Волкова Е.И., Комков О.А.
РИМО, 3 курс, 2 семестр, Великобритания
British Literature and Culture: 17th - 20th centuries
Course objective: This course is designed to introduce students to some of the major themes in British intellectual, political, and literary culture of the 17th - 20th cc. Our aim is to understand how the literature of the period is a reflection of wider political and intellectual currents and why certain forms and themes became dominant in certain periods.
The course is broadly organised chronologically but also problematically, it emphasizes recurring archetypes and themes in their reference to the issue of the national identity. Some topics are presented from the British-Russian comparative perspective.
Forms of teaching: lectures and seminars. Lectures give an idea of the major currents in British culture and literature while seminars give an opportunity to do close reading analysis and explore the complexity of the literary text through discussions, presentations and creative writing/performance.
Requirements: reading quizzes; oral and written examination; term paper. For the paper, students will select a 20th century short story and analyze it in terms of the title metaphor, mode of speech, focus, character, story, cultural issues, co-authoring and comparative perspective.
Recommended literature:
1. John Donne.(1572-1631) The Good Morrow. Good Friday. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. The Dreame. Holy Sonnets: This is my play's last scene, Batter my heart, three-person'd God. Death be not proud.
2. George Herbert (1593-1633). Easter Wings. The Collar. The Altar. Man.
3. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.
4. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) To His Coy Mistress. The Definition of Love.
5. John Milton. (1608-1674). On His Blindness. Paradise Lost.
6. John Bunyan. (1628-1688). The Pilgrim’s Progress.
7. John Dryden (1631-1700) Absalom and Achitophel.
8. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
9. Jonathan Swift.(1667-1745). A Tale of a Tub . Gulliver’s Travels .
10. Henry Fielding (1707-1754). Tom Jones.
11. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768). Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
12. Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The Rape of the Lock. Ode on Solitude. The Universal Prayer.
13. William Blake (1757-1827). Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
14. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Preface to Lyrical Ballads.(1798) We are Seven. The World is Too Much With Us.
15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Cristabel. Kubla Khan. (1798) The Epitaph.
16. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Manfred. Cain. They say that Hope is Happiness. Darkness.
17. Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822) Men of England. Ode to the West Wind.
18. John Keats (1795-1821) On a Grecian Urn.
19. Walter Scott (1771-1832) The Tale of Old Mortality.
20. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) Jane Eyre.
21. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Christmas Carol. Great Expectations .
22. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The Picture of Dorian Gray. De Profundis.
23. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) The Lady of Shalott.
24. Robert Browning (1812-1889). My Last Duchess.
25. Gerald M. Hopkins (1844-1889) Pied Beauty.
26. William B. Yeats (1865-1939) Easter 1916. The Circus Animals’ Desertion.
27. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). Murder in the Cathedral. The Waste Land. Burnt Norton (from “Four Quartets”)
28. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Pygmalion.
29. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Heart of Darkness.
30. D.H.Lawrence. (1885-1930). Sons and Lovers. England, My England.
31. James Joyce (1882-1941). Dubliners. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses.
32. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction.
33. George Orwell (1902-1950). Animal Farm.
34. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973). Leaf by Niggle.
35. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Great Divorce. Till We Have Faces.
36. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). Brideshead Revisited: the Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945). Helena (1950).
37. Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) On the Road to Rome.
38. Graham Green (1904-1990) End of the Affair
39. William G. Golding (1911- 1993) Free Fall. Darkness Visible. Lord of the Flies.
40. Samuel Becket (1906-1989) Waiting for Godot.
41. John Fowles (b. 1926). The Collector. The Maggot.
42. Anita Mason (b. 1942). The Illusionist.
Literary Criticism and Culture Studies
• Beach J.W. The Twenties Century Novel. Studies in Technique.
• Bentley G.E.,Jr. 1999. The Stranger from Paradise: William Blake
• British Cultural Studies.Geography, Nationality, and Identity. Ed. David Morlev and K.Robins.
• Contemporary Novelists. Ed. J.Vinson.
• Storey J. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: an Introduction,
• Kenneth Brodey. Fabio Malgaretti. Focus on English and American Literature.
• Life Conquers Death: Religion and Literature.
• North M. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature.
• Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. The Annotated Anthology. Ed.T.Dawson, R.C.Dupree.
• Studying British Cultures. Ed. S. Bassnett
• The Cambridge Guide to English Literature.
• The New Pelican Guide to English Literature.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
• The Oxford Anthology of English Literature.
• Tillyard E.M.W. Some Mythical Elements in English Literature.
• Алябьева Л. Литературная профессия в Англии в XVI-XIX веках.
• Волкова Е. Сюжет о спасении в русской, английской и американской литературе.
• Горбунов А.Н. Шекспировские контексты.
• Горбунов А.Н. Джон Донн и английская лирика XVII века.
• Павловская А.В. Англия и англичане.
• Эко У. Поэтики Джойса.
Week 1.
The British 17th and 18th centuries comprised a period of unparalleled religious, political, and economic revolution that simultaneously brought about a re-evaluation of what it meant to be a civilized human being. One way to measure the results of this evaluation is to investigate the complex ways in which British writers represented themselves and the universe.
Metaphysical Poets. Meaning of the term: baroque poetry, mannerism, discordia concors, macrocosm and microcosm, intellectualism, combination of religious, philosophical, lyrical, and scientific mentality and vocabulary. Conceits, or extended metaphors, paradox, antinomy, ambivalence of the verse. Colloquial language, style experiments.
John Donne: love poems and Holy Sonnets. Catholicism and Protestantism in Donne’s works. Prose works: sermons and a treatise on suicide Biathanos.
George Herbert: priest and poet. Church architecture and symbolism in poetry: The Temple. Hieroglyphic poems and variations in the graphical layout of the stanzaic forms. Easter Wings. The Altar.Herbert’s preverbial ministry.
Andrew Marvell: conceits, rhythm, oxymoron, love theme. Metaphysical and Cavalier aspects. The Definition of Love.
The reception of Metaphysical poets in Russia: translations, Donne and Brodsky.
Metaphysical poetry and 17th c. British musical traditions: conceits and consorts, meditation and In Nomine pieces, variation and fancy, passion and contemplation, polyphony of discourse (Holborne, Ferrabosco, Hume, Byrd, Ward, Dowland, Lawes).
Week 2.
Civil War and Restoration. The Commonwealth. The Puritans. The Authorized Version of the Bible. Book of Common Prayer.
John Milton as a central figure of the period. His political and literary carrier. The blindness theme. Visions of Heaven and Hell in Milton, C.S.Lewis’ Great Divorce and Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle. Classical and Biblical sources of the epic. The Renaissance tradition: titanic imagery, the humanist perspective. Dramatic elements, non-linear chronology. Epic as a synthetic genre. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. God and Satan, Good and Evil, Redemption story. Milton about Russia. Milton and Russian Literature: Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov.
Week 3.
John Bunyan’ s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Allegory, juxtapositions, biblical allusions. Bunyan’s idea of salvation. Pilgrimage theme in Chaucer and Bunyan. Protestant anti-Catholic culture, Dissenting ministry. Bible as supreme authority.
John Dryden in the political and religious context of his time. Absalom and Achitophel as a satire.
Week 4.
The Augustan Age. Whigs and Tories. Hanoverian Kings. Philosophical Rationalism. Industrial Revolution. Reading Public.
Literature of Sensibility: nature, purity, social vices, power of friendship and love.
New types of the novel.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The Natural Man archetype. Divine Nature vs Civilization. Island symbolism and its significance for British culture. The reception of Defoe in Russia.
Week 5.
State/Man relationships. Jonathan Swift as dean, political and religious thinker, poet, prose writer. The Battle of the Books, A Tale of the Tub.
