works short descriptions

the rights of woman (1790)

(Anna L. Barbauld)

• criticises Wollstonecraft saying women should stand up for their rights. (ironic, satirical tone)

• it is uncomfortable for women when they sit at the top

• it is difficult for women to stand up for their rights and to better forget about it.

• poem = traditional feminine characteristics.

Lines written in early spring (1790)

(William Wordsworth)

• laments what man has made of man.

• focus on nature, spring, friendliness

• traditional ballad form

Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1790)

(William Wordsworth)

• evil in the city → thinking of nature heals him

• growning up, he gained more insight into what nature has to offer

• dramatic monologue, conversation poem

• = visiting banks of Wye (after 5 yrs)

Ode: Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood (1800)

(William Wordsworth)

• memory & psychological growth

• lost something since he can’t see the world in the way he used to

• pt 2 poem = answers

• pt 3 poem = shouldn’t despair and there is a way to recoer vision of immortality as we have as children, have to be reminded

dejection: an ode (1800)

(Samuel T. Coleridge)

• answer Wordsworth poem

• main idea = lost in terrible dejection, loss of feeling, out of touch with world

• Imagination will recover him from this numbness = comes alive again

• the world is not something ‘out there’ but what we make of it by our own vision

• reference to folktales

Kubla Khan or, a vision in a dream: a fragment (1790/1810)

(Samuel T. Coleridge)

• Kuba Khan = orders for a place to be build

• exoticism = create own dreamscape

• describes everything surrounding the palace

• BUT doesn’t remember girl’s song which would build the palace (metaphor for perfect poem)

To Wordsworth (1810)

(percy B. Shelley)

• 1st gen big six = used to be inspiration for his beliefs → later shifted to be more traditional

• expresses in a mournful way how used to be

• dissapointment in change of stance/ passiveness

Childe Harold’s pilgrimage (1810)

(Lord Byron)

• first work with succes

• travel narrative

• melancholic tortured individual who leaves England because wants to get away from pleasure and parties and find meaning

  • dissapointment in life = point to dissapointment in how french revolution evolved

• he loved one but could never be his

So we’ll go no more a roving (1810)

(Lord Byron)

• subject is sad because he won’t go partying (roving) again

• feels like breakup = “the heart must pause to breathe, and love itself have rest”

La Belle Dame sans Merci (1810)

(John Keats)

• medieval setting, autumn

• first 3 stanza: asks knight why everything is sad-wrong: no birds sing, harvest done

• rest is reply knight: met a beautiful lady but → dream: people said she payed him

  • explains that’s why he remains alone and sad

Ode to a nightingale (1810)

(John Keats)

• melancholic, difficulty of human life

• struggles with idea of mortality= everything will fade

• sees happy bird = jealousy

• wants to fly with bird (bird = immortal)

• but realizes he can’t leave mortality

• he needs to accept pain and suffering

To a skylark (1820)

(Percy B. Shelley)

• skylark = represent ultimite inspiration/ divine joy

• bird is oblivious to human world (above that)

• poet asks: teach me your art but not deserving

Love and friendship (1790)

(Jane Austen)

• epistolary novella

• Laura tells story of her life to daughter of friend in letters

• exaggerated emotions yet minimal insight

• stories considered parodies

• lots of death, drama, fainting, satire

• emphasize emotion over reason = reaction against enlightenment ideals

Hard Times (1850)

(Charles Dickens)

• symbolical → criticizes industrial society

• set in coketown = a place that values fact over feeling

• the imagination is set to be “fairy place'“

• hands = only respected for work they do (factories)

  • Father = Thomas Gradgrind raises kids (Louisa & Tom) with no feeling or creativity

  • Louisa ends up in unhappy marriage

  • Tom ends up dishonest, irresponsible

Middlemarch (1870)

(George Elliot)

• touches political issues & debates (2yrs after reform bill)

• historical novel (40 yrs before writing)

• History and how it’s related to gender

  • Middlemarch = town with different characters from different households

  • two main plotlines (mirror eachother)

  • Dorothea= well off, marries older man to help him with scholarly work

  • Tertius Lydgate = doctor, ambitions undermined bu troubled marriage and social pressure

• Personal ideas VS social reality

The cry of the children (1840)

(Elisabeth B. Browning)

• working conditions children in mines

• people in England killing children by employing them

• Adresses reader

• flowers, animals free but children not

• kids think it’s good to die young

• “Alice” = smiling in grave, never cried

• god can’t hear them because singing angels

• only know words ‘our father’ → still believe

Goblin Market (1850)

(Christina Rossetti)

• goblins selling fruit etc on market

• mc: sisters: Lizzie (no fruit), Laura (fruit)

• Laura gives lock of hair & tear = part of herself = makes her fallen woman

• side character Jeanie eats fruit and dies (like how men dispose of women after s*x)

  • But: women still same

• Lizzie forced to eat fruit = covered in juice → when Laura drinks juice from body = saved (jesus reference)

• defending fallen women, they also capable of purity and being saved

The Windhover (1870/1910)

(Gerard M. Hopkins)

