A Critical History of English Literature 9788126162512

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A Critical History of

ENGLISH LITERATURE

A Critical History of

ENGLISH LITERATURE

Dr. Kanchan Jain

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Contents

Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism 3. Feminist Literary Criticism 4. Women’s Writing in English 5. Postmodern Literature 6. Suicide in English Literature 7. Revolutionary Impact of English Literature 8. The New Criticism After Fifty Years: A Memoir Bibliography

Preface

Literature is the art of written work. The word literature literally means: “things made from letters”. Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms—fiction and non-fiction—and two major techniques—poetry and prose. Literature may consist of texts based on factual information (journalistic or non-fiction), a category that may also include polemical works, biography, and reflective essays, or it may consist of texts based on imagination (such as fiction, poetry, or drama). Literature written in poetry emphasizes the aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as sound, symbolism, and metre — to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, ordinary meanings, while literature written in prose applies ordinary grammatical structure and the natural flow of speech. Literature can also be classified according to historical periods, genres, and political influences. While the concept of genre has broadened over the centuries, in general, a genre consists of artistic works that fall within a certain central theme; examples of genre include romance, mystery, crime, fantasy, erotica, and adventure, among others. Important historical periods in English literature include Old English, Middle English, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan era of the 16th century (which includes the Shakespearean era), the 17th Century Restoration period, the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, the Romanticism of the early 19th century, the later 19th Century Victorian, and 20th Century Modernism and Postmodernism. Important intellectual movements that have influenced the study of literature include feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, post-modernism, romanticism, and Marxism. American dramatic literature, by contrast, remained dependent on European models, although many playwrights did attempt to apply these forms to American topics and themes, such as immigrants, westward expansion, temperance, etc. At the same time, American playwrights created several long-lasting American character types,

especially the “Yankee”, the “Negro” and the “Indian”, exemplified by the characters of Jonathan, Sambo and Metamora. In addition, new dramatic forms were created in the Tom Shows, the showboat theatre and the minstrel show. One of the key developments in late-20th-century American literature was the rise to prominence of literature written by and about ethnic minorities beyond African Americans and Jewish Americans, who had already established their literary inheritances. This development came alongside the growth of the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the Ethnic Pride movement, which led to the creation of Ethnic Studies programs in most major universities. These programs helped establish the new ethnic literature as worthy objects of academic study, alongside such other new areas of literary study as women’s literature, gay and lesbian literature, working-class literature, postcolonial literature, and the rise of literary theory as a key component of academic literary study. Students and general readers will find this a comprehensive and lively-minded survey, guide and reference book to the world’s literature in the English language. —Editor

Chapter 1 : Introduction English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Thomas Pynchon is American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian, but all are considered important writers in the history of English literature. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world in countries originally colonized by the British. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practicing English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, the works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world. Until the early 19th century, this article deals with literature from Britain written in English; then America starts to produce major writers and works in literature. In the 20th century America and Ireland produced many of the most significant works of literature in English, and after World War II writers from the former British Empire also began to challenge writers from Britain. Additional information on literature in English from countries other than the UK and Ireland can be found. Old English Literature: 450-1100

Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic tribes in England after the withdrawal of the Romans and “ending soon after the

Norman Conquest” in 1066; that is c.1100-50. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period. Oral tradition was very strong in early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular, and some, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably adapted from 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. Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. The Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity after their arrival in England. The most popular and well-known of Old English poetry is alliterative verse, which uses accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic languages. The epic poem Beowulf, of 3182 alliterative lines, is the most famous work in Old English and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. The only surviving manuscript is the Nowell Codex, the precise date of which is debated, but most estimates place it close to the year 1000. Beowulf is the conventional title, and its composition by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, who is commonly referred to as the “Beowulf poet”, is dated between the 8th and the early 11th century. In the poem, Beowulf, a hero of the Geats in Scandinavia, comes to the help of Hroðgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall (in Heorot) has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel’s mother attacks the hall and is then also defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland in Sweden and later becomes king of the Geats. After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants bury him in a tumulus, a

burial mound, in Geatland. Found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex, is the poem Judith, a retelling of the story found in the Latin Vulgate Bible’s Book of Judith about the beheader of the Assyrian general Holofernes. The Old English Martyrology is a Mercian collection of hagiographies. Ælfric of Eynsham was a prolific 10th century writer of hagiographies and homilies. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous: twelve are known by name from Medieval sources, but only four of those are known by their vernacular works with any certainty: Caedmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf. Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known. Cædmon’s only known surviving work is Cædmon’s Hymn, which probably dates from the late 7th century. The Hymn itself was composed between 658 and 680, recorded in the earlier part of the 8th century, and survives today in at least 14 verified manuscript copies. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. The poem, The Dream of the Rood, was inscribed upon the Ruthwell Cross. Chronicles contained a range of historical and literary accounts, and a notable example is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part, though not all are of equal historical value and none of them is the original version. The oldest seems to have been started towards the end of King Alfred’s reign in the 9th century, and the most recent was written at Peterborough Abbey in 1116. Almost all of the material in the Chronicle is in the form of annals by year, the earliest being dated at 60 BC (the annals’ date for Caesar’s invasions of Britain), and historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point contemporary records begin. The poem Battle of Maldon also deals with history. This is the name given to a work, of uncertain date, celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking

invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem are extant; both the beginning and the ending are lost. The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. As often the case in Anglo-Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled. The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord’s band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord. Another poem with a religious theme, The Seafarer is also recorded in the Exeter Book, one of the four surviving manuscripts, and consists of 124 lines, followed by the single word “Amen”. In the past it has been frequently referred to as an elegy, a poem that mourns a loss, or has the more general meaning of a simply sorrowful piece of writing. Some scholars, however, have argued that the content of the poem also links it with Sapiential Books, or Wisdom Literature. In his account of the poem in the Cambridge Old Eng lish Reader, published in 2004, Richard Marsden writes, “It is an exhortatory and didactic poem, in which the miseries of winter seafaring are used as a metaphor for the challenge faced by the committed Christian […]” (p. 221). Classical antiquity was not forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England and several Old English poems are adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is King Alfred’s (849-899) 9th century translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. The Metres of Boethius are a series of Old English alliterative poems adapted from the Latin metra of the Consolation of Philosophy soon after Alfred’s prose translation. Middle English Literature: 1100-1500

After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common, and under the influence of the new aristocracy, Law French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. As the invaders integrated, their language and literature mingled with that of the natives and the Norman dialects of the ruling classes became AngloNorman. At the same time Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual

transition into Middle English. Political power was no longer in English hands, so that the West Saxon literary language had no more influence than any other dialect and Middle English literature was written in the many dialects that correspond to the region, history, culture, and background of individual writers. In this period religious literature continued to enjoy popularity and Hagiographies were written, adapted and translated, for example, The Life of Saint Audrey, Eadmer’s (ca. 1060 – ca. 1126) contemporary biography of Anselm of Canterbury, and the South English Legendary. At the end of the 12th century, Layamon’s Brut adapted Wace to make the first English language work to discuss the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was also the first historiography written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In this century a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is the earliest form of English which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, albeit not easily. Middle English Bible translations, notably Wyclif’s Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language. Wycliffe’s Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English, that were made under the direction of, or at the instigation of John Wycliffe. They appeared between approximately 1382 to 1395. These Bible translations were the chief inspiration and chief cause of the Lollard movement, a preReformation movement that rejected many of the distinctive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The term “Lollard” refers to the followers of John Wycliffe, a prominent theologian who was dismissed from the University of Oxford in 1381 for criticism of the Church. In the Middle Ages most Western Christian people encountered the Bible only in the form of oral versions of scriptures, verses and homilies in Latin (other sources were mystery plays, usually conducted in the vernacular, and popular iconography). Though relatively few people could read at this time, Wycliffe’s idea was to translate the Bible into the vernacular, saying “it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence”. Although unauthorized, the work was popular and Wycliffite Bible texts are the

most common manuscript literature in Middle English and almost 200 manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible survive. Another literary genre, that of Romances, appear in English from the 13th century, with King Horn and Havelock the Dane, based on Anglo-Norman originals such as the Romance of Horn (ca.1170), but it was in the 14th century that major writers in English first appeared. These are William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer and the so-called ‘Pearl Poet’, whose most famous work is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Langland’s Piers Plowman (written ca. 1360–1387) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Plowman (William’s Vision of Piers Plowman) is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem, written in unrhymed alliterative verse. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance. It is one of the better-known Arthurian stories of an established type known as the “beheading game”. Developing from Welsh, Irish and English tradition, Sir Gawain highlights the importance of honour and chivalry. It is an important poem in the romance genre, which typically involves a hero who goes on a quest that tests his prowess. “Preserved in the same manuscript with Sir Gawayne were three other poems, now generally accepted as the work of its author. These are two alliterative poems of moral teaching, “Patience” and “Purity”, and an intricate elegiac poem, Pearl. The author of Sir Gawayne and the other poems is frequently referred to as ‘the Pearl Poet’. “ The English dialect of these poems from the Midlands is markedly different from that of the London-based Chaucer and, though influenced by French in the scenes at court in Sir Gawain, there are in the poems also many dialect words, often of Scandinavian origin, that belonged to northwest England. Middle English lasts up until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. The prolific Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400), whose works were written in Chancery Standard, was the first poet to have been buried in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and

Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. This is a collection of stories written in Middle English (mostly written in verse although some are in prose), that are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. Chaucer is a significant figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules of 1382. At this time literature was being written in various languages in England, including Latin, Norman-French, English, and the he multilingual nature of the audience for literature in the 14th century can be illustrated by the example of John Gower (c. 1330 – October 1408). A contemporary of William Langland and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer, Gower is remembered primarily for three major works, the Mirroir de l’Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, three long poems written in Anglo-Norman, Latin and, Middle English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes. Significant religious works were also created in the 14th century, including works by an anonymous author in the manuscript called the Katherine Group, and by Julian of Norwich ((ca.1342 – ca. 1416), and Richard Rolle. Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1393) is believed to be the first published book written by a woman in the English language; it chronicles, to some extent, her extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia. A major work from the 15th century is Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, which was printed by Caxton in 1485. This is compilation of some French and English Arthurian romances, and was among the earliest books printed in England. it was popular and influential in the later revival of interest in the Arthurian legends. Medieval Theatre

In the Middle Ages, drama in the vernacular languages of Europe may have emerged from religious enactments of the liturgy. Mystery plays were presented on the porch of the cathedrals or by strolling

players on feast days. Miracle and mystery plays, along with moralities and interludes, later evolved into more elaborate forms of drama, such as was seen on the Elizabethan stages. Another form of medieval theatre was the mummers’ plays, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality. Mystery plays and miracle plays (sometimes distinguished as two different forms, although the terms are often used interchangeably) are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They developed from the 10th to the 16th century, reaching the height of their popularity in the 15th century before being rendered obsolete by the rise of professional theatre. The name derives from mystery used in its sense of miracle, but an occasionally quoted derivation is from misterium, meaning craft, a play performed by the craft guilds. There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays from the late medieval period; although these collections are sometimes referred to as “cycles,” it is now believed that this term may attribute to these collections more coherence than they in fact possess. The most complete is the York cycle of forty-eight pageants. They were performed in the city of York, from the middle of the fourteenth century until 1569. There are also the Towneley plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true ‘cycle’ of plays and most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during the late Middle Ages until 1576. Besides the Middle English drama, there are three surviving plays in Cornish known as the Ordinalia. These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity,

the Raising of Lazarus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Other pageants included the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets, Christ’s Baptism, the Temptation in the Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds. Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, the morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment, which represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre. In their own time, these plays were known as “interludes”, a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various moral attributes who try to prompt him to choose a Godly life over one of evil. The plays were most popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. The Somonyng of Everyman (The Summoning of Everyman) (c.1509-19), usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15thcentury English morality play. Like John Bunyan’s allegory Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Everyman examines the question of Christian salvation through the use of allegorical characters. The play is the allegorical accounting of the life of Everyman, who represents all mankind. All the characters are also allegorical, each personifying an abstract idea such as Fellowship, (material) Goods, and Knowledge and the conflict between good and evil is dramatized by the interactions between characters. English Renaissance: 1500-1660

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 English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. Like most of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow in penetrating England, and the Elizabethan

era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. Elizabethan and Jacobean Period (1558-1625)

During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and then James I (1603–25), in the late 16th and early 17th century, a London-centred culture, that was both courtly and popular, produced great poetry and drama. English playwrights combined the influence of the Medieval theatre with the Renaisance’s rediscovery of the Roman dramatists, Seneca, for tragedy, and Plautus and Terence, for comedy. Italy was an important source for Renaissance ideas in England and the linguist and lexicographer John Florio (1553–1625), whose father was Italian, was a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, had furthermore brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. He was also the translator of Frenchman Montaigne into English. This Italian influence can also be found in the poetry of Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), one of the earliest English Renaissance poets. He was responsible for many innovations in English poetry and, alongside Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/1517-1547), introduced the sonnet from Italy into England in the early 16th century. Wyatt’s professed object was to experiment with the English tongue, to civilize it, to raise its powers to those of its neighbours. While a significant amount of his literary output consists of translations and imitations of sonnets by the Italian poet Petrarch, he also wrote sonnets of his own. Wyatt took subject matter from Petrarch’s sonnets, but his rhyme schemes make a significant departure. Petrarch’s sonnets consist of an “octave”, rhyming abba abba, followed, after a turn (volta) in the sense, by a sestet with various rhyme schemes, however his poems never ended in a rhyming couplet. Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee. This marks the beginnings of English sonnet with 3 quatrains and a closing couplet. Edmund Spenser (ca. 1552-1599) was one of the most important poet of this period, author of The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. Another major figure was Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was an English poet, courtier and soldier, and is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan Age. His works include

Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poetry, and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion (1567-1620), became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. The earliest Elizabethan plays includes Gorboduc (1561) by Sackville and Norton and Thomas Kyd’s (1558–94) The Spanish Tragedy (1592). Gorboduc is notable especially as the first verse drama in English to employ blank verse, and for the way it developed elements, from the earlier morality plays and Senecan tragedy, in the direction which would be followed by later playwrights. The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582 and 1592. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English literature theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to, or parodied, in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the playwithin-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one of Shakespeare’s primary sources for Hamlet. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 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, like the “university wits” who monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and versatile, and he surpassed the “professionals”, like Robert Greene, who mocked this “Shake-scene” of low origins. Shakespeare wrote plays in a variety of genres, including histories, tragedies, comedies and the late romances, or tragicomedies. His early classical and Italianate comedies, like A Comedy of Errors, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of

his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and rustic comic scenes. Shakespeare’s next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, can be problematic because of how it portrays Shylock, a vengeful Jewish moneylender. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare’s sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar, based on Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which introduced a new kind of drama. In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called “problem plays”, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as a number of his best known tragedies, including Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra. The plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare’s part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.

Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet, which made significant changes to Petrarch’s model. A collection of 154 by sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKESPEARES SONNETS: Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker’s love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker’s mistress; and pun on the poet’s name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the “little love-god” Cupid. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Marlowe’s (1564–1593) subject matter is different from Shakespeare’s as it focuses more on the moral drama of the Renaissance man than any other thing. Drawing on German lore, Marlowe introduced the story of Faust to England in his play Doctor Faustus (c.1592), about a scientist and magician who, obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man’s technological power to its limits, sells his soul to the Devil. Faustus makes use of “the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and damnation, and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles.” Thomas Dekker (c.1570-1632) was, between 1598 and 1602, involved in about forty plays, usually in collaboration. He is particularly remembered for the The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), a work where he appears to be the sole author. Dekker is noted for his “realistic portrayal of daily London life and for “his sympathy for the poor and oppressed”.

After Shakespeare’s death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era. Jonson’s aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages and his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioural 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. However, the stock types of Latin literature were an equal influence. Jonson therefore tends to create types or caricatures. However, in his best work, characters are “so vitally rendered as to take on a being that transcends the type”. Jonson’s famous comedy Volpone (1605 or 1606)) shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice. Other major plays by Jonson are Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). Others who followed Jonson’s style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the popular comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (probably 1607-8), a satire of the rising middle class, 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 princesses’ heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher’s skills was that of portraying of 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, which was popularized in the Elizabethan era by Thomas Kyd (1558–94), and then further developed later by John Webster (? 1578-?1632). Webster’s most famous plays are The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613). Other revenge tragedies include The Changeling written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Atheist’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, Christopher Marlow’s The Jew of Malta, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois by George Chapman, The Malcontent (ca. 1603) of John

Marston and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Besides Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is a revenge tragedy. George Chapman (?1559-?1634) also wrote a couple revenge tragedies, but today he is remembered chiefly for his famous translation in 1616 of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. This was the first ever complete translations of either poem into the English language. The translation had a profound influence on English literature and inspired John Keats’s famous sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816). The most important prose work of the early 17th century was the King James Bible. This, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. This represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale, and it became the standard Bible of the Church of England. The project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Besides Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the major poets of the early 17th century included the Metaphysical poets: John Donne (1572– 1631), George Herbert (1593–1633), Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw. Their style was characterized by wit and metaphysical conceits, that is far-fetched or unusual similes or metaphors, such as in Andrew Marvell’s comparison of the soul with a drop of dew, in an expanded epigram format, with the use of simple verse forms, octosyllabic couplets, quatrains or stanzas in which length of line and rhyme scheme enforce the sense. The specific definition of wit which Johnson applied to the school was: “a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” Their poetry diverged from the style of their times, containing neither images of nature nor allusions to classical mythology, as were common, and there are often allusions to scientific or geographical discoveries. There is also a frequent concern with religious subjects in their poetry Late Renaissance: 1625-60

The Metaphysical poets John Donne (1572–1631) and George Herbert (1593–1633 were still alive after 1625, and later in the 17th century a second generation of metaphysical poets were writing, including Richard Crashaw (1613–49), Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637–1674) and Henry Vaughan (1622– 1695). The Cavalier poets were another important group of 17th century poets, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the English Civil War (1642–51). (King Charles reigned from 1625 and was executed 1649). The best known of the Cavalier poets are Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew and Sir John Suckling. They “were not a formal group, but all were influenced by” Ben Jonson. Most of the Cavalier poets were courtiers, with notable exceptions. For example, Robert Herrick was not a courtier, but his style marks him as a Cavalier poet. Cavalier works make use of allegory and classical allusions, and are influence by Latin authors Horace, Cicero and Ovid. John Milton (1608–74) “was the last great poet of the English Renaissance” and published a number of works before 1660, including A L’Allegro,1631; Il Penseroso, 1634; Comus (a masque), 1638; and Lycidas, (1638). However, his major epic works, including Paradise Lost (1667) were published in the Restoration period. Neo-Classical Period: 1660-1798 Restoration Age: 1660-1700

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 and the holy meditations of Robert 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. John Milton is one of the greatest English poets, wrote at this time of religious flux and political upheaval. Milton best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1671). Among other important poems are: L’Allegro,1631; Il Penseroso 1634; Comus (a masque), 1638; Lycidas; Paradise Regained, 1671; Samson Agonistes, 1671. Milton’s poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica, written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history’s most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press. William Hayley’s 1796 biography called him the “greatest English author”, and he remains generally regarded “as one of the preeminent writers in the English language”. 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. John Dryden (1631-1700) was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. He established the heroic couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful

satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrine and triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet. Dryden’s greatest achievements were in satiric verse in works like the mock-heroic MacFlecknoe (1682). W. H. Auden referred to him as “the master of the middle style” that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident from the elegies that it inspired. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was heavily influenced by Dryden, and often borrowed from him; other writers in the 18th century were equally influenced by both Dryden and Pope. Though Ben Jonson had been poet laureate to James I, this was not then a formal position and the formal title of Poet Laureate, as a royal office, was first conferred by letters patent on John Dryden in 1670. The post then became a regular British institution. 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 two 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 towards 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-1690s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve’s 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. Augustan Literature (1700-1750)

During the 18th century 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 by people like Isaac Newton and the writings of Descartes, John Locke and Francis 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 Encyclopaedia of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.

The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730s 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. It was during this time that poet James Thomson (1700–48) produced his melancholy The Seasons (1728–30) and Edward Young (1681-1765) wrote his poem Night Thoughts (1742), though the most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope (1688-1744). 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 mockheroic was at its zenith. Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712–17) and The Dunciad (1728-43) are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written. Pope also translated the Iliad (1715–20) and the Odyssey (1725-6). Since his death, Pope has been in a constant state of reevaluation. His high artifice, strict prosody, and, at times, the sheer cruelty of his satire were an object of derision for the Romantic poets, and it was not until the 1930s that his reputation was revived. Pope is now considered the dominant poetic voice of his century, a model of prosodic elegance, biting wit, and an enduring, demanding moral force. 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. Periodical essays bloomed into journalistic writings; such as Samuel Johnson’s “Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput”, titled to disguise the actual proceeding of parliament as it was illegal for any Parliamentary Reports to be reproduced in print. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major art form. 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 were dominant in one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift was in 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. He believed that 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 gulls. 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 attacks on pride in Gulliver’s Travels, only left safe the individual who was in constant fear and humility. 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 based on Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay’s follow up opera was banned without a 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 (1740). 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. Age of Sensibility: 1750-1798

This period is also sometimes described as the “Age of Johnson”. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson has been described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”. He is also the subject of “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). His early works include the poems “London” and “his most impressive poem” “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749). Both poems are modelled on Juvenal’s satires. After nine years of work, Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship.” This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson’s was viewed as the preeminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare’s plays (1765), and the widely read tale Rasselas (1759). In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1786). Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th and 18th century poets. Through works such as the “Dictionary, his edition of Shakespeare, and his Lives of the Poets in particular, he helped invent what we now call English Literature”. The Romantic movement in English literature of the early 19th century has its roots in 18th century poetry, the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. This includes the graveyard poets, who were a

number of pre-Romantic English poets, writing in the 1740s and later, whose works are characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, “skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms” in the context of the graveyard. To this was added, by later practitioners, a feeling for the ‘sublime’ and uncanny, and an interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. They are often considered precursors of the Gothic genre. The poets include; Thomas Gray (1716–71), whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) is “the best known product of this kind of sensibility”; William Cowper (1731-1800); Christopher Smart (1722–71); Thomas Chatterton (1752–70); Robert Blair (1699-1746), author of The Grave (1743), “which celebrates the horror of death”; and Edward Young (1683-1765), whose The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (17425), is another “noted example of the graveyard genre”. Other precursors of Romanticism are the poets James Thomson (1700–48) and James Macpherson (1736–96). Significant foreign influences were the Germans Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm Schlegel and French philosopher and writer JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–78). Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is another important influence. The changing landscape, brought about by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, with the expansion of the city and depopulation of the countryside, was another influences on the growth of the Romantic movement in Britain. The poor condition of workers, the new class conflicts and the pollution of the environment, led to a reaction against urbanism and industrialization and a new emphasis on the beauty and value of nature. During the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, created the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work The Mysteries of Udolpho 1795, is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek 1786 by William Beckford, and The

Monk 1796 by Matthew Lewis, were further notable early works in both the gothic and horror literary genres. 19th Century Literature Romanticism (1798-1837)

Various dates are given for the Romantic period in British literature. Here the publishing of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning and the start of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 as its end, even though, for example, William Wordsworth lived until 1850 and both Robert Burns and William Blake published before 1798. The Romantic period was one of major social change in England, because of the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, which took place especially between 1750 and 1850. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: first the Agricultural Revolution, that involved the enclosure of the land, drove workers off the land, and second the Industrial Revolution provided employment “in the factories and mills, operated by machines driven by steampower”. The first major Romantic poets were Robert Burns (1759-1796) and William Blake (1757-1827). Burns was a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a cultural icon in Scotland. As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published in 1786. Among poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world are, “Auld Lang Syne”; “A Red, Red Rose”; “A Man’s A Man for A’ That”; “To a Louse”; “To a Mouse”; “The Battle of Sherramuir”; “Tam o’ Shanter” and “Ae Fond Kiss”. The poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake was largely unrecognised during his lifetime, but he is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within

his work. Among his most important works are Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) “and profound and difficult ‘prophecies’ “ such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804–?11]), and “Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion” (1804–?20). Among the earliest Romantics were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends, including William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) and journalist Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). The 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 Lyrical Ballads (1798). In it Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the “real language of men” and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry, as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility” which “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The poems in Lyrical Ballads were mostly by Wordsworth, although Coleridge contributed the long “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. Coleridge is also especially remembered for “Kubla Khan”, “Frost at Midnight”, “Dejection: an Ode”, “Chistabel” and his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge and Wordsworth, along with Carlyle, were a major influence, through Emerson, on American transcendentalism. Among Wordsworth’s most important poems, are “Michael”, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, “Resolution and Independence”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” and the long, autobiographical, epic The Prelude. The Prelude was begun in 1799 but published posthumously in 1850. The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). 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 (1812), 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 Corsair (1813) 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 John William Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the ‘year without a summer’ of 1816. Polidori’s The Vampyre was published in 1819, creating the literary vampire genre. His short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour (1813). Shelley is perhaps best known for poems such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy and Adonaïs, an elegy written on the death of Keats. Shelley’s early profession of atheism, in the tract “The Necessity of Atheism”, led to his expulsion from Oxford and branded him as a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalization and ostracism from the intellectual and political circles of his time. His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, philosopher William Godwin. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and PreRaphaelite poets such as Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Shelley’s influential poem The Masque of Anarchy (1819) calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest. Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley’s verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences.

The plot for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is said to have come from a nightmare she had 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” (1818) is quite new in romanticism, and it inspired Walter Pater’s and then Oscar Wilde’s belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics. Another important poet in this period was John Clare (17931864), Clare was the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation for the changes taking place in rural England. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self”. One of 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. Scott’s novel-writing

career was launched in 1814 with Waverley, often called the first historical novel, and was followed by Ivanhoe. His popularity in England and further abroad did much to form the modern stereotype of Scottish culture. Other novels by Scott which contributed to the image of him as a Scottish patriot include Rob Roy. Jane Austen’s works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. 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 reveals 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. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew’s A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a major writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Austen’s works include Pride and Prejudice (1813) Sense and Sensibility (1811), Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma. At this time in America the prolific and popular novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) began publishing his historical romances of frontier and Indian life, to create a unique form of American literature. Cooper is best remembered for his numerous seastories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Later, in the middle of the 19th century, there was a significant Romantic movement in American literature, which, though highly original, was influenced by British and European Romanticism. The years 1850-1855 were particularly significant, with the publishing of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, Herman Melville’s

Moby-Dick, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Victorian Literature (1837-1901)

The Victorian novel: It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. Another important fact is the number of women novelists who were successful in the 19th century, even though they often had to use a masculine pseudonym. The majority of readers were of course women. At the beginning of the 19th century most novels were published in three volumes. However, monthly serialization was revived with the publication of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers in twenty parts between April 1836 and November 1837. Demand was high for each episode to introduce some new element, whether it was a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain the readers’ interest. Both Dickens and Thackeray frequently published this way. The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of social novel, also known as social problem novel, that “arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832”. This was in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England’s economic prosperity. Stories of the working class poor were directed towards middle class to help create sympathy and promote change. An early example is Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1837-8). Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s with the two novels already mentioned. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion, accessible to readers of all classes. One of his most popular works to this day is A Christmas Carol (1843). In more recent years Dickens has been most admired for his later novels, such as Dombey and Son (1846-8), Great Expectations (1860-1),Bleak House (1852-3) and Little Dorrit (1855-7) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5). An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray, who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair (1847). In that novel he satirizes whole

swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. The Brontë sisters were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently accepted as classics. 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 sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each the following year: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Later, Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte’s Villette (1853) were published. Elizabeth Gaskell was also a successful writer and first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. Gaskell’s North and South contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial north of England with the wealthier south. Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions, Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes: her early works focused on factory work in the Midlands. She always emphasised the role of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters. Anthony Trollope’s (1815–82) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works are set in the imaginary county of Barsetshire, including The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857). He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters, including The Way with Live Now (1875). Trollope’s novels portrayed the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian England. George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans (1819–80), first novel Adam Bede was published in 1859. Her works, especially Middlemarch 1871-2), are important examples of literary realism, and are admired for their combination of high Victorian literary detail combined with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict. An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism,

especially by William Wordsworth. Charles Darwin is another important influence on Thomas Hardy. Like Charles Dickens he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focussed more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898, so that initially he gained fame as the author of such novels as, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). He ceased writing novels following adverse criticism of this last novel. In novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy attempts to create modern works in the genre of tragedy, that are modelled on the Greek drama, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles, though in prose, not poetry, fiction, not a play, and with characters of low social standing, not nobility. Another significant late 19th century novelist is George Robert Gissing (1857-1903) who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best known novel is New Grub Street (1891). Important developments occurred in genre fiction in this era. Although pre-dated by John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River in 1841, the history of the modern fantasy genre is generally said to begin with George MacDonald, the influential author of The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858). William Morris was a popular English poet who also wrote several fantasy novels during the latter part of the 19th century. Wilkie Collins’ epistolary novel The Moonstone (1868), is generally considered the first detective novel in the English language, while The Woman in White is regarded as one of the finest sensation novels. H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) writing career began in the 1890s with science fiction novels like The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898) which describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians, and Wells is seen, along with Frenchman Jules Verne (1828-1905), as a major figure in the development of the science fiction genre. He also wrote realistic fiction about the lower middle class in novels like Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). By the mid-19th-century, the pre-eminence of literature from the British Isles began to be challenged by writers from the former

American colonies. This included one of the creators of the new genre of the short story, and inventor of the detective story Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). Among the significant American novelists were Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), Herman Melville (1819–91), and Mark Twain (1835-1910). The essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) are also included in the Canon of major writers. In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length “romances”, quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery. Hawthorne’s fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819–1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic and sensational sea narrative novels. Inspired by Hawthorne’s focus on allegories and dark psychology, Melville went on to write romances replete with philosophical speculation. In Moby-Dick (1851), an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. In another important work, the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a ship in time of war. His books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his death, but Melville was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century. Genre Fiction

The premier ghost story writer of the 19th century was Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas (1865), and his Gothic novella Carmilla (1872), tells the story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire. Bram Stoker’s horror story Dracula (1897), belongs to a number of literary genres, including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant Londonbased “consulting detective”, famous for his intellectual prowess. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. All but four Conan Doyle stories are narrated by Holmes’ friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. Watson. The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest examples, King Solomon’s Mines, in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). An important forerunner of modernist literature, Joseph Conrad published the novel Heart of Darkness in 1899. A symbolic story within a story, or frame narrative, about an Englishman Marlow’s journey to the Belgian Congo. Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become internationally known, such as those of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the LookingGlass. Adventure novels, such as those of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), are generally classified as for children. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. His Kidnapped (1886) is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and Treasure Island 1883, is the classic pirate adventure. At the end of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, Beatrix Potter was an 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. Victorian Poetry

The leading poets during the Victorian period were Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), Robert Browning (1812–89), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), and Matthew Arnold (1822–88). The poetry of

this period was heavily influenced by the Romantics, but also went off in its own directions. Particularly notable was the development of the dramatic monologue, a form used by many poets in this period, but perfected by Browning. Literary criticism in the 20th century gradually drew attention to the links between Victorian poetry and modernism. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria’s reign. He was described by T. S. Eliot, as “the greatest master of metrics as well as melancholia”, and as having “the finest ear of any English poet since Milton”. Browning main achievement was in dramatic monologues such as “My Last Duchess”, “Andrea del Sarto” and “The Bishop Orders his Tomb”, which were published in his two-volume Men and Women in 1855. In his introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Browning’s Poems 1833-1864, Ian Jack comments, that Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot “all learned from Browning’s exploration of the possibilities of dramatic poetry and of colloquial idiom”. Tennyson was also a pioneer in the use of the dramatic monologue, in “The Lotus-Eaters” (1833), “Ulysses” (1842), and ‘“Tithonus” (1860). While Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the wife of Robert Browning she had established her reputation as a major poet before she met him. Her most famous work is the sequence of 44 sonnets “Sonnets from the Portuguese” published in Poems (1850). Matthew Arnold’s reputation as a poet has “within the past few decades [...] plunged drastically,” and he is best remembered now for his critical works, like Culture and Anarchy (1869), and his 1867 poem “Dover Beach”. This poem depicts a nightmarish world from which the old religious verities have receded. It is sometimes held up as an early, if not the first, example of the modern sensibility. Arnold was both an admirer and a critic of Romantic poetry, and has been seen as another a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. In many of his poems can be seen the psychological and emotional conflicts, the uncertainty of purpose, above all the feeling of disunity within oneself or of the individual’s estrangement from society which is today called alienation and is thought of as a modern phenomenon. As Kenneth Allott said in 1954:

“If a poet can ever teach us to understand what we feel, and how to live with our feelings, then Arnold is a contemporary.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was a poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti’s art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work and he frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures. He also illustrated poems by his sister Christina Rossetti such as Goblin Market. While Arthur Clough (1819–61) was a more minor figure of this era, he has been described as “a fine poet whose experiments in extending the range of literary language and subject were ahead of his time”. Clough has been as one of the most forward-looking English poets of the 19th century, in part due to a sexual frankness that shocked his contemporaries. He often went against the popular religious and social ideals of his day, and his verse is said to have the melancholy and the perplexity of an age of transition, although Through a Glass Darkly suggests that he did not lack certain religious beliefs of his own. Towards the end of the 19th century, English poets began to take an interest in French Symbolism and Victorian poetry entered a decadent fin-de-siècle phase. Two groups of poets emerged in the 1890s, the Yellow Book poets who adhered to the tenets of Aestheticism, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons and the Rhymers’ Club group, that included Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Irishman William Butler Yeats. Yeats went on to become an important modernist in the 20th century. Also in the 1890s A. E. Housman published at his own expense A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems, because he could not find a publisher. At first selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success, and its appeal to English musicians had helped to make it widely known before World War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers. A Shropshire Lad has been in print continuously since May

1896. The poems are pervaded by deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation. Housman wrote most of them while living in Highgate, London, before ever visiting that part of Shropshire (about thirty miles from his birthplace), which he presented in an idealised pastoral light, as his ‘land of lost content’. The nonsense verse of Edward Lear, along with the novels and poems of Lewis Carroll, is regarded as a precursor of surrealism. In 1846 Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks that went through three editions and helped popularise the form. In 1865 The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple was published, and in 1867 his most famous piece of nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed. Lewis Carrroll’s most famous writings are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems “The Hunting of the Snark” and “Jabberwocky”. Writers of comic verse included the dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator W. S. Gilbert(1836-1911), who is best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. In the 21st century two Victorian poets who published little in the 19th century, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), are now regarded as major poets. While Hardy first established his reputation the late 19th century with novels, he also wrote poetry throughout his career. However he did not publish his first collection until 1898, so that he tends to be treated as a 20th century poet. Hopkins Poems were published posthumously by Robert Bridges in 1918. Hopkins’ poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, written in 1875, first introduced what Hopkins called “sprung rhythm.” As well as developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins “was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language” and frequently “employed compound and unusual word combinations”. Several 20th century poets, including W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and American

Charles Wright, “turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning”. America also produced major poets in the 19th century, such as Emily Dickinson (1830–86) and Walt Whitman (1819–92). America’s two greatest 19th century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War (1861–1865), and a poetic innovator. His major work was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Whitman was also a poet of the body, or “the body electric,” as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman “was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something ‘superior’ and ‘above’ the flesh”. Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel, unmarried woman in smalltown Amherst, Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime. Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. One, “Because I could not stop for Death”, begins, “He kindly stopped for me.” The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a maledominated society and an unrecognized poet: “I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?” Victorian Drama

A change came in the Victorian era with a profusion on the London stage of farces, musical burlesques, extravaganzas and comic operas that competed with productions of Shakespeare’s plays and serious drama by dramatists like of James Planché and Thomas William Robertson. In 1855, the German Reed Entertainments began a process of elevating the level of (formerly risqué) musical theatre in Britain that culminated in the famous series of comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan and were followed by the 1890s with the first Edwardian musical comedies. The length of runs in the theatre changed rapidly during the Victorian period. As transportation improved, poverty in

London diminished, and street lighting made for safer travel at night, the number of potential patrons for the growing number of theatres increased enormously. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits and improved production values. The first play to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the London comedy Our Boys, opening in 1875. Its astonishing new record of 1,362 performances was bested in 1892 by Charley’s Aunt. Several of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas broke the 500performance barrier, beginning with H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878, and Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson’s 1886 hit, Dorothy, ran for 931 performances. After W. S. Gilbert, Oscar Wilde became the leading poet and dramatist of the late Victorian period. Wilde’s plays, in particular, stand apart from the many now forgotten plays of Victorian times and have a much closer relationship to those of the Edwardian dramatists such as Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (18561950), whose career began in the last decade of the 19th century, Wilde’s 1895 comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, holds an ironic mirror to the aristocracy and displays a mastery of wit and paradoxical wisdom. English Literature Since 1901

1901-1939 Modernism: A major British lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Though not a modernist Hardy was is an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th-century. A major novelists of the late 19th-century, Hardy lived well into the third decade of the 20thcentury, but because of the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1895, from that time Hardy concentrated on publishing poetry. On the other hand another significant late 19th-century novelist, Henry James (1843-1916), continued to publish major works into the 20th-century. James had lived in Europe since 1875 and became a British citizen, but this was only in 1915, and he was born in America and spent his formative years there. Another immigrant, Polish-born modernist novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) published his first important work, Heart of Darkness in 1899 and Lord Jim in 1900. The American exponent of Naturalism Theodore Dreiser’s (1871-1945) Sister Carrie was also published in 1900. However, the Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins’s (1844–89) highly original poetry

was not published until 1918, long after his death, while another major modernist poet, Irishman W. B. Yeats’s (1865-1939), career began late in the Victorian era. Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). But while modernism was to become an important literary movement in the early decades of the new century, there were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists. Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and J.M. Synge (18711909) were influential in British drama. Shaw’s career began in the last decade of the 19th-century, while Synge’s plays belong to the first decade of the 20th-century. Synge’s most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, “caused outrage and riots when it was first performed” in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, “the morality of armaments and war” and the rights of women. An important dramatist in the 1920s, and later, was Irishman Sean O’Casey (1880-1964). Also in the 1920s and later Noël Coward (18991973) achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932), Present Laughter (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1941), have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. In the 1930s W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood co-authored verse dramas, of which The Ascent of F6 (1936) is the most notable, that owed much to Bertolt Brecht. T. S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama with Sweeney Agonistes in 1932, and this was followed by The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Family Reunion (1939). There were three further plays after the war. Novelists, who are not considered

modernists, include: Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who was also a successful poet; H. G. Wells (1866-1946); John Galsworthy (18671933), (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1932) whose works include a sequence of novels, collectively called The Forsyte Saga (1906–21); Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) author of The Old Wives’ Tale (1908); G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936); and E.M. Forster’s (1879-1970), though Forster’s work is “frequently regarded as containing both modernist and Victorian elements”. H. G. Wells was a prolific author who is now best known for his science fiction novels. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau all written in the 1890s. Other novels include Kipps (1905) and Mr Polly (1910). Forster’s most famous work, A Passage to India 1924, reflected challenges to imperialism, while his earlier novels, such as A Room with a View(1908) and Howards End (1910), examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society in England. The most popular British writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907). Kipling’s works include The Jungle Books (1894-5), The Man Who Would Be King and Kim (1901), while his inspirational poem “If—” (1895) is a national favourite and a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism. Kipling’s reputation declined during his lifetime, but more recently postcolonial studies has “rekindled an intense interest in his work, viewing it as both symptomatic and critical of imperialist attitudes”. Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday published in 1908 is arguably his best-known novel. Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has received some of the broadest-based praise. Another major work of science fiction, from the early 20th century, is A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship

with existence. It has been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the “greatest novel of the twentieth century”, and was a central influence on C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Also J. R. R. Tolkien said he read the book “with avidity”, and praised it as a work of philosophy, religion, and morality. It was made widely available in paperback form when published as one of the precursor volumes to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in 1968. The Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke (1887 -1915), Walter de la Mare (1873 – 1956), John Masefield (1878 - 1967, Poet Laureate from 1930) maintained a more conservative approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism, sandwiched as they were between the Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and Modernism, with its strident rejection of pure aestheticism. Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917) is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet. Thomas enlisted in 1915 and is one of the First World War poets along with Wilfred Owen (1893 -1918), Rupert Brooke (1887 -1915), Isaac Rosenberg (1890 -1917), Edmund Blunden (1896 -1974) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886 -1967). In Parenthesis, a modernist epic poem by David Jones (1895 -1974) first published in 1937, is probably the best known contribution from Wales to the literature of the First World War. English literary modernism developed out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the idea of objective truth. The movement was influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809–82) (On Origin of Species) (1859), Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), James G. Frazer (1854-1941), Karl Marx (1818– 83) (Das Kapital, 1867), and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), among others. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers. Important literary precursors of modernism, were: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) (Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91); Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) (Les Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–91) (Illuminations, 1874); August Strindberg (1849– 1912), especially his later plays.

Among important early modernists were the American poets T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Eliot became a British citizen in 1927 but was born and educated in America. His most famous works are: “Prufrock” (1915), The Wasteland (1921) and Four Quartets (1935–42). Ezra Pound was not only a major poet, first publishing part of The Cantos in 1917, but an important mentor for other poets, most significantly in his editorial advice for Eliot’s poem The Wasteland. Other important American poets writing early in the 20th-century were William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Robert Frost (1874-1963), who published his first collection in England in 1913, and H.D. (1886-1961). Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), an American expatriate living in Paris, famous for her line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” was also an important literary force during this time period. American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) published from the 1920s to the 1960s. Among novelist important early figures were Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), whose novel Pointed Roof (1915), is one of the earliest example of the stream of consciousness technique and D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), who published The Rainbow in 1915, though it was immediately seized by the police. Then in 1922 Irishman James Joyce’s important modernist novel Ulysses appeared. Ulysses has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”. Set during one day in Dublin, in it Joyce creates parallels with Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) is another significant modernist novel, that uses the stream of consciousness technique. The modernist movement continued through the 1920s and 1930s and beyond. During the period between the World Wars, American drama came to maturity, thanks in large part to the works of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953). O’Neill’s experiments with theatrical form and his use of both Naturalist and Expressionist techniques had a major influence on American dramatists. His best-known plays include Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In poetry Hart Crane published The Bridge in 1930 and E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens were publishing from the 1920s until the 1950s.

Similarly William Faulkner continued to publish until the 1950s and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1949. However, not all those writing in these years were modernists, this includes Americans novelists Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby 1925), and John Steinbeck. Important British writers between the World Wars, include the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), who began publishing in the 1920s, and novelists Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), E. M. Forster (1879-1970) (A Passage to India, 1924), Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) (who was not a modernist) and D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published privately in Florence in 1928, though the unexpurgated version was not published in Britain until 1959. Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-ofconsciousness technique in novels like Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own contains her famous dictum; “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. An important development, beginning really in the 1930s and 1940s was a tradition of working class novels that were actually written by writers who had a working-class background. Among these were coal miner Jack Jones, James Hanley, whose father was a stoker and who also went to sea as a young man, and other coal miner authors’ Lewis Jones from South Wales and Harold Heslop from County Durham. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) published his famous dystopia Brave New World in 1932, the same year as John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer then appeared in 1934, though it was banned for many years in both Britain and America. Samuel Beckett (1906–89) published his first major work, the novel Murphy in 1938. This same year Graham Greene’s (1904– 91) first major novel Brighton Rock was published. Then in 1939 James Joyce’s published Finnegans Wake. In this work Joyce creates a special language to express the consciousness of a character who is dreaming. It was also in 1939 that another Irish modernist, W. B. Yeats, died. British poet W. H. Auden was another significant modernists in the 1930s.