Gulliver’s Travels: State, political life, agreement, impeachment, family culture, “man at close”, odyssey motifs, Laputa as symbol of government, utopia or dystopia (Houyhnhnms). Swift as critic of the natural Christianity. Evil symbolism in Swift. “Yahoo syndrome” in modern Russia. Struldbrugs and the immortality theme in English literature. Swift and Irish issue. Irish-British relationships. Swift and Gogol: British and Russian political satire.
Week 6.
Enlightenment and Literature of Sensibility. Development of the English novel: moralizing tendency, morality and Christianity, psychological characterization, epistolary technique, authenticity of the narrative, fiction posing as truth.
S.Richardson, H.Fielding, L.Sterne. Tom Jones: “New province of writing” (Fielding) – a comic epic poem in prose, a new narrative persona, journey story, speculations and commentaries, conversational style, “not man, but manners”, liberal generosity, humour and irony. Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy: L.Sterne and J.Locke, associations, inner consciousness, fictional time and space, textual experiment, playing with the reader.
Sterne and the 19th c. Russian novel.
Locke, Stern and 20th c. interiorized textuality.
Week 7.
Alexander Pope: a Catholic outsider. Dryden’s poetic legacy, political satire, elegant style, neo-classicism.
William Blake – a Pre-Romantic prophet, visions, illuminated printing, the fearful symmetry of “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”, imagination as the “divine sparkle”, mysticism, anti-rationalism. Songs of Innocence and Experience: ignorance and endurance, Christian imagery, symbolism of childhood, a mytopoetic dialectic of the human condition. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: contraries, evolution, paradox, visions and proverbs of hell, subtext, God and Genius, Good and Evil ambivalence. Prophesies, mythology, a new religion.
Week 8.
Romanticism. Historical and social context: French revolution, war with France, Catholic emancipation, the Reform Bill of 1832, rural and industrial change, urban population, rustic vs. urban life, commercialism.
Literary context: sentimentalism, graveyard poets, elegiac poets, Nordic and Celtic mythology, Gothic novel (M.Shelley’s Frankenstein), German Romanticism in literature and philosophy, “poet and the crowd” theme, power of imagination, exotic setting, nature poetry, poetic diction and common speech, ballads, lyric, blank verse.
W.Wordsworth and S.T.Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads: the Preface as a manifesto, themes, genres, and style. Wordsworth’s reform of poetic subject and language.
Colerige’s argument with Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Cristabel: Coleridge’s mysticism, visions, symbolism, biblical allusions, oriental motifs. Coleridge as an English Schellingianer, idea of the primary and secondary imagination as a romantic modification of the imago Dei paradigm. Coleridge and Russian Literature: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Balmont. Gumilev’s translation of The Rime.
Week 9.
G.G.Byron, P.B.Shelley, J.Keats. The Byronic hero: brooding, mysterious, haunted by his guilty past, lonely, charming. Manfred: immortality and oblivion, man and shadow, a poetics of ghost-like obscurity. Cain: a mystery play, biblical story, major philosophical and theological issues, story symmetry. Don Juan: Byron and Pushkin.
Shelley’s rebellious spirit, atheism and pantheism, from the political ballad to the classical elegy.
On a Grecian Urn : Keats’s cult of beauty and the nature of aestheticism, “holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of imagination”, Greek and Medieval sources of his poetry, Spenserian and Miltonic legacy.
The reception of English Romanticism in Russia.
Week 10.
Historical novels of Walter Scott: Scottish customs and traditions, historical setting, dynamical narrative, characters, man at war. Scott and Pushkin.
The Victorian Age: British empire, Victorian ethos, political developments, Victorian family, education, reading public.
The Social Problem Novel: Elizabeth Gaskell, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot. The Governess Novel: feminine narrative, story, setting, characters, denouement.
Charles Dickens’ world: social criticism, humour, sympathy and sentimentality, childhood and adulthood, mysticism, London myth, religious commitment. Dickens and Dostoevsky. Christmas story in English culture.
Week 11
English Children’s Literature: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. The role of Children’s Literature in British culture. Form and subcontext. The world of adults seen/judged through the eyes of a child. Modern Children’s Literature and classical traditions.
Oscar Wilde: writer, art for art’s sake preacher, Aesthetic prince, wit, dandy, gay martyr, sensitive soul, laughing stock, broken heart, prisoner, Narcissus, Dionysus-Apollo, Catholic convert, tragic genius. Irish, Classical Greek, Renaissance, Pre-Raphaelite aspects. The Picture of Dorian Grey as a parable about life/art and beauty/soul relationships. De Profundis in the broad context of confessional literature, aesthetic perception of Christianity.
Week 12
Victorian Poetry:
Alfred Tennyson: ‘the inward perfection of vacancy’, meditations on mortality and death, philosophy and style, Arthurian legends, technical mastery. The Lady of Shalott, Morte D’Arthur. Malory and Tennyson.
Robert Browning: Romantic influence, religion ideas and motifs, musicality, dramatic monologue, love lyrics, innermost conflicts of the character. My Last Duchess, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Browning and Shakespeare.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: John Millais, William Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Renaissance art, naturalistic details, anti-Victorian ideas, sensual atmosphere, fantasy and reality, enigmatic symbolic forms. Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelites. Pre-Raphaelites and Russian Silver Age.
The Oxford Movement: Cardinal Newman and Gerald Manley Hopkins. Catholic Renaissance. Old English and Welsh alliterative traditions, religious background and themes, prayer as genre. Pied Beauty.
Week 13
The 20th century: the Edwardian Age, Parliamentary reforms, the First World War, Ireland, rich and poor gap. Literary context: age of uncertainty, Darwin and Freud, avant-guard in art and music, Futurism, Dada, Cubism, literary experiments, Russian influences, modernism.
William Butler Yeats: influence of Ezra Pound, philosophical and mystical symbolism, visions, Celtic mythology, Irish Renaissance, political ideas. Easter 1916. The Circus Animals’ Desertion
T.S.Eliot: Metaphysical tradition, religious revival, influence of French symbolism, disillusion, modernist fragmentation, stream of consciousness, death metaphor, time and eternity, spiritual malaise, cryptic allusions, literary criticism. The Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral T.S.Eliot and Brodsky. British-Russian play: T.S.Eliot, Elizabeth Roberts. Mark Rozovsky’s Murder in the Cathedral (in memory of Fr. Alexander Men’). Four Quartets: speculation and mystical experience, the Dantesque discourse, influence of San Juan de la Cruz, musical metaphorical paradigm (Beethoven’s last quartets as a formal stimulus) and its implications.
Week 14
The 20th century Drama.
George Bernard Shaw: Irish background, social problems, comedies of idea, paradox mastery, irony, maxims, ambivalence. Pygmalion and My Fair Lady musical.
B.Shaw in Russian theatres.
Samuel Beckett: Proust and Joyce’s influences, Theatre of Absurd, Beckett’s influence on Harold Printer and Tom Stoppard. Waiting for Godot: Albert Camus’ ‘boredom of waiting’, existentialism, tramps as outsiders, divine fools, biblical allusions to the Second Coming, symbolism of names, things, and gestures, impossible questions, anxiety, suicidal motifs, master and man theme, tree as life and death, manipulation with time, static forms, repetitions of words and actions, activity and inactivity, anti-climaxes, nothingness, despair, and hope.
Week 15
The 20th century Novel.
French and Russian influences in Joseph Conrad, D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Wolf , and James Joyce. Dystopia and totalitarian future: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.
James Joyce: Irish background, religious and intellectual controversies, anti-clericalism, modernist epic, stream of consciousness, complexity, day microcosm, humour and humanity. Dubliners: Joycean idea of epiphany, Gothic archetype of the Haunted House. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: key moments/epiphanies in Stephen Daedalus’ development. Ulysses: time and space, themes, symbolism, psychoanalysis, complexity, fluency, characters, historical background, Dublin myth, censorship and a dramatic scandalous story of publishing the novel in France, the USA, Great Britain, and Russia. Umberto Eco’s Le Poetiche di Joyce: epiphany as experience and as a function of art, poetics of expressive form, remodeling the universe via mythopoetic construction, metamorphosis, Proteus poetics, ambiguity, fluidity of discourse, elimination of abstract oppositions. Joyce and 20th c. literary development.
