2014-02-13
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Список литературы.
Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002
Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Поэма Мильтона «Потерянный рай»
https://publicliterature.org/books/paradise_lost/xaa.php
www.gutenberg.org; https://www.gumer.info/authors.php
Тема 5. The Eighteenth Century Literature. The Reign of Neoclassicism. The development of realistic novel of Enlightenment.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. The main ideas of Enlightenment. Realism of Enlightenment. Two tendencies in writing. The New Hero. The main periods of Enlightenment. Classicism of A. Pope, realistic novels of Enlightenment, the development of journalism. Daniel Defoe as a founder of English realistic novel. The importance of Robinson Crusoe by D. Defoe in English and the World Literature. Jonathan Swift as the greatest of English satirists.
Тезисы лекций. The history of England in the second half of the 17th c. and during all of the 18th.c. was marked by British colonial expansion and the struggle for the leading role in commerce. The most active sections of the population at the time were the commercial classes that are the middle classes. They hated prejudice and lived by common sense; it was a sound – thinking and rational age. The writers and philosophers of this age, reflecting the ideology of the middle class, protested against the survivals of feudalism, in which they saw the main evils of the time. They could not yet see the contradictions that were to arise within the capitalist system. Man, they thought, was perfect by nature and vice, bad qualities of human nature were due to ignorance only; so they started a public movement for enlightening the people. The enlighteners wanted to bring knowledge that is ‘light’ to the people. To their understanding this would do away with all the evils of society, and social harmony would be achieved. This movement was called the Enlightenment. Since the enlighteners believed in the power of reason, the period was also called the Age of Reason. Appeal was normally sought to what was variously called Reason, Natural things of Common sense. The characteristic features of Enlightenment all over Europe were much the same:
- a deep hatred of feudalism and its survivals; the enlighteners rejected Church dogmas and caste distinctions;
- A love of freedom, a desire for systematic education for all, a firm belief in human virtue and reason;
- a concern for the fate of the common people and of the peasants in particular.
Notwithstanding these common features there was a difference between the ideas expressed by the English enlighteners and those expressed by the French. The French E. was more progressive than the English: the French enlighteners were political leaders and set forth sharp political problems which prepared the French people for the coming revolution; whereas the English Enlightenment had no revolutionary aims in view; the English Bourgeois Revolution was over long before the Enlightenment spread in England, hence its restricted character.
English literature of the period may be characterized by the following features:
- The period saw the rise of the political pamphlet and essay, but the leading genre of the Enlightenment became the novel. The prose style became clear, graceful and polished. The poets of the period did not deal with strong human passions; they were more interested in the problems of everyday life, and discussed things in verse.
- The hero of the novel was no longer a prince but a representative of the middle class. This had never taken place before: so far, the common people had usually been depicted as comic characters. They were considered incapable of rousing admiration or tragic compassion.
- Literature became very instructive: problems of good and evil were set forth. Writers tried to teach their readers what was good and what was bad from their own points of view. They mostly attacked the vices of the aristocracy and many of them praised the virtues of the progressive bourgeois class.
The literature of the age of the Enlightenment may be divided into 3 periods. The first period lasted from the “Glorious Revolution” (1688-1689) till the end of the seventeen thirties. It is characterized by classicism in poetry. The greatest follower of the classical style was Alexander Pope. Alongside with this high style there appeared new prose literature, the essays of Steele and Addison and the first realistic novels written by Defoe and Swift. Most of the writers of this time wrote political pamphlets, but the best came from the pens of Defoe and Swift. The second Period of the Enlightenment was the most mature period. It embraces the forties and the fifties of the 18th c. The development of the realistic social novel was represented by Richardson, Fielding and Smollet. The third Period refers to the 60-80-s of the century. It is marked by the appearance of a new trend: Sentimentalism, typified by the works of Goldsmith and Sterne. This period also saw the rise of the realistic drama and the revival of poetry.
In the works of Enlighteners there were 2 tendencies: the tendency to philosophic generalization of reality and the tendency to domestic description of everyday life. These tendencies went along connecting the will to wide scale description of reality and interest to detailed representation of human motives and behavior. The both tendencies were subordinated to one task of studying and real description of life. The inherent features of Enlightenment realism were criticism of existing order, the accusation of imperfection and unreasonableness of life, satirical approach. All these factors underlined mismatching of Enlightener’s ideals and life order. The goal of Enlightenment was to assert its positive program of improving human nature and circumstances of existing life.
The important meaning in Enlightenment was creation the image of new hero who accumulated the all positive characteristics of that age, faith in great potentiality of human being, its historical optimism. The hero was not artificial but natural who acts with his common sense and reasonability according to his capabilities given by nature. The images of positive hero were too schematic and straight-lined to ideal. They embodied duality, two plans.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was a journalist and that fact itself draws him to our own time. The development of the newspaper and the periodical is an interesting literary sideline of the 17th.c. Defoe is, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a long line of ‘well-informed’ magazines. Defoe did not see himself primarily as a literary artist: he had things to say to the public, and he said them as clearly as he could without troubling to polish and revise. There are no stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there is the flavor of colloquial speech, a ‘no-nonsense’, down –to- earth simplicity. He was – like Swift – capable of irony, however and his Shortest Way with the Dissenters states gravely that those who do not belong to the Church of England should be hanged. This pamphlet was taken seriously by many, but when the authorities discovered they had been having their legs pulled, they put Defoe into prison.