Nobel Prize Winners Post-modern Literature

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. Among postmodern writers are the Americans Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and Thomas Pynchon. 20th Century Genre Literature

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, who is best remembered for her 80 detective novels as well as her successful plays for the West End theatre. Christie’s works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the ‘Queen of Crime’ and she was one of the most important and innovative writers in this genre. Christie’s novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers (18931957). Other recent noteworthy writers in this genre are Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Scot Ian Rankin. Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands 1903, is an early example of the spy novel. A noted writer in the spy novel genre was John le Carré, while in thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond’s adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), and nine short story works. Hungarian-born Baroness Emma Orczy’s (1865-1947) original play, The Scarlet Pimpernel, opened in October 1903 at Nottingham’s

Theatre Royal and was not a success. However, with a rewritten last act, it opened at the New Theatre in London in January 1905. The premier of the London production was enthusiastically received by the audience, running 122 performances and enjoying numerous revivals. The Scarlet Pimpernel became a favourite of London audiences, playing more than 2,000 performances and becoming one of the most popular shows staged in England to that date. The novel The Scarlet Pimpernel was published soon after the play opened and was an immediate success. Orczy gained a following of readers in Britain and throughout the world. The popularity of the novel encouraged her to write a number of sequels for her “reckless daredevil” over the next 35 years. The play was performed to great acclaim in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, while the novel was translated into 16 languages. Subsequently, the story has been adapted for television, film, a musical and other media. John Buchan (1875-1940) published the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. The novelist Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre. The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie (1869-1937), creator of Peter Pan (1904), presented an idealised version of society and brought of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) wrote the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the “Inklings”. Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis is especially known for The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Another significant writer is Alan Garner author of Elidor (1965), while Terry Pratchett is a more recent fantasy writer. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children’s fantasy novels, such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, often inspired by experiences from his childhood, which are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. J. K. Rowling author of the highly successful Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman

famous for his His Dark Materials trilogy are other significant authors of fantasy novels for younger readers. Noted writers in the field of comic books are Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore; Gaiman also produces graphic novels. In the later decades of the 20th-century, the genre of science fiction begun to be taken more seriously because of the work of writers such as Arthur C. Clarke’s (2001: A Space Odyssey), Isaac Asimov, Ursula le Guin, Michael Moorcock and Kim Stanley Robinson. Another prominent writer in this genre, Douglas Adams, is particularly associated with the comic science fiction work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, which began life as a radio series in 1978. Mainstream novelists such Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood also wrote works in this genre, while Scottish novelist Ian M. Banks has also achieved a reputation as both a writer of traditional and science fiction novels. Indian English Literature

Indian English literature (IEL) refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora, such as V. S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent. It is frequently referred to as Indo-Anglian literature. (IndoAnglian is a specific term in the sole context of writing that should not be confused with the term Anglo-Indian). As a category, this production comes under the broader realm of postcolonial literaturethe production from previously colonised countries such as India. History

IEL has a relatively recent history, it is only one and a half centuries old. The first book written by an Indian in English was by Sake Dean Mahomet, titled Travels of Dean Mahomet; Mahomet’s travel narrative was published in 1793 in England. In its early stages it was influenced by the Western art form of the novel. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura is

Indian in terms of its storytelling qualities. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Dhan Gopal Mukerji was the first Indian author to win a literary award in the United States. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a writer of non-fiction, is best known for his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian where he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal, a poet, translator, publisher and essayist, founded a press in the 1950s for Indian English writing, Writers Workshop. R.K. Narayan is a writer who contributed over many decades and who continued to write till his death recently. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Graham Greene and Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi where he set his novels. Some criticise Narayan for the parochial, detached and closed world that he created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set. Others, such as Graham Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi they could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan’s evocation of small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends is a good sample of his writing style. Simultaneous with Narayan’s pastoral idylls, a very different writer, Mulk Raj Anand, was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural India; but his stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of caste, class and religion.

Chapter 2 : The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism Rhetorical criticism is a practice at least as old as Plato. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates examine a speech by Lysias to determine whether or not it is praiseworthy. Rhetorical criticism analyzes symbolic artifacts (including words, phrases, images, gestures, performances, texts, films, and “discourse” in general) to discover how, and how well, they work: how they instruct, inform, entertain, move, arouse, perform, convince and, in general, persuade their audience, including whether and how they might improve their audience. In short, rhetorical criticism seeks to understand how symbols act on people. “Criticism is an art, not a science. It is not a scientific method; it uses subjective methods of argument; it exists on its own, not in conjunction with other methods of generating knowledge (i.e., social scientific or scientific).” The end goals of such criticism is greater understanding and appreciation: “By improving understanding and appreciation, the critic can offer new and potentially exciting ways for others to see the world. Through understanding we also produce knowledge about human communication; in theory this should help us to better govern our interactions with others.” Rhetorical Analysis

What is called “rhetorical criticism” in the Speech Communication discipline is often called “rhetorical analysis” in English. Through the process of criticism, a rhetorician defines, classifies, analyzes, interprets and evaluates a rhetorical artifact. Through this process a critic explores, by means of various approaches, the manifest and latent meaning of a piece of rhetoric

thereby offering further insight into the field of rhetorical studies generally and into an artifact or rhetor specifically. Such an analysis, for example may reveal the particular motivations or ideologies of a rhetor, how he or she interprets the aspects of a rhetorical situation, or how cultural ideologies are manifested in an artifact. It could also demonstrate how the constraints of a particular situation shape the rhetoric that responds to it. Certain approaches also examine how rhetorical elements compare with the traditional elements of a narrative or drama. Generally speaking, the average audience member lacks the knowledge or experience to recognize rhetoric at first glance. Therefore, one of the more important functions of rhetorical studies is establishing an artifact as rhetorical to begin with. This involves establishing the rhetorical aspects of the artifact itself(exigence, constraints, audience, persuasive potential, etc.) as well as the rhetorical situation that prompted it. Classification

Criticism also classifies rhetorical discourses into generic categories either by explicit argumentation or as an implicit part of the critical process. For example, the evaluative standard that the rhetorician utilizes will undoubtedly be gleaned from other works of rhetoric and, thus, impose a certain category. The same can be said about the examples and experts quoted within the work of criticism. Classical genres of rhetoric include apologia, epideictic, or jeremiad but have been expanded to encompass numerous other categories. Analysis

Within the realm of rhetorical criticism, analysis involves examining structure and analyzing how the individual rhetorical and literary elements work within the context of the artifact. Interpretation

Closely related with analysis, to interpretation widens the scope of the examination to include the historical and cultural context of the artifact. A rhetorician should, at this point, draw comparisons with other established works of rhetoric to determine how well the artifact fits into a particular category or if it redefines the constraints of that

category as well as how the elements illuminate the motivation and perspectives of a rhetor. Evaluation

The purposes of rhetorical criticism fall within three evaluative categories: academic, ethical, and political. Academic purposes seek to further the process of rhetorical study. Ethical purposes attempt to reveal implicit cultural values or unethical manipulations. Political purposes involve revealing hegemonic power structures in order to expose oppressive discourses or give voice to marginalized groups. Rhetorical Criticism Approaches

• Neo-Aristotelian (This perspective is sometimes also known as The “Traditional” Perspective) • Narrative • Metaphoric • Genre • Pentadic • Cluster • Ideographic (or Ideological) • Standpoint. Notable Rhetorical Criticism Scholars

• • • • • • • • •

Aristotle Kenneth Burke Edwin Black Lloyd Bitzer Celeste Condit Sonja Foss Walter Fisher Michael McGee Herbert Wichelns.

Rhetorical Base to Poetry

Rhetoric was formerly an indispensable aid to writing poetry, and some of its approaches are still helpful. Taxis, or the structure of argument, shows how lines and phrases work on our affective

understanding. Lexis or diction governs the emotive correlates, and so the appeals to the fundamental human condition. Detailed rhetorical analysis will show how each operates to achieve its ends. Rhetoric is now neglected. Originally it meant the effective use of language, not only to sway the ignorant mob but to persuade one’s intellectual peers. And by governing such matters as laying out an argument, presenting the evidence, employing the appropriate syntax and diction, rhetoric was unavoidable — in law, politics, literature and everyday life. But today rhetoric conjures up the specious promises of politicians, the showy ornament of discarded literary styles, and the empty pretences of admen and spin-doctors. Rhetoric even disallows thought, predetermining what our public ideologues must say. Perhaps for this reason contemporary poetry has become rather prosaic, even pedestrian, taking for granted that plainness bespeaks sincerity. But it was not always so. Even the prodigiously-gifted Shakespeare, the most supremely original and creative of writers, in practice followed the rules of Renaissance rhetoric very closely, depending on it for his most striking effects. His classical education was not wasted, any more than the stories he borrowed and adapted. Rhetoric is not extinct in popular literature. Anyone attending courses on article or feature writing will be taken through the standard devices, which themselves derive from rhetoric. The public expects articles to conform to certain specifications, and something departing too much from the usual is simply not read. Equally, there are conventions for the short story, for novels, and for poetry. Rhetoric has always entered into very fabric of literature — not only to persuade, but to inform, move, entertain, distract and amuse. The structure of taxis — the overall shape of a successful appeal to an audience — was usually simple. Attract the attention by producing something of immediate personal interest. Make an argument with a few more instances, but not too many, and keep them relevant. Lead to agreement with personal assurances, guarantees, claims on authority. Conclude by complimenting the audience on their humanity and common sense. Equally obvious and necessary is finding the appropriate words, tone and gestures: lexis. This meant not only avoiding the pompous, the uncouth and insincere, but making

some correlation to larger themes, to precisely the tabloid issues mentioned above. No link with the fundamental issues of human existence, and the appeal only ruffles the surface, as is the case with TV adverts, however well made. Taxis: Structure of Argument

How is the taxis developed in the poem under consideration? The opening is striking: hyperbole. We should not at all expect buildings to be impatient, and cannot initially understand what is meant. Something to do with their constituents we realize in a line or two, but are then taken off on a roller-coaster of associations. Is there an argument, and how would it appear if set out by the laws of classical rhetoric? Exordium (Introduction: appeal to the audience)

They are very impatient, the buildings (please consider the buildings) narratio (outline of case) having much in them Of the heavy surf of the North Sea (they have the character of their constituents) confirmatio (supporting examples, precedents, etc.) the heavy surf of the North Sea, flurrying The grit, lifting the pebbles, flinging them With a hoarse roar against the aggregate They are composed of (grit and pebbles, for example) the cliffs higher of course, More burdensome, underwritten as It were with past days (which mounts up) overcast And glinting, obdurate, part of the Silicate of tough lives, (and takes on the rough weather they were conceived in)

distant and intricate As the whirring bureaucrats let in And settled with coffee in the concrete pallets, Awaiting the post and the department meeting — (and extends into the lives of those who occupy the buildings) Except that these do not know it, at least do not Seem to, being busy, generally. (though they don’t know it, or wish to know it) So perhaps it is only on those cloudless, almost Vacuumed afternoons with tier upon tier Of concrete like rib-bones packed above them, And they lightheaded with the blue airiness Spinning around, and muzzy, a neuralgia Calling at random like frail relations, a phone Ringing in a distant office they cannot get to, (indeed consciously block it out) That they become attentive, or we do — (as we do) these Divisions persisting, We, constructing these webs of buildings (even as architects, working with the properties of materials) which, Caulked like great whales about us, are always Aware that some trick of the light or weather Will dress them as friends, pleading and flailing — (though seeing our constructions as huge, friendly creatures that ask to be allowed to express themselves)

And fill with placid but unbearable melodies (and ask so plaintively) Us in deep hinterlands of incurved glass. (that we are won over and are lost in their world.) refutatio (anticipating objections) the cliffs higher, of course, (which are not docile constituents entirely, already accumulating themselves into cliffs) underwritten as it were (if you would extend your imaginations a little) these do not know it (I’m not saying it’s conscious) at least do not seem to (agreed, we can’t see into people’s minds) So perhaps (I’m only suggesting it) they become attentive, or we do (or even if they aren’t aware of it, we are) what we talk about, we, constructing (because of course it’s part of our job) will dress them as friends (they only appear so) peroratio (graceful withdrawal)

Fill... Us in deep hinterlands of incurved glass (and with this unpleasant claustrophobic feeling I will leave you.) So what do we conclude? That there is an argument, which is logically laid out, but not very clear? Yes, but there is a more crucial point. To powerfully move an audience the speaker must bear in mind certain maxims:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Subject matter must be broadly empathetic. Stance should be direct and uncomplicated. Argument should be compulsively developed. Emphasis should focus on one or two images or correlates.

Rhetorical Types

Are these maxims obeyed here? Terminology is difficult, a forest of forbidding names, but as a simple introduction we group as follows: All aspects of rhetoric, everything that gives point and controlling shape to thoughts and observations, we call figure, subdividing figure into scheme where word order and syntax is involved, and trope for plays on the sense or meaning of words. Tropes we further subdivide into those which involve word meaning (e.g. metaphor), and those which more involve the sense of the passage (e.g. irony). Amongst schemes — for the record, without illustration or explanation for the moment — are anaphora, epistrophe, anadiplosis, climax, symploce, parison, isocolon, chiasmus, hendiadys, oxymoron, zeugma, epizeuxis, epanorthesis, epanalepsis, antanaclasis, polyptoton. Among the word meaning tropes are simile, metaphor, metonymy, sinecdoche, paronomasia and personification. Among the passage tropes are irony, paradox, hyperbole, litotes, aporia, anacoenosis, comprobatio and epitropis. {4} Taking the schemes in turn: anaphora (first word or phrase repeated)

we do what we talk about We, constructing... parison (parallel constructions, often in twos or threes) they are very impatient, the buildings, having much in them of the North Sea flurrying the grit lifting the pebbles flinging them with a hoarse roar... the cliffs higher, of course,

More burdensome, underwritten as it were with past days overcast And glinting, obdurate, part of the silicate of tough lives, And they lightheaded, with the blue airiness spinning around, and muzzy, a neuralgia calling at random like frail relations we do (become attentive) what we talk about constructing these webs of buildings hendiadys (two nouns or adjectives of similar or contingent meaning) More burdensome overcast obdurate Silicate of past lives cloudless almost vacuumed lightheaded with a blue airiness spinning about and muzzy, a neuralgia oxymoron (juxtaposition of words with contrasted meanings) underwritten.. by .. days overcast distant and intricate concrete packed above them, and they lightheaded placid but unbearable epanorthesis (recall of a word to suggest more appropriate expression) calling at random... a phone they cannot get to these divisions persisting, indeed what we talk about

antanaclasis (repetition of a word in an altered sense) Caulked like great whales.. dress them And now the word-meaning tropes: simile concrete like rib-bones calling at random like frail relations Caulked like great whales Will dress them as friends metaphor they are very impatient, the buildings having much in them of the heavy surf of the North Sea the cliffs... more burdensome the cliffs... underwritten.. with past days days..glinting, obdurate days part of the silicate of tough lives almost vacuumed afternoons a neuralgia calling at random webs of buildings.. are always aware buildings... dress them as friends, pleading and flailing synecdoche (substitution of part for whole) the concrete pallets hinterlands of incurved glass personification buildings with the impatience of their constituents. days part of the silicate of tough lives lives tough, distant and intricate as whirring bureaucrats. Finally, the passage tropes: hyperbole (overstatement) as you’d expect, they are impatient, the buildings

whirring bureaucrats unbearable melodies aporia (affectation of perplexity) do not know it, at least do not seem to, being busy, generally become attentive, or we do...indeed what we talk about... we, constructing Discussion: Emotive Appeal

Armed with this skeleton of the poem, which is very different from the surface grouping as six stanzas of iambic pentametres, let us begin the diagnosis. It is the extensive use of parison — parallel constructions that pick up a word and extend its associations before drifting on — that seems responsible for the surreal, rather baffling effect. The images appear free-floating and arbitrary, just flat collages of widely disparate elements, and they are not well anchored, either to an underlying content or to each other. Exactly what does flurrying the grit... refer to: the North Sea or the buildings? And More burdensome, underwritten...? Do these describe the cliffs, the North Sea or the buildings? Similarly for other examples of parison: days, lives, bureaucrats, afternoons, light-headedness, architects, webs, whales, hinterlands of glass. The other tropes only spread the confusion: there is as much oxymoron and aporia as hendiadys. It is very difficult to find a central meaning, and it may be that the rhetoric obscures any such meaning. Is this a fault? By traditional rules it must certainly appear so. Rhetoric organizes language to evoke emotion, persuade by argument, or to distract. And often very subtly. Actors learn to display emotion, but they do so by wholly identifying with the character they’re acting. They do not say to themselves, “here comes my big weepy scene, and I must remember to screw up my face and stare tearfully into the camera”. They do these things instinctively because they have learnt by year after year of varied practice how to sink their identity into such a part. Emotion has become an integral part of acting, and is no longer a mask donned as required. Even TV presenters, con-men and salesmen must believe in their script to be convincing. No doubt poets seem at a disadvantage. With their greater compass of time, scenes and characters, the

playwright or novelist has no need to hit the target squarely with the first shot. But in compensation the poet is allowed greater resources of language. Nothing very much in the arts is a raw slice of life. Dialogue in plays and novels seems natural, but is very far from a transcription of a live performance, which indeed the radio listener notes immediately. Even in the most realistic novel the dialogue is contrived — inevitably, as it has to move the plot along, display the speaker’s character and motivations, and keep the reader on the edge of his seat. And if doesn’t appear contrived, which it certainly must not, it is because it very subtly uses various understandings and conventions; it becomes an art that hides art. For the same reason, the diction of good contemporary poetry appears unpretentious, deft and inevitable, but this happy facility comes from a good deal of talent, a training of the ear and endless practice. Clearly the facility is not spontaneous or we’d find it more widely displayed, even in everyday speech. The issue is one of conventions, what an audience will accept as convincing, and it is this matter that commonly lies behind the proselytizing for naturalness in poetic language. Their practitioners are seeking to widen the acceptance of the own conventions, since it is through such new conventions that their work comes across. Be that as it may, how does the poem fare? Does it tap the wellpools of emotion, and obey the orator’s maxims. Not at all. The subject matter is remote from everyday concerns. The stance is not direct. The argument floats vaguely on through associations, and employs far too many images. Is that the end of the matter: the poem fails by the standards of classical rhetoric, and can only be one of these intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying Postmodernist creations? Perhaps so, but there is still one aspect of rhetoric that may prove enlightening: rhetoric as distraction. Rhetoric as Entertainment and Distraction

Rhetoric was an art, and was often enjoyed as such: a sophisticated audience saw through the devices but nonetheless applauded the display of such skills. Nor was this an admission of defeat, even for poetry. New Criticism focused on the literary devices employed. Postmodernism denies that anything exists beyond such

devices, poetry being a self-conscious and superior form of entertainment. And in such entertainment the illustration — exemplum in rhetoric — sometimes became more important than the argument. The correlate was seen as vivid and engrossing in its own right, which enabled the speaker or writer to smuggle in matter that had little to do with his theme. Instead of the argument proceeding step by step, with each step illustrated, the illustrations themselves linked to develop subsidiary themes, or distract from weaknesses in the central argument. Something similar is used in TV adverts: we enjoy the visual display without believing or even remembering the message. Poetry employing this technique became very oblique, if not somewhat rambling, but produced surprising effects: Milton’s extended similes that add grandeur to Paradise Lost, Byron’s irrepressible digressions in Don Juan. If the images have no connection with the theme, then of course they are simply decoration (which a less austere age was quite happy to accept) but in this modest poem the images do add to the total effect. Indeed they are vital. Baldly stated, without these beguiling illustrations, the argument of the poem is very unconvincing, even preposterous. Show me! says the sceptical reader, and it is these images, coloured by moods and associations, that do duty for reason. The Use of Kennings in Anglo-Saxon Literature.

A kenning (Modern Icelandic pronunciation: [c°[nÐiKk]; derived from Old Norse) is a type of literary trope, specifically circumlocution, in the form of a compound (usually two words, often hyphenated) that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry. For example, Old Norse poets might replace sverð, the regular word for “sword”, with a more abstract compound such as “wound-hoe”, or a genitive phrase such as randa íss “ice of shields”. The term kenning has been applied by modern scholars to similar figures of speech in other languages too, especially Old English. Etymology

The word was adopted into English in the nineteenth century from medieval Icelandic treatises on poetics, in particular the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, and derives ultimately from the Old Norse verb kenna “know, recognise; perceive, feel; show; teach; etc.”, as used in the expression kenna við “to name after; to express [one thing] in terms of [another]”, “name after; refer to in terms of”, and kenna til “qualify by, make into a kenning by adding”. The corresponding Modern English verb to ken survives only in highly remote English dialects, including Scots in the form (slight differences between dialects) of tae ken, other than the derivative existing in the standard language in the set expression beyond one’s ken, “beyond the scope of one’s knowledge” and in the phonologically altered form uncanny, “surreal” or “supernatural”. Old Norse kenna (Modern Icelandic kenna, Swedish känna, Danish kende, Norwegian kjenne or kjenna) is cognate with Old English cennan, Old Frisian kenna, kanna, Old Saxon (ant)kennian (Middle Dutch and Dutch kennen), Old High German (ir-, in-, pi-) chennan (Middle High German and German kennen), Gothic kannjan < Proto-Germanic *kannjanan, originally causative of *kunnanan “to know (how to)”, whence Modern English can ‘to be able’ (from the same Proto-Indo-European root as Modern English know and Latinderived cognition). Structure

Old Norse kennings take the form of a genitive phrase or a compound word. The simplest kennings consist of a base-word (Modern Icelandic stofnorð, German Grundwort) and a determinant (Modern Icelandic kenniorð, German Bestimmung) which qualifies, or modifies, the meaning of the base-word. The determinant may be a noun used uninflected as the first element in a compound word, with the base-word constituting the second element of the compound word. Alternatively the determinant may be a noun in the genitive case, placed before or after the base-word, either directly or separated from the base-word by intervening words. Thus the base-words in these examples are fákr and marr “steed”, the determinants báru “wave’s” and gjálfr “sea”. The unstated noun the kenning refers to is called its referent, in this case: skip “ship”. In Old Norse poetry, either

component of a kenning (base-word or determinant or both) could consist of an ordinary noun or else a heiti “poetic synonym”. In the above examples, fákr and marr are distinctively poetic lexemes; the normal word for “horse” in Old Norse prose is hestr. Complex Kennings

The skalds also employed complex kennings in which the determinant, or sometimes the base-word, is itself made up of a further kenning: grennir gunn-más “feeder of war-gull” = “feeder of raven” = “warrior”; eyðendr arnar hungrs “destroyers of eagle’s hunger” = “feeders of eagle” = “warrior”. Where one kenning is embedded in another like this, the whole figure is said to be tvíkent “doubly determined, twice modified”. Frequently, where the determinant is itself a kenning, the baseword of the kenning that makes up the determinant is attached uninflected to the front of the base-word of the whole kenning to form a compound word: mög-fellandi mellu “son-slayer of giantess” = “slayer of sons of giantess” = “slayer of giants” = “the god Thor”. If the figure comprises more than three elements, it is said to be rekit “extended”. Kennings of up to seven elements are recorded in skaldic verse. Snorri himself characterises five-element kennings as an acceptable license but cautions against more extreme constructions: Níunda er þat at reka til hinnar fimtu kenningar, er ór ættum er ef lengra er rekit; en þótt þat finnisk í fornskálda verka, þá látum vér þat nú ónýtt. “The ninth [license] is extending a kenning to the fifth determinant, but it is out of proportion if it is extended further. Even if it can be found in the works of ancient poets, we no longer tolerate it.” The longest kenning found in skaldic poetry occurs in Hafgerðingadrápa by Þórður Sjareksson and reads nausta blakks hlémana gifrs drifu gim-slöngvir “fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-moon of steed of boat-shed”, which simply means “warrior”. Word Order and Comprehension

Word order in Old Norse was generally freer than in Modern English. This freedom is exploited to the full in skaldic verse and taken to extremes far beyond what would be natural in prose. Other words can intervene between a base-word and its genitive determinant, and

occasionally between the elements of a compound word (tmesis). Kennings, and even whole clauses, can be interwoven. Ambiguity is usually less than it would be if an English text was subjected to the same contortions, thanks to the more elaborate morphology of Old Norse. Another factor aiding comprehension is that Old Norse kennings tend to be highly conventional. Most refer to the same small set of topics, and do so using a relatively small set of traditional metaphors. Thus a leader or important man will be characterised as generous, according to one common convention, and called an “enemy of gold”, “attacker of treasure”, “destroyer of arm-rings”, etc. and a friend of his people. Nevertheless there are many instances of ambiguity in the corpus, some of which may be intentional, and some evidence that, rather than merely accepting it from expediency, skalds favoured contorted word order for its own sake. Definitions

Some scholars take the term kenning broadly to include any nounsubstitute consisting of two or more elements, including merely descriptive epithets (such as Old Norse grand viðar “bane of wood” = “fire”, while others would restrict it to metaphorical instances (such as Old Norse sól húsanna “sun of the houses” = “fire”, specifically those where “[t]he base-word identifies the referent with something which it is not, except in a specially conceived relation which the poet imagines between it and the sense of the limiting element”. Some even exclude naturalistic metaphors such as Old English forstes bend “bond of frost” = “ice” or winter-!ewãde “winter-raiment” = “snow”: “A metaphor is a kenning only if it contains an incongruity between the referent and the meaning of the base-word; in the kenning the limiting word is essential to the figure because without it the incongruity would make any identification impossible”. Descriptive epithets are a common literary device in many parts of the world, whereas kennings in this restricted sense are a distinctive feature of Old Norse and, to a lesser extent, Old English poetry. Snorri’s own usage, however, seems to fit the looser sense: “Snorri uses the term “kenning” to refer to a structural device, whereby a person or object is indicated by a periphrastic description containing

two or more terms (which can be a noun with one or more dependent genitives or a compound noun or a combination of these two structures)”. The term is certainly applied to non-metaphorical phrases in Skáldskaparmál: En sú kenning er áðr var ritat, at kalla Krist konung manna, þá kenning má eiga hverr konungr. “And that kenning which was written before, calling Christ the king of men, any king can have that kenning. Likewise in Háttatal: Þat er kenning at kalla fleinbrak orrostu [...] “It is a kenning to call battle ‘spear-crash [...]”. Snorri s expression kend heiti “qualified terms” appears to be synonymous with kenningar, although Brodeur applies this more specifically to those periphrastic epithets which don’t come under his strict definition of kenning. Sverdlov approaches the question from a morphological standpoint. Noting that the modifying component in Germanic compound words can take the form of a genitive or a bare root, he points to behavioural similarities between genitive determinants and the modifying element in regular Old Norse compound words, such as the fact that neither can be modified by a free-standing (declined) adjective. According to this view, all kennings are formally compounds, notwithstanding widespread tmesis. Semantics

Kennings could be developed into extended, and sometimes vivid, metaphors: tröddusk törgur fyr [...] hjalta harðfótum “shields were trodden under the hard feet of the hilt (sword blades)”; svarraði sárgymir á sverða nesi “wound-sea (=blood) sprayed on headland of swords (=shield)”. Snorri calls such examples nýgervingar and exemplifies them in verse 6 of his Háttatal. The effect here seems to depend on an interplay of more or less naturalistic imagery and jarring artifice. But the skalds weren’t averse either to arbitrary, purely decorative, use of kennings: “That is, a ruler will be a distributor of gold even when he is fighting a battle and gold will be called the fire of the sea even when it is in the form of a man’s arm-ring on his arm. If the man wearing a gold ring is fighting a battle on land the mention of the sea will have no relevance to his situation at all and does not contribute to the picture of the battle being described”.

Snorri draws the line at mixed metaphor, which he terms nykrat “made monstrous”, and his nephew called the practice löstr “a fault”. In spite of this, it seems that “many poets did not object to and some must have preferred baroque juxtapositions of unlike kennings and neutral or incongruous verbs in their verses”. E.g. heyr jarl Kvasis dreyra “listen, earl, to Kvasir’s blood (=poetry)”. Sometimes there is a kind of redundancy whereby the referent of the whole kenning, or a kenning for it, is embedded: barmi dólg-svölu “brother of hostility-swallow” = “brother of raven” = “raven”; blikmeiðendr bauga láðs “gleam-harmers of the land of rings” = “harmers of gleam of arm” = “harmers of ring” = “leaders, nobles, men of social standing (conceived of as generously destroying gold, i.e. giving it away freely)”. While some Old Norse kennings are relatively transparent, many depend on a knowledge of specific myths or legends. Thus the sky might be called naturalistically él-ker “squall-vat” or described in mythical terms as Ymis haus “Ymir’s skull”, referring to the idea that the sky was made out of the skull of the primeval giant Ymir. Still others name mythical entities according to certain conventions without reference to a specific story: rimmu Yggr “Odin of battle” = “warrior”. Poets in medieval Iceland even treated Christian themes using the traditional repertoire of kennings complete with allusions to heathen myths and aristocratic epithets for saints: Þrúðr falda “goddess of headdresses” = “Saint Catherine”. Kennings of the type AB, where B routinely has the characteristic A and thus this AB is tautological, tends to mean “like B in that it has the characteristic A”, e.g. “shield-Njörðr”, tautological because the god Njörðr by nature has his own shield, means “like Njörðr in that he has a shield”, i.e. “warrior”. A modern English example is “painted Jezebel” as a disapproving expression for a woman too fond of using cosmetics. Ellipsis

A term may be omitted from a well-known kenning: val-teigs Hildr “hawk-ground’s valkyrie/goddess”. The full expression implied here is “goddess of gleam/fire/adornment of ground/land/seat/perch of hawk” = “goddess of gleam of arm” = “goddess of gold” = “lady”

(characterised according to convention as wearing golden jewellery, the arm-kenning being a reference to falconry). The poet relies on listeners’ familiarity with such conventions to carry the meaning. Old English and Other Kennings

The practice of forming kennings has traditionally been seen as a common Germanic inheritance, but this has been disputed since, among the early Germanic languages, their use is largely restricted to Old Norse and Old English poetry. A possible early kenning for “gold” (walha-kurna “Roman/Gallic grain”) is attested in the Ancient Nordic runic inscription on the Tjurkö (I)-C bracteate. Kennings are virtually absent from the surviving corpus of continental West Germanic verse; the Old Saxon Heliand contains only one example: lîk-hamo “bodyraiment” = “body” (Heliand 3453 b), a compound which, in any case, is normal in West Germanic and North Germanic prose (Old English lîchama, Old High German lîchamo, lîchinamo, Dutch lichaam, Old Icelandic líkamr, líkami, Old Swedish lîkhamber, Swedish lekamen, Danish and Norwegian Bokmål legeme, Norwegian Nynorsk lekam). Old English kennings are all of the simple type, possessing just two elements, e.g. for “sea”: “sail-road”, “swan-road”, “bath-way”, “whale-road”, “whale-way”. Most Old English examples take the form of compound words in which the first element is uninflected: “heofoncandel” “sky-candle” = “the sun”. Kennings consisting of a genitive phrase occur too, but rarely: heofones !im “sky’s jewel” = “the sun”. Old English poets often place a series of synonyms in apposition, and these may include kennings (loosely or strictly defined) as well as the literal referent: Hrôðgar maþelode, helm Scyldinga [...] “Hrothgar, helm (=protector, lord) of the Scyldings, said [...]” (Beowulf 456). Theuseofkenningsin Anglo-saxonliterature

The scop, or poet, of Anglo-Saxon times relied to a great extent on the metaphor to describe everyday objects in a colourful language. The type of metaphor that he used, known as the kenning, was a compound composed of two words which became the formula for a specific object.

This kenning came to be an interesting literary technique that would be used by ancient Anglo-Saxon poets for many centuries. Kennings were not, however, originated as an end in themselves, but were developed to be used as synonyms in poetic verse. The poetry of Anglo-Saxon times was not in the form of rhymed verse as is often the case today. The popular literary technique of the Anglo-Saxon period was alliteration , that is, the repetition of initial consonant sounds in two or more neighbouring words. For example, the line \ofer brade brimu, Brytene sohtan” (\over the broad sea, they sought the Britons”) contains the consonantal combination brthree times. Such alliterating words, however, were not always easy to create, and the scop frequently found himself searching for synonyms which would alliterate with the words he wished to use in a line of poetry. Eventually, the scop was forced to create his own synonyms. These synonyms, actually a form of metaphor, came to be known as kennings (kenningar in the Anglo-Saxon dialect). The first kennings used by the scops were comparatively simple in structure: they ex-pressed a single idea or thought and were compounds usually composed of two words. Examples of these \simple kennings”, as they will be called, are merehengest (\horse of the sea”, ship), s ìolarbor ? (\sun-table”, the sky); and hildenædre (\battle-serpent”, arrow). Kennings such as these soon became so popular that about one-third of the text of Beowulf is composed of them. Such frequent use, however, caused some kennings to become cliches, such as \ring-giver” for every prince. This caused the very idea of kennings to begin to stagnate, and many scops attempted to find another way to use this colourful metaphor. A new possibility for the kenning was developed by the Norse court-poets who performed before nobility. The ornate, courtly language used in the courts led the scop to bring the kenning up to a new level of sophistication. The type of phrase that resulted, to be called a \compound kenning”, might be described as a \kenning within a kenning”. For example, if \ship” was a \horse of the sea” and the sea

was the \whale-road”, then a ship became a \horse of the whale-road”. These compound kennings came to be so popular that much of the Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry of the time contained a great many of them. The degree of sophistication of kennings did not, however, stop with the level of \horse of the whale-road”. Compound kennings eventually reached a stage of complexity which would classify them more as \miniature riddles” than as a literary genre. A simple kenning would be used inside another kenning; the resulting kenning was placed within another kenning, and so forth. This process was carried out to such a great extent that an entire phrase, indeed, an entire sentence, could be considered as a single kenning which expressed a single idea. An example of this type of expression would be \...provider to the swans of the mead of battle...”. The \mead of battle” is blood; swans of blood are ravens; and a provider to the ravens is \warrior”. It should be pointed out, though, that this is a comparatively simple example of this complex type of kenning. Kennings such as this soon reached a stage of such complexity that the reading of literature containing them became cumbersome and tedious. Kennings began to lose some of their popularity when the Icelandic statesman and historian Snorri Sturluson deciphered a number of them in the Prose Edda around the thirteenth century. These explanations appear principally in the second portion of the Prose Edda, where Sturluson teaches Scaldic dictation as well as the construction of kennings by telling stories and quoting examples of Scaldic verse. Unfortunately, with Sturluson’s work, much interest in the kenning was lost, and an interesting literary technique which had become popular with poets for many centuries came to be obsolete, and the Age of the Kenning came to a quiet end. The kenning was an interesting literary technique used by ancient Anglo-Saxon poets for many centuries. I. Kennings Were First Used as Synonyms. A. Alliteration in Old Norse works required that at least twowords begin with the same sound.

B.

Synonyms were required so that a line of poetry could bealliterated. C. Kennings were developed as synonyms for use in alliteratingpoetry. II. The early kennings were comparatively simple in structure. A.

A \simple kenning” will be defined as a kenning whichexpresses a single idea or thought. B. Examples of early kennings are \world-candle” (sun), \suntable” (sky), and \horse of the sea” (ship). C. Kennings became so popular in their early stages thatabout onethird of the text of Beowulf is composed of them. D. Some kennings became so common that they became cliches,such as \ring-giver” for every prince. III. Kennings gradually increased in complexity. A.

The courtly language used by the Norse court-poets whileperforming before nobility caused kennings to increase insophistication. B. Kennings came to be \compounded” upon one another: forexample, if \ship” was a \sea-stallion” and the sea was the\whale-road”, then a ship became a \stallion of the whaleroad”. IV. Compound kennings. A. A \compound kenning” will be defined as one or morekennings used inside of another kenning. B. Compound kennings became \miniature riddles”. C. An example of a compound kenning is: \provider to theswans of the mead of battle”: \mean of battle” is blood, swansof blood are ravens, and a provider to ravens is a warrior. V. Kennings were eventually phased out; kennings were deciphered by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda. VI. Appendix A|Simple Kennings VII. Appendix B|Compound Kennings

Middle English Literature

The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the 12th century until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there is a transition to early Modern English though in literary terms the characteristics of the literary works written does not change radically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity become more apparent in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work stands outside these. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle. Early Period

After the Norman conquest of England, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language continued in some monasteries but few literary works are known from this period. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, Law French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. As the invaders integrated, their language and literature mingled with that of the natives: the Norman dialects of the ruling classes became Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English. Political power was no longer in English hands, so the West Saxon literary language had no more influence than any other dialect; Middle English literature is written, then, in the many dialects that correspond to the history, culture, and background of the individual writers. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture and administration, English literature by no means died out, and a number of important works illustrate the development of the language. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, Layamon wrote his Brut, based on Wace’s twelfth century Anglo-Norman epic of the same name; Layamon’s language is recognisably Middle English, though his prosody shows a strong Anglo-Saxon influence remaining. Other

transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament and courts of law. Early examples of Middle English literature are the Ormulum and Havelock the Dane. The Mercian dialect thrived between the 8th and 13th centuries and was referred to by John Trevisa, writing in 1387: “For men of the est with men of the west, as it were undir the same partie of hevene, acordeth more in sownynge of speche than men of the north with men of the south, therefore it is that Mercii, that beeth men of myddel Engelond, as it were parteners of the endes, understondeth better the side langages, northerne and southerne, than northerne and southerne understondeth either other…” Late Period

It was with the fourteenth century that major works of English literature began once again to appear; these include the so-called Pearl Poet’s Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Langland’s political and religious allegory Piers Plowman; Gower’s Confessio Amantis; and the works of Chaucer, the most highly regarded English poet of the Middle Ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as a successor to the great tradition of Virgil and Dante. The latter portion of the 14th century also saw not only the consolidation of English as a written language, taking over from French or Latin in certain areas, but a large shift from primarily theological or religious subject matter to that of a more secular nature. Literature during this period also saw a growth in the amount of (secular) books being copied in English. Thus, the latter portion of the 14th century can be seen as the most significant period in the history of the English language. The reputation of Chaucer’s successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. At this time the origins of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland.

The main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. Henryson and Douglas introduced a note of almost savage satire, which may have owed something to the Gaelic bardic poetry, while Douglas’s version of Virgil’s Aeneid is one of the early monuments of Renaissance literary humanism in English. Many morality plays and miracle plays were produced. Sidrak and Bokkus is an example of late Middle English literature. Caxton and the English Language

William Caxton printed four-fifths of his works in English. He translated a large number of works into English; Caxton translated 26 of the titles himself. Caxton is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles. However, the English language was changing rapidly in Caxton’s time and the works he was given to print were in a variety of styles and dialects. Caxton was a technician rather than a writer and he often faced dilemmas concerning language standardisation in the books he printed. (He wrote about this subject in the preface to his Eneydos.) His successor Wynkyn de Worde faced similar problems. Caxton is credited with standardising the English language (that is, homogenising regional dialects) through printing. This facilitated the expansion of English vocabulary, the development of inflection and syntax and the ever-widening gap between the spoken and the written word. However, Richard Pynson, a Frenchman who started printing in London in 1491 or 1492 and who favoured Chancery Standard, was a more accomplished stylist and consequently pushed the English language further towards standardisation. Scots Makars

A makar is a term from Scottish literature for a poet or bard, often thought of as a royal court poet, although the term can be more generally applied. The word functions in a manner similar to the Greek term ðïéçôÞò (poiçtçs) which means both maker and poet. It especially highlights the role of the poet as someone skilled in the crafting or making of controlled, formal poetry with intricate or involved diction

and effects. The term is normally applied to poets writing in Scots although it need not be exclusive to Scottish writers. William Dunbar for instance referred to the English poets Chaucer, Lydgate and Gower as makars. In literary history, the term The Makars is specifically used to refer to a number of poets of fifteenth and sixteenth century Scotland, in particular Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas, who wrote a diverse genre of works in Middle Scots in the period of the northern renaissance, a time of transition between medieval and renaissance sensibilities in the kingdom. Qualities in verse especially prized by many of these writers included the combination of skilful artifice with natural diction, concision and “quickness” of expression. One word that expresses these qualities in combination is the Scots term glegness. Some of the Makars, such as Dunbar, also featured an increasing incorporation of Latinate terms into Scots prosody, or aureation, heightening the creative tensions between the ornate and the natural in poetic diction. The Middle Scots plural is makaris. The Makars

The work of the Makar of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was in part marked out by an adoption in vernacular languages of the new and greater variety in metrics and prosody current across Europe after the influence of such figures as Dante and Petrarch and similar to the route which Chaucer followed in England. Their work is usually distinguished from the work of earlier Scottish writers such as Barbour and Wyntoun who wrote romance and chronicle verse in octosyllabic couplets and it also perhaps marked something of a departure from the medieval alliterative or troubador traditions; but one characteristic of poetry by the Makars is that features from all of these various traditions, such as strong alliteration and swift narration, continued to be a distinctive influence. The first of the Makars proper in this sense, although perhaps the least Scots due to his education predominantly in captivity at the English court in London, is generally taken to be James I (1394–1437) the likely author of the Kingis Quair. Apart from other principal figures already named, writing by makars such as Richard Holland, Blind Hary and Walter Kennedy also survives along with evidence that

suggests the existence of a substantial body of lost work. The quality of extant work generally, both minor and major, demonstrates a thriving poetic tradition in Scotland throughout the period. Henryson, who is generally seen today as one of the foremost makars, is not known to have been a court poet, but the Royal Palace of Dunfermline, the city in which he was based, was one of the residences of the Stewart court. A high point in cultural patronage was the Renaissance Court of James IV (1488–1513) now principally associated in literary terms with William Dunbar. The pinnacle in writing from this time was in fact Douglas’s Eneados (1513), the first full and faithful translation of an important work of classical antiquity into any Anglic language. Douglas is one of the first authors to explicitly identify his language as Scottis. This was also the period when use of Scots in poetry was at its most richly and successfully aureate. Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris (c.1505) contains a leet of makars, not exclusively Scottish, some of whom are now only known through his mention, further indicative of the wider extent to the tradition. The new plane of achievement set by Douglas in epic and translation was not followed up in the subsequent century, but later makars, such as David Lyndsay, still drew strongly on the work of fifteenth and early sixteenth century exponents. This influence can be traced right through to Alexander Scott and the various members of the Castalian Band in the Scottish court of James VI (1567–1603) which included Alexander Montgomerie and, once again, the king himself. The king composed a treatise, the Reulis and Cautelis (1584), which proposed a formalisation of Scottish prosody and consciously strove to identify what was distinctive in the Scots tradition. The removal of the Court to London under James after 1603 is usually regarded as marking the eclipse of the distinctively Scottish tradition of poetry initiated by the Makars, but figures such as William Drummond might loosely be seen as forming a continuation into the seventeenth century. The Makars have often been referred to by literary critics as Scots Chaucerians. While Chaucer’s influence on fifteenth-century Scottish literature was certainly important, the makars drew strongly on a

native tradition predating Chaucer, exemplified by Barbour, as well as the courtly literature of France. In the more general application of the term which is current today the word can be applied to poets of the Scots revival in the eighteenth century, such as Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. Modern Usage

In 2002 the City of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, instituted a post of makar, known as the Edinburgh Makar. Each term lasts for three years and the first two incumbents were Stewart Conn (2002) and Valerie Gillies (2005). The current incumbent (starting June 2008) is Ron Butlin. Other cities to create Makar posts include Glasgow (Liz Lochhead), Stirling (Magi Gibson) and Aberdeen (Sheena Blackhall). A position of national laureate, entitled The Scots Makar, was established in 2004 by the Scottish Parliament. The first appointment was made directly by the Parliament in that year when Edwin Morgan received the honour to become Scotland’s first ever official national poet. He was succeeded in 2011 by Liz Lochhead. In recent times, other examples of poets that have seemed to particularly exemplify the traditions of the makars have included Robert Garioch, Sydney Goodsir Smith, George Campbell Hay and Norman MacCaig among many others. In 2011, the community of Craigmillar in Edinburgh instituted the first Community Makar, as a three-year post. It is currently held by Diane Heron, until 2014. She is assisted in her duties by the Coort Jester, Heather Turner for the same term. The Edinburgh Makars is an Amateur Drama Group founded in 1932 by Christine Orr, the well-known Scottish actress, broadcaster and playwright. English Mystery Plays

There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays; although these collections are sometimes referred to as “cycles,” it is now believed that this term may attribute to these collections more coherence than they in fact possess.

The most complete is the York cycle of forty-eight pageants; there are also the Towneley plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true ‘cycle’ of plays acted at Wakefield; the Ludus Coventriae (also called the N Town plays” or Hegge cycle), now generally agreed to be a redacted compilation of at least three older, unrelated plays, and the Chester cycle of twenty-four pageants, now generally agreed to be an Elizabethan reconstruction of older medieval traditions. Also extant are two pageants from a New Testament cycle acted at Coventry and one pageant each from Norwich and Newcastle upon Tyne. Additionally, a fifteenth-century play of the life of Mary Magdalene, The Brome Abraham and Isaac and a sixteenth-century play of the Conversion of Saint Paul exist, all hailing from East Anglia. Besides the Middle English drama, there are three surviving plays in Cornish known as the Ordinalia, and several cyclical plays survive from continental Europe. These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, the Raising of Lazarus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Other pageants included the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets, Christ’s Baptism, the Temptation in the Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds. The York mercers, for example, sponsored the Doomsday pageant. Other guilds presented scenes appropriate to their trade: the building of the Ark from the carpenters’ guild; the five loaves and fishes miracle from the bakers; and the visit of the Magi, with their offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh, from the goldsmiths. The guild associations are not, however, to be understood as the method of production for all towns. While the Chester pageants are associated with guilds, there is no indication that the N-Town plays are either associated with guilds or performed on pageant wagons. Perhaps the most famous of the mystery plays, at least to modern readers and audiences, are those of Wakefield.