Virginia Woolf: life as inner experience and its elusive nature, impressionist techniques, psychoanalytic discourse, the conception of time. Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction as a modernist manifesto, “materialists” and “spiritualists”. Woolf’s worldwide influences (G. Garcia Marquez, M. Kundera etc.).
Joseph Conrad: Polish and Ukrainian background, sailor and artist, doubt and vagueness of the narrative, journey into the subconscious, darkness metaphor, moral lesson. Heart of Darkness.
David Herbert Lawrence: American influence, penetrating analysis of relationships between the sexes, marginal spontaneous characters of gypsies, miners, gamekeepers, a generation gap, psychological insight, an obscenity trial. Sons and Lovers. England, My England: instinct and ratio, contemplation and pragmatics, passion, duty and authority, symbolic detail.
Week 16
William Golding: post-war syndrome, intrinsic corruption of human nature, allegorical narratives, nature of evil, island dystopian symbolism, visions of childhood, autobiographical elements, confessional story, Miltonic motifs. The Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, Darkness Visible.
C.S. Lewis: the myth about Cupid and Psyche in Till We Have Faces, Platonic discourse, eros and religious experience, Deus absconditus and revelation, eidos and mask.
John Fowles: the ego and the self, the human and the subhuman condition, degradation and development, social issue, the power of art, dogmatics vs. freedom. The Collector: allusions to Shakespeare and de Sade, the initiation model and its distortions, collecting as appropriation vs. creation, contrast of confessional perspectives, choice and challenge of an everyman. The Maggot: a 17th c. British fancy, stylistic effects, comparing epochs, fantastic elements, the issue of religious experience and moral freedom, symbolism of transformation and rebirth.
Anita Mason: “postmodernism” of antiquity and the new era of Christianity in The Illusuonist, magic vs. faith, knowledge vs. love, eros and agape, Simon the Magus and his teachings as a Gnostic anticipation of Faustian discourse, true and false creation, “illusionism” as the Zeitgeist of the postclassical epoch, the spiritual controversies of the 1st and 21st c. AD.
Conclusions: Literature and British culture, the Land of Poetry and Drama, mysticism, social, religious and metaphysical dimensions, classical literature and mass culture, verbal and video culture, literature and education, British and American Literature, literature and national identity. Russian-British connections.
.
British Literature and Culture: 17th - 20th centuries
The Nobel Prize in Literature: Nominations and Reports 1901–1950
The Nobel Prize in Literature: Nominations and Reports 1901–1950
by Bo Svensén
29 December 2004
Organisation of Work
Once the statutes of the Nobel Foundation had been ratified in June 1900, the Swedish Academy immediately set to work on the preparations required to enable the award of the first Nobel Prize in 1901. A Nobel Committee consisting of five members of the Academy was established in October 1900. The task of the Committee was to submit its report before the end of September every year and to propose the choice of Laureate to the Academy. The Academy’s permanent secretary, the writer Carl David af Wirsén, was appointed to preside over this Committee.
The Academy also founded a Nobel Institute, to which a number of experts on literature in various languages were affiliated: one for the Slavic languages, one for French and Spanish, one for English and Dutch, one for Portuguese, one for German and the Scandinavian languages and one for Italian. The task of the experts was to assist the Academy with individual appraisals of the candidates proposed.
Naturally a library was also required by the Academy for its work on the Literature prize. This was established and called The Nobel Library of the Swedish Academy. It was primarily intended to assist the Nobel Institute by providing the kind of literature required for work on the prize, but if possible its collections were to be made available to others as well. It was to acquire mainly works of modern literature as well as works on literary history, linguistics, history and philosophy and reference works of various kinds. In addition the library was to subscribe to a wide range of literary journals.
The Nobel Committee through Five Decades
Wirsén presided over the Nobel Committee until his death in 1912. He was succeeded by the historian Harald Hjärne, who was to occupy the post for almost a decade.
When Hjärne died in 1922, the writer Per Hallström became chairman, a post he occupied for a total of 24 years. His contribution to the work of the Committee was considerable. In addition to the annual task of composing the Committee's report, he wrote a large number of his own expert appraisals on the candidates proposed for the prize. Of the 800 appraisals that exist from the period 1901–1950, a good 300 were written by Per Hallström.
When Hallström stepped down as Chairman of the Nobel Committee in 1946, he was succeeded by someone who had a great deal of experience of its doings. The writer Anders Österling had already been an active member of the Committee for a quarter of a century, and he now began an incumbency that was to last for the next quarter of a century. However, most of this period falls outside the scope of this survey.
The Experts
The most important group among the experts were of course those affiliated to the Nobel Institute, but others were engaged as well. One important group in this context were the Academicians themselves.
During the period, the combined linguistic skills of the Nobel Institute and the Academy only embraced the major European language areas on the whole. Where other languages were concerned, therefore, either an attempt had to be made to form some opinion of the candidate's work from translations – with all the disadvantages this involved – or recourse made to some external expert. There were candidates who wrote in non-European languages such as Arabic, Persian or Chinese but they were rare.
One European language that at times gave rise to serious problems for the Academy was modern Greek, especially as the two Greek writers of main concern came close to being awarded the prize: Kostis Palamas and Angelos Sikelianos. During the period 1926–40, the former was nominated on a total of 14 occasions.
The Nobel Year
The timetable for the Nobel Year looked more or less the same for the entire 50-year period under review. However, these routines differed in essential respects from those that apply today.
The Committee's first meeting of the year took place at the end of January or beginning of February, when the proposals that had been submitted were reviewed. A list of the approved nominations was compiled and distributed to the other members of the Academy.
Then it was the turn of the experts, whose task was to write appraisals of the candidates.
In the late spring or early summer the Nobel Committee met again, this time for preliminary discussion of the award of the prize.
The Committee met again at the beginning of the autumn to continue its deliberations. It also had to make a decision on the draft report on the candidates that had been drawn up in the intervening period by the chairman. When the Committee had approved this report it was submitted to the Academy.
The Academy then began its deliberations and reached its decision on the award of the prize some time in November. During the early years this decision was not announced immediately but remained secret until Nobel Day on December 10th.
Entitlement to Nominate
During this period the work of the Swedish Academy with the Nobel Prize was governed by special regulations on the award of the literature prize. One of the most important of these concerned entitlement to nominate candidates: "the right to nominate a candidate for the prize-competition shall belong to Members of the Swedish Academy and of the Academies in France and Spain, which are similar to it in constitution and purpose; members also of the humanistic classes of other academies and those humanistic institutions and societies that are on the same footing as academies; and teachers of aesthetics, literature and history at university colleges." (Official translation, 1901).
The replacement of this wording in 1949 by the following implied relatively significant changes: "The right to nominate candidates for the prize shall be enjoyed by members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies similar to it in membership and aims, by professors of the history of literature or of languages at universities and university colleges, by previous winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and by presidents of authors’ organizations which are representative of the literary activities of their respective countries." (Official translation). Subsequently a number of minor amendments have been made.
Written Nominations
The written nominations, which occupy a fairly large proportion of the Swedish Academy's Nobel Archives, vary greatly in character.
In most cases a nomination consists of one single letter advocating one candidate and is signed by one or two individuals.
Sometimes a larger group of members of a qualified institution, typically an academy, have signed a joint nomination. The most famous of these, and one which also achieved the desired effect, was submitted as early as 1901, when a large number of the members of the French Academy jointly endorsed the name of Sully Prudhomme. Three decades later a similar attempt was made by 27 members of the Spanish Academy in favour of Ramón Menéndez Pidal, but without achieving the same success as the French Academy.
