COURSE OBJECTIVES

Feudal system: king, lords, yeomen, serfs, the sheriff represented the king

Split between Anglo-Saxons and Normans

Loyalty of the knights to the lord and the lords to the king; 40 days of army service, later shield money to pay professional mercenaries

Education improved in schools, abbeys. 12^th -13^th centuries Oxford and Cambridge. Inns of Courts for lawyers

Changes in the language: Germanic inflections dropped, new French words, London dialect becomes the basis for Modern English

Religious works, non-religious poems (The Cuckoo Song, The Fox and the Wolf), romances (tales of heroic deeds of knights: King Arthur in The Matter of Britain, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

A successful London gentleman, prisoner of war in France in 1359, diplomatic missions in Italy, where he became familiar with Dante“s work, and may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio.

period of French influence (1359-1372), works written in octosyllabic couplets: The Romaunt of the Rose, The Book of the Duchess

period of Italian influence (1372-1386), works written in heroic couplet: The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowles, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women.

the English period (1386-1400): The Canterbury Tales. Twenty-nine pilgrims, including the author himself, meet at Tabard Inn in Southwark on their way to the shrine of Thomas a“Becket in Canterbury. They are supposed to tell two stories on the way to Canterbury and two stories on their way back. The best story will be rewarded with a free supper. Chaucer wrote only twenty-two stories, and fragments of two more. The majority are written in heroic couplets.

framed narrative

collection of portraits from knight to ploughman different categories ( monk, nun, miller, merchant, physician, etc.)

personality carefully revealed

detailed descriptions

archetypal characters

humour, tolerance, love

holiday spirit, April

Alistair Fowler: encyclopedic diversity of genres, skepticism, contemptus mundi, interchange of divine and human standards

THE PROLOGUE to the CANTERBURY TALES

INTRODUCTION

When in April the sweet showers fall

That pierce March's drought to the root and all

And bathed every vein in liquor that has power

To generate therein and sire the flower;

When Zephyr also has with his sweet breath,

Filled again, in every holt and heath,

The tender shoots and leaves, and the young sun

His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run,

And many little birds make melody

That sleep through all the night with open eye

(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)

Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage,

And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,

To distant shrines well known in distant lands.

And specially from every shire's end

Of England they to Canterbury went,

The holy blessed martyr there to seek

Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak

It happened that, in that season, on a day

In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay

Ready to go on pilgrimage and start

To Canterbury, full devout at heart,

There came at nightfall to that hostelry

Some nine and twenty in a company

Of sundry persons who had chanced to fall

In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all

That toward Canterbury town would ride.

The rooms and stables spacious were and wide,

And well we there were eased, and of the best.

And briefly, when the sun had gone to rest,

So had I spoken with them, every one,

That I was of their fellowship anon,

And made agreement that we'd early rise

To take the road, as I will to you apprise.

But none the less, whilst I have time and space,

Before yet further in this tale I pace,

It seems to me in accord with reason

To describe to you the state of every one

Of each of them, as it appeared to me,

And who they were, and what was their degree,

And even what clothes they were dressed in;

And with a knight thus will I first begin.

At table she had been well taught withal,

And never from her lips let morsels fall,

Nor dipped her fingers deep in sauce, but ate

With so much care the food upon her plate

That never driblet fell upon her breast.

In courtesy she had delight and zest.

Her upper lip was always wiped so clean

That in her cup was no iota seen

Of grease, when she had drunk her draught of wine.

Becomingly she reached for meat to dine.

And certainly delighting in good sport,

She was right pleasant, amiable- in short.

She was at pains to counterfeit the look

Of courtliness, and stately manners took,

And would be held worthy of reverence.

But, to say something of her moral sense,

She was so charitable and piteous

That she would weep if she but saw a mouse
Caught in a trap, though it were dead or bled.
She had some little dogs, too, that she fed
On roasted flesh, or milk and fine white bread.
But sore she'd weep if one of them were dead,
Or if men smote it with a rod to smart:
For pity ruled her, and her tender heart.
Right decorous her pleated wimple was;
Her nose was fine; her eyes were blue as glass;
Her mouth was small and therewith soft and red;
But certainly she had a fair forehead;
It was almost a full span broad, I own,
For, truth to tell, she was not undergrown.
Neat was her cloak, as I was well aware.
Of coral small about her arm she'd bear
A string of beads and gauded all with green;
And therefrom hung a brooch of golden sheen
Whereon there was first written a crowned "A,"
And under, Amor vincit omnia.

THE WIFE OF BATH

There was a housewife come from Bath, or near,
Who- sad to say- was deaf in either ear.
At making cloth she had so great a bent
She bettered those of Ypres and even of Ghent.
In all the parish there was no goodwife
Should offering make before her, on my life;
And if one did, indeed, so wroth was she
It put her out of all her charity.
Her kerchiefs were of finest weave and ground;
I dare swear that they weighed a full ten pound
Which, of a Sunday, she wore on her head.
Her hose were of the choicest scarlet red,
Close gartered, and her shoes were soft and new.
Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue.
She'd been respectable throughout her life,
With five churched husbands bringing joy and strife,
Not counting other company in youth;
But thereof there's no need to speak, in truth.
Three times she'd journeyed to Jerusalem;
And many a foreign stream she'd had to stem;
At Rome she'd been, and she'd been in Boulogne,
In Spain at Santiago, and at Cologne.
She could tell much of wandering by the way:
Gap-toothed was she, it is no lie to say.
Upon an ambler easily she sat,
Well wimpled, aye, and over all a hat
As broad as is a buckler or a targe;
A rug was tucked around her buttocks large,
And on her feet a pair of sharpened spurs.
In company well could she laugh her slurs.
The remedies of love she knew, perchance,
For of that art she'd learned the old, old dance.

THE PHYSICIAN

He watched his patient's favourable star

And, by his Natural Magic, knew what are

The lucky hours and planetary degrees

For making charms and magic effigies.

THE MILLER

Upon the coping of his nose he had

A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs,

Red as the bristles in an old sow's ears.

His nostrils they were black and very wide.

THE SUMMONER

With black and scabby brows and scanty beard;

He had a face that little children feared.

There was no mercury, sulphur, or litharge,

No borax, ceruse, tartar, could discharge,

Nor ointment that could cleanse enough, or bite,

To free him of his boils and pimple white.

