Saxon is in this dialect.
Differences from Modern English concern Spelling and pronunciation, the

vocabulary and the grammar. Old English made use of characters that are not
longer used.
A second feature of Old English is the absence of those words derived from
Latin and French, which form so large a part of our present vocabulary. The
vocabulary of Old English is purely Germanic. A large part of this vocabulary
has disappeared from the language.
Página |4
3. Anglo-Saxon cultura and literature Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
The third difference is the grammar. Old English has four cases and
grammatical gender.
3.1.2. Characteristics of Old English Verse

The most part are anonymous and pagan elements have frequently been
subdued and Christian elements have been added. Mixture of paganism and
Christianity. The works were originally composed by pagans, transmitted orally
and written with modifications by Christian scribes.
The early literature is poetry without prose until its Christianization. The
techniques of Old English Verses are:
1) Four stress line: Each line of Anglo-Saxon verse contained four accented
syllables.
2) A pause divided each line into two staves. Each one contained two
stresses.
3) Alliteration2: The key syllable was the third stress.
4) Variation: The repetition of a single idea through synonymous words.
5) The use or kenning, composed words of metaphoric quality.
6) Specialized poetic vocabulary which employed words unfamiliar to
current conversation.
7) Elevated and aristocratic tone pervaded.
8) Rapid narrative style. Stereotyped phrases were frequent. Word order
was free.
9) Oral composition.
3.2. Anglo Saxon Poetry

Too much contact with Germanic origins.
Few books have surviving: Beowulf

Caedmon Book
Vercelli Book
Exeter book
3.2.1. Traditional Epic Poetry

The heroic poetry that survives is only casually preserved fragments, and is the
nearest we can get to the oral pagan literature of the Heroic Age of Germania.
WHIDSITH = It’s a biographical story, where the writer tells of his travels
throughout the Germanic world.
BEOWULF = (circa 750). It’s a combination of pagan heroic traces and slight
references to Christian terminology and liturgy.
2
Alliteration: The repetition or initial sound of syllables.
Página |5
3. Anglo-Saxon cultura and literature Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
3.2.2. Christian epic poetry

Techniques of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry were being applied to purely Christian
themes; Religious poetry flourished in Northumbria in the eight century
(Northumbrian renaissance) but has survived in West Saxon transcriptions of
the late tenth century due to the Vikings destructiveness in Northumbria. Prose
in this era was written in Latin, the language of the church and school.
CAEDMON = An untutored cowherd who was divinely inspired and eventually

became the first poet in the English language.
3.3. Prose in Latin

Prose is written literature, Christian introduced literacy and preserved culture,
and the language of knowledge and learning was Latin. Prose in English will
start during the reign of King Alfred the Great,
3.4. Alfred and the origins of England

3.4.1. The Viking age
During the ninth and tenth century, The Viking invasions plundered and pillaged
Europe.
England was the hardest hit of all. The Vikings conquest every kingdom, the last
was Wesswex, which finally was conquered too and its monarch, Alfred, was
hunted like a fugitive.
Young Alfred was the first king determinate to stop invasions. He won in
Ethandun and exacting the Treaty of Hedmore, half of England and the
Christianization of his Danish adversaries. The dividing line was the old Roman
road.
Alfred was the first ruler of all free Englishmen, and he was the father of the
British navy too.
3.4.2. Anglo-Saxon prose

Old English prose is the result of Christianization and it’s came later due the
political and cultural needs.
English prose begins in the reign of King Alfred, who made an important
educational reconstruction.
Alfred’s translations
Alfred’s education programme was based in using vernacular as basic medium
of instruction.
His translations did not so much reproduce originals, but he could plan a
political unification of England.
Página |6
UNIT 4 - MEDIEVAL ENGLISH
4.1. The Norman Conquest and its effects on English culture and literature
The descendants of King Alfred continued his wisdom and brilliance until king
Ethereld the Unready who was in the exile while Dane Canute occupied the
English Trone.
When Etherel’s son (Edward) returned to become King of England was more
Norman than English. He died childless, and the Witan3 gave the throne to
Harold (Edward’s cousin, of Anglo-Saxon origins), and he had to defend it, first,
against the King of Norway (who claimed to be the successor of Canute) and
later against William, duke of Normandy and whom Edward had promised the
crown of England.
William
(Duke of
Canute Normandia)
(Conquested
King of Norway
was defeated by
England)
(Claimmed to be
canute successor)
Alfred
Ethereld the
Edward Harold
Unready
(died Childless) (Edward's cousin)
Descendant (In the exile)
Son
Consequences of the Norman Conquest

1. A new period in English History starts: Norman England in which
Williams I worked on feudal principles:
a. Subordinate and harness the abilities if the Norman nobles
b. Reform the church.
So the church and the nobility served the king.
2. England became feudal under a strong monarch.
3. England’s medieval monarchy closely linked to the Continent.
4. There were three languages: French and Latin (for the upper classes)
and English (for the lower classes).
3
Witan: Anglo-Saxon council
Página |7
4. Medieval English Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
5. Middle English: Simplification of grammar and introduction of borrowings

from French.
The High Medieval Ages (1050-1300)

1. Urbanization: Growth of commerce and an emerging urban class. The
cultural focus moved from monasteries to the university.
2. New Profit Spirit: The military importance diminished because kings
tended to hire mercenary soldiers and paid officials, so that war for them
became a sport. That change produced a change in the literature; from
Epic to Romance: Chivalry emerged.
3. Te position of women: The women started to be considered as Virgin
Mary instead of Eve. Concerted marriages appeared.
4.2. Medieval literary genres

The French influence on English literature went beyond the enrichment of its
language with thousand of French Words.
 French literature: Was the leading literature in Europe, rich and varied in
theme. It furnished new material for poets.
 The old Germanic alliterative verse was replaced by French syllabic line
with rhyme.
 England had a trilingual (Latin, French, English) literature. Language is a
clear indication of the social class.
4.2.1. Romance
 Heroic poetry is replaced by verse romance.
 Episodic nature over closely woven narratives (no unity of action), so
characters as already known.
 Typological characterization over psychological development.
 Predictable plot. Love subordinate to adventure.
 Highly imaginative encounters with extraordinary personages in fantastic
settings.
 Frequent Christian references.
 Love interest.
 Mostly translations from French, which were focus on love and
sentiments, whereas English romances stick adventure and leave
sentiments affair out.
 Idealized portrait of the roman knight.
 Unlike epic heroes, romance characters fight ritualistically, as sport,
rather than a necessity.
Arthurian legends
Celtic origins, yet reintroduced by French models.
Página |8
4.2.2. Other medieval genres

 Short narrative poem.
 Product of the middle classes to oppose romance idealism.
Fabliau  Octosyllabic verse.
 Entertaining: humor of situation.
 Caustic attitude towards women.
 Short stories with humanized animal which illustrate simple
Fable moral.
 From Greek tradition and Indian sources.
 Largely imitations from an established European tradition,
they were written in English during the 13th and 14th
centuries
 Intended to be sung, so their composition subordinated to
musical patterns.
Lyric  Origin: Pre-Christian seasonal celebrations, communal
work songs or danced folk songs for recreation.
 Folk-Lovely poetry, which tends to give woman’s
perspective.
 Dominant themes: Springtime, love, political lyrics and
religious.
 Symbolic representation of reality, typically medieval. Or
Allegory and exemplum moral anecdotes illustrating a point, usually slides into
sermons.
 A popular composition, consisting of short stanzas (four
lines) and a refrain in form of dialogue. Dramatic structure.
Ballad  Orally transmitted, they flourished in the late middle ages.
 Folk themes; violence or horror, betrayed lovers, love tests,
supernatural or fairies and witches.
4.3. Age of Chaucer (1350-1400)

The Age of Chaucer opens with on of the most dramatic events in the human
history: the Black Death, which started in Europe in 138. The effects of such
tragic episode are manifold, and the all point a growing sense of individualism.
The sense of a common experience and responsibility fostered an English

Nationalism, which was reinforced by the hatred for France during the Hundred
Year’s war4.
Moreover, the English Parliament split into the separate House of Lords and
House of commons, both of them denying foreign jurisdiction in English matters,
including papal authority5.
4
Hundred Year’s war (1337-1453): It started with Edward II’s claims to the French throne and it was a
conflict between the French House of Valois and the English House of Plantagenet.
5
England no longer a papal fief in 1371
Página |9
The Black Death lessens the labouring population, so there were few workers in
a rising job market. Labourers began to claim economic freedoms and reforms.
In 1381, there was the Peasant’s Revolt in Kent and Somerset as consequence
of the Statute of Labourers. Workers wanted to choose instead of being tied to
the land.
The dislocation of the medieval system and the mobility of the workers fostered
new patterns of manufacture and trade. Contracts started to be generalized and
co-operatives were created.
The plague also brought some moral and religious changes. John Wycliffe
demanded a propertyless church and an individual access to God. The Lollards
tried to bring Wycliffe’s beliefs into actual practice.
The secularization of English life in this era marks a cultural change. This
change propitiate that the writers started to use English and in the fourteenth
century everybody knows and uses it. The most used English was the London
English; It has adopted thousand of words from French.
4.3.1. Alliterative tradition: The Pearl poet

In the late fourteenth century there was an alliterative revival in the north of
England. These poems are similar to Anglo-Saxon poems, but they have
differences: longer lines, looser in rhythm, the medieval pause is less strictly,
hundreds of rhythmic variations.
4.3.2. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)