The most interesting of Defoe’s ‘documentary’ works is the journal of the Plague Year (one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that disastrous time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates will show that this was impossible). But his memory is revered still primarily for his novels, written late in life: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana and others. The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only on a series of plausible events, thinking.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) son of the English lawyer Jonathan Swift the elder, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 30, 1667. He grew up there in the care of his uncle before attending Trinity College at the age of fourteen, where he stayed for seven years, graduating in 1688. In that year, he became the secretary of Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party. In 1694, he took religious orders in the Church of Ireland and then spent a year as a country parson. He then spent further time in the service of Temple before returning to Ireland to become the chaplain of the earl of Berkeley. Meanwhile, he had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption surrounding him, working on A Tale of a Tub, which supports the position of the Anglican Church against its critics on the left and the right, and The Battle of the Books, which argues for the supremacy of the classics against modern thought and literature. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in favor of the Whig party. In 1709 he went to London to campaign for the Irish church but was unsuccessful. After some conflicts with the Whig party, mostly because of Swift’s strong allegiance to the church, he became a member of the more conservative Tory party in 1710.
Gulliver's Travels was a controversial work when it was first published in 1726. In fact, it was not until almost ten years after its first printing that the book appeared with the entire text that Swift had originally intended it to have. Ever since, editors have excised many of the passages, particularly the more caustic ones dealing with bodily functions. Even without those passages, however, Gulliver's Travels serves as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and critical, constantly attacking British and European society through its descriptions of imaginary countries.
Список литературы. Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Carter R., MacRae J., The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland.
Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Роман «Робинзон Крузо»:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe
Джонатан Свифт «Путешествия Гулливера»:
https://publicliterature.org/books/gullivers_travels/xaa.php
Тема 6. The Eighteenth century Novels. The emergence of Sensibility. The age of Johnson.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson) 1745-1785. The novels of the Age of Sensibility. The significance of Henry Fielding’s creative activity in the development of English novel. The period of late Enlightenment (60-80s of XVIII c). The origin of sentimentalism, its main conceptions and representatives. The main themes of sentimental poetry (J.Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Grey). Laurence Sterne as a writer of human feelings and emotions.
Тезисы лекций. This age stresses the dominant position of Samuel Johnson (1709-84) and his literary and intellectual circle, which included Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Edward Godwin. These authors on the whole represented a culmination of the literary and critical modes of neoclassicism and the worldview of the Enlightenment. The more recent name, Age of Sensibility,puts its stress on the emergence, in other writers of the 40s and later, of new cultural attitudes, theories of literature and types of poetry; we find in the period, for example, a growing sympathy of the Middle ages, a vogue of cultural primitivism (is the preference for what is conceived to be ‘nature and the natural over art and the artificial in any area of human culture and values; the innate - instincts and passions over the dictates of reason and prudential forethought), an awakening interest in ballads and other folk literature, a turn from neoclassic “correctness” and its emphasis on judgment and restraint to an emphasis on instinct and felling, the development of a literature of sensibility and above all the exaltation by some critics of ‘original genius’ and a ‘bardic ‘poetry of the sublime and visionary imagination. This was the period of the great novelists, some realistic and satiric, and some ‘sentimental: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Stern.
This type of literature was fostered by the moral philosophy that had developed as a reaction against 17 century stoicism which emphasized reason and the unemotional will as the sole motives to virtue and even more importantly as a reaction against claims that a human being is innately selfish and that the mainsprings of human behavior are self-interest and the drive for power and status. In opposition to such views, many sermons, philosophical writings and popular tracts and essays proclaimed the ‘benevolence - wishing other persons well – is an innate human sentiment and motive and that central elements in moral experience are the feelings of sympathy and ‘sensibility – that is a responsiveness to another person’s distresses and joys. “Sensibility” also connoted an intense emotional responsiveness to beauty and sublimity whether in nature or in art and such responsiveness was often represented as an index to a person’s gentility – that is, to one’s upper-class status.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754), the greatest representative of bourgeois realism in the 18th century, was a descendant of an ancient, aristocratic family. F. possessed qualities rarely found together: a rich imagination, coupled with great critical power and a keen knowledge of the human heart. He used to say that the three essential qualities in a novelist are genius, learning, and experience of human nature – genius alone is not sufficient without a good share of learning; nature can only furnish us with capacity. All these qualities, which he undoubtedly possessed himself, made him the favorite novelist of many people. The qualities of candor and sincerity are especially apparent in F’s works. His characters are all-round living beings of flesh and blood, a combination of contradictions of good and bad. The virtues he appreciates greatest are courage, frankness and generosity. The most detestable vices for him are selfishness and hypocrisy. He can forgive frivolity and light-mindedness, but he has no pity for actions which arise from calculating or conventional motives. All this found its expression in his masterpiece “ Tom Jones ”. The novel consists of 18 books, each beginning with an introductory chapter where the author discourses with the reader, in a free and easy manner, on certain moral and psychological themes. The plot of the novel is very complicated; its construction is carefully worked out, every detail being significant. Depicting England of the 18th century Fielding touches upon all spheres of life. We are shown the courts of law, the prison, the church, and the homes of people of all classes, inns and highways, even the theatre. Many people of different social ranks and professions are introduced. The charm of the book lies in the depiction of Tom’s character. He is human in the everyday sense of the word, neither idealized nor ridiculed and at the same time full-blooded. His open, generous and passionate nature leads him into a long series of adventures. Tom acts on impulse, sometimes well and sometimes ill, but never from interested motives. He is light-minded and naïve; but kind, honest and unselfish, always ready to help anyone who needs his assistance. If he heaps fault upon fault and misfortune on misfortune, it is because he is continually falling a victim to prejudice and is caught in the snare of hypocrisy. His intentions are noble and good, but owing to his simple – heartedness, which is often coupled with bad luck, his is constantly accused of vices he is not guilty of.