Text and comments available at https://hosting.uaa.alaska.edu/afdtk/ect_main.htm

Origins

Liturgical service in Latin, chanted tropes: Quem Quaeritis

1210, Pope Innocent III - outside the church

1264, Pope Urban IV inaugurated the Corpus Christi Festival

English popular shows: spectaculum or ludus ( clowning, miming, fire-eating, dumb-shows, jugglery, procession, tournaments)

Classical drama: Plautus, Terence, Seneca

French and Dutch influence

Mystery / Miracle Plays 13^th - 16^th centuries

Based on the Bible or the life of saints

Imagistic illustration of the Bible

Latin replaced by vernacular English outside the church

180 to 700-800 lines

Performed on pageants or wagons moving around; fixed audience

Supervised by guilds

Cycles: York, Chester, Coventry, Wakefield

Morality Plays 15^th - ^th centuries

Dramatization of a sermon

Abstract allegorical characters such as Truth, Justice, Peace, Vice, Death

Characters grouped around Virtue and Vice in their contest for the human soul

Everyman, Mankind: homo philosophicus

Pride of Life, The Castle of Perseverance, Respublica, Skelton, Magnificence, Peter Dorlandus, Everyman, 1495

Interludes 15^th - ^th centuries

Shorter indoor performances for entertainment, dancing, singing, disguising

Theatre as a game: desacralized semiotic contract, iconic vs. verbal effects

Henry Medwall, Nature (1486), Fulgens and Lucres ( 1497), John Rastell, The Nature of the Four Elements (1517), John Bale, King Johan (1538)

Characteristics of Medieval Drama

Nonverbal elements predominate

Flexibility, spontaneity, constant rewriting

Showy costumes, bombastic interpretation

Long performances, usually during festivals or holidays (Corpus Christi Festival, Christmas, Easter plays)

Performed in churches, inn yards, streets, college halls, private houses, moving or fixed stages, outdoors and indoors

Active participation of the audience, tourist attraction

Audience prepared to listen to sermons

Functions: drama of devotion and ritual, of salvation, of pastime

EVERYMAN

Everyman: Gramercy, Good-Deeds, now i may true friends see;

They have forsaken me everyone;

I loved them better than my Good-Deeds alon,

Knowledge, will you forsake me also?

Knowledge: Yea, Everyman, when ye to death shall go;

But not yte for no manner of danger.

Everyman: Gramercy, Knowledge, with all my heart.

Knowledge: Nay, yet i will not from hence depart,

Till I see where ye shall be come.

Everyman: Methink, alas, that I must be gone,

To make my reckoning and my debts pay,

For I see my time is nigh spent away.

Take example, all ye that this do hear or see,

How they that I love best do forsake me,

Except my Good-Deeds that bideth truly.

Good-Deeds: All earthly things is but vanity:

Beauty, strength, and discretion, do man forsake,

Foolish friends and kinsmen that fair spake,

All fleeth save Good-Deeds, and that am I.

Text and comments available at https://www.luminarium.org/medlit/everyman.htm, https://www.enotes.com/everyman

age of travelling, adventure, discovery, colonial expansion, initiative, prosperity, power, ambition, plotting, physical love

cult of life, belief in man's possibilities, exuberance of mind, frenzied passions, violence, demonism, duality body/mind, extravagance, desire to taste everything

interest in science, geography ( the South), humanism, magic, form, image, words, lyric tone ( blank verse )

influence of Plato, Aristotle ("live and die in Aristotle's work" Dr. Faustus ), Neo-Platonism, Erasmus, Montaigne

themes: how to succeed in life, how to master love, how to deal with death; explores man's inability to live content in this world; rhetoric of wonder and curiosity; introduces the fantastic; new relationship with God and destiny; salvation / damnation

texts: cheap editions, sometimes no authors mentioned, published without permission, editors interfere, alternative variants, rewritings, no real experience of the text, flexibility

Chain of Being: microcosm vs. macrocosm

stones - being

plants - being and growing

animals - being, growing, sense

man- being, growing, sense, reason

angels - pure reason

God - pure actuality

humours:

blood = air, hot and moist, spring

choler = fire, hot and dry, summer

melancholy = earth, cold and dry, autumn

phlegm = water, cold and moist, winter

John Lyly, Thomas Nash, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Christopher Marlowe

romantic comedy: Lyly, Endymion, Galathea

the revenge tragedy: Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

chronicle plays: Peele, Edward I, Greene, James IV, Marlowe, Edward II

fall of princes tragedy: Marlowe ( 1564-1593 ) Tamburlaine the Great, Dr. Faustus

text A 1604, text B 1616

origin: ancient Jewish legend, German folk books

practices of magic, misappropriation of magic to political ends, sin, love, authority, damnation, liberation

medieval sinner, Renaissance metaphysical adventurer modelled on ancient Christian rebels - Simon the Magus, Cyprian of Antioch - and Renaissance scientists - Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno

temptation of knowledge ( medicine, logic, engineering, optics, chemistry ) and occult secrets, intense curiosity, extravagant taste of profit , power and pleasure ( " O what a world of profit and delight / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence"), humanist, free-thinker

suspending normal rules in magic

"omnia in unum " - the essence common to all things in nature from stone to God ( Paracelsus, Hermes Trismegistus )

discovery of the subconsciousness, eros -" vinculum vinculorum " - an energy controlling the macrocosm and microcosm ( Giordano Bruno )

Lucifer, Mephistopheles: modern Renaissance characters

Thomas Healy " the Marlowe effect ", Peter Conrad: " a play about the prostitution of fantasy "," imperialism of greed " ;

intertext from Marlowe to Chamisso, Lenau, Heine, Goethe, Byron, Valéry, Thomas Mann, Victor Eftimiu

DR: FAUSTUS

Scene 1

Faustus: Divinity, adieu!

These necromantic books are heavenly,

Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters:

Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.

Oh, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

Is promised to the studios artisan!

All things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings

Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds.

But his dominion that exceeds in this

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:

A sound magician is a demi-god.

Here, tire my brains to get a deity.

Scene 14.

Faustus: Ah Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damned perpetually.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease and midnight never come.

Fair nature s eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day. Or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi.

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

Oh, I ll leap op to my God: who pulls me down?

See, see where Christ s blood streams in the firmament.

One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!

Ah, rent not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Yet will I call him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!

Where is it now? >Tis gone:

And see where God stretcheth out his arm,

And bends his ireful brows.

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.

No, no. Then will I headlong run into the earth.

Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbour me.

You stars that reigned at my nativity,

Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,

Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist

Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud,

Than when you vomit forth into the air

My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,

So that my soul may but ascend to heaven.

The watch strikes.

Ah! Half the hour is past,

>Twill all be past anon.

Oh God, if thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet, for Christ s sake whose blood hath ransomed me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain.

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be saved.

Oh, no end is limited to damned soul.

Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?

Or why is this immortal that thou hast?

Ah, Pythagoras metempsychosis, were that true

This soul should fly from me, and I be changed

Unto some brutish beast.

All beasts are happy, for when they die

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements,

But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.

Cursed be the parents that engendered me!