He was the first great poet in English Literature, because he represents the
New Man: a product of the mercantile middle-classes which participle in courtly
life and culture. He was not a captive of any special moral or political or social
ideas, or of any set manners.
His work fall under three periods:

1. French Period (to 1372): The early writing of Chaucer is from this
period. He went a lot of times to France and some classical material
were derived through French intermediaries. Chaucer early absorbed the
courtly love tradition.
2. Italian period (1372-1385): He enters in contact with the Italian
Renaissance and the work of some Italian writers.
3. English period (1385-1400): During this period, he wrote the most part
of the stories in English. Ones of the greatest poems of English literature
are The Canterbury Tales.
4.4. The fifteenth century: a transition period (1400-1500)

It was a period of wars and political instability. There were rebellion in Wales
and in the north and the continuing war with France (The Hundred Years’ War).
P á g i n a | 10
Moreover, there was an internal war, The War of the Roses6, between the Rose
of York and the Rose of Lancaster. Monarch succeeded monarch until the
triumph of the Tudor.
Noble classes fight while the merchant classes enrich themselves, education of
laity, displacing idealism and feudal loyalty.
William Caxton print the first book in England in 1475. There was an extension
of the reading public and a chance from verse and orality to prose and realism;
Renaissance now stirring in England.
The authority of Chaucer was paramount. It takes a

4.4.1. Chaucerian tradition
4.4.2. New reading public
4.4.3. Malory and Caxton
English verse variety of forms and ranges. There are some

attempts to continue the Canterbury Tales.
English drama Popular entertainments and festive/humours tone.
English religious prose Sermons or didactic prose, translations
Thomas Malory’s Morthe Darthur Which abridges
English Romance Prose French originals eliminates the supernatural and
turns it into simpler prose. Patriotic love for England.
6
War of the Roses: A series of dynastic Civil Wars for the Throne of England, fought during the second
half of the 15th century between the House of Lancaster (red rose banner) and The House of York (white
rose). The war ended with the marriage of Edward V and Elizabeth of York, creating a new dynasty, the
Tudors.
P á g i n a | 11
UNIT 5 – TUDOR ENGLAND
5.1. Renaissance and Reformation

Henry VIII inherited from his father a strong rule, which allowed him to play a
part in Europe’s power politics. He got married with Catherina de Aragón, but he
wanted to divorce. The pope didn’t give the consent, so he broke with Rome for
the Act of Supremacy7 and got married with Ana Boleyn.
Thomas Cromwell was the architect of such political reformation: separate

church from Rome; end of the church’s legislative independence and of the flow
of funds to the Papacy from England.
After Henry’s VIII death Edward IV take the throne with his uncle Edward
Seymour: a shift to the “left” and Protestantism. There was a religious crisis; the
first Act of Uniformity8 and The Book of Common Prayer9 are issued by
parliament and after that, a second one marked a definite break with Catholic
teaching.
Edward’s death puts Mary on the throne. She tried to change the country to the
Catholicism again. There were bloody persecutions of Protestants, expunging of
married clergy, church under state control yet catholic, repeal of Act of
Uniformity and petition for reunion with Rome. There was an Economic crisis,
the rise of inflation, collapse of the wool market, rise of prices. All that produced
a social discontent.
When Mary dead, Elizabeth I was the successor of the crown. Under Elizabeth
the ties with Rome were again severed and a new Act of Uniformity was written
and there was an economic recovery.
Attempts to break the Spanish monopoly on trade with America there was a
conflict with Spain, rivalry with King Philip II.
Henry VIII (Bloody) Mary I Elizabeth I
5.1.1. The language: Modern English

Modern English dates from 1500. English used now in learned areas where
Latin had been supreme. One of the reasons is the nationalism and the
Renaissance spirit, ideas and facts in the vernacular are available for all. The
theology of the reformation abandoned Latin because it was associated with
properly. However, Latin still remained the language of international
communication. The vocabulary was enriched by borrowings from the Classics
7
The Act of Supremacy (1534) designates the king and his successors the only supreme head in earth of
the Church of England.
8
Act of uniformity: set the order of prayer to be used in the English Book of Common Prayer.
9
Book of Common Prayer: is the short title of a number of related prayers used in the Church of
England.
P á g i n a | 12
5. Tudor England Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
(Latin and Greek) and from others contemporary languages (like French,
Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) and by 1600 there was a spelling uniformity.
5.1.2. Renaissance and humanism

The causes if the Renaissance were essentially those that had stimulated the
intellectual and artistic upsurge of western Europe in the 12 th and the 13th
centuries:
 Development of a money economy
 Population growth.
 Influence of Byzantine and Molesm cultures.
 Revival of classical studies.
 Increasing literacy of the laity. Expansion of intellectual interests through
the rising universities.
 Growth of a critical and sceptical attitude.
 Development of scientific inquiry.
Anglo-American Protestants have often tended to see the renaissance and the
Reformation as a unit, but the Renaissance Humanism is halfway between
theology and rationalism. Certainly, the humanist was not antireligious. The
humanist attitude strongly manifested itself among others, the following
concepts and areas of endeavour:
 Scholarship.
 Writing style, basic on classical rhetoric and literary criticism.
 Subject of art. The arte became more realists. There is an idealization of
the sensual instead of the spiritual.
 Ethics. Humanist search ancient Greece and Rome for ideals to
overcome the gap between the Christian ideal and the new materialistic
society.
 Philosophy. The humanist associate themselves with Platonism.
 Science: More practical and application.
 The ideal man is the man who knows about everything.
A strong individualism in the consequence of humanism. Other characteristics

of Renaissance man are hedonism, optimism and dynamism.
5.1.3. Renaissance in England

The new learning
There was a massive translation of classical Greek studies into English.
Some important writers are:
 William Grocy (first teacher at Oxford) translated a lot of documents.

 Erasmus of Rotterdam: resided in England, where he did some books
about satirizes corruption of Religion and learning and praises humanist
ideals.
P á g i n a | 13
 Sir Thomas More: Ideal Renaissance man, who would not subscribe to
the Act of Supremacy and was accused of treason.
o Utopia:
1st book  Tell us a far different world from European corruption,
war and waste.
2nd book  Tell us the ideal state of Utopia where the government
is truly representative.
Most interesting is the complete religious toleration; Utopians have
many religions but no idols. Utopia is a rational world governed by
truly humanistic principles.
5.1.4. Reformation
It shares a sense of individualism, like the renaissance, but they are opposing in
various senses:
Renaissance Reformation
Enjoyment of life and senses Piety and otherworldliness
Man’s natural good Man’s inherently depraved nature
Valued reason and tolerance Tried to impose their own brand of faith
Praised pagan antiquity Revival of a past previous to medieval church
Internationalism Nationalism
Reformation in England was born as a nationalistic project which limited papal

authority in politics, law and property; yet England had already become
secularized from the 14th-c.
The first phase of the English reformation was nationalistic. Henry VIII wanted
an English Catholic Church and persecuted Lutheranism. It is a period of
translation of biblical and religious learning into English.
5.2. Elizabethan poetry and drama (1558-1603)

5.2.1. Elizabethan poetry
General features
 New courtier life, literature became more than a didactic pastime.
 New modern English poets. Poetry as a vehicle of emotional expression.
 Dominant influence from the classics and Italy, idealizing the lady,
desperately given to her.
 Poet: a man of action plus a literary courtesan.
 Forms: terza rima (Tercets aba bcb cdc…) and ottava rima (eight line
stanza, abababcc).
 Imagery: Economy of expression (intense brief description, evocative
narratives, incomplete simile), and cliché poetic phrases yet emotionally
loaded.
P á g i n a | 14
 Subject-matters: love, unrequited, frustrated or betrayed. Love happiness

depends on sexuality and affection, yet it needs to be idealized (the
spiritual plus the sensual)
Principal writers of Elizabethan Poetry

 He synthesized foreign and vernacular traditions, new vocabulary and archaism.
Edmund Spencer
 Fluid rhyme patterns.

 Romantic Ideas and classic structure.
 Nationalist intensity and idealistic expressions.
 Principals pieces:
o The Shepherd’s Calendar
o The Fairie Queen
 The beau ideal of renaissance culture and knight.
 Principal pieces:
Sidney
Philip
o Astrophel and Stella: Love, melancholy, desesperate.

o Arcadia: A romance-epic in prose.
o A Defense of Poetrie: Critical piece on the nature of poetry.
 Venus and Adonis: An erotic narrative poem strongly sensual and outdistanced
Shakespeare
from spiritual love.

