Survey of English Literature

Fuck.

What is literature

• Written Texts that has been given meaning by people

  • Textual format

  • How it is written/crafted/made

• Complexity/layers of meaning > different interpretations

• Intention: someone engages with written thing

• Purpose: beyond information/contents

  • For re-reading

• Narration, Action, Setting, Characters, Mediated/Constructed, not reality/Imagined,

• Effort was put into it

• Doesn’t exist in a vacuum, made within a social/cultural contexts (influence)

Literature still often assumed to conform to some (or all) of the following characteristics nowadays:

• Written texts (at most with some decorative illustrations)

• fictional writing

• complex texts which presuppose a degree of knowledge/education and require some effort on the reader’s part (vs. popular entertainment)

Contemporary authors in Britain often write against these limits by

• trying to make literature accessible to a broader readership

• allowing readers to prioritise entertainment / enjoyment over intellectual engagement / interpretation

• making their works more intermedial, e.g. by including visual elemets which have the same importance as the written text

• mixing fiction with documentary and/or authobiographical elements

  • experimental and/or programmatic (anit-elitist) challanges to traditional categories

Striving for “authentic” intermediality

• aiming at recreation of “authentic” experiences

• sometimes prioritising visuality our text

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”

Beowulf characteristics Grendel

• Killing soldiers in their sleep

• creeping, accursed of God, savage

• secrecy, cowardly

• unfair advantages

• described as an enemy of God

• demon grim, evil spirit

• holding the moors

• honour does not seem to be a relevant concept

Beowulf characteristics Beowulf

• great brave praised

• acts out in the open

• fairness

• supported by divine authority

• honour > value warrior culture

• Goodly vessel

Beowulf extras

Darkness places

explicit moral judgment

These stereotypes/archetypes and stories are reassuring

affirmation of values > responsibility of othering a “villain” ?

Description of character/action: representation of the communities’ moral values

• Context of Anglo-Saxon warrior culture

• oral transmission of the work: use of mnemonic techniques and space for improvisation

Canterbury Tales

• 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

Typical features of Classical 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

Function of the Last Act of Comedy

• removal of obstacles to love

• correct allocation of the lovers into couples

• marriage

• community festival

• promise of continuity (future generations)

  • similar to tragedy

• Shakespeare comedies often have some serious elements some degree of genre mixing

• most obvious at the end: restoration of order

• imprtant in the Elizabethan world picture

• return to fixed (gender and class) hierachies

• nevertheless, potential ideological ambiguity?

American Literature:

• Where do you begin: white settlers, white English settlers?

• What about Native American traditions? no written tradition, but oral traditions: storytelling, creation myths, songs: integral part of cultural identity, sharing knowledge over generations

• What happens if we simply forego them?

Question of canon, selection by instructor, textbooks/anthologies that allege to define what American literature is.

Every decision for one literary text is a decision against hundreds of others. That can’t be changed, but it’s important to be aware of!

American Literature Special complexity:

• Whoes story are you telling?

• Who is writing the story?

• Where do you lay the focus and what do you leave out? > white settlers, The Founding Fathers, Native American History?

Puritanism: central to understanding the US even today: civil religion, economy and work ethic, racial disparities…

• Rejected the core beliefs of Catholicism and the Roman church > reformation

• Reformation in England > Puritans wanted further purification of religion

• Faced with religious persecution > left England for “A new world”

• Bible as highest authority > not church hierarchy

Reformation

Martin Luther, John Calvin: rejected core beliefs of Catholicism and the Roman church; two ideas are central to Puritanism

• the Bible is the highest authority - not the pope, bishop, priest; doing away with the church’s hierarchy

• every believer has a direct relationship with God

• Reformation in England: Anglican church retained many features of the Catholic church > Puritans desired to purify religion even further; faced religious prosecution

Religious Dissenters form England: The Pilgrims

• Religious separatists: Calvinists, left the Anglican Church to found a new covenant with God in “the new world”

• Arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower

• Governor of the colony: William Bradford (until 1657); wrote Of Plymouth Plantation, describing the departure from Europe, the journey, the arrival, and early years of community life

Religious Dissenters form England: The Puritans

• Religious reformists who sought to reform the Anglican Church in hope of returning to England at some point, after having set an example as a model union in the new world

• Landed in Boston on the Arabella in 1630

• John Winthrop: one of the key intellectual and religious figures: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

North America

• Important question to reflect on regarding their departure to North America: were they being religiously prosecuted for dissenting or is there a settler colonialist/imperialist longing?