No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,

That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven.

The clock strikes twelve.

Oh, it strikes, it strikes! Now body turn to air,

Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell.

Thunder and lightning.

Oh soul, be changed into little water drops

And fall into the ocean, ne er be found.

Thunder. Enter the Devils.

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me.

Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.

Ugly hell, gape not, come not, Lucifer!

I ll burn my books. Ah, Mephostophilis!

Exeunt with him.

born on 23 April, 1564

in 1582 marries Anne Hathaway, b. 1556

three children: Susanna (1583 - 1649 ), Hamnet ( 1585-1596 ) and Judith ( 1585-1662 )

leaves for London in 1585

1592 actor and playwright at the Globe Robert Greene: " an upstart Crow", "in his own conceit the only shake-scene in the country"

1595 The Lord Chamberlain's Men

1598 mentioned as an actor in one of Ben Jonson's plays

1599 a shareholder at the Globe

1601, 1602, 1604, 1613 buys land and houses in Stratford

1611 returns to Stratford as a rich man

dies in 1616

Anne dies in 1623

dating: external sources, internal sources, style

37 plays, 18 in Quarto form

1623 First Folio

1591:Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew

1594: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice

Henry IV Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida

1601: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, Othello

1606: Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus

1609: Pericles

1611: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest

Shakespeare and John Fletcher ( c. 1613 )

The History of Cardenio ( lost )

Henry VIII or All is True - the firing of a cannon burned the Globe in 1613, July 4

The Two Noble Kinsmen ( pr. 1634 )

Sir Thomas More

originality: borrowed subjects, but original treatment of the plot. Examples:

OTHELLO: Giambattista Cinthio ( Gli Ecatommiti-The Hundred Tales ) 1565, tr. French 1584

ROMEO AND JULIET: Bandello, Arthur Brooke ( The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet)

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM: Ovid, Chaucer, Reginald Scot   (Discovery of Witchcraft )

realism

themes: public world of affairs, wars and politics vs. private world of love and family; Eros vs. Thanatos; sense of integration vs. sense of fragmentation; thought vs. action; men vs. women

plot: inner crisis, cumulative and supernatural elements

characters: prodigality of output, impartiality, vital force, development, women, generation gap

language: artificial, complex, allegorical, poetic, comic/tragic, verse / prose, songs

objectivity. Notice the different opinions on life expressed by the following characters and think whether you can find out which one is Shakespeare's:

Hamlet (Hamlet): " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than there are dreamt of in your philosophy." (I.5.166-167)

Prospero (The Tempest): " We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep." (IV.1.156-158)

Jacques (As You Like It): " All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players." ( II.7. 139-140)

Macbeth (Macbeth): " Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing ! " (V. 5. 24-28)

Theatres: The Theatre , outside the City, James Burbage, 1576-7; The Blackfriars, The Swan, The Rose; The Globe - the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Richard Burbage, 1599, 3,000 spectators, burnt down in 1613, reconstructed, pulled down in 1644, rebuilt in 1992.

Indications given by Hamlet to actors: " Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you - trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the towncrier had spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent , tempest and as I may say the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. /.../ Pray you, avoid it. " ( Hamlet, III, 2, 1-15).

Plays and concordances available at https://www.opensourceshakespeare.com/search/search-results.php

order of writing: Henry VI ( 3 parts ), Richard III, King John, Richard II, Henry IV (2 parts ), Henry V, Henry VIII.

chronological order: 1377 to 1547 - Richard II, Henry IV ( 2 parts ), Henry V, Henry VI ( 3 parts), Richard III.

the principle of order: the world is seen as a part of the eternal law of order and human events are firmly woven into the total web of things: A Each hath his place and function to attend ( 1H6, I.i.173-175 ). Thus the macrocosm, microcosm, and body politic are inseparable realms and actions in one direction affect the whole world.

the gallery of kings: The weak king

Richard II: Thus play I in one person many people,

And none contented. Sometimes am I the king;

Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar,

And so I am. Then crushing penury

Persuades me I was better when a king.

Then am I kinged again, and by and by

Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,

And straight am nothing, but whate`er I be,

Nor I, nor any man that but man is,

With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased

With being nothing.

The music plays

Music do I hear.

Ha, ha; keep time! How sour sweet music is

When time is broke and no proportion kept.

So is it in the music of men`s lives.

And here have I the daintiness of ear

To check time broke in a disordered string;

But for the concord of my state and time

Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,

For now hath time make me his numb`ring clock.

My thoughts are minutes, and with sights that jar

They watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch

Whereto my finger, like a dial`s point,

Is pointing still in cleansing them from tears.

Now, sir, the sound that strike upon my heart,

Which is the bell. So sights, and tears, and groans

Show minutes, hours, and times. But my time

Runs posting on in Bolingbroke`s proud joy,

While I stand fooling here, his jack of the clock.

This music mads me. Let sound no more,

For though it have holp madmen to their wits,

It me it seems it will make wise men mad.

The music ceased.

Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me,

For `tis a sign of love, and love to Richard

Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.

( V. v. 1-66 )

The ideal king : Henry V

The villain king: Richard III

Richard Gloucester: Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York;

And all the clouds that loured upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments,

   Our stearn alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front,

And now-instead of mounting barbed steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries-

He capers nimbly in a lady`s chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass,

I that am rudely stamped and want love`s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph,

I that am curtailed of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time

Into this breathing world scarce half made up -

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them -

Why, I in this weak piping time of peace

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity.

And therefore since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have a laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams

To set my brother Clarence and the King

In deadly hate the one against the other.

And if King Edward be as true and just

As I am subtle false and treacherous,

This day should Clarence closely be mewed up

About a prophecy which says that `G`

Of Edward`s heirs the murderer shall be.

( I.i. 1-40 )

Aristotle, Poetics: a violation and reassertion of order, producing katharsis ( i.e., a cleansing of the soul ) through pity and fear.

A. C. Bradley, The Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904/ 1970: A a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate"

Choice

Death

Evil

Fear

Ungratefulness

Understanding death: Hamlet, the courtier, soldier, and poet

Loving and dying: Othello, the moor

Ambition: Macbeth, the soldier

Blindness: King Lear

Foil characters: antiphonal effects through opposition

5-act structure

Stages of the play

Comic moments

Double plot

Soliloquies

Blank verse

HAMLET, I, 2

O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew !

Or that the Everlasting had not fix d

His canon >gainst self-slaughter! O   God! God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on t! Ah, fie! >tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and   gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

But two months dead! Nay, not so much, not two.

So excellent a king that was to this

Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,

That he might not beteem the winds of heaven

Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!

Must I remember ? Why, she would hang on him

As if increase of appetite had grown

By what it fed on; and yet within a month -

Let me not think on t. Frailty, thy name is woman!