William
 The sonnets
Addressed either to handsome young noble, a dark lady, taken him by a friend.
Triangular perspective vs. dial one. A highly realistic view of the torments
produced by love passion.
5.2.2. Elizabethan drama

Origins of English Drama
English drama is a vernacular product which develops out of Christian liturgical
celebrations and festivities. They were called offices.
Offices will gradually envolved into secularized forms: from the church to the
town square, from Latin to vernacular, from acting priests to laymen actors.
Thus come about mystery plays, or plays dealing with religious subjects from
Old and New testaments. Guilds would pay for the performance and costs of
mystery plays, which would also select topics and communally decide and
modify lines or contents.
The morality plays (late Middle Ages), are shaped upon typological characters
which stand for vices, virtues or abstract qualities about the human condition.
The origins are unknown, but there are some parallelisms with medieval Dance
of Death, and debate between the body and the soul, professional actors and
more elaborated performance.
P á g i n a | 15
Early Elizabethan drama and the pre-Shakespearean dramatists (1515-

1595)
Interludes
By the end of the 15th century, interludes are secularized continuations of
morality plays, now dramatized versions of the fabliau. After 1500, interlude
refers any play, usually suggesting the idea of essentially secular humor.
Masques
Masques are dramatic entertainment which combines music, verse, dance, rich
disguise and scenic effects. Secularized pageants, intended to celebrate kingly
virtues, especially in vogue during Henry VIII’s reign.
Non-Professional theatre
Academic drama
The first adaptations into English of renaissance revival of classic culture took
place in university centres, imitative if Latin and Italian models. University
colleges compelled their students to perform them in Latin and, later on, in
English, so as to instruct the humanist principles, moral and literary style.
- Academic Comedy (Plautus and Terence): University students would

adapt from Plautus his stock characters and skeptical scorn and
demoralizing plots and from Terence’s somewhat psychological and
didactic characterization of human nature.
- Academic Tragedy (Seneca): Seneca chose the most violent themes of
murder, incest and adultery to display the conflict of human passion with
external responsibilities.
Seneca influence on English drama: five-act division, each one with
different scenes; bloody and sensationalist development of plot; ; choirs
or dumb-shows to intensify or supplement main plot; extended dialogues
with moral sentences intertwined; conveyance of external information via
messengers, or ghostly apparitions, that parallel violence inside and
outside the main plot.
Drama of the court

The kind of drama played in the court on festivities; their sources were
moralities and biblical dramas, Italian stories, the classics. Also played by the
Inns of Court (Law School) and the London Chiorboys before the royal court,
they set the fashion of romanticized idyll antiquity plus humorous, serious and
didactic elements, linguistic artifice, opulent pageantry and simultaneous
settings.
Public theatre
The first permanent theatre in England was erected in 1567, but it was
demolished and reconstructed on the south of the bank if the Thames as The
Globe.
P á g i n a | 16
The theatrical company: The acting group was servants of noble protectors.
They follow the model of trade guild.
The actors prolong the act if the public wanted.
The Elizabethan Theatre
Main kinds of drama

 Revenge tragedy: Senecan models, gradually psychological.
 `Fall of princes´ tragedy: Medieval wheel of fortune, hesitation and
consequence.
 Chronicle play
 Romantic comedy
 Domestic tragedy: Middle-class business folk as the subject.
 Realistic comedy: Love, marriage and material possessions.
 Comedy of Humours: Ben Jhonson and medieval theory of humours.
University wits
University wits saw the drama as a way to obtain fame and fortune from other
kind of literary writing.
P á g i n a | 17
Shakespeare as a dramatist
He was born in the rural centre of England and he get married and he had three
children.
He acted as an actor in some plays and he was one of the principal actors in
the Lord Chamberlain’s Company.
In the end of the eighteen century and the beginning of the nineteenth there
was a “Shakespeare idolatry”: Shakespeare was superhuman and could do
nothing wrong.
P á g i n a | 18
UNIT 6 – SEVENTEEH CENTURY ENGLAND
6.1. Early Stuart England

17th century opens a period of great political changes. The English crown looses
strength and authority, now replaced by a strong parliament.
James I of England tried to link Scotland with England and he tried to remove
the parliament and Charles I (James’s philo-Catholic son) continues to be
abusive, disregarding with respect to parliament.
6.1.1. The Civil War

The progressive discontent and tension ends up in a Civil War (1642)., fought
between two factions:
 Royalist side
 Republicans
Oliver Cromwell was the military leader of the republicans; he won in the Battle
of Marston Moor and Charles I was sentenced to die. The nation declared itself
a commonwealth or republic and Cromwell the Lord Protector. His rules were
inclined to obtain social freedom al liberties, but when he died, his son won’t be
able to prolong the Protectorate and the parliament asked Charles II to return to
England as King of England, Scotland and Ireland.
17th century was the age of the genius, the conquest of America and the
introducing of new colonials changed the mind. There was a sense of reality
where all coherence is lost.
Whenever, Arts enter into a period of splendour, especially plastic arts, which is
the new science that extends over Europe.
Disunity, disharmony, incoherence – such was the atmosphere of the Jacobean

and Caroline period caused by the implacable religious wars on the continent
between Roman Catholic and Protestant. This period is characterized by its
imbalance, disproportion pessimism and death wish.
6.1.2. Cavalier and metaphysical poetry (1600-1642)

The poetry of this century is divided into the schools of Jonson and Donne,
Cavalier and metaphysical.
Jonson and the Cavalier poets

No clear-up division into Cavalier and Metaphysical poetry, since poets drew
from both standpoints, and that all rebelled against pictorial fluidity, decorative
rhetoric, idealism and created new techniques, new realism of style, sharp,
condensed, fit for the intellectual/critical realism of their stances.
P á g i n a | 19
6. Seventeeth Century England Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
Called Cavalier as they supported the royalist cause, and the aristocratic
manners and style. Elegant, polished manners as courtiers, soldiers, gallants
and wits.
Social verse with (neo-)classical virtues (clarity, proportion, symmetry, decorum,

plainness, property, straightforwardness) and deeply informed by civilized
reasonableness, ceremonious respect and inner self-sufficiency.
Ben Jonson was the first great English theorist and practitioner of neo-
classicism. His poetry is ethically sober an judicious, and the poet the supreme
instructor leading society toward aristocratic ethic of gracious and responsible
living.
Donne and the metaphysical poets
Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by

conceit or ‘wit’. What unites the Metaphysical poetry as a group is less the
violent yoking of unlike ideas to which Johnson objected than that they were all
poets of personal and individual feelings, responding to their time’s pressures
privately or introspectively. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with
expressing feelings than wit analyzing it.
Metaphysical poetry appears as the complement of anti-ciceronian10 movement

in prose.
Donne treats experience as relative, a matter of individual point of view; the

personality is multiple, quizzical and inconscient, eluding definition.
Principal poets of metaphysical poetry:

 John Donne: Treats experience as relative and multifocal. Poetic
persona eludes definition, is quizzical and inverts normal perspectives.
He belittles the public world and elevates the persona. Eroding division
body/soul. Intense meditation on worldly vanity and the collapse of
traditional certainties.
 Andrew Marvel’s finest poetry, extraordinarily dense and precise,
graceful yet economy of statement, and manages to keep paradox
between antagonist terms through wit, instead of
reconciling/transcending opposites.
6.1.3. Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the post-Shakespearean drama

(1595-1642)
10
Ciceronian period: first great age of Latin literature, from approximately 70 to 43 BC; together with
the following Augustan Age, it forms the Golden Age of Latin literature. The political and literary scene
was dominated by Cicero, a statesman, orator, poet, critic, and philosopher who perfected the Latin
language as a literary medium, expressing abstract and complicated thoughts with clarity and creating
the important quantitative prose rhythm.
P á g i n a | 20
Non-Professional theatre
From the ascension of James I in 1603 until the closing of the theatres in 1642
the royal court exercised a growing experience upon the drama. The courtiers
became the chief if the ‘private theatre’ because of their place of residence,
their leisure, their taste and their money. The most spectacular type of the court
drama and the court’s own unique contribution to the Renaissance theatre was
the masque.
Public drama: Jacobean drama

After the death of Elizabeth (1603) the Renaissance drama is divides into two
categories named after the two monarch who succeed her: Jacobean (plays
under James I) and Caroline, those plays written under Charles I)
The Jacobean drama mood anticipates this new approach to dramatic

sensibility: highly secular, and skeptical about the ideal world, yet suspicious
about the real world.
6.2. The age of Milton (1642-1660)

Cromwell’s Protectorate abolished Parliament and Monarchy, proclaiming
England a Free State. The new parliament ruled the nation through a forty-one-
man council of state, an executive body elected annually. It was called
Assembly of Saints. Courtly life and entertainment were forbidden, theatres
closes, sociability almost vanished.
When Cromwell died, his son, Richard, couldn’t continuous with the protectorate
and Charles II (Charles I’s son) came to England as King.
John Milton
A mature and
somewhat
embittered figure,
His mayor
Youthfull It period to publish his three
Prose and preocupations Returned to
education and culminated in the controversy literature
great poems.
apprenticeship wew political and
writtinf of Lycidas Paradise, Lost,
social
Paradise Regained
and Samson
Agonistes
Milton grew up in a religious and musical family. When de Puritan and

parliament struggle against church and king was rapidly approaching its climas,
he published five pamphlets against episcopacy.
After the execution of Charles I, he published a serie of Latin disputations

against Continental Critics of the Regime, defending the actions of Parliament in
executing Charles.
The renaissance and the Reformation are commonly taken as antagonist

movements, but the great highway of European thought was the via media of
P á g i n a | 21
Christian humanism, the conscious merging of the natural light of classical

reason with the supraterrenal light of Christian faith.
6.3. Restoration (1660 – 1690)

The commonwealth did not long survive Cromwell’s death in 1968, and Charles
II returned to England so the reaction against Puritan manners and modals was
inevitable.
The court of Wit represents a definite group who flourished from about 1665 t
1680. They were themselves often poets or dramatist, they wrote not as
professional men of letters, but as gentlemen amateurs writing for their own
amusement.
The amoral wit and stylized hedonism, the mood and tone which we think of as
Restoration, and which is reflected so brilliantly in the best Restorian comedy,
was confined to London, and in London only to courtly and fashionable circles.
On Restoration comedy generally, people from the country are consistently
ridiculed for their uncouthness and lack of sophistication.
6.3.1. Restoration comedy