Unfortunately, we cannot know whether the plays of the Towneley manuscript are actually the plays performed at Wakefield but a reference in the Second Shepherds’ Play to Horbery Shrogys ([1] line 454) is strongly suggestive. In “The London Burial Grounds” by Mrs Basil Holmes (1897), the author claims that the Holy Priory Church, next to St Katherine Cree on Leadenhall Street, London was the location of miracle plays from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London (c 1500 - 1569) stopped this in 1542. The most famous plays of the Towneley collection are attributed to the Wakefield Master, an anonymous playwright who wrote in the fifteenth century. The epithet “Wakefield Master” was first applied to this individual by the literary historian Gayley. The Wakefield Master gets his name from the geographic location where he lived, the markettown of Wakefield in Yorkshire. He may have been a highly educated cleric there, or possibly a friar from a nearby monastery at Woodkirk, four miles north of Wakefield. It was once thought that this anonymous author wrote a series of 32 plays (each averaging about 384 lines) called the Towneley Cycle. The Master’s contributions to this collection are still much debated, and some scholars believe he may have written fewer than ten of them. These works appear in a single manuscript, currently found in the Huntington Library of California. It shows signs of Protestant editing — references to the Pope and the sacraments are crossed out, for instance. Likewise, twelve manuscript leaves were ripped out between the two final plays because of Catholic references. This evidence strongly suggests the play was still being read and performed as late as 1520, perhaps as late in Renaissance as the final years of King Henry VIII’s reign. The best known pageant in the Towneley manuscript is The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a burlesque of the Nativity featuring Mak the sheep stealer and his wife Gill, which more or less explicitly compares a stolen lamb to the Saviour of mankind. The Harrowing of Hell, derived from the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, was a popular part of the York and Wakefield cycles.

The dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were developed out of mystery plays.

Chapter 3 : Feminist Literary Criticism Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cuttingedge theoretical work in women’s studies and gender studies by “thirdwave” authors. In the most general and simple terms, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s—in the first and second waves of feminism — was concerned with the politics of women’s authorship and the representation of women’s condition within literature, this includes the depiction of fictional female characters. In addition feminist criticism was further concerned with the exclusion of women from the literary canon, Lois Tyson suggests this is due to the views of women authors not be consider as universal. Since the development of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity and third-wave feminism, feminist literary criticism has taken a variety of new routes, namely in the tradition of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory. It has considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as part of the deconstruction of existing relations of power, and as a concrete political investment. It has been closely associated with the birth and growth of queer studies. The more traditionally central feminist concern with the representation and politics of women’s lives has continued to play an active role in criticism. More specifically, modern feminist criticism deals with those issues related to the patriarchal programming within key aspects of society including education, politics and the work force. Lisa Tuttle has defined feminist theory as asking “new questions of old texts.” She cites the goals of feminist criticism as: (1) To develop and uncover a female tradition of writing, (2) to interpret symbolism of women’s

writing so that it will not be lost or ignored by the male point of view, (3) to rediscover old texts, (4) to analyze women writers and their writings from a female perspective, (5) to resist sexism in literature, and (6) to increase awareness of the sexual politics of language and style. Feminist Literary Critics

Rebecca West’s work on women’s suffrage from approximately 1910, can be traced as the beginning of the feminist criticism movement. In addition to West’s work, Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own from 1929 is an integral text to the movement. Prominent feminist literary critics include Isobel Armstrong, Nancy Armstrong, Barbara Bowen, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Laura Brown, Margaret Anne Doody, Eva Figes, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Anotgnette Kolodny, Anne McClintock, Anne K. Mellor, Nancy K. Miller, Toril Moi, Felicity Nussbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, Irene Tayler, Marina Warner. Women’s Writing in English

Women’s writing as a discrete area of literary studies is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their gender, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study. “Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men.” It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her gender: her position as a woman within the literary marketplace. Women’s writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. The majority of English literature programmes offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women’s writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right. The Exemplary Tradition

The idea of discussing women’s cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history. Lists of exemplary women can be

found as far back as the 8th century BC, when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of Women (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). British writers, as in so many other instances, embraced the classical models and made them their own. Some of the British catalogues were moral in tone but others focused on accomplishments as well as virtues. There are many examples in the 18th century of exemplary catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752), John Duncombe’s Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers, and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. And as long as there has been this laudatory trend there has been a counter-trend of misogynist writings, perhaps exemplified by Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the 18th century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle. Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a “woman’s tradition” in writing. Mary Scott’s The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe’s Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women’s publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volume Female Biography. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women’s writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming “lost” writers. And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women’s writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material. Currently

Women’s writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly interest relatively recently. In the West, the second wave of feminism prompted a general reevaluation of women’s historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women’s history and women’s writing, developed in response to the belief that women’s lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Virginia Blain et al. characterize the growth in interest since 1970 in women’s writing as “powerful”. Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early-20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender’s study, issued a companion line of 18thcentury novels by written by women. More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue 18th- and 19th-century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women’s novels. There has been commensurate growth in the area of biographical dictionaries of women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that “[m]ost of our women are not represented in the ‘standard’ reference books in the field.”. Trade publishers have similarly focused on women’s writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals such as Fireweed and Room of One’s Own which are dedicated to publishing the creative work of women writers. There are a number of dedicated presses, such as the Second Story Press and the Women’s Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women’s writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses. The widespread interest in women’s writing developed alongside, influenced, and was influenced by, a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literatures,

gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people’s writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered “literature,” and genres hitherto not regarded as “literary,” such as children’s writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and subgenres have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the “female gothic” or women’s science fiction, for example. The question of whether or not there is a “women’s tradition” remains vexed; some scholars and editors refer to a “women’s canon” and women’s “literary lineage,” and seek to “identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns” in women’s writing, but the range of women’s writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of “women’s writing” in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls “women’s writing” an “unstable category.” Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class, and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one “women’s tradition.” Some scholars maintain a commonality, however: editors Virginia Blain et al. argue that “the inter-nationality of the entries” in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English “confirms our sense both of a common literary inheritance differently managed in its several locations and of a tradition in women’s writing based on common experience and spanning geographical and cultural boundaries.” More cautiously, Roger Lonsdale allows that “it is not unreasonable to consider” women writers “in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly ‘feminine’ in social and literary behaviour they faced.”. Using the term “women’s writing” implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender. Blain et al. lay out their determination to include “not only English women, but women writing in English in several national traditions, including African, American, Asian, Australian, Canadian, Caribbean, New Zealand, South Pacific,

the British Isles.” This approach implies that although gender dynamics vary from time and place, the dynamic of difference itself is persistent, and further, that those differences present opportunities for fruitful enquiry. Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory

The emergence of feminist literary criticism is one of the major developments in literary studies in the past thirty years or so. This article attempts to give an overall view of feminist literary criticism, its discov-ery of early women novelists and feminist readings. Since feminist literary criticism has re-discovered the forgotten texts, from the 17th centu-ry onwards, written by women whose contribution to the emergence of the novel genre is undeniable, and included them in the critical evaluations, it is quite important to present them both in a historical and literary perspective. Thus the first part of this article is largely devoted to the literary achievements of these early women writers. The second part of the article mainly concentrates on the most recent phase of feminist criticism by trying to offer a theoretical perspective so that the reader is provided with a broad view of its developments. It would, however, be an incomplete discussion of feminist literary perspectives if feminist readings were excluded from the argument. Therefore the third part of the article deals with feminist readings of texts, showing their crucial differences from the male readings. My major strategy in this part is to point to a comprehensive perspective by using the deconstructive critical approach. In fact, throughout this article the deconstructive approach plays an important role, not only in arguing how the dominant discourses are challenged and disrupted, but also in demonstrating that there can be no universal and privileged meanings and values in literary traditions. Instead, there are only multiple meanings. To exemplify this view, the article concludes with a deconstructive reading of a postmodern text. Women Writers: A Historical Perspective

To understand the nature of feminist literary criticism and its alternative approach to literature, we must first understand its long history. Although critics like Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Elleman and Kate Millett were among the first to reveal the literary history of women’s images and to discuss the dominant stereotyped images of female fictional characters, the history of feminist criticism goes back hundreds of years in time. It can even be traced back to Aristotle’s declaration that “The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” and St. Thomas Aquinas’s belief that woman is an “imperfect man.” Texts going back as far as Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata, “which is about how women achieved social change by withholding sexual favours from their men”; and Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Oresteia, where Athena wins over Apollo’s argument that the mother is no parent to her child, are among the earliest examples of feminist criticism. Also, Raman Selden mentions John Donne’s “Air and Angels” where Donne alludes to Aquinas’s theory that form is masculine and matter feminine: “the superior, godlike, male intellect impresses its form upon the malleable, inert, female matter”. Sharon Spencer mentions Sappho of the 6th century BC as the greatest lyric poet of antiquity” and Christine de Pisan’s work as the “first major work of feminist criticism” . Born in 1364. Pisan attracts our attention because she “criticised the description of woman’s nature drawn by Jean de Meun in Roman de La Rose”. Pisan’s Epistre au dieu d’amours was written against the biased representations of women in de Meun’s work. In her La cite des Dames, Pisan also argued that God created man and woman as equal beings. But, it is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindica-ton of the Rights of woman which marks the first modem awareness of women’s struggle for equal rights, and therefore it is the first milestone for the equality of the sexes. Wollstonecraft was influenced by the ideas of the French revolution concerning the equal rights of individuals. K.K. Ruthven observes that “the analogy with slavery, which is present in Wollstonecraft’s book, “becomes the dominant trope in nineteenthcentury feminist writing, doubtless because of feminist involvement in

the abolitionist movement”. Seventy seven years later, in The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill expressed it very powerfully: “All men, except the most brutish, desire to have in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds”. Sixty years later Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own developed and enhanced these views with a strong female sensibility and criticism. A Room of One’s Own became an important precursor of feminist literary criticism. Here, Virginia Woolf argues that the male dominated ideas of the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creativity and true potential: In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century... Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. As Virginia Woolf was especially emphasising, women writers had to work against the grain in order to write. Yet writing was the only way left to women to assert individuality and autonomy. Excluded from many social, political and economic activities, women turned to writing. But it was not easy. In her essay, “Professions for Women.” Virginia Woolf states that she had to kill “the Angel in the House” in order to write her novels and critical works: Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer Reading this passage we can understand the difficulties involved in being a female writer. The idea is clear: it is dangerous for any

woman who writes to think of herself as a passive, subordinated being in the house. To be a writer one has to destroy the stereotyped image of house-wife and mother. In other words, women writers had before them the enormous task of defying their marginality and subversion, not only in the house, but in society as well. Mrs. Gaskell’s letter of 25 August 1850, concerning the deplorable conditions of Charlotte Bronte’s life, provides an excellent example to such struggles of female writers as Woolf was underlining. Mrs. Gaskell writes that the Bronte girls were not taught anything by their father; it was the servant who taught them to read and write, and that they lived in extremely miserable conditions. Despite the unfortunate background of her education and unfavourable circumstances of her life, Charlotte,” writes Mrs. Gaskell, “possesses a charming union of simplicity and power; and a strong feeling of responsibility for the Gift...” Mrs. Gaskell continues her letter thus: Indeed I never heard of so hard, and dreary a life - extreme poverty is added to their trials - it (poverty) was no trial till her sisters had long lingering illnesses. She is truth itself; and of a very noble sterling nature - which has never been called out by anything kind or genial ... She is very silent and very shy: and when she speaks chiefly remarkable for the admirable use she makes of simple words, and the way in which she makes language express her ideas. Of course Charlotte Bronte is not the only exemplary figure who could defy her conditions and express herself in brilliantly written novels like Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. She is just one among the multitude of women who had something of importance to say in fiction. There were many writers like her who had to endure extreme difficulties, and yet could produce lasting literary works. It is not surprising that most of the 19th century female writers foregrounded woman as the subject of their novels, or expressed female experience in their literary rebellion against their deliberate marginalisation both as women and as writers. In the 19th century women writers usually invoked a centralised object of power although it contradicted their aim of creating a resistance discourse. The centralised object of power was the male authorial discourse. Yet, they had to identify one way or the other, with power and culture in order to be accepted for

publication. But, the possibilities of transgressive potential were always there in their writing. Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is a striking example, which is regarded as the first manifesto for women’s liberation. Here, Helen Huntingdon is driven to leave her atrocious husband for an independent existence. Her defying the current laws of the times came as a shock to the social conventions of the day. In 1848 the wife and the children were under the husband’s control, and it was impossible to leave a husband without causing legal problems and social scandal. Yet Anne Bronte’s heroine, after so many attempts at reforming her husband, walks out on him taking her son with her. Here is how Arthur Hunting-don gives voice to the commonly held ideas about wives; no matter how badly the husbands may behave, the wife is expected to obey and entertain him without complaint: “Are the marriage vows a jest: and is it nothing to make it your sport to break them...?” asks Helen after she encounters her husband flirting with the wife of his friend. Huntingdon gives a typical answer to her “‘You are breaking your marriage vows yourself.’ said he, indignantly rising and pacing to and fro. ‘You promised to honour and obey me, and now you attempt to hector over me, and threaten and accuse me and call me worse than a highwayman. I won’t be dictated to by a woman, though she be my wife”. Yet Helen persists in showing the injustice in his behaviour, and asks him to imagine himself in her place: would he then honour and trust her under such circumstances? Again the answer is loaded with the double standards of the day: “‘The cases are different,’ he replied. ‘It is a woman’s nature to be constant - to love one and one only, blindly, tenderly, and for ever...’”. It is this double-sided reality that drives Helen Huntingdon to seek her independence. This double standard - especially in education - is evident in most of the 19th century female writing. For example, in Mrs. Gaskell’s last novel, Wives and Daughters (1866), the highly affectionate and protective father, Mr. Gibson, who is an intellectual man of medicine himself, is against his daughter gaining too much learning. Here is his instruction to his daughter Molly’s governess concerning her education:

Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself. After all, I’m not sure that reading or writing is necessary. Many a good woman gets married with only a cross instead of her name; it’s rather a diluting of mother-wit; to my fancy; but, however, we must yield to the prejudices of society, Miss Eyre, and so you may teach the child to read. Although Molly loves her father and obeys all his orders and fulfils all his demands, she instinctively realises that it is unjust for him to withhold a rich world of learning from her. So, “It was only by fighting and struggling hard, that bit by bit Molly persuaded her father to let her have French and drawing lessons”. But, Mrs. Gaskell writes that, “He was always afraid of her becoming too much educated”. This attitude on the part of the male character is exemplary of the generally acknowledged patriarchal perception of women in society in order to control and to limit their power. It also indicates the masculine resistance to the development of the feminine identity, because possessing a strong identity means possessing power as well. Most of the novels written in the 19th century by women used the house as the central image, because, like their heroines, female writers were almost exclusively confined to the house. Their experiences were not as broad as their male counterparts, because they were isolated especially from business life. Therefore, the novels display a highly static way of life. Although the female writers favoured the subjective voice in their fiction due to their limited experience of the world, they were aware of its disadvantages. First of all, in a world where the woman is regarded as the object, and not the subject who could participate in its affairs, the subjective voice was suggestive of a reaction against standard morality. The female writer had to conform to this morality in order to be accepted for publication. Yet, despite these difficulties the women novelists developed the subjective voice in their fiction as the only viable form of expression of the subject in process. Eva Figes states that, “the position of women, isolated within individual households, favoured the development of the subjective voice in a fiction which

concentrated on the domestic setting”. The significance of their contribution to the literary establishment lies in the fact that the women writers have seen the female identity as a continuous process of -becoming” and thus have reflected its flexibility. This can be considered as an alternative method of character portrayal, and it had been initiated by the forgotten originators of the novel genre in the 18th century. The literary achievements of Eliza Haywood, Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Sarah Fielding. Fanny Burney. Elizabeth Inchbald and Maria Edgeworth, to name only a few, established a tradition of ‘subject in process’ which later novelists like Jane Austen, the Brontes, and George Eliot were to pursue. Charlotte Bronte’s dialectical approach to the experiences of women provides an excellent example of the tradition of subject in process. The tension between personal powerlessness and desire for power and control in her female characters produces a process that enables the characters to review the dominant ideologies of the times. In Jane Eyre (1847), and Villette (1853) the heroine is able to resist social confinement and social limitations by her independent mind which combines strong will and moral integrity. Bronte’s strong- minded heroine displays an integrated female subjectivity. Lucy Snowe in Villette expresses it quite sharply: “I would deliberately have taken a housemaid’s place, bought a strong pair of gloves, swept bedrooms and staircases, and cleaned stoves and locks, in peace and independence” (382). Less strong heroines, like Caroline in Shirley (1849) too, are aware of this self in formation. This is evident in Caroline’s inner search for a meaningful identity and existence: “What was I created for, I wonder? Where is my place in the world?” (190). To ask such questions usually assumes a belief in the unity of self, a search for a coherent self that wants to know itself and control itself. This is also the rebellion of the female consciousness against the male images of female identity and experience. As Judith Kegan Gardiner points out, “The concept of female identity shows us how female experience is transformed into female consciousness, often in reaction to male paradigms for female experience” (190).

Elizabeth Bennet’s wish for self-integration, control and affection in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) also points to the subject in process: “Elizabeth, on her side, had much to do. She wanted to ascertain the feelings of each of her visitors, she wanted to compose her own, and to make herself agreeable to all.” (281). Juliet Mitchell argues that especially the early women writers emphasised the process of becoming women within a new bourgeois society: They wrote novels to describe that process - novels which said: ‘Here we are: women. What are our lives to be about? Who are we? Domesticity, personal relations, personal intimacies, stories...’ The novel is that creation by the woman of the woman, or by the subject who is in the process of becoming woman, of woman under capitalism. In the 19th century the awareness of the defects of the social system under capitalism is quite visible in the works of the female writers. The women novelists, like Mrs. Gaskell, began to question and comment on the social system in their fiction. Their position is essentially humanist. Eva Figes argues that the solution the female novelists offered was the “feminisation of society”: When women did begin to comment on the social system in fiction their outlook was essentially humanist. Leaving aside isolated statements on the position of their own sex, which occur in the writings of all women, from Jane Austen to Mary Wollstonecraft, they tended to stand aside from and indeed, distrust political systems and solutions and view the problems they described in terms of human relations. In attempting to analyse the breakdown and failure of human relations they tended to blame male behaviour, and see the solution in terms of the feminization of society. The contribution of women writers to humanist values is represented by a female identity that counterbalanced what they saw as the essentially destructive and anti-humanist male attitude and position in society. Therefore, female identity is represented as subject in process - a subject that is always in progressivist motion. Although the women writers have seen female identity as a process and have emphasised its flexibility, they could not avoid being

subjected to the unjustified claims on their intellectual powers. Thus, they have always been alienated from the mainstream of literature and society. Especially in the 19th century, women were debased for their so-called intellectual inferiority. Female artists were not believed to have an intellectual and creative capacity equal to that of “great men” like, among many others, Mozart, Michaelangelo and Milton. They could achieve equality only in one sense: that they could “die ‘grandly’ with an art comparable to a Milton’s.” This is the great talent that is freely acknowledged in women, the ability to die like a man, that is cheerfully applauded by De Quincey, as Angela Leighton has pointed out. De Quincey’s essay “Joan of Arc” is typical evidence as to the biased male perception and deliberate attempts at constructing and establishing the binary oppositions of male/female hierarchy in the social system: Woman, sister, there are some things which you do not execute as well as your brother, man; no, nor ever will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a Mozart, or a great philosopher, or a great scholar ... Yet, sister woman ... I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as the best of us men - a greater thing than even Milton is known to have done, or Michaelange-lo: you can die grandly. Despite all these attacks and underrating of their creativity, intelligence and potential, women writers “felt pressured to prove both their reliability and their physical endurance”, and they established the pre-eminent form of literary narrative, the novel. The novel genre emerged with women’s literary experiments in the 17th century, which was an age of transformation into a capitalist society full of uncertainties. Yet the female novelists have been deliberately kept out of critical consideration. A renowned critic like Walter Allen starts The English Novel with the following statement: “The comparatively sudden appearance at the turn of the seventeenth century of the novel as we know it was a manifestation of a marked change In the direction of men’s interests”. Why Allen overtly accords primacy to men and their interests is quite significant. Since the “vast majority of early novels” writes Juliet Mitchell, “were

written by large numbers of women”, how can a critic be so ignorant of their existence? It is quite clear that Allen deliberately excludes them from the canon by making no reference to their contribution to the formation of the novel genre. Women writers like Lady Mary Wroath, Anne Wearnys, Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle) are excluded from many critical works written on the emergence of the novel genre. Dale Spender argues that only the determinedly partisan could produce such a double standard in our literary heritage: ‘Men of letters’ have excluded women and women’s writing from both participation and consideration within the literary circle, and they have compounded their errors of judgement with their failure to mention that there are different rules for the women, whom they have not included. Only individuals who are determinedly partisan could have for centuries practised a double standard which judged the woman writer as a true woman and the man writer was a true writer; only individuals who are in control and who wish to stay that way could have consistently refused to admit the part they were playing in keeping women out of the world of letters Since the novel is the creation of female writers, the exclusion of so many women novelists from the canon has caused an enormous degree of reaction from the feminist critics. Therefore, reconstruction and re-evaluation of the canon as regards the novel genre has become one of the major tasks of feminist criticism. From the 17th century onwards there were a significant number of women who took to writing despite the severe disadvantages, “because selling their literary wares were treated with much the same ribaldry and contempt as prostitutes” (Spender 14). Therefore, the idea of writing and publication was regarded as a seriously dangerous issue for moral reasons. Yet, in spite of all the hindrances, women writers attempted to participate in the literary tradition, and created a new genre, the novel. The first major writer of importance is Lady Mary Wroath who was born in 1586. Her uncle being Sir Philip Sidney and her aunt the Countess of Pembroke may have been to her advantage in the first place. But, her achievement is due only to her own literary talent. Until the death of her husband and son in 1644, Lady Mary acted as a

literary patron. For example, Dale Spender states that Ben Jonson dedicated much of his work to her, including in 1610 The Alchemist. Then, in order to pay her debts and to earn her living, she wrote Urania (1621), a pastoral romance which is a new version of Sidney’s Arcadia. Urania is sig-nificant because of its innovative technique. That is, for the first time a writer is using a direct reference to reality for a realistic representation as regards the similarities between her characters and the social figures of her time. Although this text is a variation on the conventions of the pastoral code, it has a bearing on the development of the novel genre. Despite its pastoral fantasy and flowery style, Urania actually moves away from the fantastic conventions of the pastoral romance with its realism of content and with its realistic portrayal of characters. In this respect, its realistic content and its introduction of realistic dialogue separate Urania from fantasy fiction and make it a precursor of the realistic conventions. Urania is the first example to narrow the gap between fact and fiction. Lady Mary Wroath was not the only woman writer who broke the line between fantasy and reality. Many more followed her. Although the literary field was occupied by ‘men of letters’ in the 17th century, the women, especially during the second half of the century, embarked on new forms of writing that brought fiction closer to reality. They initiated the emergence of the forms of biography, autobiography and letters by writing exclusively within these forms. Among these women the most notable ones included Anne Clifford. Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Fan-shawe and Margaret Cavendish. These women wrote autobiographical sketches that are notable for their realistic details concerning their times. Especially Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624-1674), introduced realism to the literary conventions. Moreover, she boldly expressed her opinions about the situation of women. In the “Preface to the Reader” part of her book The World’s Olio (1655) Caven-dish claimed that women would not be victims if they were given the same education as men. Then, she argued, they would be intellectually equal to men: “if we were bred in schools to mature our brains and to manure our understandings, that we might bring forth the fruits of knowledge.” In

the Preface to another work, Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666) she continued the argument: “I will not say but many of our Sex may have as much Wit. and are capable of learning as well as Men: but since they want instructions, it is not possible They should attain to it: for Learning is Artificial, but Wit is natural”. In her autobiography, The True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1656), she documented, with intensity of detail, the difficulties she and her husband, Cavendish, experienced while in exile. This autobiography constitutes only one part of her Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancie’s Pencil to the Life (1656) which is a collection of tales, fables and dialogues. Here is an example of her use of realistic dialogue and the expression of her own opinions on women’s situation: There was a grave Matron, who came to visit a young virgin, whom she asked why she did not marry, since she was of marriageable years. ‘Truly’, said she, ‘I am best pleased with a single life.’ ‘What!’ answered the Matron, ‘will you lead Apes in Hell?’ The young lady said, it was better to lead Apes in Hell, than to live like Devils on Earth, for, said she, ‘I have heard that a married couple seldom or never agree, the Husband roars in his drink, and the wife scolds in her Choler, the Servants quarrel, the Children cry, and all is disorder, than ‘Us thought Hell is, and a more confused noise.’ Said the Matron, ‘Such are only the poor, meaner sort of people that live so: but the noble and rich, when they are drunk are carried straight to bed and laid to sleep, and their wives dance until their husbands are sober.’ Said the Lady, ‘If they dance until their husbands are sober, they will dance until they are weary’; ‘So they do,’ replied the Matron. During the Restoration period in England one woman writer precedes all others in time with her authentic realism: Aphra Behn (1640-1689). Virginia Woolf hails her by claiming: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds”. After Aphra Behn came a number of female writers who took fiction one step further. Delariviere Manley (1663-1724) and Eliza Haywood (16931756) should have their proper place in the history of the novel’s

development. Manley introduced the epistolary form, and made use of political satire, as well as bringing into use “a fantastical rendition of real life happenings” (Spender 73). Haywood established the epistolary novel, and she is, therefore the forerunner of Richardson. Eliza Haywood also wrote sentimental and realistic novels. Her History of Bessy Thoughtless (1751) marks the true emergence of the novel with its plot, character and dialogue. Haywood presented the world through women’s eyes and gave expression to women’s experiences. Bessy Thoughtless became the source of inspiration for later novelists like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. Burney’s Evelina and Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet are modelled after Betsy. Betsy is the pioneer in the history of fictional characters who learn from their errors. Eliza Haywood “was as much an active force (and arguably the greater force)” writes Spender, “in shaping the novel as were Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding”. Thus, the Duchess of Newcastle, Aphra Behn, and Delariviere Man-ley were actually the very first writers to initiate the emergence of the novel with their experiments in the realistic techniques, and Eliza Haywood became not only an active force in establishing conventions, but also the model to be followed in the new genre. They are the first representative figures for the 18th century women novelists who gave fiction its popular form. Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie, Mary Brunton, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, all had a share in furthering the novel and ensuring that it had popular appeal and recognition. As Showalter notes, “From about 1750 on, English women made steady inroads into the literary marketplace, mainly as novelists”. It is owing to the systematic and extensive research devoted to bringing these women novelists to light that these early founders of the novel genre have taken their place in the literary canon of today. This is one of the most significant contributions of feminist literary criticism. The literary evaluations of the early texts from the viewpoints of many different methods brought a refreshing light to literary studies in general.

Feminist Literary Criticism: A Theoretical Perspective

Feminist literary criticism became a theoretical issue with the advent of the new women’s movement initiated in the early 1960s. In fact, feminist criticism started as part of the international women’s liberation movement. The first major book of particular significance, in this respect, was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) which contributed to the emergence of the new women’s movement. In her book Friedan criticised “the dominant cultural image of the successful and happy American woman as a housewife and mother” (Leitch 308). According to Friedan, in the 1950s women had gone back to the house abandoning their jobs to men who came back from the war to claim their positions, and a feminine mystique was created in the media making the housewife and mother the ideal models for all women. Promoting women’s ideal reality within the domestic realm, this mystique had reduced the identity of women to sexual and social passivity. Betty Friedan attempted to demystify this false feminine mystique, which she described as “a world confined to her own body and beauty, the charming of man, the bearing of babies, and the physical care and serving of husband, children and home”, in order to renew the women’s fight for equal rights. She had started a new consciousness-raising movement, and played a central role in developing the new discipline of women’s studies. With the publication of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969), feminist criticism became a challenge to the traditional norms of English studies in the 1970s. With this book Millet initiated the first modem principles of feminist criticism by embarking upon a critique of sexist assumptions in male-authored texts and introducing some of the fundamental terms, such as “patriarchal,” which gained considerable significance in feminist literary studies. Sexual Politics soon became a cult book among feminist critics, especially with its politics of female representations in literature. By “politics” Millet means the operations of power relations in society. She argues that Western institutions have manipulated power to establish the

dominance of men and subordination of women in society. She also criticises Freud’s psychoanalytical theory for its male bias. With her readings of passages from established writers like D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet, Millet shows the perspectives of a female reader. Obviously she uncovers negative images of women in their fiction as submissive sexual objects. In fact, before Millet, the negative images of women both in society and in literature had produced equally provocative but more cautious responses, such as Mary Ellman’s Thinking About Women (1965). It was with Ellman that modem feminist criticism was initiated in the United States. Her somewhat humorous treatment of the stereotypes of women in literature written by men makes Ellman one of the pioneers in the development of contemporary feminist criticism. With Ellman, and more forcefully with Millet, feminist criticism has generated much public debate in women’s rights, and in their search for equality in society. Moreover, the continuing critique or woman’s cultural, social and literary identity as the “other” still sparks off a great deal of controversy and interest, not only among feminist critics, but also in literary studies in general. So, consequently, as Elaine Showalter has stated in her article, “The Feminist Critical Revolution,” feminist criticism has altered the traditional norms of literary study: “Since the late 1960s, when feminist criticism developed as part of the international women’s movement, the assumptions of literary study have been profoundly altered”. The study of a female tradition in literature has transgressed the boundaries of the traditional canon both in its theoretical, political and literary assumptions. Hence, feminist literary criticism has become, to put it in Toril Moi’s words, “an urgent political necessity”. The overriding problem is now, “how to avoid bringing patriarchal notions of aesthetics, history and tradition to bear on the ‘female tradition’. In this respect, Moi criticises Showalter who did not avoid these pitfalls” and other feminist critics, like Myra Jehien, who, she thinks, are not even aware of the problem. In view of the arguments presented above, one can, as far as I am concerned, point out that to write outside the dominant discourses, aesthetics and literary theory is already to accept the fact of being an outsider and posing willingly as “the other”. Obviously, the problem of the

relationship between politics or ideological criticism and aesthetics is already a highly complex one. Modem critical theory states that reading a text with the intention of decoding its meaning(s) is a reductive act, and it imposes some kind of limitation (in the sense of closure) on the text. This is what feminist literary criticism should try to avoid if it claims a serious place within the theoretical field of literature. Toril Moi’s argument that “without an aesthetic effect there will be no political effect” is right in as so far as feminist criticism deconstructs the binary opposition between politics and aesthetics and takes them as relational concepts and as value-free categories. If feminist criticism wants to generate new analytical methods in its readings of literary texts, it can only achieve its aim by challenging and disrupting the patriarchal tradition within its dominant discourses, that is, by working from within that tradition. Besides, feminist critics can no longer claim that they work from marginalised positions. They now constitute the majority of scholars in a great number of women’s studies departments at the universities both in Europe and in the United States. A rereading of critical theories and methods of the literary tradition is possible only if those theories and methods are challenged from within their own assumptions. This is what French feminist criticism aimed at starting with Helene Cixous who has challenged the binary opposition of man/woman in the value system. Cixous has subverted the logocentric logic behind the underlying paradigms of male/female opposition in culture and literature. Binary systems validate logocentricism so convincingly that “to decentre logocentricism would invoke reversing the values placed on each component in the binary terms which constitute it” (Ruthven 53). Once the binary opposition of male/female is reversed, as the first step to construct a new methodological basis for literary analysis, the signifying supremacy passes on to the once-secondary term in the hierarchy: “female.” The second step is to avoid the temptation of forcing this term’s dominance over the now-secondary term: “male.” In other words, the second step is to avoid the static closure of the binary opposition. The supremacy of the privileged term, female,

cannot remain in its privileged position to create new values and meanings. As Barbara Johnson notes, the deconstruction “of a binary opposition is... not an annihilation of all values or differences; it is an attempt to follow the subtle, powerful effects of differences already at work within the illusion of a binary opposition”. The meanings are achieved through a freeplay between presence and absence of the signifier (that produces meaning). The deconstruction of a text aims to undo “the domination of one mode of signifying over another (Johnson 5) The problem is that, meaning is never truly present, because it is endlessly deferred. It is created in an infinite process of referring to other signifiers, which, in fact give meaning to the previous signifier. This goes on infinitely. Thus, one can never reach a transcendental signified where the process of postponing meaning comes to an end. It is because “Writing is the endless displacement of meaning which both governs language and places it for ever beyond the reach of a stable self-authenticating knowledge”. There is no origin of meaning and an end to the signification process. As Jonathan Culler notes: “If either cause or effect can occupy the position of origin, then origin is no longer originary; it loses its metaphysical privilege. A nonoriginary origin is a “concept” that cannot be comprehended by the former system and thus disrupts it”. In short, the feminist literary tradition cannot claim to work outside this freeplay and assert any presence of origins in its analysis and evaluations of literary texts by privileging the term “female.” The terms female and male can be studied, however, as a relational and differential process. They are related to each other as signifiers in an endless signification process. It is not possible to stop this process as Derrida has brilliantly demonstrated in his theory of deconstruction. Therefore, it is necessary to study the female literary tradition in relation to its male counterpart, and to deconstruct all the binary oppositions that have been falsely created and accepted over the centuries as universal and privileged value-systems, or metanarratives. So, no matter how strongly the Western logocentricism has claimed the supremacy of meta-narratives (such as history, logic,

reason, or truth), they have been challenged since all “origins” have been shattered and all illusions broken. Now, these meta-narratives all split into multiple discourses. Feminist literary criticism has played a crucial part in breaking the logocentric tradition and challenging the supremacy of the privileged concepts and values in the patriarchal systems. This is its alternative approach to literary as well as cultural studies. Today recent critical theories of literature claim that there is no one single reality or any dominant narrative that can bind the individual writer in any way. Since the shattering of all meta-narratives there flourished a plurality of diversified narratives. Therefore, the ideologies of femininity and female writing, or the male literary tradition, should no longer be thought of in terms of universal origins or frameworks. Today no literary critic can claim to mobilise the innumerable discourses that are produced to deconstruct each other. Like any other literary discourse, feminist discourses, too, should be read intertextually, not only in terms of writer against other writers, but also in terms of the literary against itself. With the advent of deconstructive criticism, there is now a way to question and to challenge the ideologies by which the female writers had written and underwritten fiction, and also against which they had encouraged a sustained reading of that fiction. Feminist criticism is especially notable as regards its diversity of aims and methods. As Elizabeth Abel notes in her “Introduction” to Writing and Sexual Difference (1982), deciphering the interplay of writing and sexual difference requires a variety of critical approaches. Feminist critics are pluralistic in their literary methods and theories. Annette Kolodny also states that only by employing a plurality of methods will we protect ourselves from the temptations of oversimplifying any text”. But, as Kolodny also points out, there is a basic principle that unites feminist literary critics under one roof despite their plurality of methods: What unites and repeatedly invigorates feminist literary criticism... is neither dogma nor method but an acute and impassioned attentiveness to the ways in which primarily male structures of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our literary inheritance: the

consequences of that encoding for women - as characters, as readers, and as writers; and, with that, a shared analytic concern for the implications of that encoding not only for a better understanding of the past but also for an improved reordering of the present and future. Feminist literary criticism has been very successful especially in re claiming the lost literary women and in documenting the sources. In this respect, feminist criticism has successfully directed attention to the female intellectual tradition. Many early works on women writers before the 1960s usually focus on the female literary tradition. Here it is necessary to point out the difference between “female” and “feminist” positions in literary studies. According to Toril Moi in Feminist Literary Criticism: “Feminist criticism...is a specific kind of political discourse, a critical and theoretical practice committed to the struggle against patriarchy and sexism...”. Thus the term “feminist” implies a political position. As Sharon Spencer argues, feminist criticism “attempts to set standards for a literature that is as free as possible from biased portraits of individuals because of their class, race or sex”. The term “female,” on the other hand, does not imply a political or feminist position; it implies a gender difference. Female writing can be taken as the special female expression of women’s perspectives on a variety of social, cultural and political issues without being committed to the feminist position. Patricia Meyer Spacks points out that “the difference between traditional female preoccupations and roles and male ones make a difference in female writing”. Not all women writing have a feminist approach in the sense that they attempt to raise the consciousness of women, or in the sense of expanding women’s culture-bound images. Female writing, then, can be explained in terms of gender, not in terms of a collective experience of women or their political perspectives. Hence, male writers can be feminists but they cannot be female writers. The same holds true for male critics. The male feminist critic K.K.Ruthven in his Feminist Literary Studies, for example, has stated that “the aim of a feminist criticism as of any revolutionary criticism should be to subvert the dominant discourses, not to make compromises with them”. He rejects the idea that feminist criticism “is essentially women’s work”. Ruthven’s book

has been condemned by Toril Moi for its “divisiveness, aggression” and “patronising gestures. This kind of critique shows the female critic’s keen observation of the male vision, and indicates the fact that feminist literary criticism is the only alternative critical field where women wish to be dominant in practice. Since the 19705 feminist criticism also engaged itself in extensive discussions about the representations of women in literary tradition and the discovery of the impressive tradition of female writing, because the novel was actually represented almost wholly by women. Many critics like Dale Spender, Elaine Showalter, Juliet Mitchell, among others, have investigated the reason why “To be seen as a woman writer” was “to be seen in a subcategory”. Thus women began to resent the imposed literary categories and judgements by openly challenging and disrupting the logocentric tradition. This disruption of the dominant discourses of the literary establishment actually started with a number of notable books in the 1970s. These include, Patricia Meyer Spacks’s The Female Imagination (1975) which dealt with English and American novels of the past three hundred years; Ellen Moer’s Literary Women (1976) which discusses the history of women’s writing and which is considered a landmark book; Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) which describes the female tradition in the English novel from the Brontes onward as a development of subculture; and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) which studies the major female writers of the 19th century. All these notable books have paved the path for further and more detailed studies of gender and sexism in literature. The major critical studies of women writers from the viewpoint of the female tradition constitute the first serious feminist criticism. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own is a typical example. In her analysis of the historical development, Showalter presents three important stages of women’s writing. First, the imitation of the mainstream literary tradition: second, the protest against the standards of this dominant tradition concerning social values and rights: and third, self-discovery which aims at a search for identity. Showalter identifies these stages as Feminine, Feminist and Female.

The Feminine period covers the years between 1840-1889; the Feminist period 1890-1920, and the Female period starts in 1920 and comes to the 1960s. It continues with its renewal of perspectives with the advent of the women’s movement after the 1960s. Showalter’s contribution to the feminist criticism centres on her rediscovery of the forgotten women writers falling into these stages. Nine years later, Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel: 100 good writers before Jane Austen (1986) appeared. This book lays bare an impressive amount of lost women novelists. In her “Introduction” Spender writes: “For the more women novelists I found, and the more women’s novels I read, the more I was convinced of the desirability, and the necessity of reclaiming this lost tradition, and of challenging the received wisdom of the literary establishment - that for women novelists it all started with Jane Austen”. Thus, Spender undertakes the difficult task of representing the “great heritage of women novelists”. She takes these women novelists as the “bearers of women’s traditions”, and calls them “the mothers of the novel”. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic is another brilliantly written massive book on the major female writers of the 19th century. It presents the nature of the “distinctively female tradition” of the 19h century. Gilbert and Gubar’s main argument is that artistic creativity, which is perceived within the dominant 19th century tradition basically as a male quality, is in fact a patriarchal superimposition upon the women writers who are imprisoned within it. They write that in the image of the Divine Creator the male author fathers his text. Since women take the same masculine cosmic author as their model too, they end up copying or identifying with the dominant literary images of femininity which come out of the phallocentric myth of creativity”. Authored by a male God and by a godlike male, killed into a “perfect” image of herself, the woman writers’ self-contemplation may be said to have begun with a searching glance into the mirror of the male-inscribed literary text. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar especially emphasise the metaphor of paternity” in reference to the notion of authority as the legitimised masculine concept in the ownership of texts. Associating ‘author’ with the father image. Gilbert and Gubar argue that, “if the

author/father is owner of his text and of his reader’s attention, he is also, of course, owner/possessor of the subject of his text, that is to say of those figures, scenes, and events.”. From the male perspective, then, since the owner of the text is the author, he is entitled to the control of all his images. Women, thus, had to conform to the male standards of the images of femaleness in their own writing. According to Judith Fetterley, “that is the consequence of the patriarchal prediction that to be human is to be male”. Literary women, then, are forced to identify with men and male standards of writing, and yet they are, at the same time, constantly reminded of being female writers. So, deprived of the power of discourse that is given universal parameters in the hands of male writers, the female writers fought against being the “other” and the “outsider in the literary tradition: “When only one reality is encouraged, legitimised, and transmitted, and when that limited vision endlessly insists on its comprehensiveness, then we have the conditions necessary for that confusion of consciousness in which impalpability flourishes”. Feminist Readings: A Deconstructive Approach

Judith Fetterley states that “to be excluded from a literature that claims to define one’s identity is to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness”. According to her this powerlessness results from the “endless division of self against self” as well as from “invocation to identity as male while being reminded that to be male - to be universal - is to be not female”. The assumption here, that there is something universal and that is male, may hold true for the l9th century women writers who, as Anne Bronte, tried to challenge and to change it. But, the case is no longer the same in our day. Literary texts cannot insist on their universality let alone define it in specifically male terms. Yet, universal archetypes were deeply imprinted on the literary unconscious for a long time until they were deconstructed. Jonathan Culler gives “The legend of Sleepy Hollow” as an example to the creation of a universal archetype in literature that is male based. Quoting from Leslie Fiedler, Culler states that the figure of Rip van Winkle has created an archetype for the American novelists. In this archetype “the

protagonist struggles against constricting, civilising, oppressive forces embodied by women. The typical protagonist... seen as embodying the universal American dream, has been a man on the run...”. According to Culler, reading such texts the woman reader is forced to “identify with a hero who makes woman the enemy”. Thus the woman reader, as Fetterley has also pointed out, is asked to identify against herself. That is why Fetterley calls this identification process “an endless division of self against self”. The only way to repudiate the universality of these structures in the texts is to read against their own logic of foundations, and to become a resistant reader to the deliberately created illusions and imposed meanings. In other words, once the structure of the text is deconstructed, its universality inevitably disappears, and its centres lose their pull; because, in such a reading the dominating presence of any central meaning fades into absence. Jonathan Culler explains it most clearly: In literary criticism, a powerful strategy is to produce readings that identify and situate male misreadings. Though it is difficult to work out in positive, independent terms what it might mean to read as a woman, one may confidently propose a purely differential definition: to read as a woman is to avoid reading as a man, to identify the specffic defences and distortions of male readings and provide correctives. Reading as a woman provides a totally different point of departure from reading as a man. But that does not mean that the female reader reads outside the theoretical discourses, but that the female reader, by working within those discourses, resists and undoes the falsely situated perspectives of the male reader. What happens when a female reader attempts to adjust the already accepted reading process (that is male) is to reverse it in such a way that the perspective of the male reader loses its universality and is neutralised. By working from within the literary tradition, the female reader challenges its logocentricism. Thus, she uses the theoretical discourses and their methods in order to subvert the centres of male domination in those discourses. By focusing on the overlooked and suppressed elements of the text, the female reader shows that the male commentary of the text does not actually provide a

comprehensive vision, but a limited interpretation. This kind of reading displaces the dominant male perception, and shows its critical vision to be deceptive. “The task at this level is not to establish a woman’s reading that would parallel a male reading” writes Culler, “but rather, through argument and an attempt to account for textual evidence, to produce a comprehensive perspective, a compelling reading”. He continues: The conclusions reached in feminist criticism of this sort are not specific to women in the sense that one can sympathise, comprehend, and agree only if one has had certain experiences which are women’s. On the contrary, these readings demonstrate the limitations of male critical interpretations in terms that male critics would purport to accept, and they seek, like all ambitious acts of criticism, to attain a generally convincing understanding - an understanding that is feminist because it is a critique of male chauvinism. This kind of reading is both rewarding and refreshing because it retrieves and recuperates the marginal and the undermined elements in a text, and gives a broader perspective to the reader. A feminist explication of Joseph Conrad’s text Heart of Darkness is a good example of such a reading. The critical evaluations of the book provide a clear indication of the kind of limited interpretations male readers have introduced. The text itself allows for a biased male vision of women as well. “It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are,” says the narrator to his male audience sitting on a boat, “they live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be”. Marlow, the narrator, goes on to say that “it is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over”, Women are nearly absent from this story, but Marlow’s pointing out this fact makes them quite noticeable. This is a remarkable paradox in the text. Conrad’s text is framed by a story about Marlow’s bizarre experiences in the heart of Africa - especially his ambiguous relationship with Kurtz who is also absent from the action, but whose presence through the others’ discourse, dominates the entire story.