A little month, or ere those shoes were old

With which she followed my poor father s body,

Like Niobe, all tears - why she, even she -

O God! A beast that wants discourse of reason

Would have mourn d longer - married with my uncle,

My father s brother; but not more like my father

Than I to Hercules. Within a month,

Ere yet the salt of most uprighteous tears

Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,

She married. O, most wicked speed, to post

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not, nor it cannot come to good.

But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

Notes on Hamlet available at https://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/hamlet/about.html.

the capital, the province, the countryside: the rich were sophisticated and vicious, snobbish, hypocritical, and vain. Hungry and miserable, the poor lived in filthy districts, prisons or insane asylums, unsanitary conditions, factories where children were cruelly exploited, pubs populated by beggars and drunkards.

the monarchy: Queen Anne, 1702-1714, George I (1714 - 1727), George II (1727 - 1760, George III (1760 - 1820)

the Parliament, the Whigs and the Tories

Sir Robert Walpole ( Prime-Minister between 1715 - 17 and 1721 - 42) or William Pitt the Younger (1783- 1801, 1804 - 1806)

free press, impartial justice, tolerance for religious dissenters

the growth of the British empire

interest in action and reality, rather than in the characters

focus more on the plot than on the characters

characters are personalities with a flat mental cast

comic disposition

frequent contradictions with a society that was apparently disordered and inimical

the honest and moral hero was offered a life of happy fulfillment

travel books, picaresque and quixotic novels, novels of adventures and of manners

a mimetic view: under the sign of the mirror

invitation to embark on a long journey with the author

Captain William Dampier: New Voyage Round the World - 1697, Voyages and Descriptions - 1699, and Voyage to New Holland - 1703

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 1719 - the myth of the lonely island

Moll Flanders 1721 - the first female picaro

Journal of the Plague Year 1722 - the city as a literary character

Preface to Robinson Crusoe:

"The story is told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events to the uses to which wise men always apply them to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honour the wisdom of Providence in all the variety of our circumstances, let them happen how they will.

The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it. And however thinks, because all such things are disputed, that the improvement of it, as well to the diversion, as to the instruction of the reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without further compliment to the world, he does them a great service in the publication." (p. 7)

The text and comments available at https://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/17/31/frameset.html

reportorial style

a careful exploitation of details

a swift and resolute narrative rhythm

an impersonal, objective, and plain tone.

aims at concreteness,

photographic presentation of shapes

the illusion of verifiable facts.

notices, weighs, and measures everything,

employs documents, quoted letters, hospital bills

detached and unsentimental

lacks humour

A comic epic poem in prose - Preface to Joseph Andrews (1741)

ridiculous and light plot

a larger circle of incidents

a wider group of characters

people of inferior rank and manners

comic instead of sublime sentiments and diction

The text and comments at https://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/22/2394/frameset.html

Intellectual Realism - The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

The author:

omniscient point of view

a great faculty of observation, curiosity, tolerance, and sense of humour

a series of simultaneous stories

scenes of action alternate with moments of moral and philosophical debate

comments interrupt the story

numerous allusions to classical writers

double voice

Text available at https://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/22/49/frameset.html, an introduction available at https://www.ruthnestvold.com/tomjones.htm.

fantastic stories, psychological novels, Gothic stories, and historical romances

romantic and effeminate, dealing with sentiments and atmosphere rather than with action

inner crises, fantasies of love, and follies of the imagination

amorous affairs, writing letters, and crying tears of unrequited love

tragic mode

T. G. Smollett, Preface to Roderick Random (1748): clearly distinguishes the difference between the novel and the romance

Walter Scott, the Waverley cycle (1829): no difference between the two genres.

the vagaries of love

the opposition man / woman

introspections and psychological analyses

the supernatural, the fantastic, dreams, hallucinations

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1741)

Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-48)

Sir Charles Grandison (1753).

combined the realistic tendencies of Defoe with the sentimental pattern based on love tribulations.

about sentiments and addressing sentiments

unity of emotions

plot linked to the sentimental evolution of the characters

characterization through the quality and intensity of feeling

love is the supreme value of life

marriage

Pamela: " But then, thought I, how do I know what I may be able to do ? I have withstood his anger; but may I not relent at his kindness? How shall I stand that! Well, I hope, thought I, by the same protecting grace, in which will always confide ! But then what has he promised ? Why he will make my poor father and mother's life comfortable. O! said I to myself, that is a rich thought; but let me not dwell upon it, for fear I should indulge it to my ruin. What can he do for me, poor girl as I am !What can his greatness stoop to ! He talks, thought I, of his pride of heart, and pride of condition ! O these are in his head and in his heart too, or he would not confess them to me at such an instant. Well then, thought I, this can be only to seduce me! " (p. 11

Comments on Pamela available at https://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6927380

a significant dramatic function of letters

the writing, transmission, and reading of letters is an important and exciting part of the plot

direct contact with the consciousness of the character

the stream- of-consciousness technique: intimate and objective

introspection in the present development of the action together with recollections of past moments and anticipations of the future

alternating different narrative perspectives

writing to the moment

a reduced temporal distance between events and narration

CLARISSA HARLOWE:

" That you and I, my dear, should love to write is no wonder. We have always, from the time each could hold a pen, delighted in epistolary correspondences. Our employments are domestic and sedentary, and we can scribble upon twenty innocent subjects, and take delight in them because they are innocent, though were they to be seen, they might not much profit or please others. But that such a gay, lively young fellow as this (Lovelace, a.n.), who rides, hunts, travels, frequents the public entertainments, and has means to pursue his pleasures, should be able to set himself down to write for hours together, as you and I have heard him say he frequently does, that is the strange thing." (p. 33-34).

" All the letters are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects (the events at the time generally dubious): so that they abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous descriptions and reflections." (pp. 7-8).

Gulliver's Travels 1721

a book for children or a satire ? Lilliput and Mildendo, Brobdingnag and Lorbrubgrud. " The King was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I (these were his expressions) could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation, which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines, whereof, he said, some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver."(p. 175)

a political novel ? The Tramecksan and Slamecksan, the Lagado brain transplant. History: "a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, masacres, revolutions, banishments, and very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce." (p. 172)

a science-fiction novel ? Laputa, the Flying Island; Balnibarbi and the Academy of Lagado; Glubbdubdrib, the Island of Sorcerers and Magicians.

a utopia ? The country of the horses: Houyhnhnms and Yahoos.

a book of travels or a parody of it?

realistic indications as to the life of Gulliver

the geographical parameters of the places where he was shipwrecked

the exact dates of his leaving and returning to England (May 4, 1699 - April 13, 1702; June 12, 1702 - June 3, 1706; August 5, 1706 - April 16, 1710; August 7, 17l0 - Decemder 5, 1715)

the matter-of-fact style of travel books

numerous misstatements, errors, and jokes

a contradictory and unreliable perspective

introduces odd, grotesque, and wild aspects

irony

" There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it." (p. 43).

