ETI 309 Introduction to Contemporary Western Literature

ETI 309 Introduction to Contemporary Western Literature Overview of British Literature

Anglo-Saxon (Early Medieval) Period Historical Context: • Life centered around self-ruling ancestral tribes or clans • It was a time of wars and invasions (by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans) • Church and pagan worlds were juxtaposed; there was a strong belief in fate • With the help of Christianity, literacy spread; Roman alphabet was introduced

Anglo-Saxon (Early Medieval) Period Literature • The first literature in English: AD 410-1066 • Oral tradition of literature; admiration of heroic warriors who prevail in battle; expression of religious faith and moral instruction through literature • Poetry is the dominant genre • Most texts from the period are anonymous • Key literature: Beowulf, Exeter Book, Bede (History of the English Church and People) • Beowulf: a long, anonymous heroic poem about a brave young man from southern Sweden

from Beowulf Ða wæs on burgum Beowulf Scyldinga, leof leodcyning, longe þrage folcum gefræge (fæder ellor hwearf, aldor of earde), oþþæt him eft onwoc heah Healfdene; heold þenden lifde, gamol ond guðreouw, glæde Scyldingas. ðæm feower bearn forð gerimed in worold wocun, weoroda ræswan, Heorogar ond Hroðgar ond Halga til; hyrde ic þæt wæs Onelan cwen, Heaðoscilfingas healsgebedda. þa wæs Hroðgare heresped gyfen,

Middle English (Medieval) Period (1066-1485) Historical Context: • William the Conqueror was crowned king in 1066 • The Crusades brought the development of a money economy to Britain; trading increased as a result of the Crusades • Crowned king in 1154, Henry III introduced a judicial system, royal courts, juries and chivalry to Britain • The Hundred Years War between France and England (1337-1453) and The War of Roses between the royal houses of Lancaster and York for the throne of England took place • The Black Death (Bubonic Plague) in mid-14th century brought death to millions

Middle English (Medieval) Period (1066-1485) Literature • Oral tradition continues; the hero of earlier times is replaced the the man of romance • Plays instruct the illiterate masses in morals and religion • King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is the greatest national myth in English; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, author unknown, is a story of King Arthur’s knights • Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is the first major work in English literature; it is a series of stories told by a group of people on a pilgrimage to Canterbury; some ideas in the work sound very modern and it is also a great mirror of its times, too. • Caxton printing press prints Sir Thomas Malory’s romance Le Morte d’Arthur (1477)

from The Canterbury Tales from The Knight's Tale Heere bigynneth the Knyghtes Tale Whilom, as olde stories tellen us, Ther was a duc that highte Theseus; Of Atthenes he was lord and governour, And in his tyme swich a conquerour, That gretter was ther noon under the sonne. Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne, What with his wysdom and his chivalrie; He conquered al the regne of Femenye, That whilom was ycleped Scithia, And weddede the queene Ypolita, And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree, With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee, And eek hir yonge suster Emelye. And thus with victorie and with melodye Lete I this noble duc to Atthenes ryde, And al his hoost, in armes hym bisyde.

The Renaissance (Rebirth) Historical Context: • The Renaissance was the beginning of the modern world in the areas of geography, science, politics, religion, society and art • War of Roses ended in 1485 and political stability arrived with the establishment of the Tudor dynasty • Printing press helped stabilize English as a language and allowed more people to read a variety of literature • Economy shifted from farm-based to international trade • King Henry VIII cut all contact with the Catholic Church and protestantism became more important • Henry VIII’s daughter Queen Elizabeth became the symbol of the Golden Age

The Renaissance Literature • World view is shifted from religion and afterlife to human life on earth • Popular themes are the development of human potential and many aspects of love (constant, unrequited, timeless, courtly, changing, etc.) • Popular genres of the period are poetry (sonnets) and drama • Major authors/poets of the period include William Shakespeare, John Donne (Holy Sonnets), Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus), Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queen), Sir Francis Bacon (The Advancement of Learning) just to name a few.

The Renaissance Literature • This is the age of Shakespeare; most of his tragedies are written between 1598 and 1607; his major tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth are of revenge, jealousy, family and ambition and touch on many other subjects, too. • His major comedies include The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice. • Shakespeare is also the poet of many famous sonnets.

Sonnet 66 by Shakespeare Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And guilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly doctor-like controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Neoclassical/Restoration (1660-1798) Historical Context: • 50% of men were literate; traditional village life ended • The industrial revolution began and factories began to spring up; as farming life declined, people grew poorer • Coffee houses where educated men spent evenings with literary and political associates became popular • The emphasis was on the individual, and on reason and logic • Locke: a social contract exists between the people and the government, which guarantees ‘natural rights’ of life, liberty, and property

Neoclassical/Restoration (1660-1798) Literature • In addition to poetry, popular genres of the era are satire, essay, novel, letter, diary and biography. • John Milton’s Paradise Lost:a major epic poem dealing with the myth of the Creation, using the figures of God and Satan, Adam and Eve, and the Fall of the Mankind, followed by Paradise Regained and Agonistes. • John Bunyan’s ThePilgrim’s Progress: an allegorical dream-vision work; one of the most important works in English literature as it fixes the values of society as those of Christianity, faith and stability. • John Dryden’s Absalom and Architopel, a great example of satire.

Neoclassical/Restoration (1660-1798) Literature • Alexander Pope (novel, essay, translation)-TheDunciad, AnEssay on Criticism, Essay on Man, The Iliad (tr) • Daniel Defoe (novel)-RobinsonCrusoe, Moll Flanders • Jonathan Swift (satirical novel)-Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal • Samuel Johnson (critical essay)-The Lives of the English Poets • Laurence Sterne (stream of consciousness technique)-Tristram Shandy: a long comic story which plays with time, plot, and character.