Restoration theatre is not any more the popular institution it was before the
closing of playgrounds and It has circumscribed it geographic and social
boundaries; the citenzhip regarded theatre vicious and immoral, and avoided it.
Modern stage: Movable, sophisticate and elaborate. French influence and

actresses on stage.
6.3.2. Restoration prose

The most important writers ere Samuel Pepys and John Bunyan.
6.3.3. Restoration poetry

John Dryden (poet laureate, man of letters, and dramatist) and John Wilmot (an
English libertine poet) were the most important.
P á g i n a | 22
UNIT 7 – THE AUGUSTAN AGE
7.1. The Age of Pope and Swift (1700-1750)

A Historical Background
Queen Anne’s rule was brief, but it was glorious for England. In 1707 Scotland
and England were formally united under the name of Great Briton, and they
created the Union Jack and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) put an end to the War
of the Spanish Succession. England receives from Spain the right to be slave
trade with the new world and Britain obtains both Gibraltar and Menorca.
The queen died childless and protestant succession confirmed by the Act of
Settlement (1701). George I was her successor.
George I’s virtual ignorance of English affairs and his total ignorance of the
English language caused Sir Robert Walpole to become the actual ruler of the
nation. With the death of George I and the accession of George II Walpole
continued in office and the actual government was now firmily in the proem
minister’s hands.
England embarked upon a war against Spain in 1739, termed the War of the
Austrian Succession. Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, ending the long war in 1748, left
England a defeated nation except in America.
During this period, the industry and the agriculture changed. The prosperity
from Queen Anne’s age was gaining impetuous. The Col mining was one of the
British’ greatest industries now, England was ready to lead the world in
manufacturing. There was an increase in textile production and there was an
improvement in transport and farming techniques.
The term Enlightenment is used to characterize the main trend of European

thought the 18th century. They had a rationalistic and scientific approach to
human condition and reason, instead of dogma and tradition.
They preferred commitment, tolerance, responsibility, flexibility and utilitarian

analysis rather than fanatic intolerance or dismissal they were in most urban
middle classes. During this period the literature grew up mostly the periodical
publications.
The strength of the English propertied classes sensed an historical kinship with
the rich and powerful nobles who surrounded Caesar August. They called
themselves Augustan11. It sought to emulate the enlightenment refinement, and
taste of that distant era. And they manifested itself particularly in literature in the
following attitudes:
 Aristocratic courtliness
11
Augustan: The term. Neo-Classic spirit in all arts and life-faring. Nature and eternal orderliness of
things.
P á g i n a | 23
7. The Augustan age Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
 Restraint and dignity

 Urbanity, sophistication, cosmopolitanism
 Conversational ease
 Preoccupation with the here and the now
 Symmetry and balance of the useful and the ornamental.
 The greatest virtue in art was a universal significance.
 Critical and analytical spirit
 Scepticism
 Rationalism
Pope worked a skilful variation on patronage by the subscription system. The

writer in the early 18th century, while not contemplating a public career, did
usually receive aid from the political party that he backed.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
• Satirical rationalism, and public utterance rather than private
expression.
• Polish in the expression of universal social concepts.
• Social, bookship, secular style. Classical imitation (recreation of classical
aesthetics and ethics(. Artistic expression)
• Satire: Mock heroic.
• Analytical criptical spirit.
• The Rape of the Lock (1712-14), The Dunciad (1728-43: Satire in man's
ibecile disposition); translations from classics, Shakespeare's editions.
Jonathan Swift (1667-45)

• The Scriblerus Club (with Pope and Arbuthnot).
• Nature and Reason: Wrong reason and Commonsense to fight human
pride and gross disparity man's actuality and potentials. Saeva
indignatio. Scatology.
• Ironic inventive satire: plain language, minutely descriptive and
argumentative, clear and simple, free from innecessary ornament.
• Ocassionally tender, intimate and friendly (The Journal to Sella (1717-
65), espistles ti sketch of contemporary London.
• Batlle of Books (1697), A tale of a Tub (1969), travels ito Several Remote
Nations of the Worlf. By lemuel Gulliver (1726), A modest proposal
(1729)
Verse in Scots Vernacular

Since the Age of Chaucer the only dialect seriously to challenge London English
as a vehicle for English literature has been Scots. The Makaris 12 persistent and
unbroken tradition of verses in Scots vernacular has continued ever to the
present day.
12
Makaris: Scots poets writing in Scots.
P á g i n a | 24
Scots vernacular verse in this period defiantly opposes the dominant English
tendency (neoclassicism) and cushioned by Scottish nationalism.
Alam Ransay (1686-1758)
• The gentle Sheperd (1725): Patoral comedy, local setting.
• Compilation of 15th-century "makaris": henryson, Dunbar: The Tea-
Table Miscellany (1742-37)
The Non-Fiction and Short Fiction of Defoe

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731)
• Dissenter, bourgeois, middle-class individualism: utilitarian,
commosensical, pragmatic, committed, Homo Economicus.
• Trading qualities and morality relativism.
• Improvement upon social conditions: divorce laws, means of transport,
farminf improvement, literacy, women's rights. Yet
conservative/traditional viewpoints.
• Hawk-writting, planphleteerinf, journalist prose (factual, photographic),
actuality.
• Variety of writtings: Argumentative panphlets: (THe shortest way with
dissenters, 1702), argumentative verse (The true-born Englishman,
1701, in defense of William III), journalism, descriptive/documentary
narratives (A Tour Through the Whole Island if Great Britain, 1721-26; A
journal of the plage year, 1722)
Philosophical writings
Rational deism claimed to find proof of God’s existence and moral
administration of the universe in “nature!, apprehended solely through the sense
and interpreted by human reason.
Jhon Locke and David

Joseph Butler Hartley's David Hme
associationism
• Analogy of Religion, • One idea conveys / • Treatise of Human

1736 lead to another, so Nature, 1739;
• Against rational deism interplay of abstract Philosophical Essays
concepts divinity Conserning Human
included) understanding, 1748).
• Observations on Man, • Skepticism: no solid
His Frame, His duty, inner self but sense
and his impresions out of
Expectationns, 1749 sense data. Caise is
but a shadowing
memory.
• Relativized morality.
• Straightforward
prose.
• Histproal writtings,
History of England
(1754-61)
P á g i n a | 25
7.2. The Age of Johnson

In 1752 the English-Speaking world its dating into line with the recto of Europe
by replacing the out model Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar.
It’s a period of boundary disputes in North America touched off the Seven years’
war13 between England and France by the Treaty if Paris, which established
Great Britain at a peak of power previously unapproached in her history.
The British colonies along the Atlantic coast petitioned in vain against the
exploitation by George III and sought their full rights as Englishmen.
However, the Industrial Revolution transformed England in the second half of

the 18th century. The textile manufacture was revolutionized. There was a
transformation from rural to industrial England. A proletariat rapidly develop,
creating a hostile cleavage between capital and labour.
The middle class was so wrapped up in its endeavours to produce goods and
make money that it had a little concern for art. This transitional age, often
termed “the Decline of Neoclassicism”, showed that there was a growing
discontent with the intellectual concept of art, but such discontent was not yet
revolt.
“The Club” of London

One of the most influential literary societies in English letters was “The Club”.
Their support of neoclassical principles followed the established tradition of the
genteel public for which they wrote.
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)
• Poetic satires, essays and prose fiction (in The Rambler)

• A Dictionary of the English Language).
• Literari criticism: The Plays of W. Shakespeare (1765) and The lives of
the poets (1779-81).
• Universaling and general principles, didacticism, decorum, alien to
textual paradoxes. Veracity (to fundamental universals) and pleasant
entertainment.
• Practical and moral perspective, the average reader's.
Other members of “The Club”

 Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman
Empire. Theological methodology orderliness, vivid style.
 Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas if
the Sublime and Beautiful (1756).
13
Seven years’ war: Caused bay France vs England trade monopoly.
P á g i n a | 26
Scottish writers of the period

What many Scots felt was an effective challenge to Johnson’s London circle
was the brilliant intellectual if Edinburg, Scotland.
Some of the most important writers are:
 William Robertson
 Adam Smith
Some poets of the New Trend

Contrary to expectation, the 18th century English renewal of interest in medieval
period was not primarily the result of increased interest in medieval literature.
Antiquarianism was its great impetuous, originating in Renaissance.
The growing interest for medievalism could not be satisfied with the available
literature.
Thomas Gray (1716- James MacPherson THomas Chatterton

1771) (1736-1796) (1752-1700)
• Mixture • Poems of Ossian • Poems supposed to

Neoclassicism and (1773) have been written at
pre-romantic Bristol by Thomas
elements (subjective, Rowley and others in
emotional the 15th century
relationship to (1777)
nature, symbolic
pictorial). The Bard.
7.3. The Eighteenth-Century novel (1700-1800)

The development of the English novel
Although the English novel was really defined in the 18th century, it had roots in
earlier times. The middle class, gripped by Puritanism, ignore practically all
fiction and the Jacobean courtiers devoted themselves to drama and masques.
The English Novel stands apart from the allegory and romance in its vigorous
attempt at verisimilitude, and in English literature, the novel has been strongly
associated with the middle class. It must be remember that to the 18 th century
the great literary forms were the epic and the tragic drama.
Ancestors:
1. The primary impulse of the novel came from the Spanish picaresque
tales.
2. The fashionable English aristocrats were addicted to the French prose
romance.
P á g i n a | 27
3. The Italian nacelle started as a factual anecdotes but developed through

imaginative storytellers into such notable collections.
4. The pastoral romance from Hellenistic Greeks, with Italian and Spanish
imitations in the Renaissance stimulated the artificialities of Lily and
Sidney.
5. Thomas Deloney with his bourgeois fiction would probably be termed the
originator of the novel if his tradition had been maintained.
6. The English essay, as in the Sir Riger de Coverley papers from The
Spectator, often provide fictionalized narratives that needed inly a plot
tightening to approach the short story or novel.
7. Allegories such provide fiction with a compelling seriousness it had
previously led and also offered as imaginative ingenuity and flashes of
realism.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the ingredients were all available for the
true novel. But plots were too often incoherent or improbable.
The principal characteristics are:
 Provides the literacy medium for a bourgeois society.