Marlow is not only the narrator of the story, but also a character within the story itself. His comments about women, and his response to the “dead negro” - show him as a typical Englishman capable of insensitive jokes. Further, most readers tend to concentrate on him as the storyteller. If, however, the attention is directed to language, and to the ways in which meaning is produced, a decidedly male realm is encountered. The values that language is loaded with are masculine dominated, because the language used in the text gives us a binary logic that associates light, activity and thought with masculinity, and dark passivity and emotion with femininity. Feminist criticism of the text uncovers this overlooked element and challenges this already accepted symbolism. First of all, this is a story about manly adventure, narrated by a man. Secondly, he uses an overt male language. When Marlow states, “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”, his use of the sexual metaphor of penetration already associates darkness with women. Here is how he uses language to reflect masculinity: The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage - who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder - the man knows, and can look on without a wink. He must meet that truth with his own stuff with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags-rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No: you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row - is there? Very well: I hear: I admit; but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenceed. Here, Marlow is not only unversalising a relative concept like truth, but also making it an all-male meta-narrative which only men can comprehend because of their vast intellectual capacity: and thus, he is excluding women from the realm of wisdom without a second thought. But his assertion that male speech “cannot be silenced,” already implies the ironic displacement within itself. Is there, then, a possibility of silencing it? It seems so, since the male voice feels

threatened by this possibility, and resists this displacement. This masculine language connects itself with the masculine value system, in other words, with the culture and ideology of Western societies which place it in a complex interrelationship to the patriarchal and imperialist ideologies. This union of patriarchal and imperialist visions informs the masculine perceptions of the basic assumptions that organise our thinking. We are conditioned by the basic assumptions, because they form an internalised ideology. Does Conrad’s text, then, aim to colonise and pacify the savage darkness and women? Just like the savages, women are silenced and kept out: “They - the women I mean - are out of it - should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse”. Here, it is evident that the narrator tries to impose a certain ideological view on the status of women (that they are not considered as natural parts of the masculine world, which is, of course (!) the whole world itself), but the very language he uses shows an inherent contradiction in this view. In other words, ironically this assertion reverses itself because the women’s world keeps the male world from deteriorating. The women and the savages, in this text, are marginalised in the sense that they are speechless. We never hear their voice. Thus, the commonly accepted interpretive analyses of the text would leave them out, and this would seem natural since the centre is always the male voice in the narrative. The native laundress, the savage woman, the Company women are all silenced. Only Marlow’s aunt and the Intended are allowed to utter a few lines. Yet, all of them stand for darkness for Marlow and the reader unwittingly accepts this imposition. In this respect, the language of the text is permeated with an internalised ideology that is the unconscious basis of individual experience. Language reveals the kind of ideology that imposes a unified meaning on the whole text. It seems to hide the differences. But, the de-construction of the text reveals the opposite of what it so strongly asserts. For example, we are asked to take for granted that the savages “are simple people” and that they are savages, without considering their customary social

systems and their cultural practices. We are led to consider these practices as deviances and as disparate experiences, and not as different value systems. Here, it is important to note that difference plays a crucial part in the critical search for the ‘other’ possible meanings that this text embodies. The deconstructive concept of “difference” is useful in understanding the cultural and psychoanalytical account of the self: Difference, in this context; is not simply defined by reference to a norm - The masculine norm - whose negative side it would be while remaining inscribed within the realm of identity. Rather difference is to be thought of as other, not bounded by any system or any structure. Difference becomes the negation of phallogo-centricism, but in the name of its own inner diversity. Since deconstruction operates by questioning everything, it is a process of “undoing” the signification process within the text. As Barba-ra Johnson reminds us, deconstructive reading depends on “the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text”. These forces can never be subjected to a single interpretation. Johnson goes on to say that “a deconstructive reading, is a reading that analyses the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself which it ‘knows’ but cannot say”. To show the differences within, the critic gets engaged in freeplay with the signifiers in the text. Since language is a signing process, it is commonly used in discriminating women. This is the case in Heart of Darkness. Although what we call natural is imposed upon language, the very nature of language shows a gap between the text and its imposed meanings. In this sense language reveals the contradictions, and shows what seems to be the unnatural as difference, not as ‘unnatural.’ The savage woman, for example, stands for darkness, something to be avoided or conquered. Marlow transforms her into a symbol in order to control the dark wilderness. He describes her as “a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman”. Marlow’s descriptive adjectives, however, do not really convey her, but the impression she makes on him:

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent: there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul... Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half—shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself. The savage woman represents, for Marlow, the very core of wilderness. -By endowing her with symbolic attributes, Marlow hides the true customs and culture of the natives, their difference, and imposes his own controlling power on them, so that he is able to remove the potentially dangerous forces these cultures may possess. This danger becomes explicit when the savage woman starts to move, and opens her arms to the sky. She is no longer the controlled symbol, but a real threat now. Assigning the woman with his own symbolic meanings Marlow is able to impose his own reading on what is different, and he makes her an object of his vision. But, as Patricia Waugh argues, “the object must be perceived in relation to itself, rather than in relation to the experiences/feelings/thoughts of the perceiving mind”. Thus, the savage woman is not an inhabitant of the jungle as Marlow’s patriarchal perceptions would designate her. This stylized image of the woman, “who tread(s) the earth proudly” and who is of the “fecund” earth itself, shows the image making and identity making power of the masculine discourse. This kind of imposition of meanings does not indicate the male wish for victimisation, on the contrary, it shows the woman’s power. If we reverse Marlow’s focus on this woman and consider the woman’s warlike ornaments, Marlow’s indication of her grief loses its ground. She is a female warrior whose silence indicates a defying of outside forces, a resistance to the process of mystification Marlow imposes on her in order to “meet that truth with his own true stuff” as he states.

Her difference indicates that she is the other, not dependent on any other system. Her difference negates Marlow’s authorial aim of her mystification, and shows a departure from the masculine power which has natural links with the imperialist ideologies. The deliberate defence of belief in masculine truth and power is subverted by the very language the masculine subject chooses to use. In this overt way, the text deconstructs its own meanings, and all of Marlow’s grand narratives are displaced and subverted. In short, this kind of alternative reading of the text opens the reader’s consciousness to broader and more comprehensive perspectives. It is rewarding because it shows how to restore the deliberately marginalised and undermined elements of texts. It also questions how the masculine representations came to be created and validated. For many readers accepting such representations is a fairly unconscious process. It seems quite natural to subscribe to the ideology inherent in them. Feminist readings show them to be deceptive, and they attempt to refine these basic assumptions: furthermore, feminist readings direct our attention to the infinite variations of the same text in its interpretations, and point to the text’s difference from its own basic assumptions as we have seen in the case of Heart of Darkness. Feminist criticism of this text challenges the sufficiency of its received critical opinion. The “primarily male structures of power” in Kolodny’s words, are so strongly imprinted in the general consciousness of the reading public that they have become internal to the writing process itself. Only a systematic approach to representational practices in literature would dismantle those binary structures of power. As Rosalind Coward emphasises, “As feminists we have to be constantly alerted to what reality is being constructed and how representations are achieving this construction”. A feminist reading should aim to contest what seems to be a natural inscription as an agreed definition of power structures. The result may show that such inscriptions are in fact inherently phallocentric. In otherwords, male domination in texts usually blends social and ideological systems which not only validate, but also advance a patriarchal power. Contesting phallocentric patterns of thought,

feminist criticism challenges the masculine perceptions and representations as the only natural sources of authority. Dismantling logocentricism also leads to the deconstruction of patriarchal “systems of thought which legitimise themselves by reference to some PRESENCE or point of authority prior to and outside of themselves”. This point of authority is the accepted and agreed-upon definition of the author as a male presence. This male-centred writing has created the conventions by which all our literary thinking has been conditioned. But, it is powerfully challenged and readjusted by feminist literary criticism. The most brilliant challenge comes from postmodernism, or to put it more sharply, from the postmodern awareness of feminist literary criticism, to this process of contesting male authority. Due to its essential nature of interrogation of all established premises in literature. postmodernism can be considered as a natural ally of feminist literary criticism. The major break with tradition is provided by this postmodern challenge of norms, concepts and literary conventions. The most important characteristic of postmodernism, which the feminist critics can easily adopt to their literary practice, is its de-canonisation process. Arguing that “Feminism is an essential part of postmodernism,” Dina Sherzer notes, “all master codes, all conventions, institutions, authorities” come under the critical scrutiny of postmodern challenge. Ihab Hassan, in his article, “Making Sense: The Trials of Postmodernism.” has put it very strongly: We deconstruct, displace, demystify the logocentric, ethnocentric, phallocentric order of things”. Postmodern texts displace the centre of authority and origin in texts, and they question the very premises these origins are based on. They question and demystify the meta-narratives by breaking them into their multiple discourses. Similarly, feminist literary criticism directs our attention to the important task of displacing the patriarchal order of things, as well as disrupting the nature and origin of masculine representations in texts. Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) provides such a vision. Celebrating the power of imagination this novel brilliantly presents a play on meta-narratives like History and Reality. It

deconstructs the binary oppositions of History/fiction and male/female, not by reversing the hierarchy, but by blending them in such a way as to show their relational and differential process. In this way we are able to follow the “powerful effects of differences” between male/ female and History/fiction. The novel takes place in 17th century London, where the fabulous Dog Woman makes a living by organising fights and races for her hounds. But, the date of the text is not fixed in the sense of closure, because Winterson challenges fixed ideas of history by creating an aura of ambiguity and uncertainty in her reference to the historical events. The Dog Woman’s foster son, Jordan, narrates half the novel, his sections alternating with the mother’s. In between is the fabliau narrative of the twelve dancing princesses. Jordan presents a “real-life” narrative, but its fictionality and the stylistic em-phasis on the elements of fantasy reverse the opposition of reality/ fiction. Take, for example, Jordan’s claim: “The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of chattering rage”, and The Dog Woman’s emphasis: “In the city of words that I have told you about the smell of wild strawberries was the smell characteristic of the house.”. This kind of self-consciousness abounds throughout the novel, and reality turns into fiction. This is exemplified in the metaphorical displacement of gender in one of Jordan’s adventures. In search of his beautiful dancer, Fortunata, who is one of the dancing princesses, Jordan wanders from theatre to opera, from cafes to casinos, and finally to a pen of prostitutes. He enters in female disguise. Then, beneath the prostitutes’ lodgings, he discovers the Nuns of the Convent of the Holy Mother. Amidst these totally different types of women, Jordan realises that male and female identities can easily switch places: I have met a number of people who, anxious to be free of the burden of their gender, have dressed themselves men as women and women as men. After my experience in the pen of prostitutes I decided to continue as a woman for a time and

took a job on a fish stall. I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other. The “code-words of the women meaning something other” in contrast to the male constructions point to the indefinability of meaning; meaning cannot be traced down to any original point in the language system. Although Jordan states that he has long been interested in the contradictions,” concerning the paradox of the order in religion between the command, “Thou shalt not kill” and its opposite, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” he hopes to get “a full rendering of their meaning”. But, instead he ironically points to “contradictory certainties” in certain meta-narratives like Religion, Truth and History. Because of this inherent paradox in their very nature, these meta-narratives deconstruct themselves, and that is the irony Jordan notices. Similarly, meanings in Language cannot be traced down to any certainty. In this respect, “Language always betrays us.” says Jordan, “tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise”. In this text realistic concerns are placed in an ironic tension to the fantastic due to this nature of language. Therefore, Jordan remarks: “And so what we have told you is true, although it is not”. The text subverts the dominant male vision as the only viable vision of reality, and displaces male perception as the only perception with universal parameters. It also shatters one of the most deeply seated and powerful of meta-narratives, history, into its multiple discourses as produced by the alternating historical accounts of the characters. So, the result is there is no History as a universal discourse or document, but different visions of it provided by different narratives. In short, Winterson’s text deconstructs the male discourses of History, by working from within those discourses; and shows that all concepts should be dealt with, not in terms of closed realities, but in terms of continuous process. Thus, it emerges as a challenging postmodernist text.

As can be observed from the ironic handling of the conventions of history, fiction and reality in Sexing the Cherry, it is now quite impossible for any writer to impose any fixed and static notions of reality. Postmodernism contests all fixed notions and opens new horizons in fiction writing. Feminist readings provide a similar opening up of the text’s possibilities. Thus, the “male generative power” as the only creative power in literature is thoroughly subverted by the feminist readings of texts. Whereas, in terms of literary expression, many women writers, who are included among the postmodernists, depart from the practice of “formal abstraction, aesthetic distance, autonomy, and ‘objectivity’ which has dominated modernist aesthetics and much twentieth-century literary theory”. Instead of displaying an intricate linguistic virtuosity and metafictional play of words, women writing in the postmodern line, have explored “human subjectivity and history in terms of non-systematized particulars”. According to Patricia Waugh, it is important for women to experience and to explore themselves as human ‘subjects’ in their fiction, and not to follow the metafictional practice of the fragmentation of the self, in order to deconstruct subject positions they are situated in by the male ideologies: “Once women have experienced themselves as ‘subjects’ then they can begin to problematize and to deconstruct the socially constructed subject positions available to them, and to recognize that an inversion of the valuation of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ will not in itself undermine the social construction of masculinity and femininity”. This is only part of what feminist readings investigate in many postmodemist or traditional texts. The alternative feminist reading resists all ideological and linguistic impositions. Therefore, now, the notion of an all-powerful author is totally demystified. This is the most important contribution of feminist literary criticism to the literary studies that ties it so closely with postmodern awareness. In this respect, feminist literary criticism has not only achieved a revision of the literary canon, but also emerged as one of the most challenging critical theories in the rethinking of all literary conventions. Thus, feminist literary criticism has been a revisionist theoretical movement within literary studies.

Chapter 4 : Women’s Writing in English Women’s writing as a discrete area of literary studies is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their gender, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study. “Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men.” It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her gender: her position as a woman within the literary marketplace. Women’s writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognised explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organisations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. The majority of English literature programmes offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women’s writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right. The Exemplary Tradition

The idea of discussing women’s cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history. Lists of exemplary women can be found as far back as the 8th century BC, when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of Women (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). British writers, as in so many other instances, embraced the classical models and made them their own. Some of the British catalogues were moral in tone but others focused on accomplishments as well as

virtues. There are many examples in the 18th century of exemplary catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752), John Duncombe’s Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers, and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. And as long as there has been this laudatory trend there has been a counter-trend of misogynist writings, perhaps exemplified by Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the 18th century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle. Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a “woman’s tradition” in writing. Mary Scott’s The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe’s Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women’s publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six volume Female Biography. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women’s writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming “lost” writers. And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women’s writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material. Currently

Women’s writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly interest relatively recently. In the West, the second wave of feminism prompted a general reevaluation of women’s historical contributions,

and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women’s history and women’s writing, developed in response to the belief that women’s lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Virginia Blain et al. characterize the growth in interest since 1970 in women’s writing as “powerful”. Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early-20thcentury novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender’s study, issued a companion line of 18th-century novels by written by women. More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue 18th- and 19th-century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women’s novels. There has been commensurate growth in the area of biographical dictionaries of women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that “[m]ost of our women are not represented in the ‘standard’ reference books in the field.”. Trade publishers have similarly focused on women’s writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals such as Fireweed and Room of One’s Own which are dedicated to publishing the creative work of women writers. There are a number of dedicated presses, such as the Second Story Press and the Women’s Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women’s writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses. The widespread interest in women’s writing developed alongside, influenced, and was influenced by, a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literatures, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people’s writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is

considered “literature,” and genres hitherto not regarded as “literary,” such as children’s writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and subgenres have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the “female gothic” or women’s science fiction, for example. The question of whether or not there is a “women’s tradition” remains vexed; some scholars and editors refer to a “women’s canon” and women’s “literary lineage,” and seek to “identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns” in women’s writing, but the range of women’s writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of “women’s writing” in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls “women’s writing” an “unstable category.” Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class, and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one “women’s tradition.” Some scholars maintain a commonality, however: editors Virginia Blain et al. argue that “the inter-nationality of the entries” in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English “confirms our sense both of a common literary inheritance differently managed in its several locations and of a tradition in women’s writing based on common experience and spanning geographical and cultural boundaries.” More cautiously, Roger Lonsdale allows that “it is not unreasonable to consider” women writers “in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly ‘feminine’ in social and literary behaviour they faced.”. Using the term “women’s writing” implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender. Blain et al. lay out their determination to include “not only English women, but women writing in English in several national traditions, including African, American, Asian, Australian, Canadian, Caribbean, New Zealand, South Pacific, the British Isles.” This approach implies that although gender dynamics vary from time and place, the dynamic of difference itself is

persistent, and further, that those differences present opportunities for fruitful inquiry. The “Exemplary Women” Tradition

• Hesiod, Catalogue of Women (attr.) • Plutarch, in Moralia • Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361– 1375) • Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) • Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of hooly wummen (c.1430) • George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752. • John Duncombe, Feminead (1754) • Anon., Biographium faemineum : the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. London: Printed for S. Crowder, 1766. 2 vols. • Mary Scott, The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe’s Feminead. London: Joseph Johnson, 1774. • Mary Hays, Female Biography (6 vols., 1803) • Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished women from the Creation to AD 1850 (1854) • Charlotte Mary Yonge, Biographies of Good Women (First Series, 1862; Second Series, 1865) • Julia Kavanagh, Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (1850), Women of Christianity (1852), French Women of Letters (1862) and English Women of Letters (1862). These collective biographies “all argue against idealized, sentimental portrayals of female experience. She intended these biographies to provide a corrective to the silence of male historians on the topic of female influence in a variety of sphere beyond the domestic” (ODNB).

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Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day: Biographical Sketches. Glasgow: David Bryce & Son, 1893. “These sketches originally appeared as a series in the ‘Lady’s pictorial’... They are now revised, enlarged and brought up to date.” Sketches of Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Riddell, Mrs. L. B. Walford, Rhoda Broughton, John Strange Winter (Mrs. Arthur Stannard), Mrs Alexander, Helen Mathers, Florence Marryat, Mrs. Lovett Cameron, Mrs. Hungerford, Matilda Betham Edwards, Edna Lyall, Rosa Nouchette Carey, Adeline Sergeant, Mrs. Edward Kennard, Jessie Fothergill, Lady Duffus Hardy, Iza Duffus Hardy, May Crommelin, Mrs. Houstoun, Mrs. Alexander Fraser, Honourable Mrs. Henry Chetwynd, Jean Middlemass, Augusta De Grasse Stevens, Mrs. Leith Adams, Jean Ingelow. New Criticism

New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. History

New Criticism developed in the 1920s–30s and peaked in the 1940s–50s. The movement is named after John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New Critics focused on the text of a work of literature and tried to exclude the reader’s response, the author’s intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. Their aesthetic concerns were initially outlined in essays like Ransom’s “Criticism, Inc.” and Allen Tate’s “Miss Emily and the Bibliographers.” New Critics often performed a “close reading” of the text and believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. Before the New Criticism became dominant, English professors in America focused their writings and teaching on historical and/or linguistic scholarship surrounding literature rather than analyzing the literary text itself.

Also, at that time, this kind of close reading (or explication de texte) was considered the work of non-academic “critics” (or book reviewers) and not the work of serious scholars. But the New Criticism changed this. Though their interest in textual study initially met with heavy resistance from the establishment, the practice eventually gained a foothold and soon became one of the central methods of literary scholarship in American universities until it fell out of favour in the 1970s as post-structuralism, deconstructionist theory, and a whole plethora of competing theoretical models vied for more attention in literary studies. The New Criticism was never a formal collective, but it initially developed from the teaching methods advocated by John Crowe Ransom who taught at Vanderbilt. Some of his students (all Southerners) like Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren would go on to develop the aesthetics that came to be known as the New Criticism. Nevertheless, in his essay, “The New Criticism,” Cleanth Brooks notes that “The New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive beast,” meaning that there was no clearly defined “New Critical” school or critical stance. Also, although there are a number of classic New Critical writings that outline inter-related ideas, there is no New Critical manifesto. In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled “The Intentional Fallacy”, in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author’s intention, or “intended meaning” in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, “The Affective Fallacy,” which served as a kind of sister essay to “The Intentional Fallacy” Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader’s personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school of literary theory. Ironically, one of the leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay “Literature in the Reader” (1970).

The popularity of the New Criticism persisted through the Cold War years in both American high schools and colleges, in part, because it offered a relatively straightforward (and politically uncontroversial) approach to teaching students how to read and understand poetry and fiction. To this end, Brooks and Warren published Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction which both became standard pedagogical textbooks in American high schools and colleges during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, metre, setting, characterization, and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to help establish the single best and most unified interpretation of the text. Such an approach has been criticized as constituting a conservative attempt to isolate the text and to shield it from external, political concerns such as those of race, class, and gender. Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities, some of its methods (like close reading) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism, underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, and reader-response theory. Criticism

One of the most common grievances against the New Criticism, iterated in numerous ways, is an objection to the idea of the text as autonomous; detractors react against a perceived anti-historicism, accusing the New Critics of divorcing literature from its place in history. New Criticism is frequently seen as “uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature.” Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental close reading technique is based on the assumption that “the subject and the object of study—the reader and the text—are stable and independent forms, rather than products of the unconscious process of signification,” an assumption which he identifies as the “ideology of liberal humanism,” which is attributed to the New Critics who are “accused of attempting to disguise the

interests at work in their critical processes.” For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to be considered to “[create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an inert consumer of a ‘readymade’ product.” In response to critics like Hawkes, Cleanth Brooks, in his essay “The New Criticism” (1979), argued that the New Criticism was not diametrically opposed to the general principles of reader-response theory and that the two could complement one another. For instance, he stated, “If some of the New Critics have preferred to stress the writing rather than the writer, so have they given less stress to the reader—to the reader’s response to the work. Yet no one in his right mind could forget the reader. He is essential for ‘realising’ any poem or novel... Reader response is certainly worth studying.” However, Brooks tempers his praise for the reader-response theory by noting its limitations, pointing out that, “to put meaning and valuation of a literary work at the mercy of any and every individual [reader] would reduce the study of literature to reader psychology and to the history of taste.” Another objection to the New Criticism is that it is thought to aim at making criticism scientific, or at least “bringing literary study to a condition rivaling that of science.” However, René Wellek points out the erroneous nature of this criticism by noting that a number of the New Critics outlined their theoretical aesthetics in stark contrast to the “objectivity” of the sciences (though it should be noted that Ransom, in his essay “Criticism, Inc.” did advocate that “criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic”). Wellek actually attempts to refute much of the recent criticism aimed at the New Critics in his essay “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra” (1978).

Chapter 5 : Postmodern Literature Postmodern literature is post–World War II literature characterized by heavy reliance on techniques like fragmentation, paradox, and questionable narrators; such literature is seen as a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. But as is often the case with artistic movements, postmodern literature is commonly defined in relation to its precursor. For example, a postmodern literary work tends not to conclude with the neatly tied-up ending as is often found in modernist literature, but often parodies it. Postmodern authors tend to celebrate chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the writer’s authority. Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Background Notable Influences

Postmodernist writers often point to early novels and story collections as inspiration for their experiments with narrative and structure: Don Quixote, 1001 Nights, The Decameron, and Candide, among many others. In the English language,Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, with its heavy emphasis on parody and narrative experimentation, is often cited as an early influence on postmodernism. There were many 19th century examples of attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature, including Lord Byron’s satire, especially Don Juan; Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus; Alfred Jarry’s ribald Ubu

parodies and his invention of ‘Pataphysics; Lewis Carroll’s playful experiments with signification; the work of Isidore Ducasse, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde. Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and challenged the authority of the artist. Tristan Tzara claimed in “How to Make a Dadaist Poem” that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overlydescriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte’s experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realised in the AngloAmerican world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars. Comparisons with Modernist Literature

Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases

drawing on modernist examples in the “stream of consciousness” styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, “these fragments I have shored against my ruins”. Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against “ruin” is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Shift to Postmodernism

As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism’s popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died, is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism’s start. Irish novelist Flann O’Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly ‘lost’ until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O’Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance, the literary theorist Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel. The prefix “post”, however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention, through the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and Japanese American internment). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonialism (Postcolonial literature), and the rise of the personal computer (Cyberpunk fiction and Hypertext fiction). Some further argue that the beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes’ The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 (Waiting for Godot, 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan’s usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodernism works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. Post-War Developments and Transition Figures

Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in the postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd, the Beat Generation, and Magic Realism) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labelled “postmodern”; more commonly, some key figures (Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez) are cited as significant contributors to the postmodern aesthetic. The work of Jarry, the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud, Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd. The term “Theatre of the Absurd” was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd.

The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Samuel Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of the exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says, “Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett’s experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.[...] Beckett’s last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work [...] He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters.” The “The Beat Generation” was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac, who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called “spontaneous prose” to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. More broadly, “Beat

Generation” often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the “Postmoderns”. Though this is now a less common usage of “postmodern”, references to these writers as “postmodernists” still appear and many writers associated with this group (John Ashbery, Richard Brautigan, Gilbert Sorrentino, and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with the Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction; it’s full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited the book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin, for the creation of the “cut-up” technique, a technique (similar to Tzara’s “Dadaist Poem”) in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Magic Realism is a technique popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was a centre piece of the Latin American “boom”, a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the “Boom” and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labelling, however, is not without its problems.

In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America. Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern. Scope

Postmodernism in literature is not an organised movement with leaders or central figures; therefore, it is more difficult to say if it has ended or when it will end (compared to, say, declaring the end of modernism with the death of Joyce or Woolf). Arguably postmodernism peaked in the 60s and 70s with the publication of Catch-22 in 1961, Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the 80’s with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in 1985 or The Satanic Verses in 1988 to be the last great novels of the postmodern era. A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace, Giannina Braschi, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk, Jennifer Egan, Neil Gaiman, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem—and publications such as McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the fiction pages of The New Yorker, herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism. Common Themes and Techniques

All of these themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor is this an exclusive list of features. Irony, Playfulness, Black Humor

Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony, along with black humor and the general concept of “play” (related to Derrida’s concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text) are among the most recognisable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labelled postmodern were first collectively labelled black humorists: John Barth, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Jay Friedman, etc. It’s common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller, Vonnegut, and Pynchon address the events of World War II. The central concept of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic “catch-22”, and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within a serious context. The Crying of Lot 49, for example, contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. Intertextuality

Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Critics point to this as an indication of postmodernism’s lack of originality and reliance on clichés. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a work, or

the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales – as in works by Margaret Atwood, Donald Barthelme, and many other – or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists is “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker’s novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism is John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke’s poem of the same name. Often intertextuality is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice, for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Also, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Borges. Pastiche

Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or “paste” together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). For example, Thomas Pynchon includes in his novels elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction; songs; pop culture references; well-

known, obscure, and fictional history mixed together; real contemporary and historical figures (Mickey Rooney and Wernher von Braun for example); a wide variety of well-known, obscure and fictional cultures and concepts. In Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker. Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates; it was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose. Metafiction

Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or “foregrounding the apparatus”, as it’s typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for “willful suspension of disbelief”. For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself. Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique: the first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut’s own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel/story collection The Things They Carried, about one platoon’s experiences during the Vietnam War, features a character named Tim O’Brien; though O’Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O’Brien calls into

question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, “How to Tell a True War Story”, questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable and heroic, moral war stories don’t capture the truth. Fabulation

Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude. Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature — the traditional structure of a novel or role of the narrator, for example— and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction. By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators. Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Giannina Braschi’s “United States of Banana” and Salman Rushdie´s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Poioumena

Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek, “product”) is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, “the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth.” In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is about the narrator’s frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade’s long poem “Pale Fire”, but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children parallels the

creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable); Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook; John Fowles’s Mantissa; William Golding’s Paper Men; and Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew. Historiographic Metafiction

Linda Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction” to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar), Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Booker T. Washington, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung), and Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to the Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In regard to critical theory, this technique can be related to “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes. Temporal Distortion

This is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and non-linear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s non-linear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming “unstuck in time”. In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents multiple possible events

occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favoured as the correct version. Magic Realism

Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian who in 1935 published his Historia universal de la infamia, regarded by many as the first work of magic realism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier is another described as a “magic realist”. Postmodernists such as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino commonly use Magic Realism in their work. A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Ceiling”, Dan Chaon’s “Big Me”, Jacob M. Appel’s “Exposure”, and Elizabeth Graver’s “The Mourning Door”. Technoculture and Hyperreality

Fredric Jameson called postmodernism the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. “Late capitalism” implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by

simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, Don DeLillo’s White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with a “white noise” of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. Steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction popularized in novels and comics by such writers as Alan Moore and James Blaylock, demonstrates postmodern pastiche, temporal distortion, and a focus on technoculture with its mix of futuristic technology and Victorian culture. Paranoia

Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the work of Thomas Pynchon, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there’s an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be “coincidence or conspiracy — or a cruel joke”. This often coincides with the theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he’s convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. Maximalism

Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the “purpose” of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and the Odyssey of Homer, which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader’s Manifesto, attack the maximalist novel as being disorganised,

sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment. Minimalism

Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are “slice of life” stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader’s imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Samuel Beckett. Different Perspectives

John Barth, the postmodernist novelist who talks often about the label “postmodern”, wrote an influential essay in 1967 called “The Literature of Exhaustion” and in 1979 wrote “Literature of Replenishment” in order to clarify the earlier essay. “Literature of Exhaustion” was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In “Literature of Replenishment” Barth says, My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy crafts-manship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels

as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and “contentism,” pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction... Many of the well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II, one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war: The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War, the cold war of the Fifties. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that the form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a nearmovement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man, Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road, Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thomas Pynchon was writing V., and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat’s Cradle. I don’t think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn’t know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Pynchon and in Cat’s Cradle. Novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding: “I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently,

he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.” Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” makes the connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what’s seen and what’s said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature: It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as a collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this popreference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists, the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by “postmodern.” The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of a culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR, the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor, and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49... Here’s Robert Coover’s 1966 A Public Burning, in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable, in which the Cat in the Hat runs for president. Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly

experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the “Chemical (Scottish) Generation” of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term ‘postmodernist’ is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell, Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while “post-modern” is applied to authors who have been less innovative. Examples of Postmodern Literature

Some well known examples of postmodern literature, in chronological order, include: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The Cannibal (1949) by John Hawkes The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) by John Barth Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller The Lime Twig (1961) by John Hawkes Mother Night (1961) by Kurt Vonnegut Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick V. (1963) by Thomas Pynchon Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortázar The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon Lost in the Funhouse (1968) by John Barth Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) by Vladimir Nabokov Moscow-Petushki (1970) by Venedikt Erofeev The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) by J. G. Ballard Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) by Hunter S. Thompson Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino Chimera (1972) by John Barth

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon Crash (1973) by J. G. Ballard Breakfast of Champions (1973) by Kurt Vonnegut The Magus (1973) by John Fowles J R (1975) by William Gaddis The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson The Dead Father (1975) by Donald Barthelme Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany Options (1975) by Robert Sheckley It’s Me, Eddie (1976) by Eduard Limonov The Public Burning (1977), by Robert Coover Life: A User’s Manual (1978) by Georges Perec If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino Mulligan Stew (1979) by Gilbert Sorrentino How German Is It (1980) by Walter Abish Nikopol Trilogy (1980 to 1993) by Enki Bilal Sixty Stories (1981) by Donald Barthelme Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) by Alasdair Gray The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) by Philip K. Dick Mantissa (1982) by John Fowles Watchmen (1984) by Alan Moore Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) by Milorad Paviæ The New York Trilogy (1985–86) by Paul Auster White Noise (1985) by Don DeLillo A Maggot (1985) by John Fowles The Infinite Deadlock (1985–1988) by Dmitry Galkovsky Women and Men (1987) by Joseph McElroy The Mezzanine (1988) by Nicholson Baker Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) by Umberto Eco Empire of Dreams (1988) by Giannina Braschi Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) by David Markson

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The Sandman (1989 to 1996) by Neil Gaiman My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) by Mark Leyner American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis Omon Ra (1991) by Victor Pelevin What a Carve Up! (1991) by Jonathan Coe Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland Vurt (1993) by Jeff Noon A Frolic of His Own (1994) by William Gaddis The Tunnel (1995) by William Gass Reservation Blues (1995) by Sherman Alexie The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995) by Haruki Murakami Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace Chapayev and Void (1996) by Victor Pelevin Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo The Hundred Brothers (1998) by Donald Antrim Tomcat in Love (1998) by Tim O’Brien Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) Giannina Braschi Hatzfeld Tetralogy (1998 to 2007) by Enki Bilal Generation “Ï” (1999) by Victor Pelevin The Rings of Saturn (1999) by W. G. Sebald Blue Salo (1999) by Vladimir Sorokin Q (1999) by Luther Blissett House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Danielewski The Verificationist (2000) by Donald Antrim This is Not a Novel (2001) by David Markson Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald Everything Is Illuminated (2002) by Jonathan Safran Foer 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolaño Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Lunar Park (2005) by Bret Easton Ellis Trance (2005) by Christopher Sorrentino Remainder (2007) by Tom McCarthy The Last Novel (2007) by David Markson Generation A (2009) by Douglas Coupland Z213: Exit (2009) by Dimitris Lyacos 1Q84 (2009–2010) by Haruki Murakami C (2010) by Tom McCarthy A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan Witz (2010) by Joshua Cohen The Pale King (2011) by David Foster Wallace United States of Banana (2011) by Giannina Braschi

20th Century Genre Literature

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, who is best remembered for her 80 detective novels as well as her successful plays for the West End theatre. Christie’s works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the ‘Queen of Crime’ and she was one of the most important and innovative writers in this genre. Christie’s novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers (18931957). Other recent noteworthy writers in this genre are Ruth Rendell, P. D. James and Scot Ian Rankin. Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands 1903, is an early example of the spy novel. A noted writer in the spy novel genre was John le Carré, while in thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond’s adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961), and nine short story works.

Hungarian-born Baroness Emma Orczy’s (1865-1947) original play, The Scarlet Pimpernel, opened in October 1903 at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal and was not a success. However, with a rewritten last act, it opened at the New Theatre in London in January 1905. The premier of the London production was enthusiastically received by the audience, running 122 performances and enjoying numerous revivals. The Scarlet Pimpernel became a favourite of London audiences, playing more than 2,000 performances and becoming one of the most popular shows staged in England to that date. The novel The Scarlet Pimpernel was published soon after the play opened and was an immediate success. Orczy gained a following of readers in Britain and throughout the world. The popularity of the novel encouraged her to write a number of sequels for her “reckless daredevil” over the next 35 years. The play was performed to great acclaim in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, while the novel was translated into 16 languages. Subsequently, the story has been adapted for television, film, a musical and other media. John Buchan (1875-1940) published the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. The novelist Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre. The Kailyard school of Scottish writers, notably J. M. Barrie (1869-1937), creator of Peter Pan (1904), presented an idealised version of society and brought of fantasy and folklore back into fashion. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) wrote the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the “Inklings”. Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis is especially known for The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Another significant writer is Alan Garner author of Elidor (1965), while Terry Pratchett is a more recent fantasy writer. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children’s fantasy novels, such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, often inspired by experiences from his childhood, which are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. J.

K. Rowling author of the highly successful Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman famous for his His Dark Materials trilogy are other significant authors of fantasy novels for younger readers. Noted writers in the field of comic books are Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore; Gaiman also produces graphic novels. In the later decades of the 18th-century, the genre of science fiction begun to be taken more seriously because of the work of writers such as Arthur C. Clarke’s (2001: A Space Odyssey), Isaac Asimov, Ursula le Guin, Michael Moorcock and Kim Stanley Robinson. Another prominent writer in this genre, Douglas Adams, is particularly associated with the comic science fiction work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, which began life as a radio series in 1978. Mainstream novelists such Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood also wrote works in this genre, while Scottish novelist Ian M. Banks has also achieved a reputation as both a writer of traditional and science fiction novels. The Age of Shakespeare 1564-1616

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calendar, in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakespeare’s death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan. In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the queen’s death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and “the spacious times of great Elizabeth” have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a

certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen’s seal.Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression “Victorian poetry” has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elizabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser’s Gloriana, and even Shakespeare, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in Henry VIII., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced into Midsummer Night’s Dream. That very time I saw—but thou could’st not— Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal thronëd by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden meditation, fancy free— an allusion to Leicester’s unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth’s hand. The praises of the queen, which sound through all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter’s feet, the

sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown. The poets idealized Elizabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elizabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she “loved a man,” and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities, the nobles, and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the day. “When the queen paraded through a country town,” says Warton, the historian of English poetry, “almost every pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the penates. In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana, who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon.” The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honour by the Earl of Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth, and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of Kenilworth. Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakespeare, then a boy of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to see the spectacle; may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a

huge dolphin in the castle lake, speaking the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea; and may have heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song. But in considering the literature of Elizabeth’s reign it will be convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser’s career to its close (1599) we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding. In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose. This was John Lyly’s Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit. It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to see the world and get an education; but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc., written in language which, from the title of the book, has received the name of Euphuism. This new English became very fashionable among the ladies, and “that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism,” says a writer of 1632, “was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French.” Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the Monastery, but the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shaft on is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history. “Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust; be merry, but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen; be valiant, but not too venturous.” “I see now that, as the fish Scolopidus in the flood Araxes at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless.”

Besides the fish Scolopidus, the favourite animals of Lyly’s menagerie are such as the chameleon, “which though he have most guts draweth least breath;” the bird Piralis, “which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon green, green;” and the serpent Porphirius, “which, though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself.” Lyly’s style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakespeare’s comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, Euphues and his England, and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598. Lyly had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, a tract directed against the stage and published about four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is directly Euphuistic. The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587, his Menaphon; Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, and his Euphues’s Censure to Philautus. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published, in 1590, Rosalynde: Euphues’s Golden Legacy, from which Shakespeare took the plot of As You Like It. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both quote from Euphues in their plays, and Shakespeare was really writing Euphuism when he wrote such a sentence as “‘Tis true, ‘tis pity; pity ‘tis ‘tis true.” That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went to treat of the queen’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Alençon, and was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St.

Bartholomew, in 1572. Afterward he had travelled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the emperor’s court, and every-where won golden opinions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which remained in manuscript till 1590. This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian Arcadia of Sanazzaro, and the Diana Enamorada of Montemayor, a Portuguese author. It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney finished only two books and a portion of the third. It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who were wrecked on the coast of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance: disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats. Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the fairy land of Spenser. Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that he did first reduce Our tongue from Lyly’s writing, then in use, Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, Playing with words and idle similes. Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as “Italianated” as Lyly’s, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose. His “Sidneian showers of sweet discourse” sowed every page of the Arcadia with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elizabethan writers appears in Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. If he describes a field full of roses, he makes “the roses add such a ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty.” If he describes ladies bathing in the stream, he makes the water break into twenty bubbles, as “not content to have the picture of

their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set forth a miniature of them.” And even a passage which should be tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with conceits like these: “For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbour Death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck of alabaster, displaying the wound which with most dainty blood laboured to drown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white,” etc. The Arcadia, like Euphues, was a lady’s book. It was the favourite court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are thought to have been dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson’s famous epitaph. Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother; Death, ere thou hast slain another Learn’d and fair and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee. Sidney’s Defence of Poesy composed in 1581, but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier English than the Arcadia, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not in love), according to the conventional usage of the amourists. Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in a cavalry charge at Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent sent to help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his giving his

cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” Sidney was England’s darling, and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain “the meed of some melodious tear.” Spenser’s Ruins of Time were among the number of these funeral songs; but the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known. Another typical Englishman of Elizabeth’s reign was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical enterprise that marked, the times. He fought against the queen’s enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot army against the League in France. Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great nursery of English seamen. He was halfbrother to the famous navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard Grenville. He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 1591 he published a report of the fight, near the Azores, between Grenville’s ship, the Revenge, and fifteen great ships of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon, “memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable.” Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588. He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex “singed the Spanish king’s beard,” in the harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San José, in the West Indies; and on his return he published his Discovery of the Empire of Guiana. In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in the Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia, and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe. America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, “the Devonshire Skipper,” had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, after his voyage around the world, the enthusiasm of England had been

mightily stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1589, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation, worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets. We see the influence of this literature of travel in the Tempest, written undoubtedly after Shakespeare had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers’s shipwreck on the Bermudas or “Isles of Devils.” Raleigh was not in favour with Elizabeth’s successor, James I. He was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason. The sentence hung over him until 1618, when it was revived against him and he was beheaded. Meanwhile, during his twelve years’ imprisonment in the Tower, he had written his magnum opus, the History of the World. This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of learned dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. A chapter with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in a universal history nowadays: “Of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the moon; and of others which make it higher than the middle regions of the air.” The preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elizabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to Death. “O eloquent, just and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, hic jacet.” Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet. Spenser calls him “the summer’s nightingale,” and George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy (1589), finds his “vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate.” Puttenham used insolent in its old sense, uncommon; but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning. Raleigh’s most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—the saeva

indignatio of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the manuscripts or by tradition to have been “made by Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he was beheaded.” Of one such poem the assertion is probably true—namely, the lines “found in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster.” Even such is Time, that takes in trust, Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days; But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust! The strictly literary prose of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented—outside of the Arcadia and Euphues already mentioned—chiefly by tales translated or imitated from Italian novelle. George Turberville’s Tragical Tales (1566) was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter’s Palace of Pleasure (1576-1577) a similar collection from Boccaccio’s Decameron and the novels of Bandello. These translations are mainly of interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge’s Rosalind and Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the sources respectively of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Winter’s Tale, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against “Martin Marprelate,” an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them.

The most noteworthy of them were Nash’s Piers Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil, Lyly’s Pap with a Hatchet, and Greene’s Groat’s Worth of Wit. Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the Chronicle of England, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was Shakespeare’s English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakespeare in his representation of Richard III and other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakespeare followed closely Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot. Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most important was Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, the first four books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of law, and a defence, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of the English Church by bishops. No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose. It was written in sonorous, stately, and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne. Had the Ecclesiastical Polity been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would doubtless have been written in Latin. The life of Francis Bacon, “the father of inductive philosophy,” as he has been called—better, the founder of inductive logic—belongs to English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to the history of English philosophy. But his volume of Essays was a contribution to general literature. In their completed form they belong to the year 1625, but the first edition was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims—the text for an essay—than that developed treatment of a subject which we now understand by the word essay. They were, said their author, “as grains of salt, that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety.” They were the first essays, so called, in the language. “The word,” said Bacon, “is late, but the thing is ancient.” The word he took from the French essais of Montaigne, the first two books of which had been published in 1592. Bacon testified that his essays were the most

popular of his writings because they “came home to men’s business and bosoms.” Their alternate title explains their character: Counsels Civil and Moral, that is, pieces of advice touching the conduct of life, “of a nature whereof men shall find much in experience, little in books.” The essays contain the quintessence of Bacon’s practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs. “Revenge is a kind of wild justice.” “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Bacon’s reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination, and his noble English rises now and then, as in his essay On Death, into eloquence—the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that lumen siccum which he loved to commend, “not drenched or bloodied by the affections.” Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon’s writings was a dry wine. A popular class of books in the 17th century were “characters” or “witty descriptions of the properties of sundry persons,” such as the Good Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some modern Heads of the People, where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more modern instance of the kind is George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such, which derives its title from the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the original models of this kind of literature. The most popular character-book in Europe in the 17th century was La Bruyère’s Caractères. But this was not published till 1688. In England the fashion had been set in 1614, by the Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed. One of Overbury’s sketches—the Fair and Happy Milkmaid—is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness. “Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-

made hay-cock. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel, she sings defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She bestows her year’s wages at next fair, and, in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and surgery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet to say truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones. Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the springtime, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.” England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said Bishop Joseph Hall, which were “sung to the wheel and sung unto the pail.” Shakespeare loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of them through his plays, and wrote others like them himself: Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song. That old and antique song we heard last night. Methinks it did relieve my passion much, More than light airs and recollected terms Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times. Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. The knitters and the spinners in the sun And the free maids that weave their threads with bones Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth And dallies with the innocence of love Like the old age. Simple truth.