There have also been occasions when large groups of members of various authors' associations and literary societies have submitted written nominations in support of specific candidates. During the early years two British organisations were very active in this respect – the Incorporated Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature. The former established a special committee for this purpose, which in 1902 submitted 49 written proposals nominating Herbert Spencer.
In terms of extent, the most overwhelming campaign of them all was probably the one mounted in 1932 in support of Upton Sinclair's candidature. In the lists of nominations it is described as "about 800 proposals from every country of the world, collected by a committee and submitted through its secretary".
One fundamental rule is that no individuals may nominate themselves for the Nobel Prize, and no such proposals are considered by the Committee. As a curiosity, however, mention may be made of a nomination submitted in 1905 by a professor of literature in New Zealand called J.M. Brown proposing a writer named G. Sweven, who was said to be the author of a utopian novel entitled Limanora, the Island of Progress. This proposal was considered in the normal way, but in hindsight it must be regarded as a covert self-nomination. It turns out (if you search using the name "Sweven" on the Internet) that 'Godfrey Sweven' was in fact the pseudonym used by the John Macmillan Brown who submitted the nomination.
Lists of Nominations
The lists of approved nominations tell us a great deal. For instance they reveal that during this period the Committee was required to assess a total of 1,256 proposals. The distribution over the five decades is relatively even, and for the period 1901–1930 remarkably even:
Period Number of Nominations
1901–1910 223
1911–1920 221
1921–1930 240
1931–1940 301
1941–1950 271
On the other hand, if these figures are considered year by year, it turns out that there were variations. A relatively large number of nominations were submitted to begin with but they declined during the First World War. When the war ended the numbers rose slowly to reach their peak at the end of the 1930s. During the Second World War there was the same decline as during the First World War, but from 1947 onwards an increase can be seen, this time more rapid than its precursor.
The nature of the lists of nominations changes to some extent during the years. To begin with the Nobel Committee not only listed the name of the nominee but also the work or works cited in the nomination. After only a few years, however, this practice was relinquished and soon it became normal merely to list the name of the nominee.
Similarly, there was initially greater readiness than later to list all the individuals who endorsed a certain nomination – provided they were not unreasonably numerous. In 1901, for instance, the 17 members of the French Academy supporting the nomination of Sully Prudhomme are listed. When the campaigns became more extensive, the Committee was quite simply constrained to eschew lists of this kind, for example in 1929 when the poet Arno Holz was proposed by "412 professors and other teachers at universities and colleges in Germany, Austria, Switzerland etc. These proposals were submitted via the Faculty of Arts at the University of Königsberg".
The Nominators
Nominations were submitted by a wide variety of individuals. Among their names we find a predominance of professors, either those with chairs at central Europe's prestigious universities or teaching at unknown provincial universities in the far-flung corners of the world. Many of the professors were at the same time members of academies and learned societies of various kinds. Some of these associations are well-known and time-honoured, others virtually unheard of.
Among the nominators we sometimes find very famous names, for instance previous Laureates, and a not insignificant number of nominations come from members of the awarding body itself, the Swedish Academy.
About twenty previous Laureates were involved in nominating candidates during the period in question. Among those who submitted proposals we find, for instance, Maurice Maeterlinck and Romain Rolland. The second of these was responsible for a nomination that led to a great deal of discussion – for Sigmund Freud (1936). Nominations from previous Laureates also included Gerhart Hauptmann's proposal of Thomas Mann in 1924 and from Thomas Mann, who in his turn proposed Hermann Hesse as early as 1931.
The most industrious of the previous Laureates when it came to submitting nominations was at the same time a member of the Swedish Academy, Verner von Heidenstam, whose nominations included three future Laureates: Carl Spitteler, Henri Bergson and Frans Eemil Sillanpää. Nominations came from several other members of the Academy as well as Heidenstam and all in all during the period 1901–1950 they submitted about 300.
The Candidates
Like those who nominated them, the candidates proposed varied extensively. Household names alternate with totally unknown individuals, esoteric poets with the authors of best-sellers, literary stylists with plain-spoken writers of non-fiction, youthful talents with writers whose oeuvre is complete. The distribution between men and women is what could be expected of the period, but women are not remarkably under-represented. What can be determined, however, is that nominations were rarely submitted for writers outside the western cultural sphere. Sven Hedin's nominations of Chinese and Japanese writers are among the exceptions.
Some proposals were submitted numerous times. The most interesting of these were perhaps those that finally resulted in the award of the prize. The record is held by Johannes V. Jensen, who was nominated 18 times before the Academy could overcome its misgivings about some elements of his work in 1944. Grazia Deledda was another Laureate whose advocates required tenacity: when she was awarded the prize for 1926 she had already been proposed 12 times. Third place is shared by Carl Spitteler (1919) and Anatole France (1921), nominated 9 times.
The records also disclose in which year candidates awarded the prize after 1950 were nominated for the first time. They reveal that most of the Laureates in the 1950s had not had too long a wait:
First Nominated Year of Award
Pär Lagerkvist
1947 1951
François Mauriac
1946 1952
Winston Churchill
1946 1953
Ernest Hemingway
1947 1954
Halldór Kiljan Laxness
1948 1955
Albert Camus
1949 1957
Boris Pasternak
1946 1958
On the other hand nominations were already being submitted in the 1940s for three individuals who would have to wait until the 1960s before being awarded the prize. Two of them were nominated for the first time in 1947: Mikhail Sholokhov (Laureate in 1965) and Shmuel Josef Agnon (Laureate in 1966). The third was the 1962 Laureate John Steinbeck, nominated for the first time as early as in 1943.
It is often said that a candidate is not normally awarded the prize when first nominated. But during the period 1901–1950 this was not at all unusual and actually occurred on ten occasions. It is perhaps not very surprising that this was frequent in the early years, but nevertheless it is still a remarkably large number: Sully Prudhomme 1901 (obviously), Theodor Mommsen 1902, Rudolf Eucken 1908, Paul Heyse 1910 and Rabindranath Tagore 1913. Then we have to wait until the 1930s, when Sinclair Lewis (1930), Luigi Pirandello (1934) and Pearl Buck (1938) were awarded the prize during the year in which they were first nominated. The two remaining occasions both occurred in 1950 when William Faulkner was awarded the previous year's prize and Bertrand Russell for the current year.
There are also instances of candidates not being awarded the prize despite the great tenacity of their advocates. The record here is held by the Catalonian writer Angel Guimerà y Jorge, who was nominated every year from 1907 until 1923, in other words 17 times. In addition to him, mention can be made of Paul Valéry, who was nominated 12 times between 1930 and 1945, but who died just when it seemed that the Academy was about to award him the prize.
Expert Appraisals
When the list of candidates has been determined, the experts begin their work. As has been pointed out, there are about 800 expert appraisals from the period 1901–1950. If this number is related to the number of nominations submitted (1,256), it can be seen that the Nobel Committee requested expert appraisals for about two-thirds of all the candidates proposed.
Expert appraisals can vary in length, from thirty or forty pages to a mere one or two. The difference depends partly on what the appraisal deals with: the entire oeuvre of a candidate proposed for the first time or the latest work of one who has already been considered.
The number of appraisals per candidate varies a great deal. The record is held – as for the number of nominations – by the 1944 Laureate Johannes V. Jensen, who was the subject of no fewer than 18 expert appraisals.
The Nobel Committee's Reports
The Committee's Routines
On the basis of the expert appraisals submitted and – in many cases – his own reading and opinions, the Chairman of the Nobel Committee spends the summer drafting a report on the authors included in the list of nominations to be submitted to the Academy. Ideally this report will conclude with a recommendation that the Committee has elected to endorse. This may be unanimous or reflect the support of a majority of its members. If no majority can be attained, as a rule the Committee's recommendation is to reserve the prize for the following year.