 Reveals modern social complexity and group relationship
 Unified picture of man and society.
 Rationalistic examination of human personality.
 Essentially addressed in the second person.
 The epic antiquity and the medieval period recounted essentially
collective experience and universally shared concepts.
Differences between Romance and Novel:
Romace Novel
Set in the distance, idealized past Set in a more recent, less heoric
Based on the epic Modeled on history and humanism
It's usually setted in the country of the author

Tends to be seated in the locale of the author
but in a remotic exotic location
Depicts the life of the aristocracy and is designed Tends to be mor middle-class in scope and is
for upper-class reader geared to a slightly less aristocratic readership.
Tends to be long and episodic Shorter and more compact of plot
Value the preservation of virtue and chastity Focus on illegal doings and forbiden passions
Are never written in the same person as Novels Are written in the first person or in letter form
Make clear that they are mixing fact and fiction Deny that they are fiction
P á g i n a | 28
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

• Autobiographical novel: individualism, first-hand, experience, and
actuality at the cost of narrative coherence.
• Factual, photographic realism.
• Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), Roxana (1724).
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)

• Novel of character
• Sensibility and moral conflict
• Epistolary technique
• Pamela (1740-1741), Clarissa (1747-1748)
Henry Fielding
• From ohotographic factuality to realist truth: detailed, multifarious
mileu where characters and actions fit into a credible, truthful structure
• From autoboigraphical "I" to narrative omniscience.
• Self-avowed fictions to show and correct man's true nature/essence
• Chritical theory: "Comic epic prose".
• The History and Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his friend, Mr.
Abraham Adams (1742), Shamela (1741), The Story of Tom Jones, A
Foundling (1749).
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

• Realism is not reality: Experimental novel. Life and art.
• Parofy to reveal the artificial/limited nature of realist conventions.
• Self-consciousness-Metafiction
• Time, place, reason, characterization revistes. Ralativity and mental
association (stream of consiousness) over realistic representation.
• The life and opinios of Tristam Shandy Squire (1760-1767)
7.4. The Age of Blake and pre-romantic poetry (1785-1800)

The First Ministry of the younger Pitt took control of a nation enfeeble by the lost
of the American colonies and burned with outmoded governmental machinery.
The last quarter of the 18th century was revolutionary at any level. The French
revolution in 1789 changed the mentality in England. Many Englishmen formed
societies extolling France and demanding comparable programs in Britain.
The Industrial Revolution had now sent its reverberations into the quietest
villages of the countryside. Hopes of freedom and justice in Whig aristocrats
and intellectuals radicals were born.
Middle-classes were enriched and great industrialists supersede aristocrats.
P á g i n a | 29
The professional, independent artist: mostly middle-class, conforming a definite

literary class with own interest and social/artistic pleas.
William Blake (1757-1827)

• Poet, engraver and creator of his own mythology based on esoteric and
biblical readings.
• Vision and revolution.
• Neoplatonic influence: the doctrine of intentional obscurity;
neoplatonist metaphysics (remembrance and repossession of
knoeledge through imaginative vision)
• Inocence and Experience, Psycho-Symbolic scheme. Balance reason
(Urizen), imagination (Los), heart (Luvah) and body (Tharmas). No
repression: "The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom"
• From "Beulah" (Idyllic slumber of unconscious) to "Generation"
(material world) to "Ulro" (nightmarish experience), up to "Eden"
(imagination).
• FIRST PERIOD (1798-1793): "Songs of Innocence"; "Songs of
experience"
• SECOD PERIOD (1793-1797): Prophetic books: "Tiriel", "The book of
Thel", "The marriage of heaven and hell", "The book of Urizen", "The
song of Los"
• THIRD PERIOD (1797 - 1820): "Short Lyrics", "Jerusalem", "The
Emanation of the giant Albion".
Some prose writers of the period:

 Thomas Paine
 Mary Wollstonecraft
P á g i n a | 30
UNIT 8 – ROMANTIC ENGLAND
8.1. A historical Background to the English romanticism

At the beginning of the century, England and France were locked in a mortal
conflict. Napoleon had instituted the Continental System, forbidding the
importation of English products or colonial raw material and proclaimed himself
Emperor of France in the same year that Pitt returned as Prime Minister.
After 20 years of warfare, Britain became the richest and more powerful nation
in the world, but growth of great industrial cities and drastic relocation of
population caused by the Industrial Revolution destroyed the family as an
economic unit and converted the working individual into an impersonal labour
force to be used.
1811- • Luddite riots, proletarian protests: British textile artisans against Industrial
1816 Revolution
• Corn Law to exclude foreign grain, promotes native agriculture at the

1815 expense of costly bread for workers
• Suspension of the Habeas Corpus (prisioner's release from unlawful

1817 detention) and severely penalized seditious assemblies
• Catholic Emancipation Bill (full suffrage and eligibility for catholics in

1829 return for oath denying papal interference in English church
• Abolition of slavery in the british colonies

• The Factory Act: Tired ti alleviate the horrors out of Industrial Revolution
1833 (child labour, etc). Emerging of ploretarian consciousness.
During this period there were parliamentary reforms, capitulation of English

landed to middle-class bourgeoisie, now enfranchised.
England was entering into our contemporary world before any other region,
changed the mind of the Englishmen. There were three schools of thought:
1. Conservatism: They repudiated the claims of reason and revolution and

based their cause upon sentiment and emotion, conscience and
costume. They wished to maintain the “old England” unaltered.
2. Revolutionism: They demanded the end of tradition and the creation of
a truly egalitarian society.
P á g i n a | 31
8. Romantic England Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
3. Utilitarianism: Accepting the middle-class society, championing the

principles of practicality and usefulness, seeking necessary change and
improvement without revolutionary overthrow.
7.2. The Romantic Movement in Literature
Hostile critics of early 19th century Romanticism saw it as an attempt to escape

from the realities of the age; on the other hand, a neutral estimate might see
Romantics as asserting the fundamentally valid position of irrational man.
Common to all the Romantics was an idealism that sought for the individual and
for society the fullest of freedom, and expression.
The romantics ate the first contemporary men, the first architects of an ideal
democratic society. The causes of this romanticism include the following:
• Romanticism appears to be largely a middle-class

Economic
movement.
• From the 18th century on, the English middle class has
Religious
been associated with religious nonconformity.
• During the reigns of the four Georges, the prestige on the

English monarchy steadily declined, reaching a low water
Political
mark in the first third of the 19th century. Democracy and
French philosophy.
• Period era ere entering the logical development of an

Social
“open” Society. Freedom.
• Rationalist had suggested the idea of progress. It was a

reaction against the scientific dogmatism and the absolute
Psychological
confidence of the 18th century scientist that lead to poets
to explore vast gulf of human experience.
• The rational mind of the 18th century eventually destroyed

Philosophical Locke’s commonsense, materialistic explanation of the
nature of man.
Imagination and the poet: The poet as seer with demiurgically capacities.
Feelings, the seat of the soul. Creative freedom, transforming qualities of
imaginative perception. Renewal of reality. Relationship min-external world in
terms of joyous harmony and reciprocity, for the world influence, the poet’s mind
P á g i n a | 32
and the poet turn responds with an imaginative truthful apprehension of the
world. Against Lockean mechanicist theories.
Romantic language: The symbol fusing dorm-meaning-world-imagination
Other romantic elements:

 Medievalism
 Orientalism
 Primitivism
 Idea of progress
 Anti-intellectualism
 Sentimentalism
 Democracy
 Originality
 Confessionalism
 Love of the world and the picturesque in external and human nature.
The first generation of Romantic Poets (1800-1814)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Coleridge.
• The Preface (1802): Attack on the generic hierarchy and the pronciple of
decorum.
• Ponger poems: The recules, or views on a man, nature and society
(1798), containnig The prelude and an autobiographical poem, the
recluse and the excursion
• Middle and later period: Ode. Intimations of inmirtality (1802-1804),
Poems in two volumes (1807).
• Nature: Therapeutic and spiritually renewing. Extension of the self.
Identification poet/nature. Natural symbols.
• An interaction of mind and the external world that nhances the
perception of both. As it is imaginatively perceived, nature makes its
own poetry in the poet's mind, a poetry that is true to itself yet also
changed into something more wonderful, capable of constant
wondrous, imaginative remaking ("recollections in tranquility"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