• Winthrop: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill the eyes of all people are upon us” > God

Core Ideas of Puritanism

• 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 instituted by God of Chosen/Elect people; must be kept by humans)

  • Conversion narratives

• Individualism & Reading

Reading (and Writing) Puritanism

• The Bible

• Conversion narratives

• Diaries and Journals

• Chronicling God’s work

• Reading and writing to make sense of the world and discover signs of one’s closeness

Edward Taylor

• 1642-1729

• Born in England, arrived in 1688 in North America

• Minister > write sermons/poems

  (Huswifery)

Huswifery

• Letting yourself be guided by God

• Conceit: Elaborated extended metaphor

  • Spinning wheel > wool, making cloth

  • Getting to paradise and getting pure and holy/glorify

  • becoming or being made worthy of being saved

  • Individualism > personal appeal to God

• Lyrical I speaks to God directly

• Speech situation? Language and tone?

• Lanser’s Rule: Use the pronouns of the Author for the perspective of the story

Anne Bradstreet

• 1612-1672

• born in England arrived in NA in 1630

• First female writer to be published in the British colonies in NA

• In memory of my dear grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

In memory of my dear grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

• Form? Tone? Elegy: in response to someone’s death: mourning, celebration, solace

• Tension: Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate | Or sigh the days so soon were terminate

• Resolution: Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate.

• Predestination, Individualism > individual processing death of grandchild

• Shift in the second stanza > some questioning (nature metaphor)

• Still faith in God’s plan

The Making of the Unites States of America

• Revolutionary War 1775 - 1783

• Declaration of Independence 1776

• “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”

A new Nation

• Who are we? Common culture

• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay (1838) “The American Scholar”: calls for independence from England also in the thought, ideas, expression; national self-reliance

• visual art to commemorate and celebrate the origin stories

American Romanticism (Early National Period (1820-1865))

• 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

  • Dark Romanticism:

• 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

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

Walt Whitman

• 1819-1892

• 1855: first edition of Leave of Grass — poetry collection > focus on celebration of the ordinary

• Gay

• When I heard the Learned Astronomer

When I heard the Learned Astronomer

• Chill, respect the vibes of the nature guy, free verse

• science in school makes him tired and sick.

• Wandering off > into nature, perfect, quiet for yourself

• Shift in tone when the individual leaves the lecture hall to experience nature

• Individual truth and learning in nature

Emily Dickinson

• 1830-1886, Amherst MA

• most of her poetry was published posthumously

• Poems didn’t have titles, they were thus numbered

• Some keep the Sabbath going to Church (236)

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church (236)

• Breaking traditions by othering herself

• Church things at home: Bobolink, Orchard, our little sexton - sings,

• I just wear my Wings

• I’m going, all along

• nature replaces elements of church

• experiences God

• Emphasis on experiencing something directly and individually

• beauty and relevance of nature/the nature of world

King Lear Basics

• First printed in 1608, written beforehand

• third appearance in First Folio in 1623 (modified according to company’s prompt book)

• modern editions tend to conflate the two versions, not one original text of basis

The Genre of Classical 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

The tragic protagonist

• high social rank > fall of princes

• tragic flaw > in his character/misreading of an important situation (leads to the protagonist’s downfall) (failure to recognise true love) (violation of Elizabethan chain of being)

• desired effect on the audience: catharsis (emotional purification, pity and fear) through identification with the protagonist

King Lear Advanced

King Lear to beggar - becomes insane - dies - Choleric

hierarchies are important; he had to stay with power and couldn’t leave

Loses everything in the end, alone

Lear as a Tragic Protagonist

What is Lear’s tragic flaw?

• Vanity, inability to distinguish between flattery and true love

• Second possibility: evaluation of his behaviour related to the cultural context of Shakespeare’s time

  • Choice to give away his kingdom “Elizabethan chain of being”

Interdependency of different realms:

• subplot mirrors main plot (father > daughters/sons)

Plot Development

The Three Unities of Classical Drama:

• Unity of time (no gaps (within 24 hours))

• Unity of place (One or very few locations)

• Unity of action (Coherence, concentration)

Shakespeare tends to stretch (not totally broken) those unities (ambiguity)

• still has the overall coherence > ambiguity,

• offering certain freedom to the audience how to read the play

• catharsis is still there, emotions

• Still having to keep all the kinds of audiences engaged

Freytag’s Triange/Pyramid

• overall effect: symmetry (usually 5 acts), regularity, continuity

• ending is often foreshadowed already in Act 1

  More Detailed view:

• retarding moment/moment of last suspense

• Maybe you have a good ending after all

The triangle charts both the audience’s involvement in the play (tension) and the protagonist’s development (learning process)

Elizabethan Theatre

• Theatre is not considered “art” in Shakespeare’s times but (popular) entertainment

• spectators behaved accordingly

• closely connected to location of most London theatres: outside the “respectable” party of the city

• No female actors

• hardly any scenery or stage props

• no curtain

• performances in daylight

Characteristics:

• Large audiences, often rather unruly

• theatre attended by all social groups and classes

• hierarchical structure in terms of the different seating areas (e.g. “groundlings” stand close to the stage)

  • classes separated by seat prices

• proscenium stage: close spatial proximity (and often interaction) between actors and audience; spectators are placed (almost) all around the stage

Consequences for SP plays

• different kinds of spectators (social class, educational backgrounds) have to be addressed in one play

  • use of different social ranks offering identification, distinguished by the use of verse (usually iambic pentameter) and prose

• use of “comic relief” in tragedy the fool

• possibility of multiple readings of one scene

• ideological ambiguity (potential political criticism)

  • Elizabethan theatre gave rise to elements in Shakespeare’s plays which are often marginalised in performances (especially of the tragedies) nowadays

Two daughters push him out, threated him, he becomes angry and fight his daughters quietly

• point of no return > madness

• thunderstorm is like additional character, makes it more dramatic

• Most suspenseful moment, unknowing for the audience

American Romanticism

• Emergence of self-awareness as American writers, celebration of American Identity

• 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)

  • 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

Poe - one of the most influential short story writers > American Renaissance

Elements of a Short Story (Poe)

• a narrative to be read “at one sitting” within 1-2 hours

• a narrative creating “a certain unique or single effect” in readers to move them

• usually explores one incident and only a few protagonist to create the unity of effect

Focus in “The fall of the house of Usher”

• Usher as a gothic tale / horror

• Narrative situation and reliability

• Gloomy atmosphere, oppressive, autumn day, nature is rotting away

Common Gothic Features

• irrationality versus rationality

• Guilt and the uncanny

• ab-humans, ghosts and monsters

• themes of Puritanism and its tainted legacy

• psychological impact of struggle with Puritan legacy

• Doubling/Doppelganger motif: duality of the self; often the subject has a simultaneous consciousness of being both his present self and the external other observing himself > horrific effect

Gothic Elements in Usher

• a haunted house, rotting and desolate landscape, dark atmosphere, decay

• strange illness sickness

• doubled personality: e.g. Roderick/Madeline resemblance; mirroring of the crumbling house in Roderick’s deteriorating condition

• The house also being mirrored, the reflection of the pool

• Doubling, house as the building, and as the family, splits in two, the house and the family

Unreliable Narration

• Term coined by Wayne C. Booth in 1961; has undergone numerous revisions

• in its most basic definition, often a first-person narrator that states something objectively false/lies; or in some cases falsehood is not as obvious, but a feeling of distrust is created

• Usher: unnamed first person narrator who hints at his own unreliability

  • Utterly depressed people, drugged people > reliable?

Symbolism of the house

• merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the house of usher - an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion

• Cracks and fissures in the structure symnolize cracks and fissueres in family history/legacy

• The house splits in two at the end - just as the Ushers come to an end [see also the inserted lyric of “the haunted House” that foreshadows the fall of the Usher dynasty > from glorious past to decay “ laugh - but smile no more “]

• Poe explores the dark and unknown side of the human and human psyche

• mirrored in surroundings, influence on another

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Celebrated writer of AR: The scarlet letter, the house of the seven gables, the birth mark

• The Hawthorne (Hathorne) family were important members of Puritan society in the 17th century > NW wrestled with their complicated legacy

Young Goodman Brown

• Binary opposites

• Setting: Salem, late 17th century - in the village and in the woods; at night and the next morning

• characters: pious Puritans vs. sinners - Young Goodman Brown, Faith, minister, catechism teacher, deacon, and the Devil (The good and the bad)

  • blur into one another and lose their distinction: good and evil in everyone (temptation of all humans)

• darkness of mankind reflected in darkness of the forest; unknown, shadows

• pink ribbons - faith and devil, wrong path

Allegorical Elements in YGB

• Goodman Brown is tempted by evil, like Adam and Eve > 347

• Wife name Faither = allegory for Faith > 351

• His wife is save when she is devoted, says her prayers, not going to at night (puritan), yet leave his Faith behind

• Hypocrisy of American religion and origins: temptation and the sins of humanity are within everyone, recognized that no one is innocent

• Characters, setting, actions devised to represent/symbolized concepts like “good” and “Evil”

YGB context

• coming to terms with the violent side of Puritan legacy and his own family’s entanglement: Saelm Witch Trials, 1692/1693, twenty people murdered in the mass hysteria/religious overzealousness, his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a judge in the trials, never repented

• Warning against religious revivals

  • The First Great Awakening: Christian revival movements in the 1730s and 40s, spiritual conviction of personal sin and need for redemption, and by encouraging introspection and …

Features of Realist Literature

• 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.