• image of person who catches glimpse of bird

• falcon = known to hover over sky to catch prey

• energetic language, evoked by rhythm, alliteration, rhyme

• poem = for christ

The raven (1840)

(Edgar Allan Poe)

• narrator = isolated alone, pondering, grieving death of ‘Lenore’

• december = bleak, dark, spooky

• raven = devil-like, tapping on window (comes out of nowhere)

• raven refuses to leave

• Unreliable narrator

  • raven says ‘nevermore’ = narrator interprets different each time

  • Narrator = mentally distressed

• themes of supernatural & subconscious

The fall of the house of Usher (1830)

(Edgar Allan Poe)

• story = mystery & concealment, = narrator doesn’t know what the f* is happening

• narrator = friend of Roderick Usher (sister = Madeline Usher = sick)

• gloomy melancholic, isolated setting (house crumbling but still standing)

• they burry sister but = still alive

• she comes back, Narrator flees and house (with Usher siblings) crumble down

Nature (1830)

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

• essay

• nature = source of spiritual truth & personal insight

• nature is not just Material sources

• experiencing nature = connect with divine → better understand yourself

Walden: where I lived and what I lived for (1850)

(Henry David Thoreau)

• withdraws from society to reconnect with nature

• rejects materialism

• nature = teacher for personal insight/ reflection

Bartleby, the scrivener (1850)

(Herman Melville)

• very vague, no answers, don’t know why Bartleby does what he does

• narrator = lawyer who hires copyist Bartleby

• Bartleby very good at job but often = ‘I would prefer not to’

• end = Bartleby dismissed from work but refuses to leave since he has nowhere to go = prison = refuses to eat : dies

• only at end we know 1 thing of Bartleby’s past = worked at dead letter’s office → where undeliverable letters go to die = symbolic for his loneliness, distance

Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass (1840)

(Frederick Douglass (duh))

• advanced vocabulary and style

• auto-biographical

• importance literacy & knowledge = key to freedom

• unlike most, uses names & place names

• subverting master/ slave relationship (hits back = gains manhood, humanity back a bit)

• doesn’t explain escape

Beat! Beat! Drums! (1860)

(Walt Whitman)

• optimistic poem (strong word)

• drums symbolize energy, national purpose

• but also : no glory in individual suffering

• written after big battle where many died

• describes how war disrupts society

The wound-dresser (1860)

(Walt Whitman)

• people ask to tell his story

• own experience hospital as dresser → sit with soldiers (talking or dying)

• affected him mentally but saw the important

• the dresser struggles but does his best

• willing to die for them but some better off dead (suffering)

• Later point in life = mentally still in hospital (dreams)

When Lilacs in the dooryard bloom’d (1860)

(Walt Whitman)

• poem as tribute to Abraham Lincoln

• pain and grief about his assassination

• American nation prominent

• recurring images: lilacs, stars and birds & their song (carol of death)

• reference funeral train

• cycle: death comes for everyone, is soothing & delicate

There’s a certain slant of light (?)

(Emily Dickinson)

• a winter light → creates deep sense of sadness

• feeling can’t be fully explained

• when it comes: it’s like the world is aware

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (1860)

(Emily Dickinson)

• grief

• emotional numbness/ paralysis after suffering

• death= close friend of brother

• personification of nerves (sit ceremniously)

• first chill, then stupor then letting go ( grieving process)

because I could not stop for death (?)

(Emily Dickinson)

• could see graveyard from bedroom

• death = person

• takes her with him on a carriage (immortality is also there)

• unclear if speaker is dead (suggestion she is dead and looks back on day she died)

• carriage passes stages (start = kids, end = dead people’s houses)

much madness is divinest sense (?)

(Emily Dickinson)

• maybe mad people = best insights

  • agreeing with majority = sane

  • disagreeing = dangerous, mad

• chains = how people in madhouses are treated but also how people who doubt norms are treated

The adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1880)

(Mark Twain)

• main character = funny, good-natured, mind of his own, but smokes, steals, lies

• becomes friends with Tim (slave boy)

• run away together on raft alongside river

• meet people alongside river (many mean)

  • many different accents used

• end: Tim = captured and Finn has choice

  • turn him in = society’s rules

  • help him escape (does that obv)

• controversial = banned before publishing)

The yellow Wallpaper (1890)

(Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

• goes to summer ‘hall’ with husband

• thinks house is haunted → slowly goes mad

• hallucinates about being trapped = behind bars

• sees markings (ridge) on the wall = peels away wallpaper

• doesn’t want to leave anymore

• she becomes woman behind wallpaper = ridge is where her shoulder sits)

• husband comes in room = he faints and she crawls over him

The scarlet letter (1850)

• American Renaissance

• set in Puritan Boston

• Hester Prynne, who is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" on her dress for adultery [0.3]. While she keeps her baby’s father secret, her long-lost husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in disguise to torture the true father—the tormented minister Arthur Dimmesdale—before Dimmesdale publicly confesses and dies.

• Exposes society's hypocrisy (punish public sins while hiding corruption)

• selflessness & resilience of female : empathy and compassion for people in the village even if they looked down on her.