P. Conrad (1987, p. 315): "Gulliver's Travels" is nothing but "an encyclopedia of misunderstandings".

the writers laboratory

disobeying traditional rules

puzzling and irritating the reader

under the sign of the labyrinth and the carnival

a variant: meta-novels under the sign of the pen

comments on the techniques of writing

TRISTRAM SHANDY (1760-1767)

delusive title

the inner covers and the preface placed at the middle of the book

action reduced to a few insignificant incidents

tempo slowed down by digressions, descriptions, and tales within tales

blank pages and drawings

written and oral text

the rhetoric of rococo: the curve and the zig-zag line

influence of Hogarth and the visual arts

digressions: "That tho' my digressions are all fair, as you observe, - and that I fly off from what I am about, as far, and as often too, as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so that my main business does not stand still in my absence. /.../ By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, - and at the same time." (I, 22, p. 53).

ludic attitude

chapter 24 in Book IV does not exist, chapter 25 follows immediately after chapter 23.

blank (VI, 39; IX, 18, 19), black (I, 12) or marbled (III, 36) pages

playing games with letters

"Chapter XIII

Which shows, let your reverences and worships say what you will of it (for as for thinking - all who do think - think pretty much alike both upon it and other matters) - Love is certainly, at least alphabetically speaking, one of the most

Agitating

Bewitching

Confounded

Devilish affairs of life - the most

Extravagant

Futilitous

Galligaskinish

Handy-dandyish

Iracundulous (there is K to it) and

Lyrical of all human passions: at the same time, the most

Misgiving

Ninnyhammering

Obstipating

Pragmatical

Stridulous

Ridiculous - though by the bye the R should have gone first - But in short 'tis of such a nature, as my father once told my uncle Toby upon the close of a long dissertation upon the subject - "You can scarce, "said he, "combine two ideas together upon it, brother Toby, without an hypallage" --- what's that ? Cried my uncle Toby.

The cart before the horse, replied my father.----

---- And what is he to do there ? Cried my uncle Toby---

Nothing, quoth my father, but to get in....... or let it alone. Now widow Wadman, as I told you before, would do neither the one or the other. She stood however ready harnessed and caparisoned at all points to watch accidents". (VIII, 3)

Text available at https://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/TS/contents.html, comments available at https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/tristram/

Horace Walpole THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO

Matthew Gregory Lewis AMBROSIO, OR THE MONK (1795)

" Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls, of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen rising over the tops of the woods, beneath those thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend.

The extent and darkness of these tall woods awakened terrific images in her mind, and she almost expected to see banditti start up from under the trees. At length the carriages emerged upon a heathy rock, and, soon after, reached the castle gates, where the deep tone of the portal bell, which was struck upon to give notice of their arrival, increased the fearful emotions that had assailed Emily." (pp. 226-227).

man's mind is a "blank sheet of paper", containing no preconceived ideas, at the moment of its birth

it is only afterwards that memory, reason, and logic combine the different sense impression and work upon them

truth and reason can discipline the mind and make man morally good by helping him obey both divine and human laws

even simple people could judge for themselves and that, by appealing to reason, commonsense, and wit, they could find the right path in life.

the failure of reason to master reality.

the importance of senses in perceiving reality

a spontaneous and haphazard relation with the world

the sublime - a distinct aesthetic category generated by strong emotions of amazement and terror

sustained by mystery, obscurity, power, and majesty

subtler, more sensible and refined depictions of nature

the subjectivity of man's contact with reality, which differed from individual to individual

a fresh reunion of reality and ideality.

a back-to-nature movement

interest in history and folklore, exotic and primitive cultures

the poet: prophet, guide, guru

anti-intellectualist, sentimental, equalitarian, original

reason - a cause of social corruption

scientific thought stifles creative energies

freedom, imagination - the sole guides to truth

SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789): joy and happiness of childhood, divine love and sympathy, delicate images. Infant Joy, The Lamb - serene poems about childhood and its relationship to the world of the angels.

THE LAMB

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee ?
Dost thou know who made thee ?

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee,
Little Lamb God bless thee.

INFANT JOY

I have no name
I am but two days old. --
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name, --
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.

SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794): sense of gloom and mystery, power of evil, maturity associated with suffering and sorrow. Infant Sorrow, The Tyger and the other poems of the volume parallel Infant Joy, The Lamb and the other poems from Songs of Innocence.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

My mother groaned! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mothers breast.

THE PROPHETIC BOOKS (1788-1797): The Book of Thel (1790), The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania(1795), The Book of Los(1795), The Four Zoas (1797), etc.

Milton(1804), Jerusalem(1804)

complex mythological characters: Los (Inspiration), Luvah (Emotion), Urizen (Thought), Tharmas (Sensation), etc.

difficult symbolism

transience of life, death is the beginning of a new life

Good and Evil are complementary, not opposite elements

opposes tyranny, stands for freedom and imagination, which represent eternity

laments the decay of man from the state of innocence to a state of rational sterility

Text and comments available at https://www.poemhunter.com/william-blake/poems/poet-3026/page-1/

LYRICAL BALLADS (1798)

Preface by William Wordsworth:

" I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment."

recollections in tranquility have a renovating virtue

sensibility in action should be added to the mind

vulgar forms of everyday life are reshaped in a way similar to nature

the aim of the poets should be intensification without distortion, based on observation with truthfulness

important: the memory where man's imaginative powers can be stored as in a reservoir

nature works as a continuous source of suggestions which awaken the visionary faculties of the poet and help him develop into a perceptive and reflective observer

these ideas are reflected in the poem I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 5

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretch in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay: 10

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay, 15

In such a jocund company:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood, 20

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

S. T. Coleridge

his masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797), is included in the Lyrical Ballads. Other poems are Kubla Khan and Christabel. They all deal with supernatural elements. While for Wordsworth nature was found outside, for Coleridge it was present in a transcendental world.

it is the story of an old sailor, who sails to the South Pole and kills an albatross of good omen, the symbol of nature“s power and benevolent spirit. The crew hang the albatross around the neck of the mariner, the winds stop blowing, and the ship is imprisoned in the middle of the ocean (see Part II). In a dice game, Death wins the crew and all the sailors die, while Death-in-Life wins the mariner, who is punished to remain alive on the ocean as its prisoner. He is saved only when he blesses the creatures of the water in recognition of their divine nature.