• Poems on various subjects (1796)
• Lyrical ballads: "The rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" (1797, "Christabel"
(1816), "Kubla Khan" (1816
• Biographia Literaria (1817): esemplastic, the nature of the imaginative
mind, "higher third".
P á g i n a | 33
The second Generation of Romantic Poets

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1824)
• The prissioner of Chillon (1816)
• Manfred, a dramatic Poem
• Don Juan (1821)
• Cain: a mysteri (1821)
• Byronic hero: excentric, sophisticated, mysterious, passionate, arrogant,
cynic, seductive, lonely.
Jhon Keats (1795-1821)

• Poems by John Keats (1817)
• Endymion: a poetical Romance (1817-1818)
• Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St, Agnes and other poems (1820), includinf
the five great odes: On melacholy, to Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on
Indolence and To Autumn.
• "Negative capability": Poet's impersonality, free from ego, "the state of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason". Instead, poetic truth and beauty and imaginative
intensity.
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)

• Queen Mab (1812-1813)
• Alastor or the spirit of solitude (1815-1816)
• Ozymandias (1817-1818)
• Prometheus Unbound (1818-1820), "Ode to the West Wind".
• A defense of poetry (1820): poets as moral teachers. Reason
(discriminates, enumerates) and imagination (resting on know things to
create a new synthesis, truthful and spiritually authentic reality.
• Adonais (1821)
• Hellas (1821)
• From skeptic communism to platonic idealism: Universal Spirit revealed
as natural beauty and human love. Poet's divine madness whereby he is
inspired to spot eternal beauty and truth.
The early nineteenth-century novel (1800-1832)

Jane Austen (1775-1817): Neoclasic continuity
• Sensibility drew on philosophical beliefs in the innate goodness of man
(emotionally enrichinf for men, but dangerous for women).
• Half-way between actual love (marriage, position) and sentimental
love; highly ambivalent position which allows heroine's maturity anf
heroic sensibility.
• Humour, irony and "sotto voci"
• Awekening of female conscience and personal discovery.
• Landed Hampshire gentry in detail.
• Sense and Sensibility (1795), Pride and Perjudice (1812), Northanger
abbey (1818) Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persiasion (1818)
P á g i n a | 34
The romantic historical novel:
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

• Scottish revival and setting,
• For all historical inadequacy, he provides the pattern of modern
historical novel: historical background, realistic characterization (minol
characteres) and central characters incarning the author's
contemporary perspective on the past.
• Waverly (1814), Rob Roy (1817), Ivahoe (1819), The Abbot (1820),
Redgauntlet (1824).
The romantic novel revisited: Mary (Godwin) Shelley (1979-1851)

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818), The Last Man (1826)
P á g i n a | 35
UNIT 9 – VICTORIAN ENGLAND
9.1. The Victorian Age (1832-1901): A historical background

At the age of 18, Victoria accessed to the throne of England; on 1832. The rapid
growth of London is one of the many indications of the most important
development of the age: the shift from a way of life based on the ownership of
land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing.
England was the first country to become industrialized and London became the
world’s banker. But the Victorian period was also one of agony and confusion,
soy it’s subdivided in three phases:
1. Early Victorian
2. High- or Mid-Victorian
3. Late Victorian
The early period (1832-1848); a time of troubles
• Reform Bill satifies middle-class voting demands, thus breaking

conservative landowner's monopoly of power
1832
• People's Charter: Chartism (proletarian petitions: extension of

electoral rights) against Adam Smith's laissez faire (The wealth of
Nations, 1776: limited government, rule of law, liberty of individuals
1838 and free market.
• Depression, unemployed, miserable slum, riots

1840
• Crop failures and potato blight in Ireland

1845
• Introduction of free trade (fluid exporting with minimal tariff duties);

corn laws replayed; slavery abolished and more Factory Acts (1833)
regulating children's labour; poor law amandment, 1834 (social
1846 assistance to the poor) to contain the cathastrophic consequences of
fierce industrial life of the poor clsses.
P á g i n a | 36
9. The Victorian age Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
There was and growing unreachable divorce between the wealthy

(upper/middle classes) and the dispossessed, between the rural-aristocratic-
traditional-stratified, and the liberal-dynamic-industrial-mercantile.
The Mid-Victorian Period (1848-1870): Economic Prosperity and Religious

controversy
This second period had many harassing problems, but it was a time of
prosperity. Through a succession of Factory Acts in Parliament, which restricted
child labour and limited hours of employment the conditions of the working class
was improved.
There was an Imperial expansion under Lord Palmerstone (1784-1865), if only

menaced by the Wars of Crimea, India, Jamaican insurrections and Bismarck’s
policies. And in 1851 was the Great Exhibition of industry and science.
Burgeons models of domestic, sobriety, temperance and devotion to duty

projected on Victoria and Albert. The cult of Domesticity (woman as
embodiment of virtues and passivity; separate spheres for the sexes.
Most mid-Victorian poetry and critical prose was led preoccupied with
technology, economics and politics than with the conflict between religion and
science. These debates were generally between Utilitarian (religious belief was
merely an outmoded superstition) and Philosophical Conservative (the thought
that utilitarian’s point of view was an unrealistic narrow).
The Oxford movement or Tractarianism was an impressive crusade to

strengthen the Church of England, it’s leader was Newman. In particular to
Thomas Henry Huxley, who popularized the theories of Charles Darwin.
Although many English scientist were themselves men of strong religious
convictions.
In the mid-Victorian period biology reduced mankind even further into

“nothingness”. Darwin’s great treatises, The Origin of the Species (1859) and,
later, The descend of the man (1871) raised the haunting question of our
identification with the animal kingdom.
The late period (1870-1901): Decay of Victorian values

For many Victorians, this final phase of the century was a time of serenity and
security, the age of house parties and log weekends in the country.
Even so, the “Irish question” became specially devised when Home Rule for
Ireland became a topic of heated debate.
The sudden emergence of Bismarck’s Germany after the defeat of France in

1871 was progressively to confront England with powerful threats to her naval
and military position and also to her exclusive pre-eminence in trade and
industry.
P á g i n a | 37
In 1873 an 1874 such severe economic depressions occurred that the rate of
emigration rose to an alarming degree. In 1867 a second Reform Bill had been
passed which extended the right to vote to sections of the working classes.
The nineties
There were a lot of changes, but they weren’t evidenced everywhere. English
men in other sites were building railways and governing with the same
strenuous dedication to duty as in the mid-Victorian period, but in England,
Victorian standards were breaking down on several fronts.
Earnestness, respectability and Evangelicals

For all its stereotypical compactness, Victorian ethos and culture are
extraordinarily dynamic, ambivalent, and art and society interfluent one another
and result in extensive contradiction: self-sufficient and Agonic materialist and
idealist, conformist and individualist, sentimental and dynamic, iconoclastic and
worshippers of idols authority, narrow biased and imperialist, intellectually
progressive yet morally conservative, didactic and escapist.
The connections between literature in the romantic and Victorian ages are
closed. A Victorian writer might avoid the wild excess, the lack of controlled
form of much Romantic writing; Byron himself foresaw that such a reformation
was necessary.
The energy romantic literature persists, but it is channelled into a stricter

concern for disciplined forms. It is significant that he romantic poet most
influential on the Victorian age was Keats, rather than Byron.
Evangelical refers to a part of a branch of the Church of England called the low
church. Much of their power depended on the fact that their view of life and
religion was virtually identical with that of a much larger group, the
Nonconformists-that is, the Baptist.
The term Evangelical has been loosely applied to cover any kind of enthusiastic
concern for reform.
The history of Victorian asceticism is nevertheless much more complex than

common supposition allows. The middle class puritan’s code was largely
divided from the old Testament, but it also reflected commercial experience in
which sobriety, hard work, and joyless abstention from worldly pleasures paid
off., paradoxically enough in worldly success.
Insistence upon respectability - an insistence reflecting insecurity of newly

powerful class in a fluid society. Hende developed the phenomenon of “Mrs
Grundyism”: conformity in its worst sense-that is external conformity.
P á g i n a | 38
The Role of women in Victorian Life and literature

The explosive growth of the textile industries brought hundreds of thousands of
lower-class woman into factory jobs with gruelling working conditions.
Petitions to parliament advocating women’s suffrage were introduced as early

as the 1840s but, the did not become law until 1918. The Women’s property
acts and the Factory Acts corrected some of the worst aspects of women’s
employment in the mones and factories.
Feminist worked to enlarge educational opportunities for women and finally,

they could study a degree at the university.
There were improvements in the women employs, but the emigration was as
solution for the problems.
9.2. Victorian prose

It’s constitutes an important body in the literature of the period. All the writers
used prose primarily as an instrument of persuasion and argument.
9.3. Victorian poetry

Variety and experimentation. Self-divided ego, torn between the sanctioning of
emotional individuality yet conscious of democratic society of reform.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

• Mastery of decorative, musical style. Dramatic insight, power of feeling.
• Poems (1833), Poems by Alfred Tennyson (1842), In memoriam A.H.H.
(1833), Maud and other poems (1855), Idylls of the King (1872-1875).
The lady of Shalott.
 Robert Browning (1812-89; passionate, dramatic monologue)

 Elizabeth Barret Browning (18061861; more socially committed)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: The Rossetti and Swinburne

Simplicity of art, disparaging of social-moral determinations, sensual mystic
aestheticism.
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

 Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
 Angermon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
9.4. The Victorian Novel
The nineteenth century was the great age of the English novel, caused by an
increase of the reading public, the development of publishing in the modern
sense and because the novel presented a picture of live in a giving society
against a stable background of social and moral values.
P á g i n a | 39
One significant difference with the Victorian writers is that the novelist for the
most part do not share the preoccupation of the poets and essayists with
humanity’s relationship to god. They were primarily concerned with people in
society and with those aspects of experience.
The novel in the nineteenth century rapidly became the maid of all work of
literature, and the most popular way of presenting an extended argument on
social, political or even religious questions.
The condition of England Novel
Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865)

• Industrial Manchester
• Contrast between agricultural and industrial england.
• Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1855)
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

• Journalism and melodrma
• Personal observation, relish in the odd, colorful and dramatic in urban
life and in human character. Sentimental humanitarianism and
profusion of characters reacting individually to particular situations.
• Comic invention and gift for irony and caricature.
• Tackles with the discontents of urban civilization.
• Picwick papers (1836-1837, Oliver Twist (1837-1839), David Copperfield
(1849-1850), Hard Times (1854), Great expectations (1860-1861)
Victorian novel
The brontë sisters
• York moors territory. Powerful imagination. Emotional situations.
• Charlotte (1816-1855): The professor, Jane Eyre (1847)
• Emily (1818-1848): Wuthering Heights (1847)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

• Wessex agricultural territory (Dorset).
• Human condition against a ruthless natural background. Fate and tragic
determinism (impersonal logic of fact and coincidence) with dignity.
Naturalism. Pessimism.
• Consequence of human emotions.
• The return of the native (1878), The mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess
of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the obscure (1896).
Other Mid- and Late-Victorian novelists

• Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): The treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde.
• Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): The Jungle book
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): The importance of being earnest, The picture
of Dorian Gray.
• Lewis Carroll (1832-1898): Alice in wonderland, through the looking
glass. P á g i n a | 40
9.5. Victorian drama and theatre

We must distinguish playwriting on one hand and theatrical activity on the other
hand. For the theatre itself was a flouring and popular institution, we can say
that the theatre was then like the TV nowadays.
P á g i n a | 41
UNIT 10 – TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLAND
10.1. The early twentieth-century: A historical background

Queens Victoria’s jubilee in 1887 and in this time, there were manifestations of
a weakening of traditional stabilities that marked the anti-Victorianism.
The growth of popular education as a result of the Education Act in1870 led to a
rapid emergence of a literary public.
Some manifestation of the end of the Victorian age was the raise of various
kinds of pessimism and stoicism, questioning of explaining narratives/frames
about life, truth and art.
There was a fragmentation of the reading public into “highbrows”, “lowbrows”

and “middlebrows”, which widens the gap between “low culture” and “high
culture”.
High arte: A large, sophisticated and wealthy urban-based society provides a

coherent and conscious aesthetic framework, and a large-scale milieu of
training, and, for the visual arts, sourcing materials and financing work. All this
is so that the artist is able, as near as possible, to realize his creative potential
with as few as possible practical and technical constraints.
The position and valuing of the women are improved.
The Boer War (1899-1902) was fought by Britain to maintain the control of the
republics of South Africa. That, and the Irish question, makes grew up reactions
against British imperialism
First World War (1914-1918) The World War II (1939-1945)
• Post-war disillusionment (a “waste • The outbreak of the World War II

land” of social-identitarian trauma; and the Rusian “betrayal”. India’s
nationalism, intellectuals move in independence and Pakistan’s retreat
the 1930s toward political left. from the commonwealth.
Depression, unemployment, rises of
fascism. The Spanish Civil War.
Painful reorganization and reappraisal of Europe’s leading countries. Economic

rise of Japan and Germany.
Displacement of London metropolitan hegemony in favour of regional localities.

Migration from former colonies, increasing postcolonial diversity.
Modernism and Modernist Literature
A major artistic movement, which involves many arts, that attempted to develop
an individual response to the since of Social breakdown (slightly before and) in
the aftermath of World War I.
P á g i n a | 42
10. Twentieth Century England Iconos Culturales y Literarios de Inglaterra
Nietzsche, Freud, Jung... surrealism, cubism, futurism, abstract art... a positive

new experimental perspective which probes into the aspects and life/art
complexities which realism and reason left unparsed. Priestly artist, a radical
individual who takes refuge in bohemian life and ivory tower.
International Movement. Paris.
From truth to perceptions, perspective. The various sustaining structures of

human life –weather social, religious, political or artistic- had been destroyed or
shown up as falsehoods or fancies, so they need to be renewed. Make it new.
Fragmentariness, dispersal, meaningful omissions –no continuity nor coherence

strategies for explanation/naturalization, but consciousness, or myths.
Juxtaposition of segments. Shifts in perspective, voice, tone. Irony.
Suggestiveness over explanation.
Fragments out of diverse areas of experience. Shocking effects, difficult,

unsettling and active reading. Disjointed timelines, Search for meaning is
meaningful itself: Collapse of the distance world-object-subject, and concern
with form and writing. Directness compression, vividness.
Formal strategies: Free indirect speech, stream of consciousness; oxymoronic

characters juxtaposed; classical allusions (intertextuality); irony and parody;
unconventional(unexpected use of metaphors; symbolic representation;
psychoanalytical flow; discontinuous narrative; multimodality and multiple points
of view; “ideogrammatic” rendering (juxtaposition of concrete instances/objects
to express an abstraction) an imaginism (pure object, no verbal nor any other
cohesive element contributing not to direct presentation of objects).
Thematic attitudes: Breakdown of social norms, materialization of social

meanings yet through unexpected ways; separation meanings and senses from
context; despairing individuals in the face of an in manageable future/reality;
spiritual loneliness and exile; alienation and disillusionment; frustration when
reading the text; rejection of history and clock temporality; objection to outdated
social systems, traditional moralities and religious thoughts, substitution of a
mythical past.
10.1.1. Early twentieth-Century Drama
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

• Social plays under the influence of Norwegian dramatist Hernrik Ibsen.
Shockingly provocative and satiric. "Natural morality". Layers of irony
which overtun reader's rejection of conventional morals and
acceptance of anti-conventionality, as heros and villains constantly
interchange roles. Pygmalion (1913), Saint Joan (1925)
P á g i n a | 43
The Irish Theatre

The war poets
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
• "The Soldier" was a central moral purpose to recover from neurotic
conflicts.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

• Social conscience disturbed by social miseries an added compassion
with the experience of war.
10.1.2. Early twentieth-Century poetry

The modern movement
Most of the revolutionary works of Modernism belong to the second (10s) and
third (20s) decades of the century.
The writers represent in their work various ways of stamping upon literature the
impress of contemporary life. Form is as important to the writer who tries to
cleanse it of traditionalism as it is to the writer who makes them his happy
hunting-ground.
Cubism and the Imagist had a direct influence in the writers of this period.
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)
• from the Irish Literary Renaissance (spiritualism and magic) to the Celtic
Twilight Period (Irish legends). Gradually steadier, essential,
trascendental symbolism and post-war sense of desintegration. "Easter
1916", "The Second Coming". Nobel Prize awarded in 1923.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
• Although American by birth, he settled in London. The Waste Land
(1922), Prufrock and Other poems (1917), poems (1920). Suggestive
and associate language, to dislocate the world into meaning as images
relate to other limages incessantly, without overt explanation.
Disjuntice anti-narrative that throws readers into confusion in the light
of heap of broken images. Tiresias, the omni-present character as
unifying motif: sight and vision. Thirst for spiritual-non -religious-
connection. Noble prize awarded in 1948
Stephen Spender (1909-1995)

• Poet of wartime suffering destruction
David Gascoyne (1916-2001)
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

• Apparently formless, incoherent poetry, yet unusual carefulness,
unusual rhymes running on from line to line.
P á g i n a | 44
10.1.3. The early 20th-century Novel
The Modernist Novel
The novel was essentially bourgeois in its origins, but finally, it was anchored in
a social world.
The loss of the confident sense of a common world, of a public view of what
was significant in human action, which was reflected in the move toward private
association in poetry, had an effect on both the themes and the techniques of
fiction.
The construction of a plot pattern based on such subtle and provate

interpretations of the significant in human affairs would necessarily take the
novel out of the public arena of value in which it had hitherto moved.
New concept of time: “Specious present” which does not really exist but which
represents the continuous flow of the “already” into the “not yet”. New
psychological ideas emphasized the multiplicity of consciousness.
The truth about character is the sum of his whole emotional experience, and
that sum is always there.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

• Society, although necessary, os corrupting. Capitalist exploitation.
Landscapes of the mind. Nostromo (1904), Heart of darkness (1902)
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

• Human relationship and the inward feeling and outward behaviour. A
passage to India (1924), A room with a view (1908), Howard's end
(1910), Maurice (1914). Criticism, Aspects of the novel (1927): Sense of
a lively plot and coherent rhytm.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

• Interested in the flux of consciousness, wich remakes the hierarchy
author-reader-narrative voices and intensifies psycological authenticity
and experimentalism. Lyrical intuition over psychological depth and
complexity in her interior molologues. Isolation, incommunication.
Feminist Criticism, Aroom of one's own (1929). Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To
the Lightthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The waves (1931).
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
• Exploration of maternal and filial man to man, man-woman, man
environment relationships with emotional intensity in all its dimension,
challenging middle-class conventions by outcast figures. Modern
civilization stultifies instict, the (neccesary) atavic. Poetic language,
coming from the uttering of the instant, soul and body emerging as
one, at once. Sons and lovers (1913), women in love (1920), the plumed
serpent (1926), lady Chatterley's lover (1928).
P á g i n a | 45
James Joyce (1882-1941)

