Periods of Literary Studies

Old English Beowulf

• Old English heroic poem

• Consists of more than 3000 alliterative long lines

• Set in Scandinavia

• Cotton Manuscripts

• Dated between 8th and 11th century

• Construction of archetypal “heroic” individual in binary opposition to the villain

• absolute moral values of the community embodied by the victorious herp in contrast to the monstrous “Other”

Medieval Period Canterbury Tales 1500

• written in 1387 - 1400

• Story telling contest of a group of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury

• use of a frame narrative / palpable first-person narrator, frame-tale

• panorama of medieval society (vs. focus on the heroic individual in Beowulf)

• subjectivtiy of 1st person narrator

• ironically pointing out shortcomings in their society/ in “model” citizens

• tales mirror the tellers’ professions and social standing in language

• use and style > character types use of irony and satire

  • humorous social criticism

• character types > of Beowulf

  • BUT judgement is the narrator’s / nor overall moral authority

Puritan Period 1653-1660

• Absolute Sovereignty (God is in control of everything)

• Human Depravity (original sin, we are fuck ups)

• Predestination (God has decided everything already, no freedom to decide your own fate, but work and devotion needed to be saved)

• Covenant Theology (alliance institute by God of Chosen/Elect people; must be kept by humans)

  • Conversion narratives

• Individualism & Reading

Elizabethan period 1533-1613 Comedy

• Focus on plot rather than character development (vs. tragedy)

• Frequent use of character types / flat characters (often telling of very similar names)

• use of intensely complicated and interwoven plot strands

• main topic: LOVE > love as a motivator

• youthful lovers in conflict with the patriarchal system / social establishment

• often shift to natural spaces (freedom from social contentions, Forest of Arden)

• use of disguise

• often leads to play with gender categories: ambiguity

• especially complex against the background of Elizabethan theatre conventions

Transcendentalism 1836 - 1844

• Non-conformity, individualism

• self-reliance

• importance of the individual

• over-soul, supreme being

• importance of nature

• (know thyself = study nature)

• touch grass, nature as a teacher

Enlightenment

focused on reason and thought > science, maths, etc.

American Romanticism

• Emergence of self-awareness as American writers; national literature; first major literary movements that are genuinely American

  • Transcendentalist Movement 1836-1844

  • American Renaissance: 1850- 1855 new literary forms emerging > reflect US values > American topics, themes, settings

  • Emphasis on experiencing something directly and individually > union of God, humanity and nature

  • Dark Romanticism: focusses on the negative, less celebratory sides of live (slavery, violence, the unknown in Human nature, Psychological)

• Questioning Puritanism’s focus on sin and an all-knowing God

• Counter-movement to Enlightenment, which had focused on reason and thought > science, maths, etc.

• Instead: intuition, feeling subjective/individual truths celebration of American beauty and identity

Elizabethan Period Tragedy

• Catastrophe (Ending in Death)

• Tragic Hero / Protagonist

• Fall of princes

• very hierarchical, fixed places for every being, no possibility of change

• independency of different realms

• violations of this order affect other realms as well

American Dark Roamnticism

• complexity and perverseness of human nature

• less to do with the divine

• Grotesque, also the sublime > battle between the two inside of the individual

• inherent darkness of human nature > but also inherited light

Realism

• Focus on the everyday/mundane, including graphic details

• ordinary people of the middle- and working classes: showing life accurately

• verisimilitude (plausibility): appearance of being true, resemblance of truth (=/reality/truth)

• Depiction of regional differences in America (dialects, customs, e.g. Twain

• and Chesnutt)

  American Literary Realism and Naturalism

• Important US-America: Mark Twain etc.

Slave Narrative

• Autobiographical writing (author = protagonist = narrator)

• Formerly enslaved person recalls their life story: life as an enslaved person in all its physical and psychological violence, detailed accounts of the institution, their escape from slavery, life as a “free” person up North

• Abolitionist cause: demonstrating the cruelty and evil of slavery and demanding its abolition

• often appeals to Christianity and compassion of their predominantly white readership

• usually fronted by a preface by a white abolitionist to voice for an authenticate the truthfulness of the narrative

• neutral, detailed, matter of fact language

British Romanticism

• counter movement to Enlightenment (which had focused on reason and thought > science, maths, etc. )

• against neo-classical tradition / 18th century poetry (irrational form of art)

• political context: French Revolution

• relationship between individual and nature

  • sublime nature (intensely beautiful, inspirers you with awe, almost scary, intensely moving)

  • metaphor for human nature

• individual striving for new knowledge, insights about the self and the essence of being (coming to these insights by writing poetry)

Victorian Literature 1837-1901

• main genre: the novel

  • reading audience: predominantly middle class

• theatre often rejected as “popular entertainment”