Coleridge introduced prose explanations which deepen the effects of mystery and surprise

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

PART II

The Sun now rose upon the right :
Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the left
Went down into the sea.

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo !

His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck.

And I had done an hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe :
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch ! said they, the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow !

But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.

Nor dim nor red, like God's own head,
The glorious Sun uprist :
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.

The fair breeze continues ; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line.

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free ;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
'Twas sad as sad could be ;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea !

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

And the Albatross begins to be avenged.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot : O Christ !
That ever this should be !
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night ;
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.

A Spirit had followed them ; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels ; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.

And some in dreams assuréd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so ;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root ;
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.

The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner : in sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Texts and comments available at https://etc.dal.ca/lballads/welcome.html.

DEFENCE OF POETRY, 1821

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the Imagination"

the language is vitally metaphorical

Poets are the authors of language and of music, but also legislators or prophets

a Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite; a Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar

Works: Prometheus Unbound (1818-1819), Ode to the West Wind (1819), The Cloud, To a Skylark (1820), Adonais (1821), etc. To a Skylark is a poem in which Shelley expresses his deep love of nature and his pantheistic beliefs. The skylark, the only bird to sing in flight, is unseen, but its song generates ecstatic moments. It turns, thus, into the symbol of spontaneous art, of the divine power of nature and its spirit which, like that of a poet, reveals the ideal truth to mankind.

TO A SKYLARK

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit,

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 5

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 10

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream? 85

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 90

Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near. 95

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

Than in books are found

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner to the ground. 100

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then - as I am listening now. 105

Texts available at https://www.bartleby.com/139/, comments available at https://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/shelley/religionov.html

Immediate success: "I awoke one morning and found myself famous

Exotic landscapes- Spain, Greece, Albania

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

From Canto the First

II

Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth,

Who ne in virtue's ways did take delight;

But spent his days in riot most uncouth,

And vexed with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.

Ah me! In sooth he was a shameless wight,

Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

For earthly things found favour in his sight

Save concubines and carnal companie,

And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.

III

Childe Harold was he hight: -but whence his name

And lineage long, it suits me not to say;

Suffice it, that perchance they were of fame,

And had been glorious in another day:

But one sad losel soils a name for aye,

However mighty in the olden time;

Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay,

Nor florid prose, nor honeyd lies of rhyme,

Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

IV

Childe Harold bask'd him in the noontide sun,

Disporting there like any other fly;

Nor deem'd before his little day was done

One blast might chill him into misery.

But long ere scarce a third of his pass'd by,

Worse than adversity the Childe befell;

He felt the fullness of satiety:

Then loathed he in his native land to dwell,

Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremite's sad cell.

V

For he through Sin's long labyrinth had run,

Nor made atonement when he did amiss,

Had sigh'd to many though he loved but one.

And that loved one, alas! Could ne'er be his.

Ah, happy she! To 'scape from him whose kiss

Had been pollution unto aught so chaste;

Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss,

And spoil'd her goodly lands to gild his waste,

Nor calm domestic peace had ever deign'd to taste.

VI

And now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,

And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;

'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,

But Pride congeal'd the drop within his ee:

Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie,

And from his native land resolved to go,

And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;

With pleasure drugg'd, he almost longed for woe,

And e'en for change of scene would seek the shades below.

The Childe departed from his father's hall:

It was a vast and venerable pile;

So old, it seemed only not to fall;

Yet strength was pillar'd in each massy aisle.

Monastic dome! Condemn'd to uses vile!

Where Superstition once had made her den

Now Paiphan girls were known to sing and smile;

And monks might deem their time was come agen,

If ancient tales say true, not wrong these hole men.

Yet oft-times in his maddest mirthful mood

Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold's brow

As if the memory of some deadly feud

Or disappointed passion lurk'd below:

But this none knew, nor haply cared to know;

For this was not that open, artless soul

That feels relief by bidding sorrow flow,

Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole,

Whate'er this grief mote be, which he could not control.

Teyts available at https://www.online-literature.com/byron/.

three volumes of poetry (1818, 1819, 1820)

important poems: Endymion (1817),, Hyperion (1818), The Eve of St. Agnes (1819), Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)

reconciliation between the world's beauty and its transitoriness, its pain and its pleasure, its vulgarity and its refinement

nature and sensuous beauty teach one to love man

poetic visions and sensuous rapture lead to spiritual illumination

Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) is one of Keats's most famous poem. It is an ekphrastic description of an imagined object of great beauty, which suggests that imaginative art can seize the eternal essence of human experience. The last lines of the poem , "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", are a famous Romantic reformulation of the Platonic essence of spirituality. Beauty and truth are united in the works of human art, the only elements worth understanding in life.

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 5

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? 10

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 15

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 20

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearičd,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love! 25

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. 30

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea-shore, 35

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. 40

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 45

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' 50

Texts and comments available at https://englishhistory.net/keats.html.

economic, scientific, and social progress (the railway age, trade develops, colonial expansion, the Education Act of 1870, women colleges founded at Oxford and Cambridge, public libraries)

geographically and socially on the move

Darwin, The Origin of Species (1867) and the crisis of faith

Charles Dickens (1812-1870): The Pickwick Papers (1836), Oliver Twist (1837-38), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), etc.

Serial publication of novels

Middle-class readers

Fairy-tale pattern

Moral reform

Exploitation of children

Oliver Twist, ch. II

"The bowls never wanted washing, the boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again, and when they had performed this operation (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls), they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was composed. /./ Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months; at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small cook-shop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the body who slept next to him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age." (p.35)

Realism, comedy, satire, sentimentalism

Humour

Narrative point of view:

David Copperfield, ch. XI: "I was so young and childish, and so little qualified - how could be otherwise?- to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that often , in going to Murdstone and Grinby's, of a morning, I could not resist the stale pastry put out for sale at half-price at the pastrycook's doors, and spent in that the money I should have kept for my dinner. Then, I went without my dinner, or bought a roll or a slice of pudding." (p. 103)

Texts and comments available at https://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1836): Vanity Fair (1847-1848)

Opposes Dickens: no clear line between vice and virtue

Life and illusions

Upstartism

Illustrations

Metatext

VANITY FAIR, ch. III:"If Miss Rebecca Sharp had determined in her heart, upon making the conquest of this big beau, I don't think, ladies, we have any right to blame her; for though the task of husband-hunting is generally, and with becoming modesty, entrusted by young persons to their mammas, recollect that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange this delicate matters for her, and that if she did not get a husband for herself, there was no one else in the wide world who would take the trouble off her hands." (p. 27)

Texts and comments available at https://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Thackeray.html

The Brontё Sisters:

Charlotte Brontё Jane Eyre (1847)

Anne Brontё : Agnes Grey (1847)

Emily Brontё Wuthering Heights (1848)

Contemporary opinions

Symmetrical structure

Orphan children

Narrators and listeners

The window image

A world of passion, violence and cruelty

Text available at https://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/9/16/frameset.html

George Eliot Adam Bede(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), etc.