• Alienation of the artist, as conventions and society stand for paralysis.
Artistic, multifocal micrososms, where all perspectives, consciousness
and versions are possiblem depending of points of view at work at
every moment. Different streams of actions in simultaneity, allusion,
suggestion to qualify oxymoronic and mutatung characteres and
attitudes, multiple indentity which demands no fixed point of view as
all points of view should be represented in human experience. Puns,
threads of mening, fragments, heaped andd linked by recurrent motifs
(Dublin, Ulysses). Interior monologues and epiphanies (moments of
revelation of the self, via symbolic embeddedness, wich connect
artist/character to innermost self, truth, and lay bare, intead, the
mediocre nature of bourgeois lifestyle and values)
• Dubliners (1914), The portrait if the artist as young man (1916), Ulysses
(1922), Finnegans Wake (1939)
10.2. Post II World War. Twentieth Century: A historical background

At the final of the II World War, England finished it as ruins, ant that’s dorms an
integral part of late 40s and early 50 art and mood.
Former British colonies turned out independent and self-governing, deeply

resented by colonial administrators for all of Britain enlightened policy of good
government and fair play.
During the Cold War, the countries that remanded non-aligned or not moving at
all with either capitalism and NATO were called Third World either capitalism
and NATO or communism and the Sovietic Union (Which along to represent the
Second World). A definition which broadly categorizes the nations of the earth
into three groups based on social, political and economic divisions.
Britain gain a new cultural diversity following immigration from the West, Indian
sub-continent and middle east countries.
- Rising tensions in decomposing empire: Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. Anglo-

French defeat at Suez.
- Labour mandate: Domestic reforms (educational, social, nationalizing of
railways, coal and steel industries) and Welfare State. Prosperity and
parochial/provincial conservatism.
The 60s and the 70s

These years involved a major historical and cultural change which forges a new
kind of sensibility and, on the whole, a very critical attitude against social-moral
stifling, conservative stasis.
There was a sexual revolution (or sexual liberation) (second wave feminism and
Betty Friedan’s feminine Mystique, 1963), a social outlook challenging) A social
outlook challenging traditional codes of behaviour, which includes increased
P á g i n a | 46
acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationship

contraception normalization of homosexuality and alternative sexual codes.
Abortion.
Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Beatles and avant-garde youth culture
against a canons endorsed by right-wing restrictive arbiters taste.
Cold War and NATO: Britain’s opposition and nom-intervensinalist policy.

Entering into the European Community in 1973.
Material prosperity of consumerism, technological advancement, facilities and

affordable luxuries available to everyone. Clearance of Industrial slums.
The Thatcherite era: The Iron lady in the eighties. Liberal conservatism. Miner’s
strikes. Poll tax. Unemployment. Economic recovery. IRA terrorism. Republican
Sinn Féin Party (led by Gerry Adams).
The nineties: Tony Blair. Lady Di. AIDS. End of Irish conflict. 11S.
10.2.1. Drama since the 1950s

Up to 1955 English drama had either moved to escapist entertainment (music
hall, vaudeville, comedy of manners: W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), F.
Lonsdale (1881-1954), Nöel Coward (1899-1973) or “serious” drama (Sean
O’casey, 1880-1964; J.B. Priestley, 1894-1984) or T.S. Eliot’s drama in verse
(Murder in the Cathedral).
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

• The theatre of the absurd. Stripped, grotesquely comic art that deals
with non-existance, and the compulsion of interrogating everything,
briliantly develop in sterily dialects, pervasive sense of emptiness, a-
temporal spaces, and the impossibility of communication, of taking
decisions in generalized senselessness. Waiting for Godot (1955).
The Angry Young Men

• They do not constitute a group but individual artist. Yet they embody
and react to the tensions deriving from social discontent,
disappointment, frustation. Young working class reactions. The theatre
Workshop and The English Stage Company, whose repertoire included
the classics, foreign dramatists and ypunger English olaywrights, and
transgressed West End commercial, bourgeois concerns. The arts
Council fundinf policies favoured reginal/provincial frama. GRadual
proliferation of "fringr" or altenative theatre.
• John Osborne (Look Back in Anger, 1956), Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr.
Sloane, 1964), Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, 1960), Tom Stoppard
(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967)
10.2.2. Poetry Since 1950
P á g i n a | 47
The movement (1954), an allegedly new groupings of british literati, bored by

the despair of the forties, somewhat indifferent to post war suffering and
impatient of poetic “sensibility”. Instead, a middle-class scepticism, sobriety,
conformist discrespect and ironical, sardonic common sense. Philip Larkin
(1922-1986).
The Group
• Deliberatly against tame, formalist aesthetics of The Movement. Tightly
organized around magazine Delta.
• Ted Hughes (1930-1998), Married Sylvia Plath. Vigorous, energetic poet,
nature poet, the primitice and wild vs. the social and "scrippled court
artifice of polite speech". The Hawk in the rain (1957).
• Seamus Heaney (1939- act.). Richly physical description of rural life
where to keep faith ancestral values and faith. Progressively involved in
Irish Concerns. Dead of a Naturalist (1966), North (1975).
10.2.3. Fiction Since 1950
The new novelist of the 40s, disappointed by the tyranny of internationalist

experimentation, go back to test literary forms alin to realism.
Provincial retreat in English themes. Pessimism, satire.
 Evelyn Waugh (Bridgehead Revisited, 1948)

 Aldoux Huxley (Brace New World, 1932, a futurist dystopia).
Novelists from the 50s are influenced by the Angry generation: low middle-class
origin, abhorring immediate cultural past (elitist, liberal), social alienation and
pessimist discontent, disappointed with old morality and Welfare society, and
sensitive promising themselves a return to intellectual art.
 Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954)

 Alan Silitoe (Saturday night and Sunday Morning, 1958; The loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner, 1959).
Yet the path of experimentation had not been forgotten in England underneath
the Angry novelist:
 Samuel Becket: (The Unnameable, 1959),

 Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet, 1958-60 and The Avignon
Quintet (1974-85) who tires parallel yet mutually excluding/confusing
versions, places simultaneously ghostly and real, selconsious narrators.
 Iris Murdoch (The Black Prince, 1973: Use of myth-fantasy to deal with
identitatian complexity, androgynies, multiple and untrusty narrative,
indeterminacy, two forewords)

P á g i n a | 48
P á g i n a | 49

Iconos Apuntes Examen

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Iconos Apuntes Examen

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Iconos Apuntes Examen

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Profesora: María José Chivite

UNIT 2 – BEFORE ENGLAND

2.1. The Celtic and Roman World

❷ The British Isles were probably overrun by Indo-Europeans1. (2000 BC)

❹ Celtics invaded the island in successive waves from 600 BC.

Religion: Similar to polytheism.

2.2 The Christian and Germanic contribution

Anglo-Saxon were tubes originally located in an area in northern Germany and

 Celts were forced into the corners of the island

In 597, St. Augustine landed at Kent in England, sent by Pope Gregory to

The Christian Monasteries became equal to any other European centre of

UNIT 3 – ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE AND LITERATURE (450-1066)

3.1. A general view of Anglo-Saxon world and Literature

❷ Anglo Saxon  Norse Culture

The Scandinavian Culture emphasized the military virtues of courage,

The organization of the Anglo-Saxons was the typical warrior band or a

LAW = Anglo-Saxon considered each case individually, bearing in mind

CITY LIFE = Romano-Celtic cities dwindled and the agriculturist made

3.1.1. Old English

There were four main dialects: Northumbrian  Scotland

Differences from Modern English concern Spelling and pronunciation, the

3.1.2. Characteristics of Old English Verse

3.2. Anglo Saxon Poetry

Few books have surviving: Beowulf

3.2.1. Traditional Epic Poetry

3.2.2. Christian epic poetry

CAEDMON = An untutored cowherd who was divinely inspired and eventually

3.3. Prose in Latin

3.4. Alfred and the origins of England

3.4.2. Anglo-Saxon prose

UNIT 4 - MEDIEVAL ENGLISH

Consequences of the Norman Conquest

5. Middle English: Simplification of grammar and introduction of borrowings

The High Medieval Ages (1050-1300)

4.2. Medieval literary genres

4.2.2. Other medieval genres

4.3. Age of Chaucer (1350-1400)

The sense of a common experience and responsibility fostered an English

4.3.1. Alliterative tradition: The Pearl poet

4.3.2. Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400)

His work fall under three periods:

4.4. The fifteenth century: a transition period (1400-1500)

The authority of Chaucer was paramount. It takes a

English verse variety of forms and ranges. There are some

UNIT 5 – TUDOR ENGLAND

5.1. Renaissance and Reformation

Thomas Cromwell was the architect of such political reformation: separate

Henry VIII (Bloody) Mary I Elizabeth I

5.1.1. The language: Modern English

5.1.2. Renaissance and humanism

A strong individualism in the consequence of humanism. Other characteristics

5.1.3. Renaissance in England

Some important writers are:

 William Grocy (first teacher at Oxford) translated a lot of documents.

Reformation in England was born as a nationalistic project which limited papal

5.2. Elizabethan poetry and drama (1558-1603)

 Subject-matters: love, unrequited, frustrated or betrayed. Love happiness