Chapter 6 : Suicide in English Literature Suicide, the act of deliberately killing oneself, is a prominent action in many important works of English literature. Authors use the suicide of a character to portray defiance, despair, love, or honour. Whether it is written as the ultimate act of devotion or the result of depression, the act of suicide was and is a prevalent action within the context of English literature. Suicide in the Novel

According to Lorna Ruth Wiedmann, novelistic suicide patterns first emerge in the nineteenth century. She categorizes nineteenthcentury works based on five themes: ‘murder-followed-by-suicide; the survivor of suicide; age and the suicide; the suicide’s choice of method; and gender and suicide.’ Kevin Grauke states that suicide serves an “ambivalent rhetorical function” in the works of the nineteenth-century. Authors such as Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf include themes of suicide in their writing. Suicide in Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is one of the most famous authors of all time. Shakespeare’s characters commit suicide in several of his plays. Perhaps most famously, the young lovers Romeo and Juliet both commit suicide in the final scene of Romeo and Juliet. Suicide also occurs in Julius Caesar (play) when Brutus and Cassius both kill themselves. Othello commits suicide with a dagger after murdering his love in a crime of passion in Othello. The play, Antony and Cleopatra, ends with five suicides, including the deaths of both Antony and Cleopatra. Ophelia commits suicide in Hamlet following the death of

her father, and Claudius attempts to commit suicide by drinking poisoned wine, so as to follow Gertrude in death. Controversy

The subject of suicide itself is controversial. While the act of suicide can be symbolic in literature, the act itself still possesses the ability to cause controversy in the real world. Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, was extremely controversial when it was released in 1899. Toni Morrison gained fame and critics through novels such as Beloved. Some authors who have created characters that commit suicide have committed suicide themselves. Ernest Hemingway shot himself in 1961. Some of his short stories included suicidal themes. The poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide by self-asphyxiation in 1963. Thoughts on Suicide in English Literature

“Once suicide was accepted as a common fact of society- not as a noble Roman alternative, nor as the mortal sin it had been in the Middle Ages, nor as a simple cause to be pleaded or warned againstbut simply as something people did, often and without much hesitation, like committing adultery, then it automatically became a common property of art.” - diaz, 1971. From the Conquest to Chaucer 1066-1400

The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The Old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king’s court and the courts of law, from Parliament, school, and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower. When the latter got the better of the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its inflections. It had lost half of its old words, and had filled their places

with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. The masterbuilders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living animals, ox, swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their medicine, botany, and astronomy displaced the old nomenclature of leechdom, wort-cunning and starcraft. And, finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so that voice drove out steven, poor drove out earm, and colour, use, and place made good their footing beside hue, wont, and stead. A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former’s than from the latter’s. To Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us. The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred’s capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a “king’s English” or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighbouring shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more

tenaciously to ancient forms, sank into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote. The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the Continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master. The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating. Reste hine thâ rúm-heort; réced hlifade Geáp and góld-fâh, gäst inne swäf. Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within. This rude, energetic verse the Saxon scôp had sung to his harp or glee-beam, dwelling on the emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others, which were of undetermined number and position in the line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung.

The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule. The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly entries are mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated. The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely. Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by; Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land. And here we thes muneches sang. Merrily sung the monks in Ely When King Canute rowed by. ‘Row boys, nearer the land, And let us hear these monks’ song.’ It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold outlaw Hereward, “the last of the English,” held out for some years against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burgh or Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede (meadowhomestead), that the chronicle was continued nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen’s death. Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold, “a

very stern man,” and the entry in the chronicle for 1070 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conquerer put down in the year of his death (1086) by one who had “looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court.” “He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet.... Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will.... Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father.” With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of the nation’s story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his work in 1273. About 1300, Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century. In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. All real knowledge of the period dwindled away until in Capgraves’s Chronicle of England, written in prose in 1463-1464, hardly any thing of it is left. In history as in literature the English had forgotten their past, and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare, who

borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland—as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, respectively—ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spenser, who gives in the second book of his Faerie Queene a resumé of the reigns of fabulous British kings—the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron—has nothing to say of the real kings of early England. So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors. In the Roman de Rou, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings the French jongleur, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of William’s army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of “Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at Roncesvals.” This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England. The lines which Taillefer sang were from the Chanson de Roland, the oldest and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the course of one hundred and fifty years completely identified with the French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike, adventurous spirit of the vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of knights-errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was at once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled in embroidery, a splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in which the conqueror’s wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court wrought the history of the Conquest. This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to

English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every great feudal baron, or by the jongleurs, who wandered from court to castle. There is a whole literature of these romans d’aventure in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are very long— often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines—written sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers of them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The translations were usually inferior to the originals. The French trouvere (finder or poet) told his story in a straightforward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc. He invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which later poets have profited, but his own handling of them was feeble and prolix. Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the trouveres which the rude, unformed English failed to catch. The heroes of these romances were of various climes: Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favourite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach invaders and their victor in twelve great battles. The language and literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrowings in the English speech, such as bard and druid; but in the old Anglo-Saxon literature there are no more traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over six hundred years. But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of Cymric race, and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh.

About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a socalled Historia Britonum, in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Æneas, came to Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city of New Troy (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he said, by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and his three daughters; Cymbeline; Gorboduc, the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen and his daughter Sabrina, who gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in Milton’s Comus and became the heroine of the tragedy of Locrine, once attributed to Shakespeare; and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace, the author of the Roman de Rou, turned Geoffrey’s work into a French poem entitled Brut d’Angleterre, “brut” being a Welsh word meaning chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace’s poem was Englished by Layamon, a priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon’s Brut is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. Wace had amplified Geoffrey’s chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border. In particular, the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur’s queen, Guenever, and the treachery of his nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great battle between Arthur and Modred; of the wounding of the king —”fifteen fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least three gloves thrust”—; and of the little boat with “two women therein, wonderly

dight,” which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante, “sheenest of all elves,” whence he shall come again, according to Merlin’s prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his Passing of Arthur. This new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers. The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afloat. Walter Map, a gentleman of the court of Henry II., in two French prose romances connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul’s desire, an adventure only to be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of that Launcelot who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in Geoffrey’s history as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner the love-story of Tristan and Isolde, which came probably from Brittany or Cornwall, was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-saga. Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idyls of the King, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German, and in other tongues. But the final form which the saga took in mediæval England was the prose Morte Dartur of Sir Thomas Malory, composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the earlier romances, and is Tennyson’s main authority. Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister. There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English, consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225, and the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience), 1340, in prose; the Handlyng Sinne, 1303, the Cursor Mundi, 1320, and the Pricke of Conscience, 1340, in verse; metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the

Ten Commandments; the Gospels for the Day, such as the Ormulum, or Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five joys of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment; and dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in smaller part of the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety and superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the marvellous, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve Ron (A Love Counsel), by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon’s Balade of Dead Ladies, with its refrain— Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? “Where are the snows of yester year?” Where is Paris and Heléyne That weren so bright and fair of blee Amadas, Tristan, and Idéyne Yseudë and allë the, Hector with his sharpë main, And Cæsar rich in worldës fee? They beth ygliden out of the reign As the shaft is of the clee. A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of mention, among others, The Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an estrif, or dispute, in

which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The Land of Cokaygne is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, belonging to the class of fabliaux, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool’s paradise, where the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in their bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the hall of little King Pepin, are “of pie-crust and pastry crust,” with flouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins. There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a single collection (Harl. MS., 2253), which are almost the only English verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical, fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and woodruff. Hue. Those. Realm. Bowstring. When the nightingalë sings the woodës waxen green; Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, And love is to my hertë gone with a spear so keen, Night and day my blood it drinks, my hertë doth me tene. Others are love plaints to “Alysoun” or some other lady whose “name is in a note of the nightingale;” whose eyes are as gray as glass, and her skin as “red as rose on ris.” Some employ a burden or refrain. Blow, northern wind, Blow thou me my sweeting,

Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow! Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter. Winter wakeneth all my care Now these leavës waxeth bare, Oft I sigh and mournë sare When it cometh in my thought Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought. Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry, and the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English Golden Legend, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on saints’ days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael; partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the lives of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and of the AngloSaxons, Dunstan, Swithin—who is mentioned by Shakespeare—and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in the Nonne Preste’s Tale. The verse was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan’s search for the earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris. • Pain. • Branch. About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old English alliterative verse in romances like William and the Werewolf, and Sir Gawayne, and in religious pieces such as Clannesse (purity), Patience, and The Perle, the last named a mystical poem of much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as well as

alliteration. They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that alliteration was most common in the north. “I am a sotherne man,” says the parson in the Canterbury Tales. “I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by my letter.” But the most important of the alliterative poems was the Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools. The AngloNorman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress, “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.” The native English genius was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories in the wars of Edward III against the French. It was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The Church was corrupt; the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors. That social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes which finally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. This state of things is reflected in the Vision of Piers Plowman, written as early as 1362, by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country. It is in form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the Pilgrim’s Progress. The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a “fair field full of folk,” representing the world with its various conditions of men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who went to Walsingham—and their wenches after them—great lubbers and long that were loth to work; friars glossing the Gospel for their own profit; pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences; parish priests who forsook their parishes— that had been poor since the pestilence time—and went to London to sing there for simony; bishops, archbishops, and deacons, who got

themselves fat clerkships in the Exchequer, or King’s Bench; in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics. A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a sermon the text of which is, “When all treasure is tried, truth is the best.” A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced, Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc., and after a series of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic impersonations; and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in search of St. Truth, finding no guide to direct them save Piers the Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious labouring man, the sound heart of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight divisions or “passus,” to which was added a continuation in three parts, Vita Do Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best. About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author. Piers Plowman was the first extended literary work after the Conquest which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but the allegorical cast which the Roman de la Rose had made fashionable in both countries. But even here such personified abstractions as Langland’s Fair-speech and Work-when-time-is, remind us less of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French courtly allegories than of Bunyan’s Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of such Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land Busy. The poem is full of English moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality. It has little unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, parables, and scenes. It is all astir with the actual life of the time. We see the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London streets crying “Hote pies, hote! Good gees and grys. Go we dine, go we!” Had Langland not linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a finer artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination, his book might have been, like Chaucer’s, among the lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is forgotten by all but professional students of literature and history. Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS which are extant, and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman’s Crede (1394), and the Plowman’s Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the

Canterbury Tales. Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wiclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mothertongue. This he made about 1380, with the help of Nicholas Hereford, and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that time, and the Wiclifite versions were made not from the original tongues but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the Apocalypse, “If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life,” Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make rather awkward English, translating, for example, Quib sibi vult hoc somnium? by What to itself wole this sweven? Purvey’s revision was somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. and V. it was forbidden to read or to have any of Wiclif’s writings. Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers. Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), enumerate one hundred and fifty MSS. which had been consulted by them. Later translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or “King James’s Bible” (1611), followed Wiclif’s language in many instances; so that he was, in truth, the first author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which has been the main conservative influence in the mothertongue, holding it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have been lost. In 1415, some thirty years after Wiclif’s death, by decree of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up

from the soil of Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift. “The brook,” says Thomas Fuller, in his Church History, “did convey his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.” • Pigs. • Will. • Dream. Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to the student of the English language and the historian of English manners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a “well of English undefiled” to the professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediæval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth in the service of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III. He made a campaign in France in 1359-60, when he was taken prisoner. Afterward he was attached to the court and received numerous favours and appointments. He was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where, in all probability, he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He was appointed at different times comptroller of the wool customs, comptroller of petty customs, and clerk of the works. He sat for Kent in Parliament, and he received pensions from three successive kings. He was a man of business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less than study. He knew his world; he “saw life steadily and saw it whole.” Living at the centre of English social and political life, and resorting to the court of Edward III., then the most brilliant in Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which fill the high-coloured pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler,

Froissart. His description of a tournament in the Knight’s Tale is unexcelled for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts, state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower and hall: the “trompes with the loude minstralcie,” the heralds, the ladies, and the squires. He knew— What hawkës sitten on the perch above, What houndës liggen on the floor adown. But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly; the poor widow in her narrow cottage, and that “trewe swynkere and a good,” the plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of “Aprillë with her showrës sweet” and the “foulës song;” of “May with all her flourës and her green;” of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his Legend of Good Women. A fresh vernal air blows through all his pages. • Lie. • Labourer. In Chaucer’s earlier works, such as the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose (if that be his), the Boke of the Duchesse, the Parlament of Foules, the Hous of Fame, as well as in the Legend of Good Women, which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the mediæval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate descriptions of palaces, temples, portraitures, etc., which had been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, and Jean Machault’s La Fontaine Amoureuse. In some of these the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible. There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the Parlament of Foules and the Hous of Fame, and Troilus and Cresseide is a free handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato. In all of these there are passages of great beauty and force. Had Chaucer written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of all time. This position

he owes to his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales. Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the artificial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from his own ripe knowledge of men and things. The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories written at different times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The frame-work into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and “reporter.” In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors. The little “head-links” and “end-links” which bind them together give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the prologue of the Wife of Bath, to full and almost dramatic character-sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches, the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume. The pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some fifty years ago. But however the outward face of society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer’s descriptions, living and universal types of human nature. The Canterbury Tales are twenty-four in number. There were thirtytwo pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories.

Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like many another great poet he put the final touch to the various literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his Knight’s Tale, based upon Boccaccio’s Teseide, is the best of English mediæval romances. And yet the Rime of Sir Thopas, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints’ legends. The Monk’s Tale is a set of dry, moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the “moral Gower.” The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant belong to the class of fabliaux, a few of which existed in English, such as Dame Siriz, the Lay of the Ash, and the Land of Cokaygne, already mentioned. The Nonne Preste’s Tale, likewise, which Dryden modernised with admirable humor, was of the class of fabliaux, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, Dou Coc et Werpil, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the early English poem of The Fox and the Wolf, to the popular animal saga of Reynard the Fox. The Franklin’s Tale, whose scene is Brittany, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale which is laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French lais, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful lais of Marie de France. Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not, like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour, of whom he says, And yet in sooth he was a good felawe. Whether he shared Wiclif’s opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV., who was

Chaucer’s life-long patron, was likewise Wiclif’s great upholder against the persecution of the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the poor parson in the Canterbury Tales, the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be a “loller,” that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, and that, because he objects to the jovial innkeeper’s swearing “by Goddes bones.” Chaucer’s English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakespeare’s, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read, is correct and melodious. The early English was, in some respects, “more sweet upon the tongue” than the modern language. The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterals and vocalic syllables, like the endings ën, ës, ë, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together. Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the old chroniclers and legend writers; cites “auctours” and gives long catalogues of names and objects with a naïve display of learning; and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages—at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer’s artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child’s sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise. The Canterbury Tales had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis (1393) in English. The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some fifteen thousand smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel Pucel.

From Chaucer to Spenser 1400-1599

The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer’s death before any poet came whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the Court of Love, the Flower and the Leaf, the Cuckow and the Nightingale, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers. If not Chaucer’s, they are of Chaucer’s school, and the first two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as the Boke of the Duchesse and the Parlament of Foules. Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his Governail of Princes, a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a coloured portrait of his “maister dere and fader reverent.” This londës verray tresour and richesse Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse Dispoilëd hath this londe of the swetnésse Of Rhetoryk. Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the Story of Thebes, as an addition to the Canterbury Tales. His ballad of London Lyckpenny, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice— But for lack of mony I could not spede— is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.

Chaucer’s influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state. There he wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled the King’s Quhair (King’s Book), in Chaucer’s sevenlined stanza, which had been employed by Lydgate in his Falls of Princes (from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called the “rime royal,” from its use by King James. The King’s Quhair tells how the poet, on a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with The sharpë, greenë, sweetë juniper. He was listening to “the little sweetë nightingale,” when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his “heart became her thrall.” The incident is precisely like Palamon’s first sight of Emily in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and almost in the very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady: Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly crëatúre Or heavenly thing in likeness of natúre? Or are ye very Nature, the goddéss, That have depainted with your heavenly hand This garden full of flowrës as they stand? Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of Venus, Minerva, and Fortune, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to Love’s service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to his window a spray of red gilly flowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in golden letters, with a message of encouragement. James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so was the dialect of his poem, although the unique MS. of it is in the Scotch spelling. The King’s Quhair is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices,

but it is, upon the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The story of the murder has been told of late by D.G. Rossetti, in his ballad, The King’s Tragedy. The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance. The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be translated from the French, homilies and saints’ legends and rhyming chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again slipped back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer. In the history of every literature the development of prose is later than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought worthy of being written and kept. English prose laboured under the added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries. Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms. The word clerk meant either priest or scholar. Two of the Canterbury Tales are in prose, as is also the Testament of Love, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same man who wrote the Knight’s Tale and the story of Griselda. The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville—the forerunner of that great library of oriental

travel which has enriched our modern literature— was written, according to its author, first in Latin, then in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for the behoof of “lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men, that conne not Latyn but litylle.” The author professed to have spent over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far as Farther India and the “iles that ben abouten Indi,” to have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and, at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary. But there is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant; the French seems to be much later than 1356, and the English MS to belong to the early years of the 15th century, and to have been made by another hand. Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such person as Maundeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part of the “voiage” that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about gryfouns that fly away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc. Know. During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into a shape fitting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449, Reginald Peacock, Bishop of St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same controversy, The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy. Sir John Fortescue, who was chief-justice of the King’s Bench from 1442-1460, wrote during the reign of Edward IV. a book on the Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, which may be regarded as the first treatise on political philosophy and constitutional law in the language. But these works hardly belong to pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very good, examples of

English prose in a barren time. The 15th century was an era of decay and change. The Middle Age was dying, Church and State were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual influences that were working secretly under ground. In England the civil wars of the Red and White Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the Tudors. Toward the close of that century, and early in the next, happened the four great events, or series of events, which freed and widened men’s minds, and, in a succession of shocks, overthrew the mediæval system of life and thought. These were the invention of printing, the Renaissance, or revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the Protestant Reformation. William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne. In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand for MS. copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the coming into general use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment. The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and illuminating of MSS. went on, professional copyists resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging to the monastic library. Caxton’s choice of a spot was, therefore, significant. His new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the old method of transcription at the very headquarters of the MS. makers. The first book that bears his Westminster imprint was the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV. The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the time, since he naturally selected what was most in demand. The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like the Order of Chivalry, Faits of Arms, and the Golden Legend, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as Reynard the Fox, and a French version of the Aeneid. He also printed, with continuations of his own, revisions of several early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. A translation of Cicero on

Friendship, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, but no edition of a classical author in the original. The new learning of the Renaissance had not, as yet, taken much hold in England. Upon the whole the productions of Caxton’s press were mostly of a kind that may be described as mediæval, and the most important of them, if we except his edition of Chaucer, was that “noble and joyous book,” as Caxton called it, Le Morte Dartur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469, and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation from French Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet been written. It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes of simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory’s style has been improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole romance, the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has followed Malory’s narrative closely, even to such details of the scene as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer which Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when bidden to throw Excalibur into the water, “‘What saw thou there?’ said the king. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.’” • I heard the ripple washing in the reeds • And the wild water lapping on the crag. And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector over Launcelot, in Malory’s final chapter: “‘Ah, Launcelot,’ he said, ‘thou were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say,’ said Sir Ector, ‘thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare shield; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.’” Equally good, as an example of English prose narrative, was the translation made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, of that most

brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer’s contemporary, Sir John Froissart. Lord Berners was the English governor of Calais, and his version of Froissart’s Chronicles was made in 1523-1525, at the request of Henry VIII. In these two books English chivalry spoke its last genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was merged into that of the modern gentleman. And although tournaments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his Faerie Queene into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey: “In our forefathers’ time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons: as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God’s Bible was banished the court, and Morte Arthure received into the prince’s chamber.” The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into England by the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose, reached its extremity in Stephen Hawes’s Passetyme of Pleasure, printed by Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively mediæval. His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his Bowge of Courte (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza. But his later

poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him Skeltonical. This was a sort of glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French and Latin. Her beautye to augment. Dame Nature hath her lent A warte upon her cheke, Who so lyst to seke In her vyságe a skar That semyth from afar Lyke to the radiant star, All with favour fret, So properly it is set. She is the vyolet, The daysy delectáble, The columbine commendáble, The jelofer amyáble; For this most goodly floure, This blossom of fressh coloúr, So Jupiter me succoúr, She flourysheth new and new In beaute and vertéw; Hac claritate gemina, O gloriosa femina, etc. Gilliflower. Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical

character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns’s Jolly Beggars. His Phyllyp Sparrowe is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus’s elegy on Lesbia’s sparrow. In Spake, Parrot, and Why Come ye not to Courte? he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as the “one light and ornament of British letters.” Caxton asserts that he had read Vergil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, “I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon’s well.” In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety of metres, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza. In somer, when the shawes be shene, And leves be large and longe, Hit is full merry in feyre forést, To here the foulys song. To se the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hillës hee, And shadow them in the levës grene, Under the grene-wode tree. Woods. Bright. High. It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads. They lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were first composed and sung. Meanwhile they

underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of the same story. They belonged to no particular author, but, like all folklore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and ballad reciters, who modernised their language, added to them, or corrupted them, and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear no poet’s name, but are ferae naturae, and have the flavor of wild game. In the form in which they are preserved, few of them are older than the 17th or the latter part of the 16th century, though many, in their original shape, are doubtless much older. A very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same period is assigned the charming ballad of the Nut Brown Maid and the famous border ballad of Chevy Chase, which describes a battle between the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style.” But the style of the ballads was not always rude. In their compressed energy of expression, in the impassioned way in which they tell their tale of grief and horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any thing in English poetry between Chaucer and Spenser; superior to any thing in Chaucer and Spenser themselves, in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad literature was “the north country,” and especially the Scotch border, where the constant forays of moss-troopers and the raids and private warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the Battle of Otterbourne, and in the Hunting of the Cheviot, or Chevy Chase, already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English; the dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened, popular versions of the chivalry romances, which were passing out of fashion among educated readers in the 16th century and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local country-side tales, family feuds,

and tragic incidents, partly historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular spots. Such are, for example, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow, Fair Helen of Kirkconnell, The Forsaken Bride, and The Twa Corbies. Others, again, have a colouring of popular superstition, like the beautiful ballad concerning Thomas of Ersyldoune, who goes in at Eildon Hill with an elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land. Fiddler. But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about the name of that good outlaw, Robin Hood, who, with his merry men, hunted the forest of Sherwood, where he killed the king’s deer and waylaid rich travelers, but was kind to poor knights and honest workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common people as Arthur was of the nobles. The names of his confessor, Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; his companions, Little John, Scathelock, and Much, the miller’s son, were as familiar as household words. Langland in the 14th century mentions “rimes of Robin Hood,” and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage, as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon de Montfort in his war against Henry III. But there seems to be nothing historical about Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive, and there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defied the power of the Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character. He had the English love of fair play, the English readiness to shake hands and make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square fight. He beat and plundered the fat bishops and abbots, who had more than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood. He was a mighty archer with those national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft. He tricked and baffled legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawless adventure which marked the free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England.

And, finally, the scenery of the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the exploits of “the old Robin Hood of England” and his merry men. The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use of conventional epithets; “the red, red gold,” “the good green wood,” “the gray goose wing.” Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like, But out and spak their stepmother. Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example, She had’na pu’d a double rose, A rose but only twae. Or again, And mony ane sings o’ grass, o’ grass, And mony ane sings o’ corn; An mony ane sings o’ Robin Hood, Kens little whare he was born. It was na in the ha’, the ha’, Nor in the painted bower; But it was in the gude green wood, Amang the lily flower. Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century, printed in black letter, “broadsides,” or single sheets. Wynkyn de Worde printed in 1489 A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood, which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies called Garlands. Early in the 18th century the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany. But no large and important collection was put forth until Percy’s Reliques (1765), a book which

had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th century, such as Jane Elliott’s Lament for Flodden, and the fine ballad of Sir Patrick Spence. Walter Scott’s Proud Maisie is in the Wood, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of the old ballad makers. In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and many Greek scholars, with their manuscripts, fled into Italy, where they began teaching their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato. There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin classics. Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin poet, Boethius, whose De Consolatione Philosophiæ had been translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue. Caxton’s so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil’s epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Cæsar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe. Manuscripts were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars, and spread abroad by means of the printing-press. Statues were dug up and placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect workmanship in letters and the fine arts. In the latter years of the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England. William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek at Oxford, the former as early as 1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s and the founder of St. Paul’s School, and his friend, William

Lily, the grammarian, and first master of St. Paul’s (1500), also studied Greek abroad; Colet in Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome. Thomas More, afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the pupils of Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither also, in 1497, came, in search of the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost scholar of his time. From Oxford the study spread to the sister university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir John Cheke, who “taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek,” became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils was Roger Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St. John’s College, Cambridge, was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nashe testifies that it “was an universitie within itself; having more candles light in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of clock bell gave strokes.” Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent opposition from the conservative element, who were nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part from the priests, who feared that that new study would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among them Thomas More, whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as chancellor, was also a munificent patron of learning, and founded Christ Church College at Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were established in England in the first twenty years of the 16th century. Greek became a passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his Schoolmaster, a treatise on education, published in 1570, says that Queen Elizabeth “readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week.” And in the same book he tells how, calling once on Lady Jane Grey, at Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he “found her in her chamber reading Phædon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delite as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Bocase,” and when he asked her why she had not gone

hunting with the rest, she answered, “I wisse, all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato.” Ascham’s Schoolmaster, as well as his earlier book, Toxophilus, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek and Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden. One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the Scriptures into English out of the original tongues. In 1525 William Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek. Surely; a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon gewis. Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the whole Bible from the German and Latin. These were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful English of Tyndal’s Testament is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version (1611). At first it was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England. Numbers of copies were brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation. After Henry VIII had broken with the pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants. Other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul’s Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary. The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 15491552. More was, perhaps, the best representative of a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the Church from the inside, but who refused to follow Henry VIII in his breach with Rome. Dean Colet and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More, and for the same offence, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act confirming the king’s divorce from Catharine of Arragon and

his marriage with Anne Boleyn. More’s philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modelled on Plato’s Republic, and printed in 1516. The name signifies “no place” [Greek: oy thopst], and has furnished an adjective to the language. The Utopia was in Latin, but More’s History of Edward V. and Richard III. written 1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events. The first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original work of literature in England. It was a season of preparation, of education. The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558, a more settled order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors. A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy. In 1557 appeared Tottel’s Miscellany, containing songs and sonnets by a “new company of courtly makers.” Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years before by gentlemen of Henry VIII.’s court, and circulated in manuscript. The two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one time English embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king’s arms with his own. Both of them were dead long before their work was printed. The verses in Tottel’s Miscellany show very clearly the influence of Italian poetry. We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something more from Boccaccio and Petrarch. But the sonnet, which Petrarch had brought to perfection, was first introduced into England by Wiat. There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat’s poems were adaptations of the sonnets and canzoni of Petrarch and later poets. Others were imitations of Horace’s satires and epistles. Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the Aeneid. The love

poetry of Tottel’s Miscellany is polished and artificial, like the models which it followed. Dante’s Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch’s Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or love sonneteers, dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems: “Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to rue on his dying heart;” “Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore as unkindness the lover;” “The lover prayeth not to be disdained, refused, mistrusted nor forsaken,” etc. The most genuine utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor—a cage where so many a songbird has grown vocal. And Wiat’s little piece of eight lines, “Of his Return from Spain,” is worth reams of his amatory affectations. Nevertheless the writers in Tottel’s Miscellany were real reformers of English poetry. They introduced new models of style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediæval traditions which had hitherto obtained. The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer’s time, which made his scansion obsolete. The accent of many words of French origin, like natúre, couráge, virtúe, matére, had shifted to the first syllable, and the e of the final syllables ës, ën, ëd, and ë, had largely disappeared. But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still find such lines as these: • But he my strokës might right well endure, • He was so great and huge of puissánce. Hawes’s practice is variable in this respect, and so is his contemporary, Skelton’s. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the reader first feels sure that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion. Trisyllable—like crëatúre neighëboúr, etc., in Chaucer. But Chaucer’s example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faerie

Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson’s censure, that he “writ no language.” A poem that stands midway between Spenser and the late mediæval work of Chaucer’s school—such as Hawes’s Passetyme of Pleasure—was the induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called the Mirrour for Magistrates. The whole series was the work of many hands, modelled upon Lydgate’s Falls of Princes (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. The Induction is the only noteworthy part of it. It was an allegory, written in Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza, and described, with a somber imaginative power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode in the “griesly lake” of Avernus, and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the first regular English tragedy Gorboduc; and it was at his request that Ascham wrote the Schoolmaster. Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). While a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the Visions of Petrarch, and the Visions of Bellay, a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his Shepheard’s Calendar announced the coming of a great original poet, the first since Chaucer. The Shepheard’s Calendar was a pastoral in twelve eclogues— one for each month in the year. There had been a revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions, Spenser’s were the first bucolics in English. Two of his eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms of rustic life; but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds Astrophel and Hobbinol; paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia; and introduced, in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia. Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only poem of the kind

which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton’s wonderful Lycidas. The Shepheard’s Calendar, however, though it belonged to an artificial order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to English poetry. It was written while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney and it was, perhaps, composed at the latter’s country seat of Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom. After filling several clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land, “under the cooly shades of the green alders by the Mulla’s shore,” Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589, busy upon his Faerie Queene. In his poem, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how “the shepherd of the ocean” persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to the queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great poem were printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems, entitled Complaints, followed in 1591, and the three remaining books of the Faerie Queene in 1596. In 1595-1596 he published also his Daphnaida, Prothalamion, and the four hymns on Love and Beauty, and on Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty. In 1598, in Tyrone’s rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, fled to London, where he died in January, 1599. The Faerie Queene reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renascence. It was the blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, printed in 1581. Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based upon the old Charlemagne epos—Orlando being identical with the

hero of the French Chanson de Roland: the second upon the history of the first crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of colouring quite unknown to the rude mediæval romances. Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness and power. The Faerie Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance: distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser’s fairy land. Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the Romaunt of the Rose. But Spenser’s imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal sphere “apart from place, withholding time,” where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet’s dream. The poem was to have been “a continued allegory or dark conceit,” in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Grantorto is Philip II of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc.; and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the

northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young England against popery and Spain. The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser’s conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure. The “Spenserian stanza,” in which the Faerie Queene was written, was adapted from the ottava rima of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similies, especially—each of which usually fills a whole stanza—have the pictorial amplitude of Homer’s. Spenser was, in fact, a great painter. His poetry is almost purely sensuous. The personages in the Faerie Queene are not characters, but richly coloured figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that he was the poet’s poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitively alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees chanting passages from the Faerie Queene. Those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air. • Their birth was of the womb of morning dew, • And their conception of the glorious prime.

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his Prothalamion and Epithalamion. The first was a “spousal verse,” made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it appears “like a bride’s chamber-floor.” Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, is the burden of each stanza. The Epithalamion was Spenser’s own marriage song, written to crown his series of Amoretti or love sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language. Hardly less beautiful than these was Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the Butterfly, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider. The four hymns in praise of Love and Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser’s genius. He was a seer of visions, of images full, brilliant, and distinct; and not, like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of ideas, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind.

Chapter 7 : Revolutionary Impact of English Literature

From the Restoration to the Death of Pope 16601744

The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose, from passion and imagination to wit and the understanding. The serious, exalted mood of the civil war and Commonwealth had spent itself and issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical, skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts. The age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in 1662. There were able divines in the pulpit and at the universities— Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others: scholars, like Bentley; historians, like Clarendon and Burnet; scientists, like Boyle and Newton; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke. But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray. The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Molière, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and versified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration writers—Waller, Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others—had been in France during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes. John Dryden (1631-1700), who is the great literary figure of his generation, has been called the first of the moderns. From the reign of Charles II., indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English

life. What we call “society” was forming, the town, the London world. “Coffee, which makes the politician wise,” had just been introduced, and the ordinaries of Ben Jonson’s time gave way to coffee-houses, like Will’s and Button’s, which became the head-quarters of literary and political gossip. The two great English parties, as we know them today, were organised: the words Whig and Tory date from this reign. French etiquette and fashions came in, and French phrases of convenience—such as coup de grace, bel esprit, etc.—began to appear in English prose. Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors. The politics of the great rebellion had been of heroic proportions, and found fitting expression in song. But in the Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and Acts of Settlement. Court and society, in the reign of Charles II and James II., were shockingly dissolute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction against Puritanism went to great extremes. The social life of the time is faithfully reflected in the Diary of Samuel Pepys. He was a simpleminded man, the son of a London tailor, and became, himself, secretary to the admiralty. His diary was kept in cipher, and published only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is singularly outspoken; and its naïve, gossipy, confidential tone makes it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one. Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663-1664), a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans. The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies that it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was nothing new. Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane. But even the French Revolution had its humors; and as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer sectaries pressed to the front—Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, etc.,—its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler’s hero

is a Presbyterian justice of the peace who sallies forth with his secretary, Ralpho—an Independent and Anabaptist-like Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.) The humor of Hudibras is not of the finest. The knight and the squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough physical drolleries of a pantomime or circus. The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. But he had wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock sayings, as for example, • ‘Tis strange what difference there can be • ‘Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. Hudibras has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire, M’Fingal, some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler’s, as, for example, • No man e’er felt the halter draw • With good opinion of the law. The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of the Restoration, and the stage now took vengeance for its enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the Duke of York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant—who had fought on the king’s side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years—had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656, by presenting his Siege of Rhodes as an “opera,” with instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661, with the dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion. Movable painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the female parts formerly played by boys. This last innovation was said to

be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell Gwynne, was the favourite actress at the King’s Theater. Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called “classical” rules of the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV writers were not purely creative, like Shakespeare or his contemporaries in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been formed in 1636 for the preservation of the purity of the French language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art. Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and one in particular on the Three Unities. Dryden followed his example in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1667), in which he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, All for Love, founded on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, he returned to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed what they called “heroic plays,” such as the Indian Emperor, the Conquest of Granada, the Duke of Lerma, the Empress of Morocco, the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakespeare, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden’s ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love. These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King’s Theater. The indebtedness of the English stage to the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden’s comedy, An Evening’s Love, was adapted from Thomas Corneille’s Le Feint Astrologue, and his Sir Martin Mar-all, from

Molière’s L’Etourdi. Shadwell borrowed his Miser from Molière, and Otway made versions of Racine’s Bèrènice and Molière’s Fourberies de Scapin. Wycherley’s Country Wife and Plain Dealer although not translations, were based, in a sense, upon Molière’s Ecole des Femmes and Le Misanthrope. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elizabethan stage was Otway, whose Venice Preserved, written in blank verse, still keeps the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden’s heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his All for Love. And one, at least, of his comedies, the Spanish Friar, is skillfully constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he “forced his genius.” In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the Country Wife, the Parson’s Wedding, She Would if She Could, the Beaux’ Stratagem, the Relapse, and the Way of the World. These were in prose, and represented the gay world and the surface of fashionable life. Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the Committee of Dryden’s brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the Roundheads and the Banished Cavaliers of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was bourgeois——reserved for London trades-people.

A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen, and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their husbands’ money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh turned against the dishonoured husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.) The women were represented as worse than the men—scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty the situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher’s theater retain a fineness of feeling and that politesse de cæur which marks the gentleman. They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion. But the Manlys and Horners of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on “The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application. But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepys’s Diary, and in the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Grammont. This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, “artificial” at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy—the “heroic play”—was artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, 1772, and Sheridan’s Rivals, School for Scandal, and Critic,

1775-9; our last strictly “classical” comedies. None of this school of English comedians approached their model, Molière. He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity—the polished wit and delicate grace of his style—but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakespeare’s plays were rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of Macbeth and Julius Cæsar, substituting rime for blank verse. In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda— a youth who had never seen a woman. Shadwell “improved” Timon of Athens, and Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to King Lear, which turned the play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of Troilus and Cressida, Dryden made the ghost of Shakespeare speak of himself as • Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age. Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon Shakespeare in his Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age; and in his Short View of Tragedy, 1693, he said, “In the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times, in the tragical flights of Shakespeare.” “To Deptford by water,” writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, “reading Othello, Moor of Venice; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but, having so lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing.” In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good sense. Boileau’s L’Art Poétique, 1673, inspired by Horace’s Ars Poetica, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays

in riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two “poems” of this kind, an Essay on Satire, and an Essay on Poetry. The Earl of Roscommon—who, said Addison, “makes even rules a noble poetry”—made a metrical version of Horace’s Ars Poetica, and wrote an original Essay on Translated Verse. Of the same kind were Addison’s epistle to Sacheverel, entitled An Account of the Greatest English Poets, and Pope’s Essay on Criticism, 1711, which was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope’s usual point and brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius. The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The greater part of the Canterbury Tales was written in heroic couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said Dryden, “first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it.” Sir John Denham, also, in his Cooper’s Hill, 1643, had written such verse as this: O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example as it is my theme! Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full. Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope. Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join

The varying verse, the full resounding line, The long resounding march and energy divine. Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to Dryden’s verse and brought the system to such monotonous perfection that he “made poetry a mere mechanic art.” The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. The dissolute wits of Charles the Second’s court, Sedley, Rochester, Sackville, and the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” threw off a few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song. Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a kind of spurious grandeur, and the metre teased into a sound and fury, signifying nothing. Cowley’s Pindarics were filled with something which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless, the fashion spread, and “he who could do nothing else,” said Dr. Johnson, “could write like Pindar.” The best of these odes was Dryden’s famous Alexander’s Feast, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia’s day by a musical club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray’s two fine odes, the Progress of Poesy and the Bard written a half-century later. Dryden was not so much a great poet as a solid thinker, with a splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for political argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem, Annus Mirabilis, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666; namely, the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The subject of Absalom and Ahitophel—the first part of which appeared in 1681— was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The parallel afforded by the story of Absalom’s revolt against David was wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was Dryden’s reply to

the Rehearsal.. Absalom and Ahitophel was followed by the Medal, a continuation of the same subject, and Mac Flecknoe, a personal onslaught on the “true blue Protestant poet” Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted. The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, But Shadwell never deviates into sense.... The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull With this prophetic blessing—Be thou dull. Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written in the reign of Elizabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell, and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption of imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every thing but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall abused men in classes; priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse. His Religio Laici, 1682, was a poem in defence of the English Church. But when James II came to the throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the Hind and Panther, 1687, to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin which he afterward acknowledged and regretted. Milton’s “soul was like a star and dwelt apart,” but Dryden

wrote for the trampling multitude. He had a coarseness of moral fibre, but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature. He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion, and grows better with age. His Fables—modernisations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio, written the year before he died—are among his best works. Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays. But his Essay of Dramatic Poesie, which Dr. Johnson called our “first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing,” was in the shape of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the gallicised Restoration age—Cowley, Sir William Temple, and above all, Dryden—who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and colloquial air which marks it off from the more artificial diction of Milton, Taylor and Browne. A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox’s Book of Martyrs, imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678, published his Pilgrim’s Progress, the greatest of religious allegories. Bunyan’s spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike the Faerie Queene, the story of Pilgrim’s Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe’s cave or Aladdin’s palace. It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of Paradise Lost. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out quietly and

made little noise at first. But the Pilgrim’s Progress got at once into circulation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition remains. Milton, too—who received ten pounds for the copyright of Paradise Lost—seemingly found that “fit audience though few” for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. “Ay,” said Milton, good humoredly, “you may tag my verses.” And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden’s operatic masque, the State of Innocence. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera. The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope’s hands was more personal even than in Dryden’s, and addressed itself less to public issues. The literature of the “Augustan age” of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders. Swift was in high favour with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Conduct of the Allies, were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick’s, Dublin. Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his Review in the interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps, and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II.

But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the Spectator. The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time, except Steele. “Every woman,” wrote Pope, “is at heart a rake.” The reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose case the bookseller took the place of the patron. Pope’s translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent. But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a- liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope’s Dunciad, or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sordid, and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favour of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political favourites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope’s brilliant friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous Essay on Man was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld’s cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:

As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew From nature, I believe them true. They argue no corrupted mind In him; the fault is in mankind. The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden—sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his Moral Essays and Satires he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But, although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what execution it must have done at the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the satirical sketch of Addison—who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer—is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden. Pope’s very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden’s. He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most cleverly. Pope’s masterpiece is, perhaps, the Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem, a “dwarf Iliad” recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre’s cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his Lutrin, had treated with the same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the tea-urn, the ombre-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage,

and the lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those • Tea-cup times of hood and hoop, • And when the patch was worn, with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackery said of Gay’s pastorals: “It is to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a certain beauty always accompanying them.” The Rape of the Lock, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little filagree creatures with Shakespeare’s elves, whose occupation it was To tread the ooze of the salt deep, Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,... Or on the beached margent of the sea To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind. Very different are the offices of Pope’s fays: Our humble province is to tend the fair; Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care; To save the powder from too rude a gale, Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale.... Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow To change a flounce or add a furbelow. Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of

passion, he was altogether impotent. His Windsor Forest and his Pastorals are artificial and false, not written with “the eye upon the object.” His epistle of Eloisa to Abelard is declamatory and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. But he was a great literary artist. Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill. His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was closer-grained than Dryden’s. His great art was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English poet but Shakespeare. He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no longer needed to “vent its observation in mangled terms,” but could pour itself out compactly, artistically in little ready-made molds. But this high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue. His poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a hit or an effect. From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the civil war; at first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started the Tatler, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph Addison; and in its successor, the Spectator, the first number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison’s contributions outnumbered Steele’s. The Tatler was published on three, the Spectator on six, days of the week. The Tatler gave political news, but each number of the Spectator consisted of a single essay. The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of the time, and to

satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the town. “I shall endeavour,” wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the Spectator, “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.... It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffeehouses.” Addison’s satire was never personal. He was a moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele’s intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his strongest emotion seems to have been his religious feeling. One of his contemporaries called him “a parson in a tie wig,” and he wrote several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public taste. Sometimes he lectured and sometimes he preached, and in his Saturday papers he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of essays in which he gave an elaborate review of Paradise Lost. Such also was his famous paper, the Vision of Mirza, an oriental allegory of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the lighter portions of the Spectator are those which have worn the best. Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly observer of manners, and, above all, a delightful talker, that Addison is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction of character. Addison’s humor is always a trifle grave. There is no whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. “He thinks justly,” said Dr. Johnson, “but he thinks faintly.” The Spectator had a host of followers, from the somewhat heavy Rambler and Idler of Johnson, down to the Salmagundi papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps, Addison’s latest and best literary descendant. In his own age Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His Campaign,

celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much admired couplet, in which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who, • Pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform, • Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm. His stately, classical tragedy, Cato, which was acted at Drury Lane Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson “unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius.” Is is, notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine declamatory passages—in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth act— It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well, etc. The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery of St. Patrick’s, and retired to Ireland to “die like a poisoned rat in a hole.” His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him, “The stage dark-ended,” said Scott, “ere the curtain fell.” Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. “So great a man he seems to me,” wrote Thackeray, “that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.” Swift’s first noteworthy publication was his Tale of a Tub, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression. Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read Robinson Crusoe, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of De Foe’s realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details. But

underneath its fairy tales Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden’s or Pope’s, because directed, not against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show that human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet, their wars, governments, science, religion—all their institutions, in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would become disgusting. The complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them, to their shame, with the beasts, and sets instinct above reason. The method of Swift’s satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings in this kind are his Argument against Abolishing Christianity, his Modest Proposal for utilising the surplus population of Ireland by eating the babies of the poor, and his Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past, he published a minute account of Partridge’s last moments; and when the subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. “To call a man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper style for a person of his education.” Swift wrote verses as well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no illusions, and not only strips his subject, but flays it and shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions of human nature. “He saw blood-shot,” said Thackeray. The Death of Pope to the French Revolution 17441789

Pope’s example continued potent for fifty years after his death. Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry. Not only Dr. Johnson’s adaptations from Juvenal, London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Gifford’s Baviad, 1791, and Maeviad, 1795, and Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, were in the verse and the manner of Pope. In Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets. But long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New Romantic School. For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns—the gay, prosaic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole concession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, which, in the hands of cockneys like Pope and Ambrose Philips, who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand, became even more artificial than a Beggar’s Opera or a Rape of the Lock. These at least were true to their environment, and were natural just because they were artificial. But the Seasons of James Thomson, published in installments from 1726-1730, had opened a new field. Their theme was the English landscape, as varied by the changes of the year, and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature. Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, published the year of Pope’s death, was written, like the Seasons, in blank verse; and although its language had the formal, didactic cast of the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land —lawns, gardens, forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France—romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the tameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the Nibelungen Lied. Works of a similar tendency in England were the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, published between 1747

and 1757; especially Collins’s Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands, and Gray’s Bard, a Pindaric in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on Edward I., the destroyer of his guild. Gray and Mason, his friend and editor, made translations from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765, aroused the taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry. 1774-1778, Tyrwhitt’s critical edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole’s Gothic romance, the Castle of Otranto, 1765, stimulated this awakened interest in the picturesque aspects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness for supernatural and mediæval subjects. James Beattie’s Minstrel, 1771, described the educating influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet. But the most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the romantic past were the Poems of Ossian and Thomas Chatterton’s literary forgeries. In 1762 James Macpherson published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made his version—including two complete epics, Fingal and Temora —from Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of these remains. Macpherson was challenged to produce his originals, and when, many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it was asserted that this was nothing but a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic. Of the MSS. which he professed to have found not a scrap remained: the Gaelic text was printed from transcriptions in Macpherson’s handwriting or in that of his secretaries. But whether these poems were the work of Ossian or of Macpherson, they made a deep impression at the time. Napoleon admired them greatly, and Goethe inserted passages from the “Songs of Selma” in his Sorrows of Werther. Macpherson composed—or translated—them in an abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling the English version of Job or of the prophecies of Isaiah. They filled the minds of their readers with images of vague sublimity and desolation;

the mountain torrent, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal. “A tale of the times of old!” “Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of the thistle of Lora; why, thou breeze of the valley, hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant roar of streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! Come, thou huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back his soul to the bard. I look forward to Lochlin of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where Fingal decends from Ocean, from the roar of winds. Few are the heroes of Morven in a land unknown.” Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature. His father had been sexton of the ancient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and the boy’s sensitive imagination took the stamp of his surroundings. He taught himself to read from a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic blazonry. When only eleven years old, he began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff’s. The Rowley poems included two tragedies, Aella and Goddwyn, two cantos of a long poem on the Battle of Hastings, and a number of ballads and minor pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of Chaucer. His method of working was as follows. He made himself a manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey’s and Kersey’s English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole, to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once pronounced them spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy over

Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms, scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. Chatterton’s poems are of little value in themselves, but they are the record of an industry and imitative quickness marvellous in a mere child, and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he threw himself into the main literary current of his time. Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets now went back for models to the Elizabethan writers. Thomas Warton published in 1753 his Observations on the Faerie Queene. Beattie’s Minstrel, Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, and William Shenstone’s Schoolmistress were all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser’s archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery of the Faerie Queene. John Dyer’s Fleece was a poem in blank verse on English wool-growing, after the fashion of Vergil’s Georgics. The subject was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is impossible to make poetry out of serges and druggets. Dyer’s Grongar Hill, which mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, was composed in the octosyllabic verse of Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Milton’s minor poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exercised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Collins’s Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of Milton’s Nativity, and his exquisite unrimed Ode to Evening was a study in versification, after Milton’s translation of Horace’s Ode to Pyrrha, in the original metres. Shakespeare began to be studied more reverently: numerous critical editions of his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakespeare, and one of his sweetest poems, the Dirge in Cymbeline, was inspired by the tragedy of Cymbeline. The verse of Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakespeare; but their genius was not allied to his, being exclusively lyrical and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion. A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pensiveness, the spirit of Milton’s Il Penseroso, pervades their poetry.