Pantheism

Unselfishness

Disenchantment

Social determinism

Families and communities

Nature vs. culture

Interest in form: Notes on Form in Art (1868)- the novel as an organic whole

Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), etc.

Real events vs. mythology

The Wessex countryside, Egdon Heath (The Return of the Native), Stonehenge

Religious cults, paganism, dreams, obsessions, frustrations

The end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, ch. LIII: "The place was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous architraves.

'A very Temple of the Winds,' he said.

The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; /./ and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into this pavilion of the night till they stood in its midst.

'It is Stonehenge!' said Clare.

'The heathen temple, you mean?'

'Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the D'Urbervilles!"

Non heroes, but archetypes: Gabriel Oak (Far from the Madding Crowd), Alec D'Urbervilles, Tess D'Urbervilles

Immanent Will

Text and comments available at https://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/26/56/frameset.html

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Aestheticism: life follows art, art for art's sake, amorality of art

Three self-portraits: Lord Henry Wotton (aesthetic contemplation untroubled by conscience), Dorian Gray (cynical hedonism), and the painter Basil Hallward (conventional morality).

non-English writers: Henry James's new international themes and characters; Joseph Conrad's colonial experience; James Joyce and an exile focussed on Irishness

reduced sociological interest, increased interest in philosophy, psychology, and experimentalism

fairy-tale world replaced by a chaotic, absurd world

reduced, static plots

characters: male (Mars, masculinity, war), non-heroic, instinctive and irrational; private identity, unique self, fluid identity, split personality, isolated, alienated, estranged

the city, the flaneur, and the dandy opposing the countryside, technique versus nature

experimentalism: the influence of Sterne's Tristram Shandy

new novelistic techniques: teller/reflector characters in James, concentric narrations in Conrad, stream of consciousness technique in Joyce and Woolf, ludic attitudes, obsessive details, ambiguity, openness (Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet)

gap writer-reader, elitist attitude

covers a large range of movements: Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, etc.

1879-82: early and middle period - The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence, The Portrait of a Lady

1890-01 the period of dramatic work, less successful

1897-1904: late period - The Turn of the Screw, What Masie Knew, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl

Importance of theory: "Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints. /./ The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory, too, is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former, I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere."

Fiction is life: "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life. "

The novelists and painters: "Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success is the same. They may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another. Peculiarities of manner, of execution, that correspond on either side, exist in each of them and contribute to their development."

Impressionism: "A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about."

First fact, then form: "The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact; then the author's choice has been made, his standard has been indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution."

Freedom of execution: "The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant--no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes."

The novel as an organism: "A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts."

No distinction between novels and romances: "There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character."

International writer, of American origin

Juxtaposition of Americanness and Europeanness, innocence and experience, purity and corruption, politics and culture, history and modernity. The Portrait of a Lady: Isabel Archer, an American in Europe, is transformed from a poor relative into an independent woman. Falls victim of a selfish husband, Gilbert Osmond and wastes her life.the novel is her moral growth, initiation into the ways of the world, gradual self-understanding

THE AMBASSADORS

The novel describes the contrast between engagement and detachment, between moral commitment and moral relativism, beween personal confrontation and personal diplomacy.

It is the story of Lewis Lambert Strether, who has traveled to Europe in the hope of bringing back to America the son of his friend, Mrs. Newsome. Strether is one Mrs. Newsome's ambassador and he supposes that if he brings back Chadwick, Mrs. Newsome's son, she will agree to marry him. Chad loves Madame de Vionnet and has greatly improved in Europe, a situation which complicates Strether“s mission. He decides that his mission will be unselfish, and will be motivated only by trying to help others and advises Chad to stay in Paris.

slow and detailed plot, tactful and discreet characters, of remarkable moral sensibility, and faithful to their personal conscience

complex prose style, indirect and ambiguous dialogue, questions are never answered directly, conversation has vague implications and hidden meanings

teller characters vs. reflector characters

selective omniscience: third person narration filtered through the mind of the central character

Text and comments available at https://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/

Of Polish origin, Josef Korzeniowski: "He always spoke English imperfectly, but he wrote it - not like a native, but like a native who was enabled miraculously to rediscover his own language as a mature man. It was lucky he did not get into the hands of a present-day language teacher, or he would have spoken it well, written it indifferently, and would never have been heard of again." (Barnard, 1989:152)

Career 1874-1896: the sea, he served on or commanded French, Belgian, and British ships. Stories of the sea: romantic, exotic, self-exploring, the codes of the crew

Themes: honour, guilt, moral alienation, expiation, man's responsibility to himself, fidelity, brotherhood, nature

Impressionistic technique: Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus"- "All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music - which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words, of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage."

HEART OF DARKNESS: a story of greed, trickery, brutality, and enslavement in the Belgian Congo, but also in Victorian London. The last words of Kurtz: "The horror! The horror!" indicate it.

Marlow, the narrator-hero, vs. Kurtz, the colonizer

Kurtz: the half civilised, half mad, greedy, brutal colonizer, desirous to exterminate the Africans, who are "enemies", "criminals".

LORD JIM: the story of a captain discovering his own inner self

Marlow, the narrator, vs. Jim, the sailor

"He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, appareled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Estern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water clerk he was very popular." (p.

Concentric story-telling, mysterious, full of shadows, "unnerving" (Cedric Watts, Introduction to the Penguin Books Edition, 1986) because of Jim's ambiguous, subversive heroism, the multiple points of view, suspended interpretations, delayed decodings (the method of announcing effects without discussing the causes), the syntax of uncertainty ( the as-if technique, numerous conditionals, hypothetic sentences).

The omniscient, impartial narrator isreplaced by a hesitating, confused, unreliable narrator, situated outside truth, alienated and lost by his incapacity to comprise in words the wholeness of life.

Descriptions of exotic nature, cosmic dimensions: sea, wind, stars, storms.

Musicality of style, equilibrium of sounds and colours.

Text and comments available at https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965): Poetry: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, (1910), The Wasteland (1922), etc. Drama: Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), etc.

Of American origin

Under the influence of Ezra Pound

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT

Relation with the predecessors:"We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."

Judging a poet: "In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. "

Main current, Europeanness: "The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe - the mind of his own country - a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen."

Giving up personality: "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

reaction to the excesses of Victorian poetry

against traditional formalism and flowery poetic diction

models: ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante, and the English Metaphysical poets

urban, mechanical, and industrial settings: the new heroes would be London office workers, and the new settings would be vacant lots, smoked over buildings, and subways.