The optimism felt in literature during the first half of the 18th c. gave way to a certain depression as years went by. Towards the middle of the century a new literary trend, that of Sentimentalism, appeared. The first representative of the sentimental school in English literature was Samuel Richardson (1689 –1761). He was asked by a publisher to write a series of letters which should serve as models for the correspondence and behavior of people in the lower walks of like. He did so, and to add interest, he write them as the connected letters of a young serving-girl to her parents, telling the story of her temptation by her master, a certain MR.B, of her resistance and of her final triumph in marrying him. The book appeared in 1740 and was so popular that R. wrote a sequel, which described Pamela’s experience as wife in a sphere much above that of her birth, her lessons in behavior suitable to that estate, and her plans for the education of her children The moral and social purposes of the book are therefore successfully blended, though it must be admitted that Pamela’s morality is of a rather calculating type. The success of Pamela or Virtue Rewarde (1740) encouraged the author to produce a second work of fiction, Clarissa, (1748) with appeared in 8 volumes. This is the story of a young lady, Clarissa Harlowe, who is at the outset the unwilling object of the attentions of a certain Lovelace. Like Pamela, Clarisse is told by means of letters – epistolary form which pass between the different characters. Obviously, this method is in its nature dramatic, that is to say, the reader holds communication directly with the characters. In other ways it is clear that Richardson thought of the novel as an elaborated drama.
His novels are works in which the inner world of the characters is shown. Richardson glorifies middle – class virtues as opposed to the immorality of the aristocracy. He makes his readers sympathize with his heroes. These novels were very much admired in the 18 and 19th centuries.
Tobias Smollett (1721 –1771) was another Scotsman, who was the major comic novelist of the second half of the 18.c. His novel, such as Roderick Random (1748) is entertaining adventure in which the heroes go traveling all over Europe. They are angry young men, who react against bad treatment and the ills of society with strong language and often violent behavior. This is social observation, but it has a more comic tone than the satire of Swift and generation earlier. Many readers found Smollett’s novels and their themes too strong. His final novel Humphy Clinker (1771) is an epistolary novel which describes how disunited the UK was nearly 70 years after the union of parliaments in 1707. Above all, Smollett uses rich and original language to suit his characters, and he brings a new tone of comic freedom to the novel after Fielding.
The most unusual novel of the time was Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) by Laurence Sterne. This is a long comic story which plays with time, plot and character and even with the shape and design of the page. Traditionally, a plot had a beginning, middle and an end, in that order. Sterne was the first to change this order. He wanted to show how foolish it is to force everything into the traditional plot. Sterne was the first writer to use what came to be known as the stream of consciousness technique, following the thoughts of characters as they come into their heads. In this he was influenced by the essay concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, and his theories about time, sensations and the relation of one idea to another. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is an account of travels through France and Italy. And here tears are shed freely –especially over animals, Sterne being perhaps the first of the English ‘poor-dumb-beast’ sentimentalists. It was through the copious shedding of tears of pity and sympathy, in writers like Sterne, that the humanitarianism which is now said to be a great characteristic of the English was able to develop.
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story". The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. It originated in England in the second half of the 18th century and had much success during the English romantic period with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A later well known novel in this genre, dating from the Victorian era, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The name Gothic refers to the (pseudo)-medieval buildings in which many of these stories take place. This extreme form of romanticism was very popular in England and Germany. The English gothic novel also led to new novel types such as the German Schauerroman and the French roman noir.
The Term Gothic Applied for:
1. The Gothic novel was also considered as Gothic romance.
2. The term Gothic is also employed to designate narrative poetry or prose of which the major elements are horror, violence, and the supernatural.
3. The selection of the locale was usually a haunted castle with dungeons, underground passages, ghost-haunted rooms, and secret stairways that produced great amount of awe, wonder and fear.
The genre was nothing but a phase of the literary movement of romanticism in English literature. It was also the precursor of the modern mystery novel.
The Major writers of the Gothic Romance:
It was Horace Walpole who inaugurated the Gothic romance. He wrote The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). Other major writers were Clara Reeve, who wrote The Champion of Virtue (1777); Ann Radcliffe, who wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Charles Robert Maturin, who wrote The Fatal Revenge (1807); and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who wrote Frankenstein (1818).
Список литературы. Carter R., MacRae J., The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland.
Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature.