Naturally the routines adopted for the Nobel award have undergone some degree of development during this 50-year period. The factors that have played a role derive on the one hand from external circumstances, such as the prevailing situation, the standing of the Academy or the status of the Nobel Prize, and on the other from the working methods and opinions of those involved in the work of the Nobel Committee and the Nobel Institute; this applies above all to the Chairman of the Committee. These developments are reflected to some extent in the form and content of the reports.
The Form and Content of the Reports
As an example, it can be noted that Wirsén, even though he can fall back on the expert appraisals, fairly often deals in greater depth with one or several candidates, particularly those he would like to advocate. For instance, he devotes a considerable number of pages to Mistral in 1904, Sienkiewicz in 1905, Carducci in 1906, Swinburne in 1908, Verhaeren in 1909 and Maeterlinck in 1909 and 1911.
Hjärne's reports partly reflect his own expertise and areas of interest as a historian. He devotes a great deal of space to the Danish cultural historian Frederik Troels-Lund in 1916 and to Benito Pérez Galdós' extensive oeuvre on historical subjects in 1915, but he also presents a comprehensive account of his standpoint concerning literary authors such as Romain Rolland (1915), Henrik Pontoppidan (1917) and Karl Gjellerup (1917).
Sometimes Hjärne also touches on issues of principle relating to the literature prize, partly because of the impact of world events. The most striking is the detailed discussion found at the beginning of the 1914 report. Several of the foremost spokesmen for the sciences, scholarship and arts on both sides – indeed several of the Laureates, in particular Maeterlinck and Hauptmann, Eucken and Kipling – have clashed and attacked each other acrimoniously, which has raised the question of what was going to happen to international cultural relationships at the end of the war. Therefore, in Hjärne's opinion, in awarding the prize the Academy should endeavour to mitigate the abuses and excesses that result from "nationalistic tendencies in contemporary literature and the struggle for power in general" and in its award of the prize avoid appearing to favour any particular nation. Instead it should assert "the transcendence of literature over the political unrest of the period" and function as "the international arbitrator of scholarship […] refusing to allow its serenity to be disturbed by contact with profane concerns".
When in 1922 Per Hallström began his long tenure of the chairmanship of the Committee, the character of the reports changes. They are now shorter than they were and as there is no shortage of nominations, at least during the 1930s, this means that most of the candidates are dealt with relatively concisely. The most important exceptions can be found in some of the earliest reports: in 1922 when the two main candidates Jacinto Benavente and William Butler Yeats are weighed against each other, in 1924 and 1926 when the focus is on George Bernard Shaw and in 1927 when the candidature of Kostis Palmas is dealt with. In addition, mention can be made of a relatively comprehensive treatment of the oeuvre of the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno in the 1935 report.
The concise treatment of the award proposals also means that the reports become more uniform. One example will be cited here to illustrate this, it refers to a candidate nominated for the first time:
No. 4. René Béhaine. The expert appraisal provides a detailed analysis of Histoire d'une société, a cycle of novels that seems to be the writer's only, and as yet uncompleted, work and this analysis leads to a definite rejection of the nomination. The Committee members have through their own perusal of more or less extensive sections of these works reached the same verdict. [1937]
The wording quoted above is relatively courteous. This is the normal tone but at times the Committee can express itself considerably more bluntly:
No. 28. Lion Feuchtwanger. The worldwide reputation gained so rapidly by the historical novels of this German writer has not been found in the expert appraisal to correspond to any genuine literary value. This can probably be explained by the current taste for brutal effects and the inability of the general public to discriminate between the authentic and the spurious, or rather its predilection for crude deceit. The Committee's members definitely recommend rejection of this proposal. [1930]
When Anders Österling assumed the chairmanship of the Nobel Committee its routines were altered to some extent, and this is reflected in the form taken by its reports. From 1947, these reports conclude with the presentation of the specific opinions of the members of the Committee in which they "each deal with the proposals that above all have aroused interest and seem pertinent". After presenting these points of view, the chairman ends the report with his summary of the overall opinion of the Committee.
Nobel's Will and the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation
The prescript in Nobel's will that the literature prize is to be awarded to the writer who has produced "the most distinguished work of an ideal tendency" is echoed in reports produced throughout the period and appears in various guises:
"more than most represents what the testator called "the ideal" in literature" [on Sully Prudhomme, 1901]
"cannot however be considered to embody the noble idealism that should characterise those awarded the Nobel Prize in literature" [on Anatole France, 1910]
"one cannot deny him the idealism required of a winner of the Nobel Prize" [on H.G. Wells, 1921]
"that he lacks to an unusual extent, hitherto at least, the idealistic tendencies continually invoked in this context" [on Alberto Moravia, 1949]
Equally often the reports refer to issues relating to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation. In 1902, when a decision had to be made on candidates like Herbert Spencer and Theodor Mommsen, there was already discussion of the interpretation of Article 2 of the Statutes, which stipulates that the prize can also be awarded “to other writings which may claim to possess literary value by reason of their form or their mode of exposition”. Subsequently this issue was mainly discussed in relation to works of history and philosophy but it could also involve literary history and religion. One consistent feature is the extreme unwillingness to extend the scope of the Committee’s judgements. Among other candidates prevented by similar arguments from being awarded the prize can be mentioned the historian Guglielmo Ferrero, the literary critic Ramon Menéndez Pidal, James Frazer, who wrote on the anthropology of religion, and the philosophers Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Benedetto Croce.
The Committee determined, especially towards the end of this period, that the statutes do not forbid the Academy to award the prize posthumously provided that the candidate had been nominated as prescribed. This was the justification offered for the posthumous award to Erik Axel Karlfeldt in 1931. On one occasion a decision had to be made on no fewer than three such cases, in 1945 when Franz Werfel, Johan Huizinga and Paul Valéry had all died during the year. After 1931, however, the Committee consistently refrained from recommending the Academy to award the prize posthumously. (According to the current regulations the prize may only be awarded posthumously if the decision has been made prior to the prizewinner's death.)
Dividing the Prize?
It would be reasonable to presume that the idea of dividing the prize has been discussed more frequently than the decisions suggest. One or two cases have even come to light earlier, for instance when a proposal to divide the prize between the Norwegians Ibsen and Bjørnson was discussed in 1902 and the suggestion made in 1905 that Sienkiewicz should share the prize with another Polish writer, Eliza Orzeszkowa. But as time passed such proposals were made less frequently. In his 1948 report, Anders Österling refers, en passant, to the possibility of the prize being shared by T.S. Eliot and Angelos Sikelianos but rejects it immediately "as where both are concerned it would certainly be considered a disparagement".
Members of the Academy among those Nominated
One particular problem is of course posed by the candidates who are at the same time members of the Academy. In virtually every case it appears that they have declined nomination and a routine has been established which means that they are not subjected to the appraisal of either an expert or the Committee. Instead the whole assessment process is referred to the Academy in its entirety and therefore is not open to our scrutiny.
National and Political Considerations
In spite of Nobel's express injunction against national considerations, these cannot at times be avoided. During the early years in particular, there was great concern to avoid awards that might give the impression that any particular country was favoured. After Sully Prudhomme had been awarded the prize in 1901, there was reluctance to award it to Frédéric Mistral in the following year. And the award to Mistral in 1904 spoiled in its turn the chances of Albert Sorel in 1905 and Gaston Boissier in 1906. Similarly the award to André Gide in 1947 posed an obstacle to the candidature of Georges Duhamel in the following year.
Sometimes writers are nominated for the Nobel Prize on more or less nationalistic grounds and in some quarters veritable campaigns are launched for a national literary hero. In 1905 there is already mention of "impugnment of the Academy in Italian newspapers from somewhat obscure sources" as a result of the award of the previous year's prize to Frédéric Mistral and José Echegaray and not to Giosuè Carducci. Spanish support for the candidature of Jacinto Benavente in 1921 was also described by the Committee in terms that enable us to discern that the secrecy required of those submitting nominations was not always observed so scrupulously.