New poetic experience: techniques as collage, found poetry, visual poetry, the juxtaposition of apparently unconnected materials, and combinations of these. Poetry, painting and music: logopoeia, melopoeia, phanopoeia.

Influence of Ezra Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagist, The ABC of Reading

Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.

To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome

THE WASTELAND

new logic based on the perception of disconnected word-groups,

new attitude toward language, intertextuality.

summarizes the Grail legend, not precisely in the usual order, but retaining the principal incidents and adapting them to a modern setting.

the Grail legend seen as the surviving record of an initiation ritual of the Greek Mysteries. It also dramatizes initiation into maturity, and it bespeaks a quest for sexual, cultural, and spiritual healing.

death and rebirth, initiation, fertility symbolism, mythology (Adonis, Osiris), failure of love and faith (James Frazer, The Golden Bough)

waste land a world that makes too much of the physical and too little of the spiritual relations between the sexes. Symbol: Tiresias, for whom love and sex must form a unity, is unable to unify them.

Parts: I. The Burial of the Dead, II. A Game of Chess, III. The Fire Sermon, IV. Death By Water, V. What the Thunder Said.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruelest month, breeding 1

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering 5

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

.....................

.Son of man, 20

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

Text and comments available at https://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

Joyce's Irishness, father, Catholicism, provincialism as a disease, paralysis, Dublin as an archetypal city. Leaves Ireland in 1902, comes back, leaves again in 1904.

Experimentalism: Barnard (1989:159): "a joker, a prankster, a linguistic reveller, a constructor of puzzles, and a parodist of genius". Mosaic of discourses: sermons, speeches, stories, quotations collected by Stephen in A Portrait. Terminator of the novel in Finnegans Wake : "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

Indirect reading

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

Artistic theory: - the artist is a man apart, who should reject the opinions of the man in the street

the importance of epiphany: integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony), claritas (radiance)

the artist should help the reader to share the apprehension of claritas by removing what is obscure and irrelevant.

ULYSSES: encyclopaedic complexity, formlessness, obscurity

Chronotop: 6/16/1904 Bloomsday: 18 hours= 18 chapters, expanding the moment to a grand epic of humanity; space: "the Joyce country", immense impressionistic panorama of a place

Intertext, myths

archetypes, characters in the round : Bloom, Stephen. Joyce about Bloom: " I see him from all sides, and therefore he is all-round in the sense of your sculptor's figure. But he is a complete man as well - a good man."

Modern life, the city, history, art

Interior monologue: Leopold Bloom about writing a message on sand of the seashore.
"Useless. Washed away. Tide comes here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don't know. What is the meaning of that other
word. I called you naughty boy because I do not like.
AM. A.
No room. Let it go." (Ch. 13 Nausicaa)

Molly Bloom: "I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the

rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and L thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." (Ch. 18, Penelope)
Text available at https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/ulysses.html and comments available at https://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/joynote.html

MODERN FICTION (1919) old vs. new, impressionistic novels. Reading a book is like watching a painting, seeing nature in a new way.

MR. BENNETT AND MRS. BROWN (1924): notices a change in the human characteristics and relationships, a romantic reaction, more intuitive and poetic

A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929): feminist ideas

NOVELS: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), Orlando (1928)

Mrs. DALLOWAY

Title, "this being Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Richard Dalloway"

1 day: 13.06. 1923, age:52, remembers her youth. Threefold effect of time: the passing moments or hours, the voyage from youth to old age, historic time (related to nation-wide or world-wide events)

Septimus Warren Smith - her double

Cubist simultaneity, collage, deep psychology, skywriting, Big Ben, tunnelling

Stream of consciousness

FID and its characteristics:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning-fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?"-was that it?-"I prefer men to cauliflowers"-was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace-Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was!-a few sayings like this about cabbages."

Cinematic techniques

Time /space shifts

Camera eye: exterior/interior shifts

Life is chaotic,fragmentary, disillusioning, but also intense joy. Human beings are part of an everchanging flow of existence

No chapter divisions, no separation, one stream.

Feminist cause: female experience, complementarity, androgyne

Text available at https://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/ and comments available at https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dalloway/

Philosophical background

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992.

Press.Franēois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1979

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991

Brian Mc Hale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987

A. PRECURSORS: FROM THE 1940'S TO THE 60'S

Dictatorship as a modern form of evil

Totalitarianism as a religion

Death of illusions

" A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early-acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. (pp. 220-221)

Text available at https://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/

Children, education, institutions, freedom

The evolution/ involution of homo ludens

Symbols and their stylistic effects

AKill the beast ! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!

Now out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind.

AKill the beast! Cut his throat. Spill his blood!"

Again the blue-white scar jagged above them and the sulphurous explosion beat down. The littluns screamed and blundered about, fleeing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror.

AHim! Him!

The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe.

AKill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!

The blue-white scar was constant, the noise unendurable. Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill.

AKill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!

The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws. (pp. 138-139)

MOLLOY (1950), MALONE DIES (1951),THE UNNAMABLE (1952)

Minimalism

Life and death, subjectivity and objectivity, inside and outside

Antiplots, antiheroes

New novelistic forms

- David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads,

- new generation of experimenters - John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Christine Brooke Rose, S. B. Johnson.

THE MAGUS (1966, rewritten in 1977)

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1969)

Chapter 13 AWho is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? "I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to known my characters minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and >voice of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe - Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised. Perhaps it is only a game. Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them. Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on you. Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should have written >On the Horizontality of Existence >The Illusion of Progress >The History of the Novel Form >The Aetiology of Freedom >Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age ... what you will.

Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions. (p. 85)

David Lodge, The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?, 1992

The Great Natives: Peter Ackroyd, Ian McEwan, Marin Amis, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Penelope Lively, etc.

The Great International Writers: Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Timothy Mo, etc.

Themes

the exile, identity quest, otherness

Englishness/Britishness, Romanianness, Europeanness

The city, the body, the text

Kazuo Ishiguro, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, 1989

"... the English landscape at its finest - such as I saw it this morning - possesses a quality that the landscape of other nations , however more superficially dramatic inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term greatness. /.../

And yet what precisely is "greatness" ? Just where or in what does it lie ? I am quite aware - it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as if the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout about it." (p. 28)

Techniques of antiform and deconstruction:

influence of the media, virtual and hyperreality,

participation, performance, happening

ambiguity

openness

dispersal, fragmentation, randomness, permutation

excess

playfulness

irony

intertextuality, pastiche.

Salman Rushdie, The Moor s Last Sigh

A Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experience or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess ? A ( p. 161 )

A He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she and then he, and then they, and after that she and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until...phew! Boy! Over and done with! - No. There s more. The whole thing must be told. A p. 89 )

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