Stapleton M. The Cambridge Guide to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Http://englishlit.about.com/arts/englishlit
www.spartacus.schoonet.co.uk/drama.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Http://www.factspider.com/neo-romanticism
Тема 7. The beginning of the Romanic movement. The Nineteenth century Romanticism.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Historical background of Romantic Period. The main historical and philosophical preconditions for continuation and origin of two main literary movements of 19th c. - romanticism and realism. The reflection in Romanticism the process of alienation of individuality from society. The attitude of Romanticists to modern English society. The process of re-creation of reality with the help of poetic imagination and fantasy in English Romanticism. The role of Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey) in the formation of English Romanticism. The preface of W. Wordsworth to “Lyrical Ballads” as the manifest of English Romanticism. The ideas and role of Revolutionary Romanticists (Byron, Shelly) in the development of English Romanticism. The main contradictions in the creative works of Revolutionary Romanticists. Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels.
Тезисы лекций. It is dated as beginning in 1785 or alternatively in 1789 (the outbreak of the French Revolution), or in 1798 (the publication of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads) – and as ending either in 1830 or else 1832, the year in which Sir Walter Scott died and the passage of the Reform Bill signaled the political preoccupations of the Victorian era. The term is often applied also to literary movements in European countries and America. Romantic characteristics are usually said to have been manifested first in Germany and England in the 1790s, and not to have become prominent in France and America until two or three decades after that time. Major English writers of the period, in addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge, were the poets William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Walter Savage Landor; the prose writers Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, the novelists Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley. The span between 1786 and the close of the 18 c. was that of the Gothic romances by William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Godwin and Anne Radcliffe. Romanticism, which was the leading literary movement in England for more than half a century, was caused by great social and economic changes.
The Industrial revolution, which had begun in the middle of the 18th c., was no sudden change from home manufacturing to large-scale factory production. Enclosing common land had begun as early as the 16th c., but it was only in the second half of the 18th c., that the process became rapid and spread all over Britain. The peasants, completely deprived of their lands, were forced to go to work in factories. Mines and factories had changed the face of the country. Where flowing rivers and green meadows lay, towns sprang up, because water-power was the best available force to drive the new machines. But mechanization did not improve the life of the common people. It only meant a new form of slavery. Now the economic and social ills were clearly seen by the people: the diseases of industrial towns, the misery of child labor, the crowds of underpaid workers and the tyranny of the factory bell that had turned human beings into parts of a machine and made them desperate at the loss of personal freedom. The suffering of the new class, the proletariat, led to the first strikes, and workers took to destroying machines. This was a movement directed against industrial slavery. Workers, who called themselves Luddites after a certain Ned Ludd who in a fit of fury broke two textile frames, naively believed that machines were the chief cause of their sufferings. These actions led to severe repression by the authorities.
The Great French Revolution was accepted as progressive by many in Britain, but when it involved all sections of the French population, it gave a shock to the ruling classes. Under the influence of the Revolution the Irish peasants plotted a rebellion against English landlordism. It broke out in 1798 but was cruelly drowned in blood. The British government took the lead in the counter-revolutionary wars against France. Now the belief of progressive-minded people in the ideal nature of the bourgeois system fell to pieces. As a result, a new humanist movement that of Romanticism, sprang up towards the close of the 18th.c.
Romanticism was a movement against the progress of bourgeois civilization, which had driven whole sections of the population to poverty and enslaved their personal freedom. It was an effort to do away with the injustice that comes into being within the capitalist formation of society, that is to say, the exploitation of man by man. But no one as yet knew what to be done to achieve equality and freedom. New themes for writing arose: no longer were writers attracted to the domestic epic which had been the chief subject of the novel. Protesting against the bourgeois system that crushed human individuality to insignificance, they longed to depict strong individuals, endowed with grand, tempestuous and even demonic passions. The romanticists made emotion, and not reason, the chief force of their works. This emotion found its expression chiefly in poetry. The problem of what was to become of man stirred the hearts of all men of letters.
Some poets were, seized with panic and an irresistible desire to get away from the present. They wished to call back ‘the good old days’, the time long before the mines and factories came, when people worked on ‘England’s green and pleasant land”. These pets are called the Passive Romanticists. They spoke for the English farmers and Scottish peasants who were ruined by the Industrial Revolution. They idealized the patriarchal way of life during the Middle ages, a period that seemed to them harmonious and peaceful. Their motto was “close to nature and from Nature to God”, because they believed that religion put man at peace with the world. The poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey belonged to this group. They were also called the Lake Poets after the Lake District attracted the poets because industry had not yet invaded this part of the country.