Romanticism (1789-1832) Romanticism: an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, the Romantic period lasting from the French Revolution to the Reform Act Historical Context • Napoleon rose to power in France and opposed England militarily and economically • Middle class gained representation in the British Parliament • Railroads began to run; gas lamps were developed

Romanticism (1789-1832) • Romantics saw man in the solitary state, unlike their predecessors who saw man as a social animal. • Romantics emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind, exalted the atypical, even bizarre, honored the hermit, the outcast, the rebel. • Romantic writing was mostly poetry. • William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience) • William Wordsworth (The Prelude) • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Lyrical Ballads) • John Keats (Isabella, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to a Grecian Urn) • Percy B. Shelley (Adonais, The Mask of Anarchy) • Lord Byron (Manfred)

Romanticism (1789-1832) • Romantic prose: • Jane Austin (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma); • Mary Shelley (Frankenstein); • Sir Walter Scott (Waverly, The Bride of Lammermoor) • The growth of the novel in this period prepares the way for the even larger growth of the novel in the Victorian period

Victorian Period (1832-1900) Historical Context: • There was an unprecedented growth of industry and business in Britain • Paper became cheap; magazines and novels were mass produced. • The Crimean War (1854-6) was not a success; the Indian Mutiny of 1857 indicated problems in the colonies; Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species questioned people’s beliefs. • This was an age of extremes: poor working classes who lived and worked under terrible conditions versus rich and comfortable middle classes. • Many protests were held against the monarchy; a strong republican movement began to grow.

Victorian Period (1832-1900) Literature • Novel becomes the most important literary genre in Britain and all over the world. • Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Hard Times, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol) • Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre) • Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights) • Anne Brontë (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) • Aphra Behn, aka George Eliot, (Scenes of Clerical Life, Middlemarch) • Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude and the Obscure) • Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Teleny?)

Victorian Period (1832-1900) Literature • Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange History of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde) • Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book, Plain Tales from the Hills) • Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass); Anna Sewell (Black Beauty); H.G.Wells (The Time Machine, The Invisible Man) • Victorian poetry shows a more realistic vision of nature • Alfred Tennyson (In Memoriam A.H.H.); Robert Browning (My Last Duchess); Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese) • Edward Fitzgerald’s free translation from Persian The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is very popular. • Edward Lear becomes famous for his nonsense poems, in a rhyming form called a limerick (A Book of Nonsense)

Modern Literature (1900-1945) Historical Context: • In 1900, the British Empire had grown to include many parts of the world, but the Boer War in South Africa was not successful for the British; colonies throughout the world began to rebel and British control of other countries began to disappear. • The Empire lost one million soldiers to WWI. • Communism grew in Russia, fascism grew in Italy and Germany. • Workers in large industries became more interested in socialism and joined trade unions. • The British Labour Party grew; women were allowed to vote for the first time in 1928. • Winston Churchill lead Britain through WWII; the Germans bombed England.

Modern Literature (1900-1945) Literature • The content of literature: lonely individual fighting to find peace and comfort that has lost its absolute values and traditions; situational ethics—no absolute values; mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; loss of the hero in literature; destruction made possible by technology • Genres: free verse poetry, speeches, memoirs, novels (stream of consciousness; detached, unemotional; humorless, present tense; magic realism) • Approach to life: “Seize life for the moment and get all you can out of it.”

Modern Literature (1900-1945) • Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, Nostromo) • E.M.Forster (Howards End, A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Maurice-written in 1913, published in 1971 after his death) • D.H.Lawrence (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’sLover-1928, banned until 1960 • James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake) • Virginia Woolf (Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, A Room for One’s Own) • William Somerset Maugham (Liza of Lambeth, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Razor’s Edge) • Saki (The Unbearable Bassington)

Modern Literature (1900-1945) Drama • George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, My Fair Lady) • Somerset Maugham (The Circle, The Constant Wife) • Noël Coward (The Vortex, Private Lives) • T.S.Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral) Poetry • Wilfred Owen (Anthem for Doomed Youth, Strange Meeting, Futility) • T.S.Eliot (Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land, Four Quartets)

Contemporary Literature (1945-present) Historical Context: • The British Empire declines. • The legacy of the WWII, especially the Holocaust, the American A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki inform much of the literature of the earlier period; literature reflects a sense of psychic exhaustion resulting from the trauma and deprivation of the war years. • Increased immigration is brought about by the need for a larger workforce; racism becomes an issue. • Cold War develops between the Allies and the USSR. • Changes take place in class structure, social hierarchy, gender identity, the role of women, moral values, attitudes towards family. • World grows smaller due to advances in technology; media culture interprets values and events for individuals; world enters a new millenium

Contemporary Literature (1945-present) • The key social, political, and cultural changes in Britain, and in the world, since the WWII has had a profound impact on literature. • Established notions of the literary have been challenged from a previously marginalized perspectives (e.g., feminist, post-colonial). • The thematic and linguistic range of literature has widened; a more liberal cultural climate allowed greater freedom in the representation of sexuality and sexual orientation. • By 1970’s, the departure from traditional narrative modes gained momentum, shifting away from traditional realism to magic realism, leading to post-modernism.

Contemporary Literature (1945-present) • Fragmentary, non-linear narrative structures, increasingly adopted throughout the 70’s and 80’s mirrored the period’s gradual breakdown of political and cultural consensus. • Mass genocide and the still-present nuclear threat led writers to reassess the validity of what postmodern theorists called “grand narratives”, stories or myths that offer a single, coherent view of the world.

ETI 309 Introduction to Contemporary Western Literature