In the reports it is repeatedly observed that the Academy's decision on the award of the prize should be made with no consideration of political factors, a principle, however, that cannot always be maintained. This issue became most acute in connection with the two world wars. In the 1914 report Hjärne comments, as has already been observed, on the virulent feuds with nationalistic overtones conducted during the war between writers on both sides. In the following year he goes into this subject in more detail and writers he identifies in particular are Henri Bergson, Émile Faguet, Paul Bourget and Émile Verhaeren.
In an individual opinion submitted in September 1939 it is pointed out with reference to Hermann Hesse that he became a Swiss citizen long before the Nazis assumed power in Germany and therefore not for political reasons, so that awarding him the prize should not be received badly in Germany. On the other hand, the Committee rejected Winston Churchill's candidature in 1948 on the grounds that the prize "would acquire a political rather than literary import. A gesture of this kind could easily, in the light of Sweden's justly or unjustly criticised stance during the Second World War, be misconstrued."
In the advocacy for Hesse he is characterised as "a dignified and sympathetically unconventional representative of hard-pressed but tenacious humanism". Comments of this kind on the contemporary world are not unusual in the Nobel Committee's reports and this applies not only to current political circumstances but also the general zeitgeist and prevailing literary tastes.
Specific Works or an Entire Oeuvre?
The lack of good candidates was a problem that became obvious mainly during the 1920s. One recourse discussed at that time in the Nobel Committee was to emphasise one precept in the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulating that the prize was to be awarded to "works" and not to an entire oeuvre, which it was hoped would make it possible to avoid taking responsibility for the inferior works of an uneven writer. This is what happened for example in 1924 when it was decided to disregard the rest of Wladyslaw Reymont's works and he was explicitly awarded the prize for the novel The Peasants. But because subsequently it was decided more or less consistently not to award the prize for any single work, sometimes there are fears that the Academy will be considered to have based its decision on the weaker aspects of the Laureate's oeuvre as well. Considerations of this kind posed obstacles to the candidatures of Arnold Bennett, for example, in 1926, Maxim Gorky in 1928 and John Masefield in 1935.
Nobel's wording in his will that the prize was to be awarded to a work published during the "preceding year" was formulated less stringently in the statutes but this does not mean that the age of the work for which the award is made is always unproblematic. One well-known example is the 1929 award to Thomas Mann, when the Academy created a sensation by referring in its motivation not to the relatively recent The Magic Mountain but to a work of his youth, Buddenbrooks, published as early as 1901.
Reward or Support?
What is the Nobel Prize in literature intended to do? Should the prize be a reward for a finished performance or should it provide support and encouragement? This is a question that arises in the Committee at times during the end of this period. In 1932 one member asserts in an individual appraisal that awarding the prize to John Galsworthy, a "popular and world-famous celebrity whose approachable cycle of novels has been read and appreciated everywhere", will not have "the slightest significance either for him or for literature"; on the other hand should the Academy award the prize to Paul Ernst it will be rewarding "a writer with a distinctive, independent personality who stands aloof from the din of the marketplace". Fifteen years later the Committee's reluctance to endorse Ernest Hemingway's candidature was based in part on the feeling that it had not been able to "discount the thought that in this case the prize would be an arid gesture as the amount involved is undoubtedly insignificant when measured against the standards of American success".
The Award Decisions
Normally the Nobel Committee's reports concluded with a recommendation to the Academy, endorsed either by the entire Committee or a majority of its members. On a few occasions the Committee has been so divided that no majority has been attained for any of the candidates.
To what extent did the Academy follow the recommendations of its Nobel Committee? While Wirsén was chairman, on the whole the Academy adopted its proposals. The exceptions were 1904 when the Committee recommended Mistral on his own but in the end he shared the prize with Echegaray, 1908 when the Committee recommended Swinburne but the prize was awarded instead to Rudolf Eucken, the philosopher, and 1909, when after a great deal of bitter contention in the Committee and in the Academy the prize was finally awarded to Selma Lagerlöf.
During the following decade, which coincides on the whole with Hjärne's incumbency as chairman, there was less consistency. In 1914, 1915, 1918 and 1919 the prize was reserved until the following year, and two of the prizes, for 1914 and 1918, were never awarded but reinvested. On the whole the recommendations of the Committee failed to find favour with the Academy during this period. In 1913 the French literary scholar Émile Faguet had been proposed for the prize, but the Academy preferred the newly discovered up-and-coming writer Rabindranath Tagore. The 1915 prize was not awarded to the Committee's candidate Benito Pérez Galdós but to Romain Rolland nor in 1916 to its two Danish recommendations, Karl Gjellerup and Jakob Knudsen, but to Heidenstam, a Swede.
From 1920 onwards there is greater agreement between the Nobel Committee and the Academy. Disregarding 1921, when the Committee proposed Galsworthy but the Academy preferred Anatole France, the Committee's proposals became the Academy's decisions up until 1928. In that year the Academy admittedly awarded the prize to the Norwegian writer recommended by the Committee, Sigrid Undset, but the prize reserved in 1927 went to Henri Bergson and not to the candidate who after Undset had received the Committee's strongest support, Maxim Gorky.
The 1930s are characterised by a relatively pronounced lack of correspondence between the proposals of the Nobel Committee and the Academy's decisions. The awards to John Galsworthy in 1932 and Luigi Pirandello in 1934 are in actual fact the only two which followed the recommendation of the Committee. It can be seen, for instance, that a majority of the Committee advocated the Flemish writer Stijn Streuvels for two years in succession, but in 1937 he had to give way to Roger Martin du Gard and in 1938 to a new discovery, Pearl Buck.
After the award to Sillanpää in 1939, the Nobel Awards were cancelled entirely for the first few years of the war. However, the work of the Nobel Committee continued as before and in 1940 and 1942 it proposed Gabriela Mistral, who was finally awarded the prize when her name was suggested for the third time in 1945. However, the award of the prize in the previous year to Johannes V. Jensen had already re-established congruity between recommendation and decision and for the rest of the decade the Academy demonstrated its willingness to follow the proposals of the Nobel Committee even when it became increasingly bold and submitted previously almost unthinkable names such as Hermann Hesse, André Gide and T.S. Eliot.
*
The purely literary criteria that have determined the standpoints adopted by the Committee have also varied from one period to another and this too is reflected in its reports. However this is a subject that, like the impact of trends in literary criticism and the history of ideas on its work, lies beyond the scope of this survey.
Bibliography
Kjell Espmark: The Nobel Prize in Literature. A Study of the Criteria behind the Choices. Boston, Mass. 1991: G. K. Hall & Co. 211 pp.
Sture Allén & Kjell Espmark: The Nobel Prize in Literature. An Introduction. Stockholm 2001: Swedish Academy. 58 pp.
Nobelpriset i litteratur. Nomineringar och utlåtanden 1901–1950. ['The Nobel Prize in Literature. Nominations and the Nobel Committee's Reports 1901–1950.'] Ed. Bo Svensén. I: 1901–1920. xliii + 489 pp. II: 1921–1950. 529 pp. Stockholm 2001: Swedish Academy.
Using Children's Literature to Understand Civics Concepts
Using Children's Literature to Understand Civics Concepts
by
Anabelle Gervais O’Malley, NBCT
Brandywine School District
Mt. Pleasant Elementary School
Young children enter school with many experiences. They have heard the word “no” from the time they were infants but have rarely explored notions of authority and governance on a formal level. Although rules and expectations surround their daily lives, young children have yet to examine how they fit into the democratic context. I have always felt that my students needed to play a role in designing classroom rules. This year, however, I knew that I wanted to incorporate an even deeper understanding about civics concepts into this process. I decided to do so using children’s literature.