Another group of poets distinguished themselves for the revolutionary spirit which they brought into poetry. The Revolutionary Romanticists tried to look ahead and see the future. They spoke up for the new working class and believed in their right to active struggle for liberty. They kept an eye on all political events and sympathized with the national liberation movement in all oppressed countries. The poets believed that the peoples of the world would gain freedom, and imagined that the states of the future would be somewhat like the republics of ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, great pessimism is felt in the works of all these poets, because they did not understand that the struggle for freedom was led at that time by the class of the bourgeoisie and therefore could not give freedom to the workers. The outstanding Revolutionary Romanticists were George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), the first great writer of historical novels, was born in Edinburgh. His father was an Edinburgh lawyer who descended from the fighting and riding clan of Buccluch. He was the first of his clan to live in a city and practice a profession. He had a large family. Walter, the future writer, was the ninth of his twelve children. When not yet two years old, the boy fell ill with a disease that left him lame for life. His parents thought country air would be good for him, so they sent him to his grandparents’ farm, called Sandy Knowe, a place where there were hills and crags and a ruined tower. Walter soon became a strong boy. In spite of his lameness he climbed the steep hills and rode his pony at a gallop. Walter’s grandparents told him thrilling tales of adventures on the Scottish border and stories of the crumbling abbeys and old castles. He learned to love the solemn history of Scotland and liked to recite Scottish ballads and poems. When he grew older and went to school, he became very fond of reading: one of his favorite books was a collection of ballads, called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry edited by Bishop Percy. At the age of 15 Scott had a chance to meet Robert Burns. At the suggestion of his father, Scott became a lawyer and practiced for fourteen years. Like many writers belonging to the Romantic trend, Scott, too felt that all the good days were gone. He wished to record all the historical facts he knew before they were forgotten. And thus pay tribute to the past. Scott’s first published work was a translation of Goethe’s historical play. The folk ballads Walter Scott had collected were the first poetic work he published. It was called “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” and consisted of three volumes; the first two were issued in 1802 and the third one in 1803. Soon after, his own romantic poems attracted the attention of the reading public, the best were ‘the lay of the last minstre’1805, marmion1808 and the lady of the lake 1810. These poems reproduce old legends and combine them with historical material. They were written with great poetic skill and accompanied by such beautiful descriptions that he poet became very famous. But when Byron’s wonderful poems appeared, Scott to quote his own words, “left the field of poetry to his rival ‘who by that time was already a friend of his. He took to writing novels. It was not only a new beginning; it marked a new period in Scott’s creative work. He declined the honor of poet-laureate in 1813 because he understood that writing official verses and odes on the birthdays of members of the royal family would interfere with his creative work.
Список литературы. Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Академия», 2007
Аникин Г.В., Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Высшая Школа», 1985
Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002
Интернет ресурсы. www.spartacus.schoonet.co.uk/drama.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Http://www.factspider.com/neo-romanticism
on line e-texts - www.gutenberg.org
https://www.gumer.info/authors.php
Тема 8. The Victorian era. Victorian novels. The development of critical realism.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Victorian period, historical and cultural context. Critical realism, the main Victorian novelists – Ch. Dickens and W. Thackeray. The development of social novel.
Тезисы лекций. The beginning of the Victorian Period is frequently dated 1830, or alternatively 1832 (the passage of the first Reform Bill), and sometimes 1837 to the accession of Queen Victoria; it extends to the death of Victoria in 1901. Queen Victoria often referred to us as the greatest and most beloved of all the British monarchs. Historians often subdivide the long period into three phases early Victorian (1832 to 1848), Mid-Victorian (1848-70), and Late Victorian (1870-1901). It was a time of rapid and fundamental economic and social changes that had no parallel in earlier history – changes that made England, in the course of the 19th.c, the leading industrial power, with an empire that occupied more than a quarter of the earth’s surface. The pace and depth of such developments inspired a mood of nationalist pride and optimism about future progress, but also produced social stresses, turbulence and widespread anxiety about the ability of the nation and the individual to cope, socially, politically and psychologically, with the joint problems of the age. The social novel emphasized the influence of the social and economic conditions of an era on shaping characters and determining events; often it also embodies an implicit or explicit thesis recommending political and social reforms. The realistic trend in the novels of Victorian period was dominated and it was established in1840s years.
The Victorian novelists’ saw their duties in the efforts to enlighten, to stimulate conscience, to make society more sensitive to understanding the realities of time. The prevailed literary movement of novels was realism. The reason for the development of the novel was the desire by the reading public to understand the huge social changes of the time.
The first step toward illuminating the history of the nineteenth century novel is the separation of three fairly distinct generations of novelists, the first, led by Austen and Scott, the second, dominated by Dickens and Thackeray and the third, headed by Meredith and Hardy. Each of these generations can be distinguished from the others by the types of novels written, the degree of purity with which the types were preserved, and the extent to which novelists confined their activity to a specific genre or experimented with a number of forms of the novel.
During the first generation of the century, three distinct types of novels emerged -- the romantic –historical novel, the novel of manners and the realistic social novel or novel with a purpose.
As the century passed, however, each of these types underwent modification, first, from one or another of the other types, and second, from external influences in the life of the period. The romantic novelist, for example, found in the increased knowledge of the past and of alien cultures material which the vogue of realism encouraged him to treat with something of the historian’s cautions fidelity to fact. Similarly, the novelist of manners tended to abandon the treatment of circumscribed lives of the upper-middle class or the aristocracy, and to extend his plot to include the life of the army, the church, politics and industry. Under the influence of the social novelist, he frequently deepened his tone form irony to satire. Finally, the social novelist found rich material in the growing awareness of the economic evils of the time, in the attempt to eliminate them and in the conflict between traditional belief and scientific skepticism. Since the zeal for reform had its roots in an essentially romantic conception of the relationship between moral man and immoral society, it is not surprising that many of the social novels contain a strong infusion of romanticism along with their universally recognized realism.