Gray was a fastidious scholar, who produced very little, but that little of the finest quality. His famous Elegy, expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest perfection, is the representative poem of the second half of the 18th century, as the Rape of the Lock is of the first. The romanticists were quietists, and their scenery is characteristic. They loved solitude and evening, the twilight vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a little of the stilted poetic diction of their classical forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were their favourite mannerisms: Collins’s Odes were largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, Pity, Liberty, Mercy and Simplicity. A poet in their dialect was always a “bard;” a countryman was “the untutored swain,” and a woman was a “nymph” or “the fair,” just as in Dryden and Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many Latin epithets, like amusive and precipitant, and calls a fish-line The Floating Line Snatched from the Hoary Steed

They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, literary. It lacks emotional force, except now and then in Gray’s immortal Elegy, in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, in Collins’s lines, On the Death of Thomson, and his little ode beginning, “How sleep the brave.” The new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and practice. Joseph Warton published, in 1756, the first volume of his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, an elaborate review of Pope’s writings seriatim, doing him certainly full justice, but ranking him below Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. “Wit and satire,” wrote Warton, “are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal.... He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical authors in verse.” Warton illustrated his

critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the Seasons had “been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of nature and landscape.” It was symptomatic of the change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to displace the French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, and regular parterres, and that Gothic architecture came into repute. Horace Walpole was a virtuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle at Strawberry Hill he made a collection of ancient armor, illuminated manuscripts, and bric-a-brac of all kinds. Gray had been Walpole’s travelling companion in France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and separated, but were afterward reconciled. From Walpole’s private printing-press at Strawberry Hill Gray’s two “sister odes,” the Bard, and the Progress of Poesy, were first issued in 1757. Both Gray and Walpole were good correspondents, and their printed letters are among the most delightful literature of the kind. The central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell’s famous Life of Johnson, published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was fiftyfour years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced the worth and intellect which shone through his subject’s uncouth exterior. He followed him about, note-book in hand, bore all his snubbings patiently, and made the best biography ever written. It is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life, he should prevent it by taking Boswell’s. And yet Johnson’s own writings and this biography of him have changed places in relative importance so completely that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion. Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so common among the English. He was the son of a

Lichfield book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller’s hack. Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of those whom he called “the great.” He was a clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of the time: Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman; Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson’s school, near Lichfield. Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last century. His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a cockneyish attachment to London. He was a high Tory, and an orthodox churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person, and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff. He was a great diner out, an inordinate teadrinker, and a voracious and untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits, such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house and the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by chance. Though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute, especially when talking “for victory,” Johnson had a large and tender heart. He loved his ugly, old wife—twenty-one years his senior—and he had his house full of unfortunates—a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute widow, a negro servant— whom he supported for many years, and bore with all their ill-humors patiently. Among Johnson’s numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755; his moral tale, Rasselas, 1759; the introduction to his edition of

Shakespeare, 1765, and his Lives of the Poets, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses. Here is a sentence, for example, from his Visit to the Hebrides: “We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible.” The difference between his colloquial style and his book style is well illustrated in the instance cited by Macaulay. Speaking of Villiers’s Rehearsal, Johnson said, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet;” then paused and added—translating English into Johnsonese —”it has not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction.” There is more of this in Johnson’s Rambler and Idler papers than in his latest work, the Lives of the Poets. In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the “beauties of nature.” When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least, some “noble wild prospects,” the doctor replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London. The English novel of real life had its origin at this time. Books like De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague, etc., were tales of incident and adventure rather than novels. The novel deals primarily with character and with the interaction of characters upon one another, as developed by a regular plot. The first English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, was Samuel Richardson, a printer, who began authorship in his fiftieth year with his Pamela, 1740, the story of a young servant girl who resisted the seductions of her master, and finally, as the reward of her virtue, became his wife. Clarissa Harlowe, 1748, was the tragical history of a high-spirited young lady who, being driven from her home by her family because

she refused to marry the suitor selected for her, fell into the toils of Lovelace, an accomplished rake. After struggling heroically against every form of artifice and violence, she was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson’s portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson’s subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches. Clarissa Harlowe is his masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine’s virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers, persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly mad. In Richardson’s novels appears, for the first time, that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature. Pamela was translated into French and German, and fell in with the current of popular feeling which found fullest expression in Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise, 1759, and Goethe’s Leiden des Jungen Werther, which set all the world aweeping in 1774. Coleridge said that to pass from Richardson’s books to those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew man, but Fielding knew men. The latter’s first novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon Pamela’s by her master. This reversal of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone on simply as a burlesque. But the exuberance of Fielding’s genius led him beyond his original design. His hero, leaving Lady Booby’s service, goes travelling with good

Parson Adams, and is soon engaged in a series of comical and rather boisterous adventures. Fielding had seen life, and his characters were painted from the life with a bold, free hand. He was a gentleman by birth, and had made acquaintance with society and the town in 1727, when he was a handsome, stalwart young fellow, with high animal spirits and a great appetite for pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the stage; married, and spent his wife’s fortune, living for a while in much splendor as a country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced condition as a rural justice with a salary of five hundred pounds of “the dirtiest money on earth.” Fielding’s masterpiece was Tom Jones, 1749, and it remains one of the best of English novels. Its hero is very much after Fielding’s own heart, wild, spendthrift, warm-hearted, forgiving, and greatly in need of forgiveness. The same type of character, with the lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in Amelia, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of Fielding’s wife. With Tom Jones is contrasted Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of Fielding’s most admirable creations. For the regulated morality of Richardson, with its somewhat old-grannified air, Fielding substituted instinct. His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only, and his ideal of character is manliness. In Jonathan Wild the hero is a highwayman. This novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and is one of the strongest, though certainly the least pleasing, of Fielding’s writings. Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a difference. He was a Scotch ship-surgeon, and had spent some time in the West Indies. He introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar, in the persons of Tom Bowling and Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had introduced, in Squire Western, the equally national type of the hardswearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory squire. Both Fielding and Smollett were of the hearty British “beef-and-beer” school; their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low life, physical life, runs riot through their pages—tavern brawls, the breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches. Smollett’s books, such as Roderick Random, 1748; Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories of

broadly comic adventure than Fielding’s. The latter’s view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature. “The generous wine of Fielding,” says Taine, “in Smollett’s hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop.” A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, who finished his Adventures of Gil Bias in 1735, are very perceptible in Smollett. A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, 1759-1767, and the Sentimental Journey, 1768. Tristram Shandy is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne’s chosen province was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings, mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. Coleridge and Carlyle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that he was only a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Sterne’s pathos is closely interwoven with his humor. He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith’s, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titillation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, “There is room enough in the world for thee and me.” It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions. He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little. Less

coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it. Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages seduce. He is full of good sayings both tender and witty. It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.” A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels of domestic and rural life. The book, like its author, was thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. Very improbable things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic. But its characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with touches of a most loving humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith’s father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, 1770, who was “passing rich on forty pounds a year.” This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson—so that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists—did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life. Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith, and, perhaps, a few other plays, the stage had now utterly declined. The novel, which is dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to take its place, and to represent life, though less intensely, yet more minutely than the theater could do. In the novelists of the 18th century, the life of the people, as distinguished from “society” or the upper classes, began to invade literature. Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and his contemporaries—Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith—ranged over a wide variety of ranks and conditions. This is one thing which distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from that of the first, as well as in some degree from that of all previous centuries. Among the authors of this generation whose writings belonged to other departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned, in

passing, the great historian, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published from 1776-1788, and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary quality. The romantic poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart. It was reserved for two men—a contrast to one another in almost every respect—to bring once more into British song a strong individual feeling, and with it a new warmth and directness of speech. These were William Cowper (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (17591796). Cowper spoke out of his own life-experience, his agony, his love, his worship and despair; and straightway the varnish that had glittered over all our poetry since the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had scribbled verses when he was a young law student at the Middle Temple in London, and he had contributed to the Olney Hymns, published in 1779 by his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but he only began to write poetry in earnest when he was nearly fifty years old. In 1782, the date of his first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he had read but one English poet during the past twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all English poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least impulse to books and the most to the need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings. Cowper had a most unhappy life. As a child he was shy, sensitive, and sickly, and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whither he was sent after his mother’s death. This happened when he was six years old; and in his affecting lines written On Receipt of My Mother’s Picture, he speaks of himself as a Wretch Even then, Life’s Journey Just Begun.

In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum, where he spent a year. Judicious treatment restored him to sanity, but he came out a broken man and remained for the rest of his life an invalid, unfitted for any active occupation. His disease took the form of religious melancholy. He had two recurrences of madness, and both times made attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and afterward at

Olney, in Buckinghamshire, he found a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his wounded spirit. His two poems To Mary Unwin, together with the lines on his mother’s picture, were almost the first examples of deep and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last century. Cowper found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round of quiet household occupations. He corresponded indefatigably, took long walks through the neighbourhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs. Unwin and his friend, Lady Austin, and amused himself with carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, especially hares, of which gentle animals he grew very fond. All these simple tastes, in which he found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in his best poem, The Task, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, and the rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a barometre, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper was an outdoor as well as an indoor man. The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by low hills. Nevertheless Cowper’s natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thomson’s. The Task reflects, also, the new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of humanity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which Rousseau had given expression in France, and which issued in the French Revolution. In England this was the time of Wilberforce, the antislavery agitator; of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher; of John and Charles Wesley, and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English Church. John Newton, the curate of Olney and the keeper of Cowper’s conscience, was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals; and Cowper’s first volume of Table Talk and other poems, 1782, written under Newton’s inspiration, was a series of sermons in verse, somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, and theaters. “God made the country and man made the

town,” he wrote. He was a moralizing poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a “coddled poet.” And, indeed, there is a suspicion of gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He lived much among women, and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine delicacy. But there is no sickliness in his poetry, and he retained a charming playful humor— displayed in his excellent comic ballad John Gilpin; and Mrs. Browning has sung of him, •

How, when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights departed, • He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted. At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotchman, named Samuel Rose, called upon Cowper at Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, entitled Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns. Cowper read the book through twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dialect, pronounced it a “very extraordinary production.” This momentary flash, as of an electric spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief British poets of their generation, but of two literatures. Scotch poets, like Thomson and Beattie, had written in southern English, and, as Carlyle said, in vacuo, that is, with nothing specially national in their work. Burns’s sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his country a hearing beyond the border. He had, to be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him, and his immediate models were Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these remained provincial, while Burns became universal. He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of “bonny Doon,” in a clay biggin not far from “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk,” the scene of the witch dance in Tam O’Shanter. His father was a hard-headed, Godfearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty. The crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleasures. In the Cotter’s Saturday Night Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents’ household, the rest that came at the week’s end, and the family worship about the “wee bit ingle, blinkin’ bonnily.” Robert was handsome, wild, and

witty. He was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like his last, were of “the lasses.” His head had been stuffed, in boyhood, with “tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights,” etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman who lived in the family. His ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird sings. He composed his verses while following the plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at evening, balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls of the cottage. Burns’s love songs are in many keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passion, like Ae Fond Kiss and To Mary in Heaven, to such loose ditties as When Januar Winds, and Green Grow the Rashes O. Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and at Mauchline, where he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert, after their father’s death, he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities of the tavern. There, among the wits of the Mauchline Club, farmers’ sons, shepherds from the uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, recite his verses, and join in the singing and ranting, while • Bousin o’er the nappy • And gettin’ fou and unco happy. To these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs, John Barleycorn and Willie Brewed a Peck o’ Maut, but the headlong fun of Tam O’Shanter, the visions, grotesquely terrible, of Death and Dr. Hornbook, and the dramatic humor of the Jolly Beggars. Cowper had celebrated “the cup which cheers but not inebriates.” Burns sang the praises of Scotch Drink. Cowper was a stranger to Burns’s high animal spirits, and his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections, but no passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose irregularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, became involved, through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between the Old Light and New

Light clergy. His Holy Fair, Holy Tulzie, Twa Herds, Holy Willie’s Prayer, and Address to the Unco Gude, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish, and Prayer in Prospect of Death. His farm turned out a failure, and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica, when the favour with which his volume of poems was received stayed his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. There the peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite society of the Scotch capital, with results in the end not altogether favourable to Burns’s best interests. For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district. But poverty, disappointment, irregular habits, and broken health clouded his last years, and brought him to an untimely death at the age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and force. “The man sank,” said Coleridge, “but the poet was bright to the last.” Burns is the best of British song-writers. His songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry, a chorus, or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for example, Auld Lang Syne, My Heart’s in the Highlands, and Landlady, Count the Lawin. Burns had a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues. His elementary qualities as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy which embraced men, animals, and the dumb objects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and The Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation to his Auld

Mare Maggie. Next after love and good fellowship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of his song. Of his national anthem, Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Carlyle said: “So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode.” Burns’s politics were a singular mixture of sentimental Toryism with practical democracy. A romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled Stuarts, and to have been “out” in ‘45 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns as Over the Water to Charlie. But his sober convictions were on the side of liberty and human brotherhood, and are expressed in The Twa Dogs, the First Epistle to Davie, and A Man’s a Man for a’ that. His sympathy with the Revolution led him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a captured smuggler, as a present to the French Convention, a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of his century, and his prose correspondence betrays his lack of culture by its constant lapse into rhetorical affectation and fine writing.

Chapter 8 : The New Criticism After Fifty Years: A Memoir Bickering, backbiting, generational rift are not new, but something else is new. Outside the university, one hears a growing outcry of “Enough!” (it takes many forms, including a number of Bad Writing contests, in which English professors are routinely awarded top prizes), while within the field, the current president of the Modern Language Association, Edward Said, has caused a stir by lamenting the “disappearance of literature itself from the…curriculum” and denouncing the “fragmented, jargonized subjects” that have replaced it. One can discern the new feeling in the titles of several recent books whose tone is somewhere between a coroner’s report and an elegy. Alvin Kernan, formerly provost at Yale and dean of the graduate school at Princeton, and now senior adviser on the humanities to the Mellon Foundation, initiated the in memoriam theme with The Death of Literature (1990). More recently, the theme appears in, among other books, Literature Lost (1997), by John Ellis, a scholar of German literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, The Rise and Fall of English (1998), by Robert Scholes, a professor at Brown, and it is reprised in Kernan’s new book, a memoir of his fifty years in the academy, In Plato’s Cave. On the same obituary note, a front-page story in the Times reported a few months ago that the English Department at Duke University—the “cutting-edge” department of the Eighties—had collapsed into factions so bitter that the dean placed it under the direction of a botanist whose field of expertise is, appropriately, plant respiration. What does it all mean? Should the teaching of English be given a decent burial, or is there life in it yet?

Literature in English has been a respectable university subject for barely a century. The scholar of Scottish and English ballads Francis James Child was appointed to the first chair in English at Harvard in 1876; the English honours degree was not established at Oxford until 1894. Almost from the start there have been periodic announcements from a distinguished roster of Jeremiahs that liberal education, with literary studies at its core, is decadent or dying. In 1925, John Jay Chapman looked at American higher education and, finding Greek and Latin classics on the wane, proclaimed “the disappearance of the educated man.” Some fifty years later, not long before he died, Lionel Trilling gave a paper on “The Uncertain Future of the Humanistic Educational Ideal”—a title that understated the pessimism of the paper itself. Yet during this half-century of putative decline, the study of literature—measured by the attraction it held for students and young faculty—was booming. During the unprecedented expansion of American higher education in the 1960s, in my own department at Columbia, scores of candidates registered each year for the MA degree, and many went on for the Ph.D. Today, all this has changed. The number of Ph.D.s in English awarded annually in the United States peaked in the mid-1970s at nearly 1,400. Since then, the number has dropped by almost one third—a trend consistent with the contraction of the humanities (literature, language, philosophy, music, and art) as a whole, which fell as a percentage of all Ph.D.s from 13.8 percent to 9.1 percent between 1966 and 1993. In the same period, the percentage represented by the humanities of all BAs granted in the United States dropped from 20.7 percent to 12.7 percent. Even if one takes consumer appeal as a measure of value (as Chapman and Trilling did not), student attrition does not necessarily amount to an indictment of the field for some intellectual failing. For one thing, the decline in humanities students relative to other fields reflects the fact that the postwar expansion took place especially in the previously underemphasized fields of science and technology. With increased access to college for many students whose social and economic circumstances would once have excluded them, vocational fields such as business, economics, engineering, and, most recently,

computer programming have also burgeoned. Moreover, as the historian Lynn Hunt points out, the average age of American undergraduates has risen sharply in recent years, and older students tend to pursue subjects that have practical value for finding a job. But it is also true that many “traditional” students (the new term for those who used to be referred to as “college age”) are turning away from literature in particular and from the humanities in general already in high school. Among the millions who take the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), usually given in the tenth grade, only 9 percent indicate interest in the humanities. Even at so-called elite institutions, humanities enrollments have leveled off or fallen (at Harvard College, 25 percent of the students—and only 15 percent of male students—now concentrate in humanistic subjects). Many who once might have taken time for reading and contemplation now tend to regard college, in Trilling’s prescient phrase, “as a process of accreditation, with an economic/social end in view.” It is always dispiriting to find young people feeling they have no time to “waste”; and even at Ivy League schools, where financial aid, though imperiled, remains relatively generous, it is common nowadays to hear students say they must find a way to finish in three years in order to limit their indebtedness and to get on to “real work.” There is a correlation, if not a clear sequence of cause and effect, between the decline in student numbers and the dwindling job market for new professors of literature and other humanistic subjects. Since science and other competing fields now command a much greater share of university resources than they once did, humanities professors who earned their degrees during the expansion of the 1960s are not being replaced at the same pace at which they are retiring. Therefore, at a time when the United States has historically low unemployment rates, “the ratio of dignified academic jobs to the number of doctoral graduates” in the humanities, according to Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and formerly chair of the English department at the University of Michigan, “is perhaps one to three even when we count optimistically.” One reflection of what Kernan calls the “catastrophically depressed” job market was the recent graduate student strike at Yale

over wages and benefits (in which humanities students played a large part). Administrators and senior faculty tend to regard the teaching duties of graduate students as part of their apprenticeship for the career for which they are being trained. But students facing a dead end at the conclusion of their studies may reasonably regard their duties as exploitation by a university that gets high-quality labour from them at low cost, only to replace them with a new supply of temporary workers in the persons of the next crop of Ph.D. candidates. While in the last ten years or so, the number of English Ph.D.s has remained relatively constant or even risen slightly, some English departments (including Yale’s) have responded conscientiously to the employment crisis by reducing the number of incoming candidates for the Ph.D. to as few as ten—which then creates a shortage of teachers to staff composition and introductory courses. Completing the circle, the shortfall is made up by hiring, at minimal wages and with no benefits at all, part-time faculty drawn from the growing pool of unemployed Ph.D.s who were “apprentices” just a few years before. These unsustainable trends tell us nothing about what actually goes on in the classroom, where, if there is a certain amount of gynecology-as-epistemology nonsense, there is still plenty of intelligence and passion on the part of both full-time and part-time faculty. But these developments do help to explain the fractious mood of the contemporary English department. Literature is a field whose constituency and resources are shrinking while its subject is expanding. Even as English loses what budget-conscious deans like to call “market share,” it has become routine to find notices in the department advertising lectures on such topics as the evolution of Batman from comic-book crusader to camp TV star to macho movie hero alongside posters for a Shakespeare conference. This turn to “cultural studies,” which has not been much deterred by any fear of trivialization or dilettantism, means that English studies now venture with callow confidence into the interpretation of visual, legal, and even scientific “texts.” As the young critic Michael Bérubé reports, “English has become an intellectual locus where people can study the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Christian

perspective, the text of the O.J. trial from a Foucauldian perspective, and the text of the Treaty of Versailles from a Marxist perspective.” Even conservative departments are beginning to take account— belatedly—of the global literature of decolonization, which followed the Second World War. As a subject for study English now properly comprises more than the literature of England, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Authors from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, and South Africa now fall under the purview of faculty already hard-pressed to staff courses on Milton, Spenser, or Donne. Establishing a curriculum has become an exercise in triage by which some writers can be saved only if others are sacrificed—one reason why each new appointment promised by the provost or dean provokes a fight among the beneficiaries. What is at stake in these squabbles? For one thing, a college education has become very expensive—about $140,000 for four years at a first-rank private university. And since a rise in purchase price tends to raise consumers’ demand for some testimony to the worth of what they are buying, old questions are being asked on and off campus with new urgency. Does an English BA still have value? What does it matter if the action shifts to cultural studies and English becomes, as Harold Bloom (among others) sorrowfully predicts, a minor department harboring a few aesthetes who like to read what Scholes calls “a foreign literature [written] in a (relatively) familiar language”? One response to such questions has always been a calculated insouciance. The academy, some say, has never mattered much to the fate of literature, and literature may even be endangered when professors get their hands on it. This idea has a good pedigree (“We see literature best from the midst of wild nature,” Emerson wrote in his essay “Circles,” “or from the din of affairs”) but today this would be a glib answer, and an anachronistic one, in view of what Kernan calls “the waning of book culture” even within the university. Kernan’s work is an elegy for the “single figure, sitting alone, silently reading to himself or herself.” He takes no comfort from the reading groups and chain-store coffee bars that are giving old books new life—many of whose members and patrons seem to be adults whose taste in reading was stimulated in college at least a generation

ago. And he overlooks the sales boost that follows every TV or movie “remake” of a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens or James. (It is a conspicuous irony that while English departments turn towards popular culture, popular culture is turning towards classic writers.) But he is fundamentally right that fewer of today’s booted-up, logged-in, on-line college students are having an igniting experience with books. And professors of English have never done a poorer job than they are doing now at answering the question, “So what?” An answer that leads back, I believe, to the core of a literary education is to be found in an entry Emerson made in his journal 165 years ago. “The whole secret of the teacher’s force,” he wrote, “lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening.” Having left the ministry two years before, Emerson was still in the process of transforming himself from a preacher into a lecturer, and of altering the form of his writing from the sermon to the essay. But his motive for speaking and writing had not changed with the shedding of his frock. Like every great teacher, he was in the business of trying to “get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep.” None of us who has ever been a student can fail to read this passage without remembering some teacher by whom we were startled out of complacency about our own ignorance. For this to take place, the student must be open to it, and the teacher must overcome the incremental fatigue of repetitive work and somehow remain a professor in the religious sense of that word—ardent, exemplary, even fanatic. Literary studies, in fact, have their roots in religion. Trilling understood this when he remarked, in his gloomy essay about the future of the humanities, that “the educated person” had traditionally been conceived as an initiate who began as a postulant, passed to a higher level of experience, and became worthy of admission into the company of those who are thought to have transcended the mental darkness and inertia in which they were previously immersed.

Such a view of education as illumination and deliverance following what Trilling called “exigent experience” is entirely Emersonian. It has little to do with the positivist idea of education to which the modern research university is chiefly devoted—learning “how to extend, even by minute accretions, the realm of knowledge.” This corporate notion of knowledge as a growing sum of discoveries no longer in need of rediscovery once they are recorded, and transmittable to those whose ambition it is to add to them, is a great achievement of our civilization. But except in a very limited sense, it is not the kind of knowledge that is at stake in a literary education. Those who brought English literature into the university late in the nineteenth century knew this. And lest they forget, colleagues in established fields were glad to remind them—as did the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, in a broadside published in 1887 in the London Times: There are many things fit for a man’s personal study, which are not fit for University examinations. One of these is “literature.”…[We are told] that it “cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies, enlarges the mind.” Excellent results against which no one has a word to say. Only we cannot examine in tastes and sympathies. English, in other words, amounted to nothing more than “chatter about Shelley.” One way some English professors defended themselves against this sort of attack was to stick to the business of establishing dates, allusions, and the historically contingent meanings of words—the sort of foundational work that had previously been done for the Greek and Roman classics. In the stringent form of philology, this was the tactic by which English teachers managed to make room for themselves in the university in the first place—though the status of philology as empirical knowledge was never entirely secure. Kernan tells how, as a student at Oxford after the war, he was trying without much success to master the history of the English language until his tutor took pity on him and advised, “When you hit a word in a text that you cannot identify, simply correlate it with some modern word that it sounds like and then invent a bridge between them. Most of the examiners will be

suspicious, but may consider, so imprecise is linguistic science, your little word history an interesting possibility.” Since then, literary “science” has yielded many genuine discoveries. Biographical scholars have uncovered salient facts about authors’ lives; textual scholars have hunted down corruptions introduced by copyists, printers, or intrusive editors into what authors originally wrote. But for most students, especially undergraduates, the appeal of English has never had much to do with its scholarly objectives. Students who turn with real engagement to English do so almost always because they have had the mysterious and irreducibly private experience—or at least some intimation of it—of receiving from a work of literature “an untranslatable order of impressions” that has led to “consummate moments” in which thought and feeling are fused and lifted to a new intensity. These ecstatic phrases describing aesthetic experience come from Walter Pater, who was writing in Oxford in the 1870s—at just that “point of English history,” as T.S. Eliot put it, marked by “the repudiation of revealed religion by men of culture.” This was also the moment when English first entered the university as a subject of formal study. The idea that reading can be a revelatory experience stretches back in its specifically Christian form at least to Saint Augustine, who wrote of being “dissociated from myself” until he heard a child’s voice beckoning him to open the Gospels, “repeating over and over, ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.”‘ A millennium and a half later, Matthew Arnold wrote in the same spirit when he defined culture (in a phrase that has often been misconstrued and misappropriated) as the “pursuit of total perfection by means of getting to know…the best which has been thought and said in the world, and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.” For Augustine, “the best which has been thought and said” was to be found exclusively in scripture; for Arnold, it was more various—scattered throughout all works capable of leading readers beyond the “bounded intellectual horizon within which we have long lived.” Like any religion that has been codified and institutionalized, this “religion of culture” (as Arnold’s detractors called it) has been

susceptible to deformations—proselytizing the impressionable young, degenerating into idolatry, clinging to rituals long after the spirit from which they originally arose is attenuated or gone. Yet something like faith in the transforming power of literature is surely requisite for the teacher who would teach with passion and conviction. It is a faith expressed uncommonly well by Emerson some thirty years before Arnold: Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal [present-day] circle through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. This large assertion links aesthetic response with moral (or what Kernan prefers to call “existential”) knowledge, and even with the imperative to take reformist action in the world. For Arnold, culture had nothing to do with the motive “to plume” oneself with “a smattering of Greek and Latin,” or to wear one’s education as a “badge” of “social distinction.” To acquire culture was, instead, to become aware of the past and restless with complacencies of the present, and to be stirred by the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it.” As long as teachers of literature acknowledged their responsibility for transmitting culture in this sense, they held a dignified position in the university. In fact, since the decline of classics and theology, and the takeover of philosophy departments by technical analytic philosophers, they have stood, along with those historians who continue to practice narrative and cultural history in the grand nineteenth-century style, as the last caretakers of the Arnoldian tradition. Today, when students are more and more focused, as Scholes puts it, on acquiring “technological truth in the form of engineering, computer science, biotechnology, and applications of physics and chemistry,” the university’s obligation is surely larger than ever to see that students encounter works of literature in which the human “truths” they bring with them to college are questioned and tested. There is no inviolable reason why this sort of education must proceed chiefly in the English department; and to some extent it has already migrated at

some institutions into “core curricula” where the Jewish and Christian Bibles and Greek and Roman classics are read in translation (inevitably at some loss), along with later works of philosophy and history. But for the foreseeable future, the English department will remain a main source and training ground for most college teachers of literature, and the condition of the English department is a pretty reliable measure of the state of liberal education in general. Kernan gives a moving account of how he taught Aeschylus’ Oresteia (in Richmond Lattimore’s translation) in a “Great Books” course at Yale—with a teaching method that runs close to the pulpit technique of “opening” the text and that accords with Arnold’s idea of what culture should mean: I analyzed the trilogy in a formalist manner, mainly following a scenic and imagery pattern in which again and again light and hope flare up, only to expire in darkness and despair, and then to be relit once more. A play that begins in darkness lit by the small, distant fire announcing the fall of Troy ends at last in the full blaze of noon of the Athenian theater and the Athenian court. I did not hesitate to point out to the students that the struggle for justice that is Aeschylus’s subject is still played out every day in our courts, where rational laws free murderers because there is a shred of reasonable doubt, and the families of the murdered cry out and demand what we have come to call “victim’s rights.” This, I told them, or most often tried to extract from them in discussion, without apology for connecting literature with life, is where the real power of great literature lies, in its ability to portray feelingly and convincingly critical human concerns in terms that do not scant its full human reality and its desperate importance to our lives. All the aesthetic formalist aspects of the play—Aeschylus’s extraordinarily tangled language, the profusion of imagery, the repetitive hope-failure pattern of the plot, the intense and brooding characters—were, in my opinion, ultimately in the service of the play’s presentation of the human need for full justice and explanation of why it is so difficult to achieve.

I was not arguing that the play has a “message,” that it carries some social argument for a better court system; rather, it offers a universal description of where we humans live always in relation to justice. This is, I suppose, a view of the purpose of art that would most readily be called “moral,” and I would not repudiate the term entirely, but I think that “existential” would be a far better term, for “moral” carries with it the suggestion of some rigid prescription, of a limited and coercive point of view, which is not the way great literature works. This way of teaching may strike the resolute historical scholar as too “presentist,” and the present-minded theorist as too “universalist.” But these objections will never vitiate the gratitude of a student who has been touched by such a teacher. The sad news is that teachers of literature have lost faith in their subject and in themselves. “We are in trouble,” as Scholes puts it, “precisely because we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we cannot make truth claims but must go on ‘professing’ just the same.” But what kind of dubious “truth-claims” does literature make? Literature does not embody, as both outraged conservatives and radical debunkers would have it, putatively eternal values that its professors are sworn to defend. It does not transmit moral certainty so much as record moral conflict. Its only unchanging “truth-claim” is that experience demands self-questioning. “Literature,” as Carl Woodring puts it with typical understatement, “is useful for a skeptical conduct of life.” If the English department becomes permanently marginal, students will have been cheated and the university left without a moral centre. This is why the state of literary studies is a problem not just for literature professors, but for everyone. One irony in the marginalizing of English studies is that they enjoyed their greatest prestige in the secular academy when they held most closely to the tradition of scriptural exegesis from which they derive. In the immediate postwar decades, when English departments were flourishing, intellectual energy was concentrated in something called the New Criticism—a reductive term often taken today to

designate a narrow formalism and stipulative method. In fact, many who accepted the rubric were engaged in a broad resistance to what one of their leaders, Cleanth Brooks, called the “quixotic desire” of humanists “to be objective and ‘scientific.”‘ The New Criticism was still, and unashamedly, driven by an essentially religious impulse— as expressed in the quasi-theological title of Brooks’s notable essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” which argued that trying to distill “‘a prosesense’ of a poem” as if one could build “a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung” amounts to a kind of blasphemy. As his Yale colleague W.K. Wimsatt explained in another famous essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” the poet—the mind behind the creation—remains an inscrutable creator whose intention can never be fully known, but in whose handiwork one may glimpse something of the sublime idea to which the poem gives form. At the height of the New Criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, some of its most respected practitioners taught in small colleges, and even those in the research universities, such as Reuben Brower at Harvard (to which he had come from Amherst), were primarily undergraduate teachers. Under their spell, the classroom became something like a Quaker meeting, not so much a place of compulsory recitation as of open invitation for students to contribute towards the goal of building, collectively, new insights into the work under discussion. Ultimately, the New Criticism was a mood more than a methodology. And it was, not incidentally, the last time that practicing poets—T.S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and, later, Richard Wilbur, among others—had a significant impact on academic criticism. Pater’s belief that “lyrical poetry…is… the highest and most complete form of poetry” had been transmitted by Eliot to the New Critics, who regarded a work of literature—which they described in language close to that with which Augustine had described creation itself—as “a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.” Contemplating these patterns and harmonies under the guidance of a good teacher could (and can) be a wonderfully vertiginous experience. But in acknowledging what every true writer knows— that words are never quite governable by the will of the author—the New

Critics were planting seeds of future trouble for English studies. Paul de Man, who introduced the deconstructionist theory of Jacques Derrida to American readers after the New Criticism had become a received orthodoxy, detected in the New Critics a “foreknowledge” of what he called, borrowing a phrase from the Swiss critic Georges Poulet, “hermeneutic circularity.” There is a hint of what he meant in Kernan’s charming story about a retirement party for one of the elder Yale eminences he had known only slightly during his graduate years. “You were never my student, I believe,” said the older man. “No,” Kernan concurred, to which came back the indecipherable reply, “A pity.” Was there a compliment in that answer? Or was it a dig? How could one know if either was intended? A pity for whom—teacher or student? Writers and good critics have always revelled in language play; but in the 1970s academic criticism got terribly solemn about it. Suddenly, the professor’s “a pity” was no longer a joke; it had become a “multivalent,” “indeterminate,” and “undecidable” “speech act” construed differently by different “interpretive communities,” all of which was evidence that the “referentiality” of language to anything outside itself is an illusion, and that sequences of words to which we assign meaning are actually “gaps” filled by the “subjectivity” of the reader. Captain Ahab’s second mate on the Pequod, Mr. Stubb, had pretty much summed it up a long time before: “Book!…you’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.” Deconstruction fit the darkening mood of the Seventies, when all claims to timeless or universal truth became suspect as self-serving deceptions perpetrated by wielders of power. It was an effort, as we used to say, to heighten the contradictions and raise them to the level of consciousness. Along with its offshoot, “reader-response” criticism, it was a mischievously extreme skepticism that regarded all meanings and judgements as contingent on the “subject-position” of the reader. Deconstructionists rejected the idea that a work of the imagination manifests any “presence” (a rubric under which they gathered such notions as meaning, beauty, and authorship), and, with the atheist zeal

of erstwhile believers, they substituted terms like “aporia” and “absence.” One of the implications was that literature was no more or less worthy of study than any other semiotic system; fashion, gestures, sports could now serve as a “text” for the game of interpretation. But this view soon lost its playfulness, and turned into the dogma that literature, like any constructed system of meaning, must be assessed in relation to this or that “identity” (race, class, gender, etc.) to the exclusion of every other point of view. Here began in earnest the fragmentation of literary studies that is so evident today—and that has left a legacy of acrimony, and of intellectual and professional fatigue. Deconstruction can also be seen as simply another phase in the continuing effort by literary studies to get respect from “hard” disciplines by deploying a specialized vocabulary of its own. Long before its rise, in an essay entitled “The Meaning of a Literary Idea” (1949), Trilling had remarked that “people will eventually be unable to say, ‘They fell in love and married,’ let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say, ‘Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.”‘ Trilling’s parody of the Freud fad of his day was intended to illustrate how “ideas tend to deteriorate into ideology,” and by ideology he meant the habit or ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. Today’s rendition, to which the requisite dash of Gramsci and sprinkle of Foucault (among the biggest postdeconstruction influences on literary studies) are added, would go something like this: “Privileging each other as objects of heterosexual desire, they signified their withdrawal from the sexual marketplace by valorizing the marital contract as an instrument of bourgeois hegemony.” Who knows what tomorrow will bring? British Literature

British literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. This includes literatures from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. By far the largest part of British literature has been written in the English language, with English literature developing into a global phenomenon, because of its use in the former colonies of Britain. In addition the story of British literature involves writings in Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon, Cornish, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, Latin, Manx, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and other languages. Literature in Northern Ireland includes writings in English, Irish and Ulster Scots. Irish writers have played an important part in the development of literature in England and Scotland, but though the whole of Ireland was politically part of Britain before 1922, it can be controversial to describe Irish literature, other than from Northern Ireland, as British. Literature in the Celtic languages of the islands is the oldest surviving vernacular literature in Europe. British Identity

Definitions of British literature are bound up with historical shifts of British identity. Changing consciousness of English national identity, Scottish national identity, Welsh nationalism, and the effects of British imperialism have altered interpretations of how the literatures of the Isles have interacted. The impact of Irish nationalism, that led to the partition of the island of Ireland in 1921, means that literature of the Republic of Ireland is not considered to be British, although the identity of literature from Northern Ireland, as part of the literature of the United Kingdom, may fall within the overlapping identities of Irish and British literature, where “the naming of the territory has always been, in literary, geographical or historical contexts, a politically charged activity”. Welsh literature in English (previously called Anglo-Welsh literature) is the works written in the English language by Welsh writers, especially if their subject matter relates to Wales. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh literature in the Welsh language.