In developing the unit, I strove to lay the foundation for an understanding of how our political system works and how the legislature operates. In order for young children to gain this understanding, they need to participate in activities that are meaningful to them. I knew that creating our classroom rules was something that was of utmost importance during the first few days of school. I wanted to develop the ideas of authority, rules, and justice. These ideas could then be built upon throughout the year as the children learned that they have a voice that could facilitate change in classroom issues.
Laws and rules are needed to guide behavior and establish order in our country. Students, like adults, must deal with rules and laws all of the time. Understanding the purposes of rules and laws and how rules and laws serve similar purposes is fundamental for young citizens. Children need to learn that there are several purposes for having rules and laws. Firstly, rules and laws describe acceptable and unacceptable behavior for citizens. Secondly, they provide order, predictability, and security. Thirdly, they assign burdens and responsibilities. Lastly, they limit the power of the people in authority. Once students have gained this understanding they can begin to see that our government can be described as the people and groups who have the authority to make, carry out and enforce laws, and manage disputes.
I helped my students grasp these complex concepts by turning to literature. Children can relate to characters in books, and I wanted to be able to help them construct their understanding of civics concepts through discussions of the characters’ thoughts and actions. We started out by reading the book Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes (1996). In this story, Lilly brings a special purse to class and has it taken away by the teacher. We discussed the classroom rules in the story and their purposes. During our discussion the children were able to look at both Lilly’s and the teacher’s points of view and surmise why each acted as she did. We discussed the fact that a rule is a “guideline for behavior.” Next, the children brainstormed a list of rules that they follow at home and talked about why rules are important and need to be followed. Finally, we looked at guidelines for good rules and compared their home rules to this chart. Are the rules clear, easy to understand, enforceable and fair? Are the rules explained to everyone who needs to follow them?
This activity proved to be important as the children began to see rules in a new light. They started to see that rules are meant to be helpful, even though they may not always like them. The children easily put themselves in Lilly’s place, but could also understand the consequences of her actions.
The next book we looked at was Better Not Get Wet, Jesse Bear (Carlstrom, 1988). In this story, Jesse bear does a variety of things on a hot summer day and is repeatedly told by his parents that he “better not get wet.” Things change at the end when he puts on his bathing suit to go swimming and is told that he “better get wet.” My goal in using this book was to help the children understand the purposes for rules as well as their application to particular settings and situations. As we read through the story, I paused several times to ask the students if “don’t get wet” was a good rule in the particular situation. Of course, when Jesse bear is washing dishes and watering the garden, the children could see that the rule certainly was applicable. Finally, the students were able to see that the rule about not getting wet didn’t make much sense when Jesse Bear went swimming. We began to think about other rules and when they may or may not be applicable. The children worked in small groups and were given the task of deciding when a certain rule would and wouldn’t apply. Some of the rules included, “No talking in class,” “No tattling,” and “Stay in your seat.” After identifying situations in which the rules would or would not apply, the children were asked to rewrite the rules so that they would meet our “Guidelines for Good Rules.” “No talking in class” became “Talk softly in class when you are working. Listen when someone else is talking.” “No tattling” became “Solve little problems by yourself.” “Stay in your seat” became “Get your materials and get right to work.” The beauty of this activity was that it helped the children understand that there must be some room for discretion in the enforcement of rules and laws. They also began to see that it is rarely easy to create a rule that fits every situation. Issues of fairness and safety were raised as the children formed and supported their opinions about the rules. At appropriate and relevant levels, my students were developing an understanding of the roles of legislators and judges.
The next book we explored was Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto (1993). In this story a little girl wears her mother’s diamond ring without permission and loses it as she makes tamales for a family celebration. Needless to say, she and her siblings end up eating more than their share of tamales as they look for the ring. This book helps to introduce the terms authority and power to the students. We discussed who made the rule and what the rule meant in terms of wearing the ring. I then introduced the term governance and pointed out that Maria’s mother made the rule to govern the family so as to protect her children from making mistakes and to safeguard their property. My students saw that the mother had the right to make the rule, and we discussed why. We then began to think of other people who have the right to make rules for them or tell them what to do. They came up with people such as the principal, a bus driver, and the teacher. Next we talked about people who do not have the right to dictate their behavior. They had many responses and stories to tell at this point. After they told their stories, we created a chart. One side was labeled authority and the other side power. We talked about how we respect and support people who hold authority. Conversely, we examined the need to use good judgment in not allowing others to use their power to control us in inappropriate ways. All too often, young children who lack assertiveness are bullied by others who abuse their power. One of the skills that I hoped to instill was for children to be able to recognize the difference between authority and power and to respond appropriately. Finally, we talked about how parents, teachers, and legislators are just some examples of the people who possess authority.
The next book that I used in our unit was Applemando’s Dreams by Patricia Pollaco (1991). In this story Applemando lives in an ordinary village but he has extraordinary dreams that his true friends are able to see. When it rains his vivid dreams stick to surfaces and brighten up the drab village. I used this book as a springboard for helping the children think about their hopes and dreams for the coming school year. After writing and illustrating their ideas, the children shared their work with the group. I elicited the idea that rules can serve as tools in our attempt to fulfill our hopes and dreams. Children worked in small groups to list as many rules as they could that would be important to help our class run fairly, peacefully, and orderly. All of the ideas were listed on a chart and the children saw that there were far too many rules to remember. We next grouped the rules into categories and named the categories (i.e., Rules About Classroom Materials, Rules About Being in Charge of Yourself, etc). Finally, the children were able to come up with four general rules that encompassed all of the other rules. These four rules were (1) Be in control of yourself (2) Show respect to others
(3) Show respect to others’ things (4) Try to have fun. The last rule caused a great debate. Originally it was “Have fun” but some students objected saying that you can’t possibly have fun doing everything in school, but you could try. Once the rules had been written, we took a vote to see who could abide by these rules. All of the children agreed that they were fair, helpful, and met the criteria we had established for good rules. I explained to the children that this was our Class Constitution, and we all signed it. The Constitution now hangs in a prominent place and is the focus of many class meetings.
The final lesson of our civics unit involved understanding the consequences of breaking rules and understanding what makes these consequences fair. This is the foundation of justice and lays the groundwork for later investigations into the judicial system. We read the book Arnie and the Stolen Markers (Carlson, 1987). In the book, Arnie spends all of his money only to realize that he still wants a set of markers. When a shopkeeper’s back is turned, Arnie steals the markers and races home. Unfortunately (for him), Arnie’s mother discovers his deed. At this point I paused to engage the students in a reading prediction, asking the children what should and would happen to Arnie. We read to the end of the book and found out that Arnie had to work at the shop until he had paid off the markers. I asked them if they thought Arnie’s punishment was a fair one and why. I introduced the term logical consequence. The children saw that Arnie had to do something to “fix” the situation. We talked about laws for stealing and other laws that they knew. I reminded them that there are people with authority called judges whose job it is to deal with these matters. We then discussed what happens when “big” rules are broken in school. (The teacher or principal sends the student to the interventionist, students are sent home, etc.) I reminded them that “little” hurts happen, too. For example, feelings may get hurt if someone is not allowed to play at recess. Would the same punishments be just or appropriate in those situations? The students and I discussed why. Next, we brainstormed some of the “little” hurts that happen when rules are broken in the classroom. The children were arranged in small groups, and each group was given one of those situations in which “little” hurts occurred; they had to decide on three fair consequences for the infractions. Then they had to come to a consensus about which consequences would be best. We listed thse consequences and used them when minor infractions occurred.
All of the literary selections examined in this article allowed me to take abstract concepts such as rules, laws, governance, authority and justice, and make them accessible to young children. While they will need many more experiences with these concepts in order to understand their deeper meanings and relationship to our form of government, the children were able to grasp the understanding that they had a voice and were part of a democracy in their classroom community.
References
Carlson, N. (1987). Arnie and the Stolen Markers. New York: Viking.
Carlstrom, M. (1988). Better Not Get Wet, Jesse Bear. New York: McMillan.