One characteristic of Victorian literature – especially prose – is the high moral purpose allied to a Romantic technique: language is rich and highly ornamental, colorful description, concerning of big social problems with criticism. That is why it was named critical realism. The Victorian novelists’ duty is to enlighten, to stimulate conscience, to make society more sensitive and to recognize the truth of reality.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is perhaps the greatest of Victorian novelist and he is one of the few whose works did not become unpopular after his death. The secret of his popularity lies in an immense vitality, comparable to Shakespeare’s, which gathers round his creations and creates a special Dickensian world which, more or less resemble the real world and has its own logic and laws and its own special atmosphere.
His novels, which are classified as social novels attack the injustice of many social systems and the inequalities between the rich and the poor. They reflect the profound social changes which took place throughout the 19th c. as new manufacturing towns sprang up around the coal mines and the north of England. Instead of the old village and family stability, we see a new industrialism which brought with it widespread corruption and a lack of concern for the emotional and imaginative lives of individuals, particularly children.
He has an astonishing range of characters of all classes and is a master of many styles of language – notably poetic prose and comic dialogue. His narrative inventiveness is unique and his graphic, tragic-comic vision of the world (which sometimes slips into sentimentality) has great appeal. Dickens’s novels are all animated by a sense of injustice and person wrong; he is concerned with the problems of crime and poverty, but he does not seem to believe that matters can be improved by legislation or reform movement – everything depends on the individual, particularly the wealthy philanthropist. If he has a doctrine, it is one of love.
The literary critics divided the Dickens’s creative works on 4 periods. Thus the first period begins from 1833 with the writing to periodicals and ends in 1841. These series of sketches achieved immense popularity, and resulted in the creation of Mr Pickwick and his Club. The complete result was a novel The Posthumous Papers of Pickwick Club, first issued in 20 monthly parts in 1836-7. The novel was formless as to plot, crowded with humorous figures. The members of this club are constituted a corresponding Society of the Club to report to it their journey and adventures and observations of characters and manners. This is the basis on which the novel is constructed and the club serves to link a series of detached incidents and changing characters, without solid plot. The second period of Dickens’s creative work lasts from 1842 to 1848. In these years the movement of working class rose to its height. The fight of the individual against organized authority was reflected in a popular distrust of governmental methods, a deep-seated reaction against their institutions. To this feeling Dickens constantly appealed in his novels. In 1842 he and his wife visited America, where he was welcomed received. His first impressions were favorable, but disillusion followed and his American Notes General Circulation (1842) caused much offence in America, as did his portrayal of America stereotypes in novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4). Late in1844 he paid a long visit to Italy which produced Pictures from Italy contributed to the Daily News a new Radical paper founded by Dickens in 1846. In this period Dickens moved towards historical novels – Barnaby Rudge first of two, where Dickens strongly concentrated on the social conditions of his own day and presented them. A Christmas Carol was the first of a series of Christmas books, which included The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens shows his view of man’s duty to man – Scrooge, the miser, a bad character who improves his behavior after a ghost tells him the manner of his death, so he miraculously becomes a philanthropist; Christmas symbolizes the only way in which the world can the improved – the exercise of charity.
Dombey and Son or the full name Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation (1848) Dickens began during a visit to Switzerland in 1846. It was time of the highest raising of chartist movement in England and also time when the spirit of Revolution was highly concentrated in European countries. At that time Dickens began to lose his illusions about the possibility of peaceful relations between two classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat, he doubted of the effectiveness of appeals to the governmental authorities. The material of Dombey and Son was carefully structured around the central idea of Mr. Dombey’s obsessive ambition for his firm and son, which overrides the claims of family love and personal need. The unity of theme and multiplex plot constructed here with more mastery touch serve to expose the main idea of the novel – to show antihuman essence of bourgeois world.
The new third period begins from 1849 to 1859: A Tale of Two Cities 1849; The Personal History of David Copperfield 1850, Bleak House 1853, Hard Times 54, Little Dorrit 1857. All these novels are crowded with characters, either fully developed or drawn by a few quick but sure strokes of the great writer’s pen. In the novels Dickens describes and attacks many kinds of unpleasant people and places – bad schools and schoolmasters, government departments, bad prisons, dirty houses. His characters include thieves, murderers, men in debt, stupid and unwashed men and women, hungry children and those who do their best to deceive the honest
The last period of Dickens productive activity drops to 1860 s years. In this period he wrote famous novels Great Expectations, 1861 and Our Mutual Friend 1864.The novels also reflect the profound social changes which took place throughout the Victorian age.
It is customary to group with Dickens a novelist who had fame almost equal to him and with whom he was compared all the way – William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). Dickens wrote of low life and was a warm – blooded romantic; Thackeray wrote in a satirical and moralistic light upper - and middle-class English life and was anti-romantic. Like Dickens, he was opposed to utilitarian beliefs and deplored the absence of spontaneous affection in daily life. He was, however, more resistant to Romantic influence than Dickens and looked for support in an 18th c. sense of proportion and elegance. Capable of tenderness, but never of sentimentality like Dickens, Thackeray was once seen as the equal of his contemporary Dickens, or even as his superior. For Thackeray’s realism is that of the observer, not that of the analyst. He never isolates a single case and studies it with long, close patience. On the contrary, he sees life with the wide vision of a man of the world. To have confined his multitude of characters within the limits of a carefully built plot, would have introduced and element of unreality into his book. Thackeray was not a romantic, and he did not produce his characters for the purpose of expressing violent feelings. He could describe strange qualities in human beings, and he could also show life’s cruelties and people’s weaknesses.