The use of the label “Celtic fringe” as applied to non-English, or traditionally non-English-speaking, territories to marginalise these cultures has been analysed as a colonial attitude, and the literatures of Ireland, Scotland and Wales may be studied through the methodology of postcolonialism. However, Britain’s legacy survives around the world, as a shared history of British presence and cultural influence in the Commonwealth of Nations has produced a substantial body of writing in English and many other languages. Old British and Late Medieval Literature: 449-1500

Latin Literature: Chroniclers such as Bede (672/3-735), with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, and Gildas (c.500-570), with his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, were figures in the development of indigenous Latin literature, mostly ecclesiastical, in the centuries following the withdrawal of the Roman Empire around the year 410. Adomnán’s (627/8-704) most important work is the Vita Columbae, a hagiography of Columba, and the most important surviving work written in early medieval Scotland. It is a vital source for knowledge of the Picts, as well as an insight into the life of Iona Abbey and the early medieval Gaelic monk. The vita of Columba contains a story that has been interpreted as the first reference to the Loch Ness Monster. Written just after or possibly contemporarily with Adomnán’s Vita Columbae, the Vita Sancti Cuthberti (c.699-705) is the first piece of Northumbrian Latin writing and the earliest piece of English Latin hagiography. The Historia Brittonum composed in the 9th century is traditionally ascribed to Nennius. It is the earliest source which presents King Arthur as a historical figure, and is the source of several stories which were repeated and amplified by later authors. Latin continued in use as a language of learning long after the Reformation had established the vernaculars as liturgical languages for the élites. In Scotland, Latin as a literary language thrived into the 17th century as Scottish writers writing in Latin were able to engage with

their audiences on an equal basis in a prestige language without feeling hampered by their less confident handling of English. Utopia is a work of fiction and political philosophy by Thomas More (1478-1535) published in 1516. The book, written in Latin, is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. New Atlantis is a utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), published in Latin (as Nova Atlantis) in 1624 and in English in 1627. In this work, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit” are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the mythical Bensalem. The plan and organization of his ideal college, Salomon’s House (or Solomon’s House), envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure sciences. George Buchanan (1506–1582) was the Renaissance writer from the Isles who had the greatest international reputation, being considered the finest Latin poet since classical times. As he wrote mostly in Latin, his works travelled across Europe as did he himself. Amongst poets who wrote poems in Latin in the 17th century were George Herbert (1593-1633) (who also wrote poems in Greek), and John Milton (1608–74). Philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ Elementa Philosophica de Cive (1642-1658) was in Latin. However, things were changing and by about 1700 the growing movement for the use of national languages (already found earlier in literature and the Protestant religious movement) had reached academia, and an example of the transition is Isaac Newton’s writing career, which began in New Latin and ended in English: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in Latin Opticks, 1704, in English. Early Celtic Literature

For a comparatively small country, Ireland has made a large contribution to world literature in all its branches. The Irish literature that is best known outside the country is in English, but the Irish

language also has the most significant body of written literature, both ancient and recent, in any Celtic language, in addition to a strong oral tradition of legends and poetry. The Ulster Cycle written in the 12th century, is a body of medieval Irish heroic legends and sagas of the traditional heroes of the Ulaid in what is now eastern Ulster and northern Leinster, particularly counties Armagh, Down and Louth. The stories are written in Old and Middle Irish, mostly in prose, interspersed with occasional verse passages. The language of the earliest stories is dateable to the 8th century, and events and characters are referred to in poems dating to the 7th. In Medieval Welsh literature the period before 1100 is known as the period of Y Cynfeirdd (“The earliest poets”) or Yr Hengerdd (“The old poetry”). It roughly dates from the birth of the Welsh language until the arrival of the Normans in Wales towards the end of the 11th century. Y Gododdin is a medieval Welsh poem consisting of a series of elegies to the men of the Britonnic kingdom of Gododdin and its allies who, according to the conventional interpretation, died fighting the Angles of Deira and Bernicia at a place named Catraeth in ca. AD 600. It is traditionally ascribed to the bard Aneirin, and survives only in one manuscript, known as the Book of Aneirin. The poem is recorded in a manuscript of the second half of the 13th century, and it has been dated to anywhere between the 7th and the early 11th centuries. The text is partly written in Middle Welsh orthography and partly in Old Welsh. The early date would place its oral composition to soon after the battle, presumably in the Hen Ogledd (“Old North”) in what would have been the Cumbric variety of Brythonic. Others consider it the work of a poet in medieval Wales, composed in the 9th, 10th or 11th century. Even a 9th-century date would make it one of the oldest surviving Welsh works of poetry. The name Mabinogion is a convenient label for a collection eleven prose stories collated from two medieval Welsh manuscripts known as the White book of Rhydderch (Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch) (ca. 1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest) (1382–1410). They are written in Middle Welsh, the common literary language between the end of the eleventh century and the fourteenth century. They include the four tales that form Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (“The Four Branches

of the Mabinogi”). The tales draw on pre-Christian Celtic mythology, international folktale motifs, and early medieval historical traditions. While some details may hark back to older Iron Age traditions, each of these tales is the product of a highly developed medieval Welsh narrative tradition, both oral and written. Lady Charlotte Guest in the mid 19th century was the first to publish English translations of the collection, popularising the name “Mabinogion” at the same time. Gaelic literature in Scotland includes a celebration, attributed to the Irish monk Adomnán, of the Pictish King Bridei’s (671–93) victory over the Northumbrians at the Battle of Dun Nechtain (685). Pictish, the now extinct Brythonic language spoken in Scotland, has left no record of poetry, but poetry composed in Gaelic for Pictish kings is known. By the 9th century Gaelic speakers controlled Pictish territory and Gaelic was spoken throughout Scotland and used as a literary language. However, there was great cultural exchange between Scotland and Ireland, with Irish poets composing for Scottish or Pictish patrons, and Scottish poets composing for Irish patrons. No Cornish literature survives from the Primitive Cornish period (c600-800 AD). The earliest written record of the Cornish language, dating from the 9th century, is a gloss in a Latin manuscript of the Consolation of Philosophy, which used the words ud rocashaas. The phrase means “it (the mind) hated the gloomy places”. Old Norse Literature

From the 8th to the 15th centuries, Vikings and Norse settlers and their descendents colonised parts of what is now modern Scotland. Some Old Norse poetry survives relating to this period. The Orkneyinga saga (also called the History of the Earls of Orkney) is a historical narrative of the history of the Orkney Islands, from their capture by the Norwegian king in the ninth century onwards until about 1200. 20th century poet George Mackay Brown was influenced by the saga, notably for his 1973 novel Magnus. The Icelandic Njáls saga includes actions taking place in Orkney and Wales. Besides these Icelandic sagas a few examples, sometimes fragmentary, of Norse poetry composed in Scotland survive. Among the runic inscriptions at Maeshowe is a text identified as irregular verse. Scandinavian cultural contacts in the Danelaw also left legacies in literature. Höfuðlausn or

the “Head’s Ransom” is a skaldic poem attributed to Egill SkallaGrímsson in praise of king Eirik Bloodaxe in the kingdom of Northumbria. Old English Literature: 449-1100

Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses literature written in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, in the period after the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic tribes in England after the withdrawal of the Romans and “ending soon after the Norman Conquest [in 1066]”; that is to c. 1100-50). These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous: twelve are known by name from Medieval sources, but only four of those are known by their vernacular works to us today with any certainty: Caedmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose name is known. Cædmon’s only known surviving work is Cædmon’s Hymn, probably dating from the late 7th century. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. The Wanderer is an Old English poem preserved only in an anthology known as the Exeter Book, a manuscript dating from the late 10th century. It counts 115 lines of alliterative verse. As often the case in Anglo-Saxon verse, the composer and compiler are anonymous, and within the manuscript the poem is untitled. The Wanderer conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord’s band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord. The epic poem Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite not being set in England. A hero of the Geats, Beowulf battles three antagonists: Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a Dragon. The only surviving

manuscript is the Nowell Codex. The precise date of the manuscript is debated, but most estimates place it close to the year 1000. Chronicles contained a range of historical and literary accounts; one notable example is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. Nine manuscripts survive in whole or in part, though not all are of equal historical value and none of them is the original version. The oldest seems to have been started towards the end of Alfred’s reign in the 9th century, while the most recent was written at Peterborough Abbey in 1116. Almost all of the material in the Chronicle is in the form of annals, by year; the earliest are dated at 60 BC (the annals’ date for Caesar’s invasions of Britain), and historical material follows up to the year in which the chronicle was written, at which point contemporary records begin. These manuscripts collectively are known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Battle of Maldon is the name given to an Old English poem of uncertain date celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem are extant; both the beginning and the ending are lost. The Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity after their arrival in England. A popular poem, The Dream of the Rood, was inscribed upon the Ruthwell Cross. Judith is a retelling of the story found in the Latin Bible’s Book of Judith of the beheader of the Assyrian general Holofernes. The Old English Martyrology is a Mercian collection of hagiographies. Ælfric of Eynsham was a prolific 10th century writer of hagiographies and homilies. Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the Christian. The most popular and well-known understanding of Old English poetry continues to be alliterative verse. The system is based upon accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types can be used in any verse. The system was inherited from and exists in one form or another in all of the older Germanic languages.

Several Old English poems are adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is a 10th century translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy contained in the Cotton manuscript Otho A.vi. The Metres of Boethius are a series of Old English alliterative poems adapted from the Latin metra of the Consolation of Philosophy soon after the prose translation. Late Medieval Literature: 1100-1500

The linguistic diversity of the islands in the medieval period, with each of the languages producing literatures at various times which contributed to the rich variety of artistic production, made British literature distinctive and innovative. Latin literature circulated among the educated classes. Gerald of Wales’s most distinguished works are those dealing with Wales and Ireland, with his late 12th century two books in Latin on his beloved Wales the most important: Itinerarium Cambriae and Descriptio Cambriae which tell us much about Welsh history and geography. Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the development of Anglo-Norman literature in the Anglo-Norman realm introduced literary trends from Continental Europe such as the chanson de geste. However, the indigenous development of Anglo-Norman literature was precocious in comparison to continental Oïl literature: Geoffrey Gaimar produced the earliest rhymed chronicle; Benedeit, the earliest adventure narrative inspired by Celtic sources; Jordan Fantosme, the earliest eyewitness historiography; Philippe de Thaun, the earliest scientific literature. Religious literature continued to enjoy popularity. Hagiographies continued to be written, adapted and translated: for example, The Life of Saint Audrey, Eadmer’s contemporary biography of Anselm of Canterbury, and the South English Legendary. The Roman de Fergus was the earliest piece of non-Celtic vernacular literature to come from Scotland. As the Norman nobles of Scotland assimilated to indigenous culture they commissioned Scots versions of popular continental romances, for example: Launcelot o the Laik and The Buik o Alexander.

While chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon attempted to weave such historical information they had access to into coherent narratives, other writers took more creative approaches to their material. Geoffrey of Monmouth was one of the major figures in the development of British history and the popularity for the tales of King Arthur. He is best known for his chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) of 1136, which spread Celtic motifs to a wider audience, including accounts of Arthur’s father Uther Pendragon, wizard Merlin, and sword Caliburnus (named as Excalibur in some manuscripts of Wace). Culhwch and Olwen is a Welsh tale about a hero connected with Arthur and his warriors, and is the longest of the surviving Welsh prose tales. It is perhaps the earliest extant Arthurian tale and one of Wales’ earliest extant prose texts. The 12th century poet Wace (c. 1110 – after 1174), who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy, is considered the founder of Jersey literature and contributed to the development of the Arthurian legend in British literature. His Brut showed the interest of Norman patrons in the mythologising of the new English territories of the Anglo-Norman realm by building on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, and introduced King Arthur’s Round Table to literature. His Roman de Rou placed the Dukes of Normandy within an epic context. The Prophecy of Merlin is a 12th-century poem written in Latin hexameters by John of Cornwall, which he claimed was based or revived from a lost manuscript in the Cornish language. Marginal notes on Cornish vocabulary are among the earliest known writings in the Cornish language. At the end of the 12th century, Layamon’s Brut adapted Wace to make the first English language work to discuss the legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was also the first historiography written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba is a short chronicle of the Kings of Alba. It was written in Hiberno-Latin but displays some knowledge of contemporary Middle Irish orthography and probably

put together in the early 13th century by the man who wrote de Situ Albanie. The original text was without doubt written in Scotland, probably in the early 11th century, shortly after the reign of Kenneth II, the last reign it relates. Early English Jewish literature developed after the Norman Conquest with Jewish settlement in England. Berechiah ha-Nakdan is known chiefly as the author of a 13th century set of over a hundred fables, called Mishle Shualim, (Fox Fables), which are derived from both Berachyah’s own inventions and some borrowed and reworked from Aesop’s fables, the Talmud, and the Hindus. The collection also contains fables conveying the same plots and morals as those of Marie de France. The development of Jewish literature in mediaeval England ended with the Edict of Expulsion of 1290. Matthew Paris (c. 1200 – 1259), a Benedictine monk, wrote a number of works in the 13th century. Some were written in Latin, some in Anglo-Norman or French verse. In the later medieval period a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is the earliest form which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, albeit not easily. Middle English Bible translations, notably Wyclif’s Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language. Wycliffe’s Bible is the name now given to a group of Bible translations into Middle English that were made under the direction of, or at the instigation of, John Wycliffe. They appeared over a period from approximately 1382 to 1395. These Bible translations were the chief inspiration and chief cause of the Lollard movement, a pre-Reformation movement that rejected many of the distinctive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. In the early Middle Ages, most Western Christian people encountered the Bible only in the form of oral versions of scriptures, verses and homilies in Latin (other sources were mystery plays, usually conducted in the vernacular, and popular iconography). Though relatively few people could read at this time, Wycliffe’s idea was to translate the Bible into the vernacular, saying “it helpeth Christian men to study the Gospel in that tongue in which they know best Christ’s sentence”. Although unauthorized, the work was popular and Wycliffite Bible texts are the most common manuscript literature

in Middle English and over 250 manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible survive. Romances appear in English from the 13th century, with King Horn and Havelock the Dane, based on Anglo-Norman originals such as the Romance of Horn. Piers Plowman (written ca. 1360–1387) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Plowman (William’s Vision of Piers Plowman) is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called “passus” (Latin for “step”). Piers is considered by many critics to be one of the early great works of English literature along with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight during the Middle Ages. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance. It is one of the better-known Arthurian stories, of an established type known as the “beheading game”. Developing from Welsh, Irish and English tradition Sir Gawain highlights the importance of honour and chivalry. It is an important poem in the romance genre, which typically involves a hero who goes on a quest that tests his prowess. “Preserved in the same manuscript with Sir Gawayne were three other poems, now generally accepted as the work of its author. These are two alliterative poems of moral teaching, Patience and Purity, and an intricate elegiac poem, Pearl. The author of Sir Gawayne and the other poems is frequently referred to as ‘the Pearl Poet.’ “ The English dialect of these poems from the Midlands is markedly different from that of the London-based Chaucer and though influenced by French in the scenes at court in Sir Gawain, there are in the poems also has many dialect words, often of Scandinavian origin, that belonged to northwest England. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer is best known today for The

Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories written in Middle English (mostly written in verse although some are in prose), that are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin. The first recorded association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules of 1382. The multilingual nature of the audience for literature in the 14th century can be illustrated by the example of John Gower (c. 1330 – October 1408). A contemporary of William Langland and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer, Gower is remembered primarily for three major works, the Mirroir de l’Omme, Vox Clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, three long poems written in Anglo-Norman, Latin and, Middle English respectively, which are united by common moral and political themes. Women writers were also active, such as Marie de France in the 12th century and Julian of Norwich in the early 14th century. Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love (circa 1393) is believed to be the first published book written by a woman in the English language. Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438) is known for writing The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language, which chronicles, to some extent, her extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia. Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315/1320 – c. 1350/1370), is regarded as one of the leading Welsh poets and amongst the great poets of Europe in the Middle Ages. His main themes were love and nature. The influence of wider European ideas of courtly love, as exemplified in the troubadour poetry of Provençal, is seen as a significant influence on his poetry. He was an innovative poet who was responsible for popularising the metre known as the “cywydd” and first to use it for praise. But perhaps his greatest innovation was to make himself the main focus of his poetry. By its very nature, most of the work of the

traditional Welsh court poets kept their own personalities far from their poetry, whereas Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poems are full of his own feelings and experiences. Since at least the 14th century, poetry in English has been written in Ireland and by Irish writers abroad. The earliest poem in English by a Welsh poet (Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal’s Hymn to the Virgin) dates from about 1470. The Latin and English poem Flen flyys written around 1475, is chiefly famous for containing in coded form the first known written usage in English of a particular profane term in the English language. Among the earliest Lowland Scots literature is Barbour’s Brus (14th century). Whyntoun’s Kronykil and Blind Harry’s Wallace date from the (15th century). From the 13th century much literature based around the royal court in Edinburgh and from the 14th century at the University of St Andrews, which was founded early in that century. Major writers from the 15th century include Henrysoun, Dunbar, Douglas and Lyndsay. The works of Chaucer had an influence on Scottish writers. Robert Henryson’s (c. 1460–1500) most famous work is the narrative poem The Testament of Cresseid, which imagines a tragic fate for Cressida, in the medieval story of Troilus and Criseyde, which was left untold in Geoffrey Chaucer’s version. Henryson’s cogent psychological drama makes the poem a major works of northern renaissance literature. The poem was written in Middle Scots; a modern English translation by Seamus Heaney was published in 2004. For the Scottish Literary Renaissance in the mid-twentieth century, Dunbar was a touchstone. Many tried to imitate his style, and “high-brow” subject matter, such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Sydney Goodsir Smith. As MacDiarmid himself said, they had to go “back to Dunbar”. Gavin Douglas (c. 1474 – September 1522) was a Scottish bishop, makar and translator. Although he had an important political career, it is for his poetry that he is now chiefly remembered. His principal pioneering achievement was the Eneados (1553), a full and faithful vernacular translation of the Aeneid of Virgil and the first successful example of its kind in any Anglic language. Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, (also

spelled Lindsay) (c. 1490 – c. 1555) was a Scottish poet whose works reflect the spirit of the Renaissance. In the Cornish language Passhyon agan Arloedh (“The Passion of our Lord”), a poem of 259 eight-line verses written in 1375, is one of the earliest surviving works of Cornish literature. The most important work of literature surviving from the Middle Cornish period is An Ordinale Kernewek (“The Cornish Ordinalia”), a 9000-line religious drama composed around the year 1400. The longest single surviving work of Cornish literature is Bywnans Meriasek (The Life of Meriasek), a play dated 1504, but probably copied from an earlier manuscript. Le Morte d’Arthur, is Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th century compilation of some French and English Arthurian romances, was among the earliest books printed in England, printed by Caxton in 1485. It was popular and influential in the later revival of interest in the Arthurian legends. Medieval Drama

In the Middle Ages, drama in the vernacular languages of Europe may have emerged from religious enactments of the liturgy. Mystery plays were presented on the porch of the cathedrals or by strolling players on feast days. Miracle and mystery plays, along with moralities and interludes, later evolved into more elaborate forms of drama, such as was seen on the Elizabethan stages. Another form of medieval theatre was the mummers’ plays, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George and the Dragon and Robin Hood. These were folk tales re-telling old stories, and the actors travelled from town to town performing these for their audiences in return for money and hospitality. Mystery plays and miracle plays (sometimes distinguished as two different forms, although the terms are often used interchangeably) are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They developed from the 10th to the 16th century, reaching the height of their popularity in the 15th century before being rendered obsolete by

the rise of professional theatre. The name derives from mystery used in its sense of miracle, but an occasionally quoted derivation is from misterium, meaning craft, a play performed by the craft guilds. There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays from the late medieval period; although these collections are sometimes referred to as “cycles,” it is now believed that this term may attribute to these collections more coherence than they in fact possess. The most complete is the York cycle of forty-eight pageants. They were performed in the city of York, from the middle of the fourteenth century until 1569. There are also the Towneley plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true ‘cycle’ of plays and most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during the late Middle Ages until 1576. The Ludus Coventriae (also called the N Town plays” or Hegge cycle), now generally agreed to be a redacted compilation of at least three older, unrelated plays, and the Chester cycle of twenty-four pageants, now generally agreed to be an Elizabethan reconstruction of older medieval traditions. Besides the Middle English drama, there are three surviving plays in Cornish known as the Ordinalia. These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, the Raising of Lazarus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Other pageants included the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets, Christ’s Baptism, the Temptation in the Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds. Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, the morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment, which represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre. In their own time, these plays were known as “interludes”, a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various moral attributes who try to prompt him to choose a Godly life over one of evil. The plays were most popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries.

The Somonyng of Everyman (The Summoning of Everyman) (c.1509-19), usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15th-century English morality play. Like John Bunyan’s allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, Everyman (1678) examines the question of Christian salvation through the use of allegorical characters. The play is the allegorical accounting of the life of Everyman, who represents all mankind. In the course of the action, All the characters are also allegorical, each personifying an abstract idea such as Fellowship, (material) Goods, and Knowledge and the conflict between good and evil is dramatized by the interactions between characters. The Late Renaissance or Caroline Period: 1625–1660

The Metaphysical poets continued writing in this period. Both John Donne and George Herbert died after 1625, but there was a second generation of metaphysical poets, consisting of Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), Thomas Traherne (1636 or 1637–1674) and Henry Vaughan (1622–1695). Another important group of poets at this time were the Cavalier poets. They were an important group of writers, who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–51). (King Charles reigned from 1625 and was executed 1649). The best known of the Cavalier poets are Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Carew, and Sir John Suckling. They “were not a formal group, but all were influenced” by Ben Jonson. Most of the Cavalier poets were courtiers, with notable exceptions. For example, Robert Herrick was not a courtier, but his style marks him as a Cavalier poet. Cavalier works make use of allegory and classical allusions, and are influence by Latin authors Horace, Cicero, and Ovid. John Milton (1608–74) is one of the greatest English poets, who wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval. He is generally seen as the last major poet of the English Renaissance, though his major epic poems were written in the Restoration period, including. Paradise Lost (1671). Among the important poems Milton wrote during this period are L’Allegro, 1631; Il Penseroso, 1634; Comus (a masque), 1638; and Lycidas, (1638). His later major works are: Paradise Regained, 1671; Samson Agonistes, 1671. Milton’s works

reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and selfdetermination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history’s most influential and impassioned defences of free speech and freedom of the press. William Hayley’s 1796 biography called him the “greatest English author”, and he remains generally regarded “as one of the preeminent writers in the English language”. Thomas Urquhart (1611-1660), a Scottish Royalist, translated Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel into English, a translation that has achieved its “own creative identity”, and has been described as “the greatest Scottish translation since Gavin Douglas’s Eneados”. According to legend, Urquhart died in a fit of laughter on receiving news of the Restoration of Charles II. Neoclassicism: 1660-1798

This period is also described as the Neoclassical age or Age of reason. The Restoration:1660-1700 : The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 launched a fresh start for literature, both in celebration of the new worldly and playful court of the king, and in reaction to it. Theatres in England reopened after having been closed during the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell, Puritanism lost its momentum, and the bawdy “Restoration comedy” became a recognisable genre. In addition, women were allowed to perform on stage for the first time. The Mercurius Caledonius, founded in Edinburgh in 1660 by the playwright Thomas Sydserf, was Scotland’s first newspaper. Sydserf was behind the establishment in Edinburgh of the first regular theatre in Scotland, and his 1667 play Tarugo’s Wiles: or, The Coffee-House, based on a Spanish play, was produced in London to amazement that a Scot could write such excellent English. He was also among the first to translate Cyrano de Bergerac into English; his Óåëçíáñ÷ßá, or the Government of the World in the Moon (1659). Scottish poet John Ogilby, who was the first Irish Master of the Revels, had established the Werburgh Street Theatre, the first theatre in Ireland, in the 1630s. It was closed by the Puritans in 1641.

The Restoration of the monarchy in Ireland enabled Ogilby to resume his position as Master of the Revels and open the first Theatre Royal in Dublin in 1662 in Smock Alley. In 1662 Katherine Philips went to Dublin where she completed a translation of Pierre Corneille’s Pompée, produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and printed in the same year both in Dublin and London. Although other women had translated or written dramas, her translation of Pompey broke new ground as the first rhymed version of a French tragedy in English and the first English play written by a woman to be performed on the professional stage. Aphra Behn (one of the women writers dubbed “The fair triumvirate of wit”) was a prolific dramatist and one of the first English professional female writers. Her greatest dramatic success was The Rover (1677). Behn’s depiction of the character Willmore in The Rover and the witty, poetry-reciting rake Dorimant in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) are seen as a satire on John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647 – 1680), an English libertine poet, and a wit of the Restoration court. His contemporary Andrew Marvell described him as “the best English satirist”, and he is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. His A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind is assumed to be a Hobbesian critique of rationalism. Rochester’s poetic work varies widely in form, genre, and content. He was part of a “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease”, who continued to produce their poetry in manuscripts, rather than in publication. As a consequence, some of Rochester’s work deals with topical concerns, such as satires of courtly affairs in libels, to parodies of the styles of his contemporaries, such as Sir Charles Scroope. He is also notable for his impromptus, Voltaire, who spoke of Rochester as “the man of genius, the great poet”, admired his satire for its “energy and fire” and translated some lines into French to “display the shining imagination his lordship only could boast”. John Dryden (1631-1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. He established the heroic

couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrine and triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet. Dryden’s greatest achievements were in satiric verse in works like the mock-heroic MacFlecknoe (1682). W. H. Auden referred to him as “the master of the middle style” that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident from the elegies that it inspired. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was heavily influenced by Dryden, and often borrowed from him; other writers in the 18th century were equally influenced by both Dryden and Pope. Iain Lom (c. 1624–c. 1710) was a Royalist Scottish Gaelic poet appointed poet laureate in Scotland by Charles II at the Restoration. He delivered a eulogy for the coronation, and remained loyal to the Stuarts after 1688, opposing the Williamites and later, in his vituperative Oran an Aghaidh an Aonaidh, the 1707 Union of the Parliaments. Though Ben Jonson had been poet laureate to James I in England, this was not then a formal position and the formal title of Poet Laureate, as a royal office, was first conferred by letters patent on John Dryden in 1670. The post then became a regular British institution. Diarists John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times. Their works are among the most important primary sources for the Restoration period in England, and consists of eyewitness accounts of many great events, such as the Great Plague of London (1644-5), and the Great Fire of London (1666). Cín Lae Uí Mhealláin is an account of the Irish Confederate Wars which “reflected the Ulster Catholic point of view” written by Tarlach Ó Mealláin. James Melville’s diary is written in a vigorous, fresh style, and is especially direct in its descriptions of Scottish contemporaries and an original authority for the period, written with much naïveté, and revealing an attractive personality.

Described as “an account of the progress of the Confederate war from the outbreak of rebellion in 1641 until February 1647” its text “reflected the Ulster Catholic point of view.” The publication of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Part I:1678; 1684), established the Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628–88) as a notable writer. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Bunyan writes about how the individual 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. Nicholas Boson (1624–1708) wrote three significant texts in Cornish, Nebbaz gerriau dro tho Carnoack (A Few Words about Cornish) between 1675 and 1708; Jowan Chy-an-Horth, py, An try foynt a skyans (John of Chyannor, or, The three points of wisdom), published by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, though written earlier; and The Dutchess of Cornwall’s Progress, partly in English, now known only in fragments. The first two are the only known surviving Cornish prose texts from the 17th century. In Scotland, after the 17th century, anglicisation increased, though Lowland Scots was still spoken by the vast majority of the population, and Scottish Gaelic by a minority. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period include Robert Sempill (c.1595–1665), Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie. The Augustan Age: 1700-1750

The late 17th, early 18th century (1689 -1750) in English literature is known as the Augustan Age. Writers at this time “greatly admired their Roman counterparts, imitated their works and frequently drew parallels between” contemporary world and the age of the Roman emperor Augustus (27 AD - BC 14). Some of the major writers in this period were John Dryden (1631-1700), Jonathan Swift (16671745), William Congreve, (1670-1729), Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Richard Steele (1672-1729), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Henry Fielding (1707– 54), Samuel Johnson (1709-84). The “Invention of British Literature”

The Union of the Parliaments of Scotland and England in 1707 to form a single Kingdom of Great Britain and the creation of a joint state by the Acts of Union had little impact on the literature of England nor on national consciousness among English writers. The situation in Scotland was different: the desire to maintain a cultural identity while partaking of the advantages offered by the English literary market and English literary standard language led to what has been described as the “invention of British literature” by Scottish writers. English writers, if they considered Britain at all, tended to assume it was merely England writ large; Scottish writers were more clearly aware of the new state as a “cultural amalgam comprising more than just England”. James Thomson’s “Rule Britannia!” is an example of the Scottish championing of this new national and literary identity. With the invention of British literature came the development of the first British novels, in contrast to the English novel of the 18th century which continued to deal with England and English concerns rather than exploring the changed political, social and literary environment. Tobias Smollett (1721–71) was a Scottish pioneer of the British novel, exploring the prejudices inherent within the new social structure of Britain through comic picaresque novels. His The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) is the first major novel written in English to have a Scotsman as hero, and the multinational voices represented in the narrative confront Anglocentric prejudices only two years after the Battle of Culloden. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) brings together characters from the extremes of Britain to question how cultural and linguistic differences can be accommodated within the new British identity, and influenced Charles Dickens. Developments in Publishing

Edward Cave created the first general-interest magazine in 1731 with The Gentleman’s Magazine. He was the first to use the term “magazine” on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied material. The Daily Courant, first published on 11 March 1702 in Fleet Street, was the first British daily newspaper. The News Letter is one of Northern Ireland’s main daily newspapers and is the oldest English language general daily newspaper still in publication in the world, having first been printed in 1737. The Press and Journal is a daily regional newspaper serving the northern counties of Scotland

including the cities of Aberdeen and Inverness. Established in 1747, it is Scotland’s oldest daily newspaper. John Newbery made children’s literature a sustainable and profitable part of the literary market, and he published his most popular story The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes in 1765. The English pictorial satirist and editorial cartoonist William Hogarth (1697-1764) has been credited with pioneering Western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”. Much of his work satirizes contemporary politics and customs. A seminal book in piracy, A General History of the Pyrates 1724, was published in London, and contained biographies of several notorious English pirates such as Blackbeard and Calico Jack. Prose, Including the Novel

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. Periodical essays bloomed into journalistic writings; such as Samuel Johnson’s “Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput”, titled to disguise the actual proceeding of parliament as it was illegal for any Parliamentary Reports to be reproduced in print. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major art form. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. The English novel has generally been seen as beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), though John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Aphra Behn’s, Oroonoko (1688) are also contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and even the “Prologue” to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have been suggested. The rise of the novel as an important literary genre is generally associated with the growth of the middle class in England. Other major 18th century

British novelists are Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), author of the epistolary novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1747-8); Henry Fielding (1707–54), who wrote Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749); and Fanny Burney (1752-1840), whose novels “were enjoyed and admired by Jane Austen,” wrote Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796). Anglo-Irish literature achieved an ambiguous independence in the 18th century with the emergence of writers such as Jonathan Swift, whose important early novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1735) is both a satire of human nature, as well as a parody of travellers’ tales like Robinson Crusoe. Other Irish writers who achieved success in the ascendant British literary field included Laurence Sterne (1713– 68) who published Tristram Shandy in parts between 1759 and 1767, and Oliver Goldsmith (?1730-74) author of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, invented the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, and The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, were further notable early works in both the gothic and horror literary genres. In the 18th century, Scottish writers such as Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott continued to use Lowland Scots. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels. Drama in the Augustan Age

Although documented history of Irish theatre began at least as early as 1601, the earliest Irish dramatists of note were: William Congreve (1670-1729), one of the most interesting writers of Restoration comedies and author of The Way of the World (1700); late Restoration playwright, George Farquhar (?1677-1707), The Recruiting Officer (1706); as well as two of the most successful playwrights on the London stage in the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith (?1730-74), She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), The School for Scandal (1777). Anglo-Irish

drama in the 18th century also includes Charles Macklin (?16991797), and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805). The age of Augustan drama was brought to an end by the censorship established by the Licensing Act 1737. After 1737, authors with strong political or philosophical points to make would no longer turn to the stage as their first hope of making a living, and novels began to have dramatic structures involving only normal human beings, as the stage was closed off for serious authors. Prior to the Licensing Act 1737, theatre was the first choice for most wits. After it, the novel was. The Roots of Romanticism: 1750-1798

The second half of the 18th century is sometimes called the “Age of Johnson”. Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson has been described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history”. He is also the subject of “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature”: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). His early works include the poems “London” and “his most impressive poem” “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749). Both poems are modelled on Juvenal’s satires. After nine years of work, Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as “one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship.” This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson’s was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare’s plays (1765), and the widely read tale Rasselas (1759). In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1786). Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th and 18th century poets. Through works such as the “Dictionary, his edition

of Shakespeare, and his Lives of the Poets in particular, he helped invent what we now call English Literature”. The graveyard poets were a number of pre-Romantic English poets, writing in the 1740s and later, whose works are characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, “skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms” in the context of the graveyard. To this was added, by later practitioners, a feeling for the ‘sublime’ and uncanny, and an interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. They are often considered precursors of the Gothic genre. The poets include; Thomas Gray (1716–71), whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) is “the best known product of this kind of sensibility”; William Cowper (1731-1800); Christopher Smart (1722–71); Thomas Chatterton (1752–70); Robert Blair (1699-1746), author of The Grave (1743), “which celebrates the horror of death”; and Edward Young (1683-1765), whose The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-5), is another “noted example of the graveyard genre”. Other precursors of Romanticism are the poets James Thomson (1700–48) and James Macpherson (1736–96), the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. Significant foreign influences were the Germans Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm Schlegel and French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is another important influence. The changing landscape, brought about by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, with the expansion of the city and depopulation of the countryside, was another influences on the growth of the Romantic movement in Britain. The poor condition of workers, the new class conflicts and the pollution of the environment, led to a reaction against urbanism and industrialization and a new emphasis on the beauty and value of nature. Iolo Morganwg, founder of the Gorsedd, first came to public notice in 1789 when he produced Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, a collection of the poetry of the 14th-century Dafydd ap Gwilym. Included in this edition was a large number of previously unknown poems by Dafydd that he claimed to have discovered; these poems are

regarded as Williams’ first literary forgeries. In 1794 he published some of his own poetry, which was later collected in the two-volume Poems, Lyric and Pastoral. Essentially his only genuine work, it proved quite popular. Although William Williams Pantycelyn was claimed by Saunders Lewis as the first poet of the Romantic movement, and Iolo Morganwg’s antiquarian enthusiasms fed an appetite elsewhere for Romantic ideas, a true movement of Romanticism in Welsh literature only developed in the 19th century when it overlapped with Aestheticism. Robert Burns (1759-1796) was a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a cultural icon in Scotland. As well as writing poems, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published in 1786. Among poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world are, “Auld Lang Syne”; “A Red, Red Rose”; “A Man’s A Man for A’ That”; “To a Louse”; “To a Mouse”; “The Battle of Sherramuir”; “Tam o’ Shanter” and “Ae Fond Kiss”. The importance of translation in spreading the influence of English literature to other cultures of the islands can be exemplified by the abridged Manx version of Paradise Lost by John Milton published in 1796 by Thomas Christian. The influence also went the other way as Romanticism discovered inspiration in the literatures and legends of the Celtic countries of the islands. The Ossian hoax typifies the growth of this interest. The interest in Celtic bards such as the supposed Ossian inspired a reaction in England that saw Shakespeare being termed “the Bard” or the “Bard of Avon”. The 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee was an example of what was derisively called bardolatry as Shakespeare was held up as an example of transcendent genius, the ideal of the Romantic poet. 19th century literature

Romanticism: 1798-1837 : Various dates are given for the Romantic period in British literature: here the publishing of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning and the start of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 as its end, even though, for example, William

Wordsworth lived until 1850 and William Blake published before 1798. The poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) was the first of the English Romantic poets. Largely disconnected from the major streams of the literature of the time, Blake was generally unrecognised during his lifetime, but is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. Among his most important works are Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) “and profound and difficult ‘prophecies’ “ such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804–?11), and “Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion” (1804–?20). Among the earliest Romantics were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends, including William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) and journalist Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). The 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 Lyrical Ballads (1798). In it Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the “real language of men” and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry, as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility” which “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The poems in Lyrical Ballads were mostly by Wordsworth, although Coleridge contributed the long “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. Coleridge is also especially remembered for “Kubla Khan”, “Frost at Midnight”, “Dejection: an Ode”, “Christabel” and his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German

idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge and Wordsworth, along with Thomas Carlyle, were a major influence, through Emerson, on American transcendentalism. Among Wordsworth’s most important poems, are “Michael”, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, “Resolution and Independence”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” and the long, autobiographical, epic The Prelude. The Prelude was begun in 1799 but published posthumously in 1850. The third major Lake poet, Robert Southey’s, most enduring contribution to literary history is perhaps the children’s classic, The Story of the Three Bears, the basis of the original Goldilocks story. The second generation of Romantic poets include George Gordon Byron. They flouted social convention and often used poetry as a political voice. Amongst Lord Byron’s best-known works are the brief poems “She Walks in Beauty” and “So, we’ll go no more a roving’”, in addition to narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. Another key poet of the Romantic movement was John Keats, whose poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” expound on his aesthetic theory of negative capability, and remain among the most celebrated by any author of the period. “To Autumn” is the final work in a group of poems known as “Keats’s 1819 odes”, poems characterized by sensual imagery. In 1882, Swinburne wrote in the Encyclopædia Britannica that “the Ode to a Nightingale, [is] one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages”. More recently critic Helen Vendler stated the odes “are a group of works in which the English language find ultimate embodiment”. Percy Shelley, famous for his association with Keats and Byron, was the third major romantic poet of the second generation. Generally regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language, Shelley is perhaps best known for poems such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy and Adonaïs, an elegy written on the death of Keats. Shelley’s early profession of atheism, in the tract “The Necessity of Atheism”, led to his expulsion from Oxford and branded him as a radical agitator and thinker, setting an early pattern of marginalization and ostracism from the intellectual and political circles of his time.

His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, philosopher William Godwin. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and PreRaphaelite poets such as Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Shelley’s groundbreaking poem The Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest. Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley’s verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences. The Triumph of the Novel

Major novelists in this period were the Englishwoman Jane Austen (1775-1817) and the Scotsman Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), while Gothic fiction of various kinds also flourished. Austen’s works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. 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 reveals 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. Austen’s work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew’s A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a major writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Austen’s works include Pride and Prejudice (1813) Sense and Sensibility (1811), Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma. The other major novelist at the beginning of the early 19th century was Sir Walter Scott, who was not only a highly successful British novelist, but “the greatest single influence on fiction in the 19th century ... [and] a European figure”. Scott established the genre of the

historical novel with his series of Waverley Novels, including Waverley (1814), The Antiquary (1816), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). Many of Scott’s novels are based on Scottish history but a few of them are set in England. However, Austen is today widely read and the source for films and television series, while Scott is neglected. Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), is an important Gothic novel, as well as being an early example of science fiction. It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. Another important fact is the number of women novelists who were successful in the 19th century, even though they often had to use a masculine pseudonym (e.g. Emily and Charlotte Brontë). The majority of readers were of course women. At the beginning of the 19th century most novels were published in three volumes and were very expensive. However, monthly serialization was revived with the publication of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers in twenty parts between April 1836 and November 1837. Demand was high for each episode to introduce some new element, whether it was a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain the readers’ interest. Both Dickens and Thackeray frequently published in this way. Although London, as imperial capital, was the pre-eminent centre for literature and publishing, the pluricentric nature of British culture and the growing sophistication of provincial towns and cities as rapid industrialisation progressed meant that literature developed in the provinces. The Lake Poets (William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge), the Brontës, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell are all figures who strengthened the provincial trend in the literature of England, examining questions of Englishness at the same time as other writers of the Isles were exploring the conflicts of their own non-English identities. The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of social novel, also known as social problem or industrial novel, that “arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832”. This was in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and was a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England’s economic

prosperity. Stories of the working class poor were directed towards middle class readers to help create sympathy and promote change. An early example is Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38). Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s with the two novels already mentioned. He wrote vividly about London life and struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion, accessible to readers of all classes. One of his most popular works to this day is A Christmas Carol (1843). In the late 20th century Dickens was most admired for his later novels, such as Dombey and Son (1846–48), Great Expectations (1860-61), Bleak House (1852–53), Little Dorrit (1855-57) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray, who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair (1847). In that novel he satirises whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. The three Brontë sisters were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently accepted as classics. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846, as poets under the pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each the following year: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Later, Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte’s Villette (1853) were published. Elizabeth Gaskell of Manchester was also a successful writer and her first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. Gaskell’s North and South contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial north of England with the wealthier south. Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions, Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes: her early works focused on factory work in southeast Lancashire. She always emphasised the role of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters. Anthony Trollope (1815–82) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of

his best- loved works are set in the imaginary county of Barsetshire, including The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857). He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters, including The Way with Live Now (1875). Trollope’s novels portrayed the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian England. Adam Bede was the first novel of George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, 1819–80), published in 1859. Her works, especially Middlemarch (1871-2), are important examples of literary realism, and are admired for their combination of high Victorian literary detail combined with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict. Victor Hugo spent 18 years in exile in the Channel Islands 18521870. He completed Les Misérables in Guernsey and Les Travailleurs de la mer was written and set in Guernsey and has been described as “the finest British novel written in French”. Hugo used some of Guernsey poet George Métivier’s work as material in his novels. An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William Wordsworth. Charles Darwin is another important influence on Thomas Hardy. Like Charles Dickens he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898, so that initially he gained fame as the author of such novels as, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). He ceased writing novels following adverse criticism of this last novel. In novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy attempts to create modern works in the genre of tragedy, that are modelled on the Greek drama, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles, though in prose, not poetry, fiction, not a play, and with characters of low social standing, not nobility. Another significant late

19th century novelist is George Robert Gissing (1857-1903) who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best known novel is New Grub Street (1891). Also in the late 1890s, the first novel of Polish-born immigrant Joseph Conrad, (1857-1924), an important forerunner of modernist literature, was published. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was published in 1899, a symbolic story within a story, or frame narrative, about the journey to the Belgian Congo by an Englishman called Marlow. This was followed by Lord Jim in 1900. Ulster Scots was used in the narrative by Ulster novelists such as W. G. Lyttle (1844–1896). By the middle of the 19th century the Kailyard school of prose had become the dominant literary genre, overtaking poetry. This was a tradition shared with Scotland which continued into the early 20th century. The Scottish authors; Robert Louis Stevenson, William Alexander, J. M. Barrie, and George MacDonald, also wrote in Lowland Scots or used it in dialogue. The Welsh novel in English starts with “The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti” (1828) by T. J. Ll. Prichard, and novelists following him developed two important genres: the industrial novel and the rural romance. Serial fiction in Welsh had been appearing from 1822 onwards, but the work to be recognisable as the first novel in Welsh was William Ellis Jones’ 1830 “Y Bardd, neu y Meudwy Cymreig”. This was a moralistic work, as were many of the productions of the time. The first major novelist in the Welsh language was Daniel Owen (1836-1895), author of works such as Rhys Lewis (1885) and Enoc Huws (1891). The first novel in Scottish Gaelic was John MacCormick’s DùnÀluinn, no an t-Oighre ‘na Dhìobarach, which was serialised in the People’s Journal in 1910, before publication in book form in 1912. The publication of a second Scottish Gaelic novel, An t-Ogha Mòr by Angus Robertson, followed within a year. Genre Fiction

Important developments occurred in genre fiction in this era. Sir John Barrow’s descriptive 1831 account of the Mutiny on the Bounty immortalised the Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty and her people. The legend of Dick Turpin was popularised when the 18th

century English highwayman’s exploits appeared in the novel Rookwood in 1834. Although pre-dated by John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River in 1841, the history of the modern fantasy genre is generally said to begin with George MacDonald, the influential author of The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes (1858). William Morris was a popular English poet who also wrote several fantasy novels during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Wilkie Collins’ epistolary novel The Moonstone (1868), is generally considered the first detective novel in the English language, while The Woman in White is regarded as one of the finest sensation novels. H. G. Wells’s (1866-1946) writing career began in the 1890s with science fiction novels like The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898) which describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians, and Wells is seen, along with Frenchman Jules Verne (1828-1905), as a major figure in the development of the science fiction genre. He also wrote realistic fiction about the lower middle class in novels like Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Penny dreadful publications were an alternative to mainstream works, and were aimed at working class adolescents, introducing the infamous Sweeney Todd. The premier ghost story writer of the 19th century was Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas 1865, and his Gothic novella Carmilla 1872, tells the story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire. The vampire genre fiction began with John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819). This short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. An important later work is Varney the Vampire (1845), where many standard vampire conventions originated: Varney has fangs, leaves two puncture wounds on the neck of his victims, and has hypnotic powers and superhuman strength. Varney was also the first example of the “sympathetic vampire”, who loathes his condition but is a slave to it. Bram Stoker, author of seminal horror work Dracula, featured as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula, with the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing his arch-enemy. Dracula has been attributed to

a number of literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant Londonbased “consulting detective”, famous for his intellectual prowess, skilful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning and forensic skills to solve difficult cases. Holmes’ archenemy Professor Moriarty, is widely considered to be the first true example of a supervillain, while Sherlock Holmes has become a by-word for a detective. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. All but four Conan Doyle stories are narrated by Holmes’ friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson. The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest examples, King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novels The Prisoner of Zenda 1894, and Rupert of Hentzau, 1898. F. Anstey’s comic novel Vice Versa 1882, sees a father and son magically switch bodies. Satirist Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat 1889, is a humorous account of a boating holiday on the river Thames. Grossmith brothers George & Weedon’s Diary of a Nobody 1892, is also considered a classic work of humour. Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become internationally known, such as those of Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the LookingGlass. Adventure novels, such as those of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), are generally classified as for children. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. His Kidnapped (1886) is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, and Treasure Island 1883, is the classic pirate adventure. At the end of the Victorian era and leading into the Edwardian era, Beatrix Potter was an author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which

featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to publish 23 children’s books and become a wealthy woman. Another classic of the period is Anna Sewell’s animal novel Black Beauty. In the latter years of the 19th century, precursors of the modern picture book were illustrated books of poems and short stories produced by English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway. These had a larger proportion of pictures to words than earlier books, and many of their pictures were in colour. Some British artists made their living illustrating novels and children’s books, include Arthur Rackham, Cicely Mary Barker, W. Heath Robinson, Henry J. Ford, John Leech, and George Cruikshank. 19th Century Drama

For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was restricted by a licensing system to the Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could perform only musical entertainments (although magistrates had powers to license occasional dramatic performances). By the early 19th century, however, music hall entertainments had become popular, and provided a loophole in the restrictions on non-patent theatres in the genre of melodrama which did not contravene the Patent Acts, as it was accompanied by music. The passing of the Theatres Act 1843 removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres, enabling local authorities to license theatres as they saw fit, and also restricted the Lord Chamberlain’s powers to censor new plays. The 1843 Act did not apply to Ireland where the power of the Lord Lieutenant to license patent theatres enabled control of stage performance analogous to that exercised by the Lord Chamberlain in Great Britain. Drama did not achieve importance as a genre in the 19th century until the end of the century, and then the main figures were Irish-born. Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (1820–90), was an extremely popular writer of comedies who achieved success on the London stage (London Assurance, 1841). In the last decade of the century major playwrights emerged, including George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) (Arms and the Man, 1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895). Both these writers lived mainly in

England and wrote in English, with the exception of some works in French by Wilde. The Celtic Revival

The development of Irish literary culture was encouraged in the late 19th and early 20th century by the Irish Literary Revival, which was supported by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Augusta, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge (The Playboy of the Western World, 1907), and later Seán O’Casey (The Shadow of a Gunman, 1923). The Revival stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature. This was a nationalist movement that also encouraged the creation of works written in the spirit of Irish, as distinct from British culture. While drama was an important component of this movement, it also included prose and poetry. Ernest Rhys was seen as the leading Welsh member of the Celtic Revival and his poetry and translations were held in high regard at the time, not least by Yeats. However posterity remembers him best as the shaper and first editor of the Everyman’s Library, which brought affordable classics to a wide reading public. 20th Century

The year 1922 marked a significant change in the relationship between Great Britain and Ireland, with the setting up of the Irish Free State in the predominantly Roman Catholic South, while the predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. This separation also leads to questions as to what extent Irish writing prior to 1922 should be treated as a colonial literature. Nationalist movements in other parts of Britain, especially Wales and Scotland, also significantly influenced writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations has given rise to the concept of British and Commonwealth literature used for literary prizes such as the Booker Prize. Questions of identity have been raised, notably in 1994 when James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late became the first (and only, as of 2012) Scottish novel to win the Booker Prize. Simon Jenkins, a columnist for The Times, called the award “literary vandalism.” In his acceptance speech, Kelman countered the criticism and decried its basis as suspect, making the case for the culture and language of “indigenous”

people outside of London. “...the gist of the argument amounts to the following, that vernaculars, patois, slangs, dialects, gutter-languages etc. might well have a place in the realms of comedy (and the frequent references to Billy Connolly or Rab C. Nesbitt substantiate this) but they are inferior linguistic forms and have no place in literature. And a priori any writer who engages in the use of such so-called language is not really engaged in literature at all.” Irish poetry and prose has redefined itself against British literature, and moves to political independence in Scotland are leading to a redefinition of the relationship between English literature and other literatures that have historically been defined in association with it. By the end of the twentieth-century further political devolution had taken place in the U.K. and both Scotland and Wales now have their own parliaments, together with more control over their internal matters, though far from full independence. Modernism and Cultural Revivals: 1901-1945

From around 1910 the Modernist movement began to influence British literature. While their Victorian predecessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20th century writers such as James Joyce often felt alienated from it, so responded by writing more intellectually challenging works or by pushing the boundaries of acceptable content. Vorticism was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century, based in London but international in make-up and ambition. The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto. It was co-founded and edited by Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957), the English painter and author. His novels include Tarr (1918) and the trilogy The Human Age (1928 and 1955) set in the afterworld. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, Welsh literature began to reflect the way the Welsh language was increasingly becoming a political symbol. Two important literary nationalists were Saunders Lewis (1893-1985) and Kate Roberts (1891-1985) both of whom began publishing in the 1920s. Saunders Lewis was above all a

dramatist. His earliest published play was Blodeuwedd (The woman of flowers) (1923–25, revised 1948). Other notable plays include Buchedd Garmon (The life of Germanus) (radio play, 1936) and several others after the war. Lewis also published two novels, Monica (1930) and Merch Gwern Hywel (The daughter of Gwern Hywel) (1964) and two collections of poems. In addition he was a historian, literary critic, and a founder of the Welsh National Party in 1925 (later known as Plaid Cymru). Kate Roberts’ first volume of short stories, O gors y bryniau (“From the swamp of the hills”), appeared in 1925 but perhaps her most successful book of short stories is Te yn y grug (“Tea in the heather”) (1959), a series of stories about children. As well as short stories Roberts also wrote novels, perhaps her most famous being Traed mewn cyffion (“Feet in chains”) (1936) which reflected the hard life of a slate quarrying family. Kate Roberts’ and Saunders Lewis’s careers continued after World War II and they both were among the foremost Welsh-language authors of the twentieth century. First World War

The experiences of the First World War were reflected in the work of war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon. Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna was a Scottish Gaelic poet who served in the First World War, and as a war poet described the use of poison gas in his poem Òran a’ Phuinnsuin (“Song of the Poison”). His poetry is part of oral literature, as he himself never learnt to read and write in his native language. Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in World War I although producing comparatively few war poems as such, was later the subject of an Oscar-nominated Welsh film. In Parenthesis, an epic poem by David Jones first published in 1937, is a notable work of the literature of the First World War, that was influenced by Welsh traditions, despite Jones being born in England. In non-fiction prose T. E. Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) autobiographical account in Seven Pillars of Wisdom of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire is important. Poetry reflecting life on the home-front was also published; Guernésiais writer Thomas Henry Mahy’s collection Dires et Pensées du Courtil Poussin, published in 1922, contained some of his observational poems published in La Gazette de Guernesey during the war.