• The role of women (from the “angel in the house” to the New woman)

• industrialisation, growing class divisions and struggle for political participation

• growth of the British Empire

• new technologies and changing perception of the world (railway, photography, telegraph)

• fear of “degeneration” especially towards the end of the 19th century

Victorian literature Fin de Siecle

• 1860s - Fin de Siècle (final decades of the 19th century)

• The decade of sensationalism

• Sensation novel, dentation drama

• Victorian Anxieties > time of change e.g. fear of degeneration

• Read by both the working class and the middle class (and therefore often perceived as a threat to society)

• Connection with railways travel and a sense of changing times

• Reflects general suspicion that appearances may not be as reliable as presupposed

• More specifically: mirrors social fears that women may no longer be contained by the role of “the angel in the house”

  • Starting of female emancipation (slowly)

• Intensification of 1860s anxieties about new times and the threat they constitute to the Victorian value system

• ‘sensational’ elements have definitely arrived in the ‘literary’ nove

Moderism in Britain

• most represetnative genre: short story

Relevant characteristics

• Focus on an isolated event/scene (’medias in res’ beginning and open ending)

• Aim of recording a momentary strong impression - Poe’s unity of effect

• Foregrounding questions of perception and its literary realization

• Fragmentation/ discontinuity

• Foregrounding subjective perception

• Disillusionment / sense of isolation

• Formal innovation/turning away from literary traditions

• Transcending established genre / media boundaries

Three Basic Conflicts American Modernism

• How should literature relate to literary history and those who came before?

• Should popular culture be a part of literature?

• How political/ apolitical should literature be?

Modernist literature obsessed with alienation, doubt with form and language of its own:

• Feeling of pessimism/disintegration of the world: political systems, traditions, human beings, psyche

• fragmentation

• disillusionment, scepticisms,

• yet often vision of putting fragmented world together as a whole

• age of decadence, prosperity for some (the golden age)

• corruption and crime

Harlem Renaissance

• Not a cohesive movement, rather parallel developments/visons

• racial pride, racial self-assertation, selfdefinition

• call for acceptance in all areas of life: countering Jim Crow segregation

• Focus on rich history of African Americans

• emphasis on Black creativity and intelligence

• analysis of “double consciousness” (two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body)

Postmodernism

• Continuation and break with modernism

• hard to limit temporally (from the 1960s/1970s onwards?; currently coming to an end??

• Continuation: intensification of general sense of loss and alienation > loss of reality, loss of history, loss of truth

• but: fragmentation and disintegration are often celebrated

• art no longer seen as means to produce stable form and structure, playful approaches tend to dominate, no need for a stable form

British Literature: From Postmodernism to Contemporary Literature

Some Markers of Recent Postmodernism cf. first session of the Survey: ‘Contemporary British Writing’

➔ testing the limits of ‘literature’ / experimental and/or anti-elitist challenge to traditional categories

➔ stronger appreciation of ‘authenticity’ / of the ‘real’?

Post-postmodernism

(Slowly) Turning away from the postmodernist paradigm

• as early as 1993 David Foster Wallace noted a shift away from the postmodern irony toward a “literature of sincerity”

• rise and return of certain genres: memoirs = best-sellers, ethnic Bildungsroman, social realism

• postmodernism has increasingly disappeared from scholarship on recent literature and from syllabi on “Contemporary American Literature”

• turn from playfulness of postmodernism, turn to new realism

• sense that postmodernism doesn’t capture the Zeitgeist anymore, e.g. lack of political commitment that can generate “actual results” [see how philosophy, politics, and the arts come together?]

Metamodernism

• Myriad crisis (desire for change) of the past two decades (Climate change, financial meltdown, of democracy, global conflicts) > desire for change (again)

• resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, the potential for “universal truths” without giving up on postmodernist insights

• often texts (Cultural products) move between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect

General Characteristics/markers of Postmodernism

• modernist fragmentation is intensified; but: often no longer linked with a sense of loss but with a liberating opportunity for creative play and individual freedom

• playfulness, irony; in content, language, intertextual elements e.g. parody, pastiche (~imitation)

• fluidity of genre boundaries, heightened intermediality

• metafiction, self-reflexivity

• questioning fixed identities

  ➢ constructedness (of texts, identities, realities, truths)

  ➢ disappearance of the real

• (further) dissolution of cultural structures (e.g. religion, family)

• embrace of “low” culture, popular culture

• skepticism towards authoritarian understandings of historical knowledge → rejection of “grand narratives” of science, politics, humanity (Althusser)

• multiplicity (of forms, of identities, of meaning etc.)

• focus on individual, less widely generalizable forms of experience, memory, and knowledge