Список литературы. Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Академия», 2007
Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Carter R., MacRae J., The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland.
Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature.
https://andromeda.rutgers.edu.~j
www.britishliterature.com
https://vos.ucsb.edu
Http://englishlit.about.com/arts/englishlit
Тема 9. The nineteenth century Novels. Late Victorian Literature. Fiction and poetry.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Further development of Victorian novels. Female novelists – the sisters Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans).Fiction and poetry.
Тезисы лекций. Victorian novels frequently tell of the need of individuals, often women, to fulfill themselves in a society offering limited opportunities. Sometimes their predicament is intensified by a situation where the individualism of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition and Latin – Catholic authoritarianism come into conflict with each other. Sometimes the vulnerability of women, in both social and domestic contexts, is seen to be at the mercy of arrogant male attitudes. Love may be personal and passionate and yet marriages, representing the values of society, are often disastrous.
In the isolation of a Yorkshire vicarage, three sisters, none of them destined to live long, were writing novels and poems. Charlotte Bronte (1816-55), who admired Thackeray, dedicated her most un-Thackeray novel, Jane Eyre, to him. Here, in this story of the governess who falls in love with her master, himself married to a madwoman, we have a passion not to be found in either Thackeray or Dickens, a genuine love-story of great realism, full of sharp observation and not without wit. This story, with its frank love-scenes, was something of a bombshell. Her novel Jane Eyre (1847) opens with a transcript from the author’s own life at boarding-school, but the heroine soon passes beyond the world of the author’s experience into the romantic realm of her longing and imagination. The heroine is a genuine woman. Psychologically she is a study of the author’s inner life, and her romantic experience is symbolic of attempt which Charlotte and her sisters made to enlarge and color their oppressive little world with the spaces and splendors of the imagination. For while her experience in life was limited, and constantly tended to throw her back on romantic invention, she was purpose a realist, bent on dealing with things as they are, and on making them better. Charlotte dedicated the novel to Thackeray, in terms which show the moral energy which she possessed. High morality and strong spirit of rebelliousness to injustice; wrong; unfairness of existing order were the strongest features of a heroine. The image of woman of such strong individuality was impossible to find in Dickens or Thackeray, even in Elizabeth Gaskell. In Jane Eyre we can see also successful attempts to show psychological inner life of the main heroine. Beginning with Jane Eyre readers come to know how deep her contact with nature. From her novels we recognize how largely in her life the clouds, the ragged hills, the wide spaces of the Yourkshire moors under sunset or moonlight, made up for the inadequacy of human society and interests. In a deeper sense nature enters into the main background of the plot in order to open the inner life of her heroes. Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) has gradually come to be recognized as one of the major imaginative creations of the century. It is the very heart and soul of the romantic spirit, with its story of wild passion set against the Yorkshire moors. It is fusion of realism and romantic tradition; it is clash of reality and dream. In the history of English novel, this story is unique for its dark and thunderous atmosphere, descriptions of nature as a background for showing inner, psychological conditions of heroes, and its powerful fusion of inordinately passionate love and hate. The novel has been compared to Shakespeare’s King Lear, chiefly because of its immense and uncontrollable passions. Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Bronte is a story of a rector’s daughter who takes service as a governess, first with the Bloomfield family, whose undisciplined children are described as ‘tiger’ and then with the Murrays, where the conduct of her eldest charge, Rosalie, a heartless coquette, is contrasted with her own modest and gentle behaviour. Rosalie marries ambitiously and unhappily, but Agnes is happily united with Mr. Weston, the curate, the only one to have shown kindness in her days of servitude.
Other novelists included Mrs. Gaskell (1819-1865) and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans 1819-1880). The religious and social problems of England found a passionate exponent in Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell (Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson), the wife of a Unitarian clergyman in Manchester. Her life brought her into contact with the industrial and social difficulties growing out of the struggle between master and workman; and these she treated with great skill in Mary Barton (1848) and in North and South (1855). Mary Barton is a painfully vivid picture of conditions among the working class during the economic depression which gave the decade the name of the ‘hungry forties’. The novel shows deep feeling for the poor people employed at this time in factories. The book is notable for its realistic depiction of the wretchedness and poverty of the laboring class and its vigorous animus against the factory-owners and industrialists. North and South is a study of the different lives led by English people, especially the poor in the north and the happier ones in the south. The plot centers round Margaret Hale, a gentle girl from the south, who goes north and meets the problems of angry crowds of poor workpeople.
In Cranford (1853), her best – known book, she entered a different field, that of realistic observation for its own sake. Cranford is a series of carefully etched portraits and sketches of English village life. The life of the village, where the ladies of good family are poor, is described with immense skill. The novel is justly famous for the picture it gives of gentlefolk in a sleepy Cheshire town in the early part of the century.