Henkes, K. (1996). Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. New York: Greenwillow.
Larkin, M. (1998). Law in Your Life: A Publication of Street Law. Cincinnati: West
Educational Publishing.
Pollaco, P. (1991). Applemando’s Dreams. New York: Philomel.
Singleton, L. (1997). C is for Citizenship: Children’s Literature and Civic
Understanding. Boulder: Social Science Consortium.
Soto, G. (1993). Too Many Tamales. New York: Putnam.
English literature
English literature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009)
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world.
This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in English, some notable works listed. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also section, bottom of the page.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Old English
• 2 Middle English literature
• 3 Renaissance literature
• 4 Early Modern period
o 4.1 Elizabethan Era
o 4.2 Jacobean literature
o 4.3 Caroline and Cromwellian literature
o 4.4 Restoration literature
o 4.5 Augustan literature
• 5 18th century
• 6 Romanticism
• 7 Victorian literature
• 8 Modernism
• 9 Post-modern literature
• 10 Views of English literature
• 11 See also
• 12 External links
Old English
Main article: Anglo-Saxon literature
The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon's Hymn). The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably a "milder" adaptation of the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today's newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon peoples remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers. Even without their crudest lines, the Old English war poems, and to a larger extent all Germanic war poems, still smell of blood feuds and their consonant rhymes sound like the smashing of swords under the gloomy northern sky: there is always a sense of imminent danger in the narratives. Sooner or later, all things must come to an end, as Beowulf eventually dies at the hands of the monsters he spends the tale fighting. The feelings of Beowulf that nothing lasts, that youth and joy will turn to death and sorrow entered Christianity and were to dominate the future landscape of English fiction.
Middle English literature
Main article: Middle English literature
Renaissance literature
Main article: English Renaissance
Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance).
Early Modern period
Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain
Elizabethan Era
Main article: Elizabethan literature
Further information: Canons of Renaissance poetry
The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.
The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564-1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe's subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose untimely death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the 'high life' of London's underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the 'accidental stabbing' might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure.
Jacobean literature
After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.
Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.
Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.
Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.
Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 1600s, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.
Caroline and Cromwellian literature
The turbulent years of the mid-17th century, during the reign of Charles I and the subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate, saw a flourishing of political literature in English. Pamphlets written by sympathisers of every faction in the English civil war ran from vicious personal attacks and polemics, through many forms of propaganda, to high-minded schemes to reform the nation. Of the latter type, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes would prove to be one of the most important works of British political philosophy. Hobbes's writings are some of the few political works from the era which are still regularly published while John Bramhall, who was Hobbes's chief critic, is largely forgotten. The period also saw a flourishing of news books, the precursors to the British newspaper, with journalists such as Henry Muddiman, Marchamont Needham, and John Birkenhead representing the views and activities of the contending parties. The frequent arrests of authors and the suppression of their works, with the consequence of foreign or underground printing, led to the proposal of a licensing system. The Areopagitica, a political pamphlet by John Milton, was written in opposition to licensing and is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written.
Specifically in the reign of Charles I (1625 – 42), English Renaissance theatre experienced its concluding efflorescence. The last works of Ben Jonson appeared on stage and in print, along with the final generation of major voices in the drama of the age: John Ford, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. With the closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642, drama was suppressed for a generation, to resume only in the altered society of the English Restoration in 1660.
Other forms of literature written during this period are usually ascribed political subtexts, or their authors are grouped along political lines. The cavalier poets, active mainly before the civil war, owed much to the earlier school of metaphysical poets. The forced retirement of royalist officials after the execution of Charles I was a good thing in the case of Izaak Walton, as it gave him time to work on his book The Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, the book, ostensibly a guide to fishing, is much more: a meditation on life, leisure, and contentment. The two most important poets of Oliver Cromwell's England were Andrew Marvell and John Milton, with both producing works praising the new government; such as Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Despite their republican beliefs they escaped punishment upon the Restoration of Charles II, after which Milton wrote some of his greatest poetical works (with any possible political message hidden under allegory). Thomas Browne was another writer of the period; a learned man with an extensive library, he wrote prolifically on science, religion, medicine and the esoteric.
Restoration literature
Main article: Restoration Literature
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation.
The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.
As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times.
Augustan literature
Main article: Augustan literature
The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730's themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome's transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 - 1750 was called "the Augustan Age" by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope's excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope's Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major artform. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels.
If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift's prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift's A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver's Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his "exile" to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him.
Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This "low" comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned to the playhouse with The Beggar's Opera. Gay's opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay's follow up opera was banned without performance. The Licensing Act 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period's drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control.
An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1749). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson's Clarissa with Tom Jones. Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke.
18th century
Further information: 18th century literature
During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon.
They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.
During the end of the 19th century Ann Radcliffe would be the pioneer of the Gothic Novel. Her novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, sets the tone for the majority of her work, which tended to involve innocent, but heroic young women who find themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles ruled by even more mysterious barons with dark pasts. The Romance of the Forest would follow and her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is considered the ultimate Gothic Novel of the late 18th century.
Increased emphasis on instinct and feeling, rather than judgment and restraint. A growing sympathy for the Middle Ages during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature. Ann Radcliffe's novel would embody all of this in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Romanticism
The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories.
This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning "creativity"), democracy (once disparagingly used as "mob rule"), class (from now also used with a social connotation), art (once just meaning "craft"), culture (once only belonging to farming).
But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines.
The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads". This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural "real" (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (for eg. in "The Idiot Boy"), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").
The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Giaour and The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary Dr. John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the 'year without a summer' of 1816.
Although his is just a short story, Polidori must be credited for introducing The Vampyre, conceived from the same competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.
Shelley had been expelled from college for openly declaring his atheism. He had married a 16-year-old girl, Harriet Westbrook whom he had abandoned soon after for Mary (Harriet took her own life after that). Harriet did not embrace his ideals of free love and anarchism, and was not as educated as to contribute to literary debate. Mary was different: the daughter of philosopher and revolutionary William Godwin, she was intellectually more of an equal, shared some of his ideals and was a feminist like her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women.
One of Percy Shelley's most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature.
Mary Shelley did not go down in history for her poetry, but for giving birth to science fiction: the plot for the novel is said to have come from a nightmare during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta's invention and Luigi Galvani's experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein's chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today's medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although "the monster" is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him.
John Keats did not share Byron's and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. His most remembered work, Ivanhoe, continues to be studied to this day.
In retrospect, we now look back to Jane Austen, who wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman's point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and choosing the right partner in life, with love being above all else. Her most important and popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, would set the model for all Romance Novels to follow. Jane Austen created the ultimate hero and heroine in Darcy and Elizabeth, who must overcome their own stubborn pride and the prejudices they have toward each other, in order to come to a middle ground, where they finally realize their love for one another. In her novels, Jane Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She brought to light not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Jane Austen started a genre that is still followed today. Her works generally are seen as 'realist' and not romantic in the artistic sense.
Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section.
Victorian literature
Main article: Victorian literature
Charles Dickens
It was in the Victorian era (1837-1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope's insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature.
The Bronte sisters were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after their long search to secure publishers.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and others. Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.
Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson, were written for adults but are now generally classified as for children. At the end of the Victorian Era and leading into the Edwardian Era, Helen Beatrix Potter was an English author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to published 23 children's books and become a wealthly woman. Her books along with Lewis Carroll’s are read and published to this day.
Modernism
Main article: Modernist literature
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx's political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats.
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.
Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with "discovering" both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the century's greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse, forms which would dominate English poetry into the twenty-first century.
Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.
Post-modern literature
Main article: Postmodern literature
This section requires expansion.
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon
Views of English literature
"I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber (sc. Old English literature) at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift." - Jorge Luis Borges, 'An Autobiographical Essay', The Aleph & Other Stories