The end of the First World War saw a decline in the quantity of poetry published in Jèrriais and Guernésiais in favour of shortstorylike newspaper columns in prose, some being collected in book or booklet form – this being a common genre in the Norman mainland. Poetry: 1901-1945

Two Victorian poets who published little in the 19th century, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), have since come to be regarded as major poets. While Hardy first established his reputation the late 19th century with novels, he also wrote poetry throughout his career. However he did not publish his first collection until 1898, so that he tends to be treated as a 20th century poet. Hardy lived well into the third decade of the twentiethcentury, an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20th century, but because of the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1895, from that time Hardy concentrated on publishing poetry. Victorian poet Gerald Manley Hopkins’s Poems were posthumously published in 1918 by Robert Bridges (1844 - 1930, Poet Laureate from 1913). Hopkins’ poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, written in 1875, first introduced what Hopkins called “sprung rhythm.” As well as developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins “was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language” and frequently “employed compound and unusual word combinations”. Several twentieth century poets, including W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and American Charles Wright, “turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning”. Irish modernist W. B. Yeats’s career began in the Victorian era and continued as he became a major 20th century poet. Yeats one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, Yeats had a major influence on both British and Irish poets. In his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; the first Irishman so honoured Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Free verse and other stylistic innovations came to the forefront in this era, with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were especially associated. T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) was born American, migrated to England in 1914, at the age of 25, and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. He was “arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.” He produced some of the best-known poems in the English language, including “The Waste Land” (1922) and Four Quartets (1935-1942). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972), an American expatriate, made important contributions of British literature during his residence in London. He was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but more important was the major editing that he did on the “The Waste Land”. The Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare (1873 – 1956), John Masefield (1878 - 1967, Poet Laureate from 1930) maintained a more conservative approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism, sandwiched as they were between the Victorian era, with its strict classicism, and Modernism, with its strident rejection of pure aestheticism. Edward Thomas (1878 1917) is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet. A duality of character in the literature of Scotland came to be characterised as Caledonian Antisyzygy - a self-imposed critical discourse about how to forge a model of homogenous national Scottish culture out of a heterogenous patchwork of language communities and national loyalties. In the early 20th century in Scotland, a renaissance in the use of Lowland Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid whose A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), is widely regarded as one of the most important long poems in 20thcentury Scottish literature. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and Robert McLellan. The revival produced verse and other literature, including the plays for which Robert McLellan is best known. James Pittendrigh MacGillivray (1856 - 1938) and Lewis Spence (1874 – 1955) looked back to what they regarded as a Golden Age of

Middle Scots literature, partly as a political gesture to revive the style that prevailed when Scotland was a sovereign nation under the Stuarts. Such experimentation with archaising language for poetic effect did not found a new direction for literature in Scots, but their willingness to play with Mediaeval poetic language had an influence by stimulating debate and stimulating new ways of experimenting with Scots as a literary language. A somewhat diminished tradition of vernacular Ulster Scots poetry survived into the 20th century in the work of poets such as Adam Lynn, author of the 1911 collection Random Rhymes frae Cullybackey, John Stevenson (died 1932), writing as “Pat M’Carty”, and John Clifford (1900–1983) from East Antrim. With the revival of Cornish there have been newer works written in the language. In the first half of the 20th century poetry was the focus of literary production in Cornish. The epic poem Trystan hag Isolt by A. S. D. Smith (1883 – 1950) reworked the Tristan and Iseult legend. Peggy Pollard’s 1941 play Beunans Alysaryn was modelled on the 16th-century saints’ plays. John Hobson Matthews wrote several poems, such as the patriotic “Can Wlascar Agam Mamvro” (“Patriotic Song of our Motherland”). Robert Morton Nance (1873 - 1959) created a body of verse, such as “Nyns yu Marow Myghtern Arthur” (“King Arthur is not Dead”). In the 1930s the Auden Group, sometimes called simply the Thirties poets, was an important group of politically left-wing British and Irish writers, that included W. H. Auden (1907–73), Louis MacNeice (1907-63), Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–72, Poet Laureate from 1968), and Stephen Spender (1909–95). Auden was a major poet who had a similar influence on subsequent poets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot had on earlier generations. Others associated with this group were novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), and sometimes, novelist Edward Upward (1903-2009), and poet and novelist Rex Warner (1905–86). British Drama: 1901-45

Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and J. M. Synge (1871-1909) were influential in British drama. Shaw’s career as a playwright began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, while

Synge’s plays belong to the first decade of the twentieth century. Synge’s most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World, “caused outrage and riots when it was first performed” in Dublin in 1907. George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate about important political and social issues, like marriage, class, “the morality of armaments and war” and the rights of women. In the 1920s and later Noël Coward (1899-1973) achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1932), Present Laughter (1942) and Blithe Spirit (1941), have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. In the 1930s W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood co-authored verse dramas, of which The Ascent of F6 (1936) is the most notable, that owed much to Bertolt Brecht. T. S. Eliot had begun this attempt to revive poetic drama with Sweeney Agonistes in 1932, and this was followed by The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Family Reunion (1939). There were three further plays after the war. Early 20th Century Genre Literature

Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands 1903, defined the spy novel. Emma Orczy (Baroness Orczy)’s The Scarlet Pimpernel was originally a highly successful play in 1905. The novel The Scarlet Pimpernel was published soon after the play opened and was an immediate success. Orczy gained a following of readers in Britain and throughout the world. The popularity of the novel, which recounted the adventures of a member of the English gentry in the French Revolutionary period, encouraged her to write a number of sequels for her “reckless daredevil” over the next 35 years. The play was performed to great acclaim in France, Italy, Germany and Spain, while the novel was translated into 16 languages. Subsequently, the story has been adapted for television, film, a musical and other media. Her stories about Lady Molly of Scotland Yard were an early example of a female detective as main character. Her character The Old Man In the Corner was among the earliest armchair detectives to be created. John Buchan wrote adventure novels Prester John (1910) and four telling the adventures of Richard Hannay, of which the first, The

Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) is the best known. Novels featuring a gentleman adventurer were popular between the wars, exemplified by the series of H. C. McNeile with Bulldog Drummond 1920, and Leslie Charteris, whose many books chronicled the adventures of Simon Templar, alias The Saint. The medieval scholar M. R. James wrote highly regarded ghost stories in contemporary settings. In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows and the Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell’s first book Scouting for Boys was published. Classics of children’s literature include A. A. Milne’s collection of books about a fictional bear he named Winnie-the-Pooh, who inhabits Hundred Acre Wood. Prolific children’s author Enid Blyton chronicled the adventures of a group of young children and their dog in The Famous Five. T. H. White wrote the Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King, the first part being The Sword in the Stone 1938. Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, featuring tiny people who borrow from humans. Inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel The Secret Garden, was the Great Maytham Hall Garden in Kent. Hugh Lofting created the character Doctor Dolittle who appears in a series of twelve books, while Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians featured the villainous Cruella de Vil. This was called the Golden Age of detective fiction. Agatha Christie, a writer of crime novels, short stories and plays, is best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Christie’s works, particularly those featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Her most influential novels include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 1926 (one of her most controversial novels, its innovative twist ending had a significant impact on the genre), Murder on the Orient Express 1934, Death on the Nile 1937 and And Then There Were None 1939. Other female writers dubbed “Queens of crime” include Dorothy L. Sayers (gentleman detective, Lord Peter Wimsey), Margery Allingham (Albert Campion - supposedly created as a parody of Sayers’ Wimsey,)

and New Zealander Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn). Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre, and also wrote detective fiction. A major work of science fiction, from the early 20th century, is A Voyage to Arcturus by Scottish writer David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the “greatest novel of the twentieth century”, and was a central influence on C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Also J. R. R. Tolkien said he read the book “with avidity”, and praised it as a work of philosophy, religion, and morality. It was made widely available in paperback form when published as one of the precursor volumes to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in 1968. From the early 1930s to late 1940s, an informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the “Inklings”. Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is known for The Screwtape Letters 1942, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit 1937, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Second World War

It was anticipated that the outbreak of war in 1939 would produce a literary response equal to that of the First World War. The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to pose the question in 1940: “Where are the war-poets?” Keith Douglas (1920 – 1944) was noted for his war poetry during World War II and his wry memoir of the Western Desert Campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. He was killed in action during the invasion of Normandy. Alun Lewis (1915 – 1944), born in South Wales, was one of the best-known English-language poets of the war Alun LlywelynWilliams wrote in Welsh from the soldier’s viewpoint, and R. Meirion Roberts from the viewpoint of a chaplain. Caradog Prichard’s ‘Rwyf Innau’n Filwr Bychan (1943), a journal in Welsh, provided an account of military life from a supporter of the war, although a minority of Welsh nationalist writers produced works in opposition to the war.

Sidney Keyes was the most important and prolific of the Second World War poets. David Gascoyne, a surrealist poet of the 1930s, developed Christian imagery, while Edith Sitwell’s Still Falls the Rain evoked the Blitz. Denton Welch (1915 – 1948) produced minutely observed portraits of the English countryside during the war. Fair Stood the Wind for France was a 1944 novel by H. E. Bates who was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories as the Air Ministry realised that the populace was less concerned with facts and figures about the war than it was with reading about those who were fighting it. Put Out More Flags (1942) by Evelyn Waugh is set during the “Phoney War”, and follows the wartime activities of characters introduced in Waugh’s earlier satirical novels . The German military occupation of the Channel Islands 1940– 1945 encouraged increased use of the vernacular languages among those who remained in the islands, but the German censorship permitted little original writing to be published. Within the restrictions, Les Chroniques de Jersey, the only surviving French language newspaper in the Islands, republished considerable quantities of older Jèrriais literature for purposes of morale and the assertion of identity. The post-Liberation social changes meant, however, that vernacular literature in the Channel Islands has never regained the situation it had enjoyed previously. The Second World War has remained a theme in British literature. Later works of note include: Atonement, Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize shortlisted 2001 novel; Charlotte Gray, a 1999 novel by Sebastian Faulks; and Empire of the Sun, J. G. Ballard’s 1984 novel drawing extensively on his wartime experiences. Late Modernism: 1946-2000

Though some have seen modernism ending by around 1939, with regard to English literature, “When (if) modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred”. In fact a number of modernists were still living and publishing in the 1950s and 1960, including T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson and John Cowper Powys.

Furthermore Northumberland poet Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published little until Briggflatts in 1965 and French-resident, Irishman Samuel Beckett, born in 1906, continued to produce significant works until the 1980s. While modernist Samuel Beckett was not a British writer he had a major influence on British writers in the second half of the 20th century, in works like Waiting for Godot (1955), Happy Days (1961), Rockaby (1981). However, some view him as a postmodernist. Perhaps the most significant event relating to the novel in English in the second half of the twentieth-century was the publication, originally in French, of Samuel Beckett’s trilogy: Molloy (1951); Malone Meurt (1951) (Malone Dies, translated by Beckett, 1958); and L’Innomable (1953) (The Unnamable, 1960). The attitude of the post-war generation of Welsh writers in English towards Wales differs from the previous generation, in that they were more sympathetic to Welsh nationalism and to the Welsh language. The change can be linked to the nationalist fervour generated by Saunders Lewis and the burning of the Bombing School on the Lleyn Peninsula in 1936, along with a sense of crisis generated by World War II. In poetry R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) was the most important figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with The Stones of the Field in 1946 and concluding with No Truce with the Furies (1995). R. S. Thomas was an Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. In fiction the major figure in the second half of the twentieth century was Emyr Humphreys (1919). Humphreys’ first novel The Little Kingdom was published in 1946; and during his long writing career he has published over twenty novels, including a sequence of seven novels, The Land of the Living, which surveys the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Wales. His most recent work is the collection of short stories, The Woman in the Window (2009). Another Welsh novelist of the post-Second-WorldWar era was Raymond Williams (1921–88). Born near Abergavenny, Williams continued the earlier tradition of writing from a left-wing perspective on the Welsh industrial scene in his trilogy: “Border Country” (1960), “Second Generation” (1964), and “The Fight for Manod” (1979). Contemporary novelists in Welsh include Mihangel Morgan (1955- ) and Fflur Dafydd (1978- ).

A new writer after the war was the popular novelist in Welsh Islwyn Ffowc Elis (1924-2004) (also a winner of the crown at the 1947 National Eisteddfod). He made his debut as a novelist in 1953 with Cysgod y Cryman (translated into English as Shadow of the Sickle). He produced novels in a range of genres, including the first science fiction novel in Welsh. Among British writers in the 1940s and 1950s was Dylan Thomas; Evelyn Waugh and W.H. Auden continued publishing significant works. In 1947 Malcolm Lowry published Under the Volcano. George Orwell’s satire of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published in 1949. An essayist and novelist, Orwell’s works are important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war period was William Cooper’s naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life, a conscious rejection of the modernist tradition. Graham Greene’s works span the 1930s to the 1980s. He was a convert to Catholicism and his novels explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. He combined serious literary acclaim with broad popularity in novels such as Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948) and A Burnt-Out Case (1961), The Human Factor (1978). Other novelists writing in the 1950s and later were: Anthony Powell whose twelve-volume cycle of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, is a comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century; Kingsley Amis who is best known for his academic satire Lucky Jim 1954; Nobel Prize laureate William Golding whose allegorical novel Lord of the Flies 1954, shows how culture created by man fails, using, as an example, a group of British schoolboys marooned on a deserted island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results; Edward Blishen whose first best-selling book Roaring Boys 1955, is an honest account of teaching in a London secondary modern school in the 1950s (followed by a sequel This Right Soft Lot 1969), and whose most famous work is The God Beneath the Sea, a children’s novel based on Greek mythology, written in collaboration with Leon Garfield and published in 1970 (illustrated

by Charles Keeping with a sequel The Golden Shadow 1973); philosopher Iris Murdoch who was a prolific writer of novels dealing with sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious, including Under the Net 1954. Scottish novelist Muriel Spark pushed the boundaries of realism: her first novel, The Comforters (1957) concerns a woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel; The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) has a character who, in line with a tradition of Scottish literature, is literally the devil incarnate. The narrator of her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), at times takes the reader briefly into the main action’s distant future, to see the various fates that befall its characters. Anthony Burgess is especially remembered for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange 1962, set in the not-too-distant future, which was made into a film (1971] by Stanley Kubrick. Mervyn Peake (1911–68) published his Gothic fantasy Gormenghast trilogy between 1946 and 1959. One of Penguin Books’ most successful publications in the late 20th century was Richard Adams’s heroic fantasy Watership Down (1972). Evoking epic themes, it recounts the odyssey of a group of rabbits seeking to establish a new home. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) played with the nature of fiction, with its narrator who freely admits the fictive nature of the story he relays, and its alternative endings. Angela Carter (1940-1992) was a novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. Writing from the 1960s until the 1980s, her novels include, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 1972, and Nights at the Circus 1984. Margaret Drabble (1939- ) is a novelist, biographer and critic, who published from the 1960s into the 21st century. Her older sister, A. S. Byatt (1936- ) is best known for Possession 1990. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary 1996, and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 1999, chronicle the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single woman in London. Since the 1970s a number of books of Jèrriais literature have been published, including two collections of writings by George F. Le Feuvre: Jèrri Jadis and Histouaithes et Gens d’Jèrri.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page was published in 1981 after the death of its author G.B. Edwards (1899-1976). Edwards rejected the Guernsey mainstream literary traditions of the sea, heroic adventure, romance and exoticism. The author’s use of Guernsey English and exploration of a personal journey against a background of rapid social change in Guernsey were among factors that led to the novel’s high critical reception. Salman Rushdie is among a number of post Second World War writers from former British colonies who permanently settled in Britain. Rushdie achieved fame with Midnight’s Children (1981), that was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Booker Prize later that year, and was named Booker of Bookers in 1993. His most controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1989) was inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. Doris Lessing from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), published her first novel The Grass is Singing in 1950, after immigrating to England. She initially wrote about her African experiences. Lessing soon became a dominant presence in the English literary scene, publishing frequently, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Other works by her include a sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and a sequence of five science fiction novels the Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983). V. S. Naipaul (1932- ) was another immigrant, born in Trinidad, who wrote A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River (1979). Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Also from the West Indies is George Lamming (1927- ) who wrote In the Castle of the Skin (1953), while from Pakistan came Hanif Kureshi (1954-), a playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. His novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for the best first novel, and was also made into a BBC television series. Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-) was born in Japan, but his parents immigrated to Britain when he was six. Ishiguro wrote historical novels in the first-person narrative style. His works include, The Remains of the Day 1989, Never Let Me Go 2005. Scotland has in the late 20th-century produced several important novelists, including James Kelman who like Samuel Beckett can create

humour out of the most grim situations. How Late it Was, How Late, 1994, won the Booker Prize that year; A. L. Kennedy whose 2007 novel Day was named Book of the Year in the Costa Book Awards. In 2007 she won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature; Alasdair Gray whose Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is a dystopian fantasy set in his home town Glasgow. Highly anglicised Lowland Scots is often used in contemporary Scottish fiction, for example, the Edinburgh dialect of Lowland Scots used in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh to give a brutal depiction of the lives of working class Edinburgh drug users. But’n’Ben A-Go-Go is a 2000 cyberpunk novel entirely in Scots by Matthew Fitt, notable for using as many of the different varieties of Scots as possible, including many neologisms – imagining how Scots might develop by 2090. In Northern Ireland, James Fenton’s poetry, at times lively, contented, wistful, is written in contemporary Ulster Scots. The poet Michael Longley (born 1939) has experimented with Ulster Scots for the translation of Classical verse, as in his 1995 collection The Ghost Orchid. Philip Robinson’s (born 1946) writing has been described as verging on “post-modern kailyard”. He has produced a trilogy of novels, as well as story books for children, and two volumes of poetry. Martin Amis (1949) is one of the most prominent British novelists of the end of the 20th, beginning of the 21st century. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). Pat Barker (1943-) has won many awards for her fiction. English novelist and screenwriter Ian McEwan (1948- ) is a highly regarded writer whose works include The Cement Garden (1978) and Enduring Love (1997), which was made into a film. In 1998 McEwan won the Man Booker Prize with Amsterdam. Atonement (2001) was made into an Oscarwinning film. This was followed by Saturday (2005), and Solar (2010). McEwan was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011. Alex Garland’s works include The Beach 1996, Giles Foden wrote The Last King of Scotland 1998, and Joanne Harris’s most notable work is Chocolat 1999. A few novels have been published in Cornish since the last decades of the 20th century, including Melville Bennetto’s An Gurun Wosek a Geltya (The Bloody Crown of the Celtic Countries) in 1984;

subsequently Michael Palmer published Jory (1989) and Dyroans (1998). Poetry after World War Two

While poets T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas were still publishing after 1945, new poets started their careers in the 1950s and 1960s including Philip Larkin (1922–85) (The Whitsun Weddings,1964), Ted Hughes (1930–98, Poet Laureate from 1984) (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957) and Seamus Heaney (1939- ) (Death of a Naturalist, 1966). A Catholic from Northern Ireland, Heaney, however, rejected his British identity and lived in the Republic of Ireland for much of his later life. Northern Ireland has also produced a number of other significant poets, including Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon. James Fenton’s poetry, at times lively, contented, wistful, is written in contemporary Ulster Scots. The poet Michael Longley (born 1939) has experimented with Ulster Scots for the translation of Classical verse, as in his 1995 collection The Ghost Orchid. As part of the Scottish Gaelic Renaissance, Sorley MacLean’s (1911–96) work in Scottish Gaelic in the 1930s gave new value to modern literature in that language. However, while “most of his most important poetry had been written in the 1930s and 1940s, almost none of it was widely available” until the publication of Reothairt is Contraight/Spring Tide and Neap Tide: Selected Poems 1932-72, in 1977 and a Collected Poems in 1989. Iain Crichton Smith (1928–98) was more prolific in English but also produced much Gaelic poetry and prose, and also translated some of the work of Sorley Maclean from Gaelic to English, as well as some of his own poems originally composed in Gaelic. Much of his English language work was related to, or translated from, Gaelic equivalents. Modern Gaelic poetry has been most influenced by Symbolism, transmitted via poetry in English, and by Scots poetry. Traditional Gaelic poetry utilised an elaborate system of metres, which modern poets have adapted to their own ends. George Campbell Hay looks back beyond the popular metres of the 19th and 20th centuries to forms of early Gaelic poetry. Donald MacAuley’s poetry is concerned with place and community. The following generation of Gaelic poets writing at the end of the 20th century lived in a bilingual world to a greater extent than any other

generation, with their work most often accompanied in publication by a facing text in English. Such confrontation has inspired semantic experimentation, seeking new contexts for words, and going as far as the explosive and neologistic verse of Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh (1948-). Scottish Gaelic poetry has been the subject of translation not only into English, but also into other Celtic languages: Maoilios Caimbeul and Màiri NicGumaraid have been translated into Irish, and John Stoddart has produced anthologies of Gaelic poetry translated into Welsh. In the 1960s and 1970s Martian poetry aimed to break the grip of ‘the familiar’, by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways, as though, for example, through the eyes of a Martian. Poets most closely associated with it are Craig Raine and Christopher Reid. Martin Amis, an important novelist in the late twentieth and twentieth centuries, carried into fiction this drive to make the familiar strange. Another literary movement in this period was the British Poetry Revival, a wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry. Leading poets associated with this movement include J. H. Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Lee Harwood. It reacted to the more conservative group called “The Movement”. The Mersey Beat poets were Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war. Ted Hughes was among poets whose work found roots in the speech patterns and dialects of Northern England: other notable poets from the north of England include Tony Harrison (1937 ), who explores the medium of language and the tension between native dialect (in his case, that of working-class Leeds) and acquired language, and Simon Armitage. In Welsh language poetry, Alan Llwyd came to prominence when he achieved the rare feat of winning both the Crown and the Chair at the 1973 National Eisteddfod and then repeated the feat in 1976. He also wrote the script for the Oscar-nominated Welsh-language film

Hedd Wyn (1992) about the life of poet Hedd Wyn, who was killed in World War I. In contemporary Cornish poetry, Tony Snell’s work is heavily influenced by the early poetry of Wales and Brittany, and it was he who adapted the Welsh traethodl to Cornish. The bard Pol Hodge is another example of a poet writing in Cornish. Amelia Perchard (1921-2012), one of Jersey’s foremost contemporary writers, published many poems and produced one-act plays. Geoffrey Hill (1932- ) has been considered to be among the most distinguished English poets of his generation, and on his 80th birthday was described in the House of Commons by Education Secretary, Michael Gove, as the United Kingdom’s “greatest living poet”. Although frequently described as a “difficult” poet, Hill has retorted that poetry supposed to be difficult can be “the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing they are intelligent human beings”. Charles Tomlinson (1927-) is another important English poet of an older generation, though “since his first publication in 1951, has built a career that has seen more notice in the international scene than in his native England; this may explain, and be explained by, his international vision of poetry”. The critic Michael Hennessy has described Tomlinson as “the most international and least provincial English poet of his generation”. His poetry has won international recognition and has received many prizes in Europe and the United States, including the 1993 Bennett Award from the Hudson Review; the New Criterion Poetry Prize, 2002; the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Ennio Flaiano, 2001; and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Attilio Bertolucci, 2004. Late 20th Century Genre Literature

In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond’s adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale 1953, Live and Let Die 1954, Dr. No 1958, Goldfinger 1959, Thunderball 1961, and nine short story works.

In contrast to the larger-than-life spy capers of Bond, John le Carré was an author of spy novels who depicted a shadowy world of espionage and counter-espionage, and his best known novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 1963, is often regarded as one of the greatest in the genre. Frederick Forsyth writes thriller novels, including The Day of the Jackal 1971, The Odessa File 1972, The Dogs of War 1974 and The Fourth Protocol 1984. Ken Follett writes spy thrillers, his first success being Eye of the Needle 1978, followed by The Key to Rebecca 1980, as well as historical novels, notably The Pillars of the Earth 1989, and its sequel World Without End 2007. Elleston Trevor is remembered for his 1964 adventure story The Flight of the Phoenix, while the thriller novelist Philip Nicholson is best known for Man on Fire. Peter George’s Red Alert 1958, is a Cold War thriller. War novels include Alistair MacLean thriller’s The Guns of Navarone 1957, Where Eagles Dare 1968, and Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed 1975. Patrick O’Brian’s nautical historical novels feature the Aubrey–Maturin series set in the Royal Navy, the first being Master and Commander 1969. The “father of Wicca” Gerald Gardner began propagating his own version of witchcraft in the 1950s. Having claimed to have been initiated into the New Forest coven in 1939, Gardner published his books Witchcraft Today 1954 and The Meaning of Witchcraft 1959, the foundational texts for the religion of Wicca. Ronald Welch’s Carnegie Medal winning novel Knight Crusader is set in the 12th century and gives a depiction of the Third Crusade, featuring the Christian leader and King of England Richard the Lionheart. In crime fiction, the murder mysteries of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James are popular. Nigel Tranter wrote historical novels of celebrated Scottish warriors; Robert the Bruce in The Bruce Trilogy, and William Wallace in The Wallace 1975, works noted by academics for their accuracy. Science Fiction

John Wyndham wrote post-apocalyptic science fiction, his most notable works being The Day of the Triffids 1951, and The Midwich Cuckoos 1957. George Langelaan’s The Fly 1957, is a science fiction

short story. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is based o n his various shor t s to rie s, particularly The Sentinel. His other major novels include Rendezvous with Rama 1972, and The Fountains of Paradise 1979. Brian Aldiss is Clarke’s contemporary. Michael Moorcock, 1962) is a writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels. He was involved with the ‘New Wave’ of science fiction writers “part of whose aim was to invest the genre with literary merit” Similarly J. G. Ballard (1930- ) “became known in the 1960s as the most prominent of the ‘New Wave’ science fiction writers”. A later major figure in science fiction is Iain M. Banks who created a fictional anarchist, socialist, and utopian society the Culture. The novels that feature in it include Excession 1996, and Inversions 1998. He also publishes mainstream novels, including the highly controversial The Wasp Factory in 1984. Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing also published a sequence of five science fiction novels the Canopus in Argos: Archives between 1979 and 1983. Literature for Children and Young Adults

Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children’s fantasy novels, often inspired from experiences from his childhood, with often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. Dahl was inspired to write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964, featuring the eccentric candymaker Willy Wonka, having grown up near two chocolate makers in England who often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies into the other’s factory. His other works include James and the Giant Peach 1961, Fantastic Mr. Fox 1971, The Witches 1983, and Matilda 1988. Boarding schools in literature are centred on older pre-adolescent and adolescent school life, and are most commonly set in English boarding schools. Popular school stories from this period include Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s and his illustrations for Geoffrey Willans’s Molesworth series, Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch, the Jennings series by Anthony Buckeridge (1912–2004). Ruth Manning-Sanders collected and retold fairy tales, and her first work A Book of Giants contains a number of famous giants, notably Jack and the Beanstalk. Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising is

a five-volume fantasy saga set in England and Wales. Raymond Briggs’ children’s picture book The Snowman 1978 has been adapted as an animation, shown every Christmas on British television, and for the stage as a musical. The Reverend. W. Awdry and son Christopher’s The Railway Series features Thomas the Tank Engine. Margery Sharp’s series The Rescuers is based on a heroic mouse organisation. The third Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo published War Horse in 1982. The prolific children’s author Dick King-Smith’s novels include The Sheep-Pig 1984, and The Water Horse. Diana Wynne Jones wrote the young adult fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle in 1986. Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series begins with Stormbreaker 2000. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy series is a sequence of seven novels that chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter. The series began with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997 and ended with the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007; becoming the best selling book-series in history. The series has been translated into 67 languages, placing Rowling among the most translated authors in history. J.K. Rowling took part in a sequence of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony which celebrated British children’s literature. 21st Century Literature

Formerly an appointment for life, the appointment of the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom is now made for a fixed term of 10 years, starting with Andrew Motion in 1999 as successor to Ted Hughes. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded Motion in the post in May 2009. A position of national laureate, entitled The Scots Makar, was established in 2004 by the Scottish Parliament. The first appointment was made directly by the Parliament in that year when Edwin Morgan received the honour The post of National Poet of Wales (Welsh: Bardd Cenedlaethol Cymru) was established in May 2005. The post is an annual appointment with the language of the poet alternating between English and Welsh. In English literature, Zadie Smith’s (1975- ) Whitbread Book Award winning novel White Teeth 2000, mixes pathos and humour, focusing on the later lives of two war time friends in London. Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel Wolf Hall 2009, is set in the

Tudor court of King Henry VIII. In 2012 Mantel became the first woman and the first British writer to win the Booker Prize twice, as the second part of her historical trilogy Bring Up the Bodies was awarded the prize. In 2004, David Mitchell’s science fiction novel Cloud Atlas won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award. Julian Barnes (1946- ) won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending. Three of his earlier novels had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. England, England explores English national identity, invented traditions, the creations of myths and the authenticity of history and memory. In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James set the record as the fastest selling paperback of all time. Contemporary writers in Scottish Gaelic include Aonghas MacNeacail, and Angus Peter Campbell who, besides two Scottish Gaelic poetry collections, has produced two Gaelic novels: An Oidhche Mus Do Sheol Sinn (2003) and Là a’ Deanamh Sgeil Do Là (2004). A collection of short stories P’tites Lures Guernésiaises (in Guernésiais with parallel English translation) by various writers was published in 2006. In March 2006 Brian Stowell’s Dunveryssyn yn Tooder-Folley (The vampire murders) was published – the first fulllength novel in Manx. There is some production of modern literature in Irish in Northern Ireland. Performance poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn exploits the creative possibilities for poetry of “creolised Irish” in Belfast speech. The perceived success and promotion of genre authors from Scotland provoked controversy in 2009 when James Kelman criticised, in a speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the attention afforded to “upper middle-class young magicians” and “detective fiction” by the “Anglocentric” Scottish literary establishment. John Byrne was supportive, saying that there was “a danger of Scotland becoming known as the home of genre fiction”. This was a reaction to the popularity of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and of Ian Rankin and other “Tartan Noir” authors. The popularity of “Tartan Noir” has led to

renewed interest in crime fiction set in Wales, attracting the label “Welsh Noir”, and Northern Ireland, labelled along with crime fiction from the Republic of Ireland as “Emerald Noir”. The theatrical landscape has been reconfigured, moving from a single national theatre at the end of the 20th century to four as a result of the devolution of cultural policy. National theatre companies were founded in Scotland and Wales as complements to the Royal National Theatre in London: Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh language national theatre of Wales, founded 2003), National Theatre of Scotland (founded 2006), National Theatre Wales (the English language national theatre company of Wales, founded 2009). Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru attempts to shape a distinctive identity for drama in Welsh while also opening it up to outside linguistic and dramatic influences. Literary Institutions

Original literature continues to be promoted by institutions such as the Eisteddfod in Wales or the Mod, in Scotland and by publishing organisations such as Ùr-sgeul, an independent publisher of new Scottish Gaelic prose, and the Welsh Books Council. The Royal Society of Edinburgh includes literature within its sphere of activiy. Literature Wales is the Welsh national literature promotion agency and society of writers, which administers the Wales Book of the Year award. The imported eisteddfod tradition in the Channel Islands encouraged recitation and performance, a tradition that continues today. Formed in 1949, the Cheltenham Literature Festival is the longestrunning festival of its kind in the world. The Hay Festival in Wales attracts wide interest, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival is the largest festival of its kind in the world. The Poetry Society publishes and promotes poetry, notably through an annual National Poetry Day. World Book Day is observed in Britain and Ireland and the Crown Dependencies on the first Thursday in March annually. The Story of a Literary Lie

WHO wrote the stories which are found in the old Gaelic manuscripts we do not know, yet the names of some of the old Gaelic poets have come down to us. The best known of all is perhaps that of Ossian. But as Ossian, if he ever lived, lived in the third century, as it is not probable that his poems were written down at the time, and as the oldest books that we have containing any of his poetry were written in the twelfth century, it is very difficult to be sure that he really made the poems called by his name. Ossian was a warrior and chief as well as a poet, and as a poet he is claimed both by Scotland and by Ireland. But perhaps his name has become more nearly linked to Scotland because of the story that I am going to tell you now. It belongs really to a time much later than that of which we have been speaking, but because it has to do with this old Gaelic poet Ossian, I think you will like to hear it now. In a lonely Highland village more than a hundred and fifty years ago there lived a little boy called James Macpherson. His father and mother were poor farmer people, and James ran about barefooted and wild among the hills and glens. When he was about seven years old the quiet of his Highland home was broken by the sounds of war, for the Highland folk had risen in rebellion against King George II., and were fighting for Prince Charlie, [17] hoping to have a Stewart king once more. This was the rebellion called the ‘45, for it was fought in 1745. Now little James watched the red coats of the southern soldiers as, with bayonets gleaming in the sun, they wound through the glens. He heard the Highland battle-cry and the clash of steel on steel, for fighting came near his home, and his own people joined the standard of the Pretender. Little James never forgot these things, and long afterwards, when he grew to be a man and wrote poetry, it was full of the sounds of battle, full, too, of love for mountain and glen and their rolling mists. The Macphersons were poor, but they saw that their son was clever, and they determined that he should be well taught. So when he left school they sent him to college, first to Aberdeen and then to Edinburgh.

Before he was twenty James had left college and become master of the school in his own native village. He did not, however, like that very much, and soon gave it up to become tutor in a family. By this time James Macpherson had begun to write poetry. He had also gathered together some pieces of old Gaelic poetry which he had found among the Highland folk. These he showed to some other poets and writers whom he met, and they thought them so beautiful that he published them in a book. The book was a great success. All who read it were delighted with the poems, and said that if there was any more such poetry in the Highlands, it should be gathered together and printed before it was lost and forgotten for ever. For since the ‘45 the English had done everything to make the Highlanders forget their old language and customs. They were forbidden to wear the kilt or the tartan, and everything was done to make them speak English and forget Gaelic. So now people begged Macpherson to travel through [18] the Highlands and gather together as much of the old poetry of the people as he could. Macpherson was at first unwilling to go. For one thing, he quite frankly owned that he was not a good Gaelic scholar. But at length he consented and set out. For four months Macpherson wandered about the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, listening to the tales of the people and writing them down. Sometimes, too, he came across old manuscripts with ancient tales in them. When he had gathered all he could, he returned to Edinburgh and set to work to translate the stories into English. When this new book of Gaelic poetry came out, it again was a great success. It was greeted with delight by the greatest poets of France, Germany, and Italy, and was soon translated into many languages. Macpherson was no longer a poor Highland laddie, but a man of world-wide fame. Yet it was not because of his own poetry that he was famous, but because he had found (so he said) some poems of a man who lived fifteen hundred years before, and translated them into English. And although Macpherson’s book is called The Poems of Ossian, it is written in prose. But it is a prose which is often far more beautiful and poetical than much that is called poetry.

Although at first Macpherson’s book was received with great delight, soon people began to doubt about it. The Irish first of all were jealous, for they said that Ossian was an Irish poet, that the heroes of the poems were Irish, and that Macpherson was stealing their national heroes from them. Then in England people began to say that there never had been an Ossian at all, and that Macpherson had invented both the poems and all the people that they were about. For the English knew little of the Highlanders and their customs. Even after the ‘15 and the ‘45 people in the south knew little about the north and those who [19] lived there. They thought of it as a land of wild mountains and glens, a land of mists and cloud, a land where wild chieftains ruled over still wilder clans, who, in their lonely valleys and sea-girt islands, were for ever warring against each other. How could such a people, they asked, a people of savages, make beautiful poetry? Dr. Samuel Johnson, a great writer of whom we shall hear more later, was the man of his day whose opinion about books was most thought of. He hated Scotland and the Scottish folk, and did not believe that any good thing could come from them. He read the poems and said that they were rubbish, such as any child could write, and that Macpherson had made them all up. So a quarrel, which has become famous, began between the two men. And as Dr. Johnson was far better known than Macpherson, most people agreed with him and believed that Macpherson had told a “literary lie,” and that he had made up all the stories. There is no harm in making up stories. Nearly every one who writes does that. But it is wrong to make up stories and then pretend that they were written by some one else more famous than yourself. Dr. Johnson and Macpherson were very angry with and rude to each other. Still that did not settle the question as to who had written the stories; indeed it has never been settled. And what most men believe now is that Macpherson did really gather from among the people of the Highlands many scraps of ancient poetry and tales, but that he added to them and put them together in such a way as to make them beautiful and touching. To do even that, however, a true poet was

needed, so people have, for the most part, given up arguing about whether Macpherson wrote Ossian or not, and are glad that such a beautiful book has been written by some one. How Alfred the Great Fought with His Pen

King of Wessex (871–99) in southwestern England. He joined his brother Ethelred I in confronting a Danish army in Mercia (868). Succeeding his brother as king, Alfred fought the Danes in Wessex in 871 and again in 878, when he was the only West Saxon leader to refuse to submit to their authority and was driven from the kingdom to the island of Athelney. He defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington (878) and saved Kent from another Danish invasion in 885. The next year he took the offensive and captured London, a success that brought all the English not under Danish rule to accept him as king. The conquest of the Danelaw by his successors was enabled by his strategy, which included the construction of forts and a naval fleet and the reformation of the army. Alfred drew up an important code of laws and promoted literacy and learning, personally translating Latin works by Boethius, Pope Gregory I, and St. Augustine of Hippo into AngloSaxon. The compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun under his reign. WHILE Caedmon sang his English lays and Bede wrote his Latin books, Northumbria had grown into a centre, not only of English learning, but of learning for western Europe. The abbots of Jarrow and Wearmouth made journeys to Rome and brought back with them precious MSS. for the monastery libraries. Scholars from all parts of Europe came to visit the Northumbrian monasteries, or sent thither for teachers.But before many years had passed all that was changed. Times of war and trouble were not yet over for England. Once again heathen hordes fell upon our shores. The Danes, fierce and lawless, carrying sword and firebrand wherever they passed, leaving death and ruin in their track, surged over the land. The monasteries were ruined, the scholars were scattered. A life of peaceful study was no longer possible, the learning of two hundred years was swept away, the lamp of knowledge lit by the monks grew dim and flickered out. But when

sixty years or more had passed, a king arose who crushed the Danish power, and who once more lit that lamp. This king was Alfred the Great. History tells us how he fought the Danes, how he despaired, and how he took heart again, and how he at last conquered his enemies and brought peace to his people. Alfred was great in war. He was no less great in peace. As he fought the Danes with the sword, so he fought ignorance with his pen. He loved books, and he longed to bring back to England something of the learning which had been lost. Nor did he want to keep learning for a few only. He wanted all his people to get the good of it. And so, as most good books were written in Latin, which only a few could read, he began to translate some of them into English. In the beginning of one of them Alfred says, “There are only a few on this side of the Humber who can understand the Divine Service, or even explain a Latin epistle in English, and I believe not many on the other side of the Humber either. But they are so few that indeed I cannot remember one south of the Thames when I began to reign.” By “this side of the Humber” Alfred means the south side, for now the centre of learning was no longer Northumbria, but Wessex. Alfred translated many books. He translated books of geography, history and religion, and it is from Alfred that our English prose dates, just as English poetry dates from Caedmon. For you must remember that although we call Bede the Father of English History, he wrote in Latin for the most part, and what he wrote in English has been lost. Besides writing himself, Alfred encouraged his people to write. He also caused a national Chronicle to be written. A chronicle is the simplest form of history. The old chronicles did not weave their history into stories, they simply put down a date and something that happened on that date. They gave no reasons for things, they expressed no feelings, no thoughts. So the chronicles can hardly be called literature. They were not meant to be looked upon as literature. The writers of them used them rather as keys to memory. They kept all the stories in their memories, and the sight of the name of a king or of a battle was enough to unlock their store of words. And as they told their tales, if they forgot a part they made something up, just

as the minstrels did. Alfred caused the Chronicle to be written up from such books and records as he had from the coming of the Romans until the time in which he himself reigned. And from then onwards to the time of the death of King Stephen the Saxon Chronicle was kept. It is now one of the most useful books from which we can learn the history of those times. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, the record is very scant. As a rule, there is not more than one short sentence for a year, sometimes not even that, but merely a date. It is like this:—”Year 189. In this year Severus succeeded to the empire and reigned seventeen winters. He begirt Britain with a dike from sea to sea.” Year 190.” Year 199.” Year 200. In this year was found the Holy Rood.” And so on it goes, and every now and again, among entries which seem to us of little or no importance, we learn something that throws great light on our past history. And when we come to the time of Alfred’s reign the entries are much more full. From the Chronicle we learn a great deal about his wars with the Danes, and of how he fought them both by land and by sea. The Saxon Chronicle, as it extended over many hundred years, was of course written by many different people, and so parts of it are written much better than other parts. Sometimes we find a writer who does more than merely set down facts, who seems to have a feeling for how he tells his story, and who tries to make the thing he writes about living.

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