The intellectual and moral life of middle Victorian era is revealed more fully in the works of Mary Ann Evans, or George Eliot ( 1819-1880). She was born in 1819 and grew up in the years when, under the influence of scientific speculation, the English mind was casting loose from it theological searching. She was for a time assistant editor of the Westminster Review, the organ of the freethinkers; and in this position she met John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, G.H. Lewes, and other liberals. Her irregular union with Lewes and her renunciation of formal Christianity were the 2 important events of her life, for they imposed upon her the responsibility of counteracting the view held by many that freedom of thought was naturally accompanied by moral laxity. They strengthened her already powerful ethical impulse. In 1857 she wrote: “If I live five years longer, the positive result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will far outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others.
Before this she had begun to experiment with fiction, her first story ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton ” appeared in Blackwood’s Magzine in 1856. She added to this story two others of moderate length and republished all three as Scenes from Clerical Life. The next year she published her first novel, Adam Bede, and it was evident that a new writer and a great one had appeared. Her next story, The Mill on the Floss (1860), turns on the refusal of her heroine to break the social law for the sake of her own happiness.
The novels of George Eliot were realistic, but she was more than an observer; she was also a scientist and a moralist. She was not content to picture human life as it appears. She tried to pierce behind the shows of things, and to reveal the forces by which they are controlled. Accordingly she analyzes her characters. In the case of the simple types this analysis takes the form of comment, rapid, incisive and convincing. In the case of the more conscious, developed characters, her analysis is more elaborate and more sustained. For her heroines Eliot drew largely upon her own spiritual experience, and this personal psychology she supplemented by wide reading, especially in the literature of confessions. In this way she gained an extraordinary vividness in portraying the inner life. Her most characteristic passages are those in which she follows the ebb and flow of decision in a character’s mind, dwelling on the triumph or defeat of a personality in a drama where there is but one actor. It is to be noted that George Eliot never lets her case drop with the individual analysis. She always strives to make her case typical, to show that the personal action and the results for both the individual and society accord with general laws. Her chief function as a writer is the interpretation of the world in terms of morality. She does not deal with party question, nor primarily with industrial or social problems. Her ethical motive is a broader one than the emancipation of thought or the formulation of a political program. It is to show how, in obedience to law, character grows or decays; how a single fault or flaw brings suffering and death and throws a world into ruin; how on the other hand, there is a making perfect through suffering, a regeneration through sin itself, a hope for the world through the renunciation and self-sacrifice of the individual.
In the history of fiction the last generation of the 19th.century can be distinguished from the first two generations by the comparatively small number of first – rate novelists it produced and by the virtual abandonment by such novelists of the types – the historical novel, the novel of manners, and the social novel – that, alone or in combination, had been popular since the opening of the century. Such novelists as Meredith, Hardy, and James developed complex forms of prose – fiction by skillfully fusing elements earlier novelists had left distinct. Thus, in Meredith and James elements from the novel of manners are combined imperceptibly with searching studies in psychology and morals, and in Hardy romantic elements from the regional novel and fused with a variety of philosophic pessimism. In consequence, the English novel in the third generation of the century attained heights of conscious artistry earlier novelists had rarely achieved.
We turn now to the poetry of the age. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), who later was made Lord Tennyson for his contribution to lit, sums up many of the preoccupations of the period in work which is thoroughly Romantic. Romantic, however, with a difference, for Tennyson brings to his sensuous verse a care, a deliberate contrivance of effect, which suggests Pope more than Keats. His music is distinctive, but its flow is by no means ‘artless’ –nothing is left to chance. The first works are ‘irresponsible’, delighting in the world of the senses, but the sense of Victorian responsibility is not long in coming, and moral problems begin to rude. The Palace of art teaches that beauty must be shared almost suggesting the substitution of art galleries and public libraries for the aristocratic gloating over personal treasures. Tennyson is an optimist. Some of his visions, as in Locksley Hall, are of a happy, liberal future and even ‘the Parliament of man, the Federation of the World’. As a technician, he is unsurpassed and the skill with which he manages the simple stanza of the long In Memoriam – immense variety, no monotony – is superb.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) approaches, in his language and imagery, the poetry of our own time. Both are, to some extent, anti-romantic: there are railway – trains, cigars, grand pianos, ‘scrofulous French novels’ and trousers; language is often colloquial and even slangy. There is a lot humor (rarely found in the romantics) and a kind of self-mockery in the grotesque rhymes that Browning sometimes uses. He also suggests the modern poets in his obscurity, but his obscurity does not derive from complexity of thought; it comes from impatience with language and a deliberate desire to dazzle the reader – Browning’s vocabulary is large and his fondness for little-known words proverbial. his early Sordello is so difficult that, of one of the lines, he himself said, ‘when I wrote that only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant; now God only knows’.
Elizabeth Browning (1819-1861) was, in her day, thought to be superior as a poet to her husband. her Aurora Leigh, a blank –verse novel, was hailed as the greatest thing since Shakespeare, but, though it is readable, we cannot now find many marks of greatness in it. Her lyrics- especially the Sonnets from the Portuguese – are pretty, displaying a woman’s passion which seems feeble in comparison with Emily Bronte’s and technically little more than competent.
Список литературы. Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Академия», 2007
Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002