Sentimental tradition: emotional appeal to the readers

Classical slave narrative - (early) Realism: descriptive, showing life accurately

• 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

Historical context Slave Narrative

• 1619: arrival of enslaved Africans in what would later be US, Jamestown; triangular slave trade,

• Middle Passage > gruelling/deadly journey from Africa to US

• The Compromise of 1808: illegal to import enslaved people but slavery remains legal in the US

• 1820, Missouri Compromise: Maintaining a balance of slaveholding and free states as the US expands westwards; legal south of /illegal north of the Mason-Dixon Line

• 1861-1865: Civil War over slavery; 1863: Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln; slavery prohibited nationwide after the end of the Civil War

• 1870: right to vote for African American man

Fredrick Douglass

• formerly enslaved, escaped in 1838

• published several narratives

Douglass Narrative

• Abolitionist cause

• Telling a story of his slave-holder was kind at first, but her heart turned to stone the longer he had to uphold slavery. Looses her purity, like poison.

Douglass Notes

On his mother’s passing

• stripped of intimacy and family, didn’t know his mother, no connection, theft of identity

Chattel Slavery

• status of slave was inheritable in the colonies and later in the US

• Partus sequitur venterm (the offspring follows the womb): maternal heritable slavery, passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 > created lineages of enslavement that enriched slavery

Chapter 1: Physical Violence and Cruelty

Literacy = Liberty, A slave who can read and write is useless? Too powerful,

• Resolution to escape, turning point in his life and the narrative

• You have seen how a man was made slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man (1200)

Harriet Jacobs > incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• Enslaved woman > different experience than FD

• She hid in an attic for 7 years > to be near her children > escapes in 1842

• First woman to author a slave narrative

• Preface offered by a female white abolishionist > pre-empts some doubts readers may have had > calling on readers to act upon what they are about to read

• Jacob’s narrative > first years relatively calm > after death of her mistress (inherited to a child) > lives with Dr. Flint after this > he coerces her sexually (try to buy her, give her gifts, talking to her) > she finds herself at the whim of someone else (no power to say no, trying to evade him) > constant threat (No escape)

• Her experience of slavery is gendered > enslaved women could not decide about their piousness / purity

• Enslaved women often fell pregnant, had to care for the children (of the masters) / had their children taken away

• Less agency available to enslaved women > she has to scorn Flint by having children another man (only way to escape his affections)

Romance

• 14th century: old vernacular language of France

• 14th century: verse narratives about knights, heroes (written in the vernacular instead of in Latin)

• 17/18th century: narrative about heroic deeds (roman)

• 18th century: Friedrich von Schlegel defined a new kind of poetry which would replace the older, classical concepts (”romantisch”)

• 19th century: critics in England began to relate the notion of “romantisch” (romantic) to English poets who had written from the end of the 18th century about the 1830s

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)

The Big Six I

• William Blake

• William Wordsworth

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  • Main representatives of the first generation of Romantic poets

The Big Six II

• George Gordon Lord Byron

• Mary Shelly’s Husband (Percy Bysshe Shelly)

• John Keats

  • Main representatives of the second generation of Romantic poets

William Wordsworth:

• 1770-1850

• 1798: Lyrical Ballads with S.T. Coleridge (Preface)

• lived in the Lake District close to Coleridge and Robert Southey (Lake Poets)

• was made Poet Laureate in 1843

I wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Definition of Good poetry:

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overfflow of powerful feelings

Thought long and deeply: intense feelings “recollected in tranquillity” = good poetry

The importance an function of nature

• Nature as teacher (moral force)

• nature as spiritual force and source of inspiration

  • can have an uplifting effect when the individual is depressed

  • come to terms with metaphysical questions

  • can inspire poetic creativity

• Prominence of the lyrical I

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• 1772-1834

• wrote Lyrical Ballads together with Wordsworth

• most well known poems: The rime of the ancient mariner, kubla khan, chstistabel

• interested in psychology (extreme states of mind, e.g. in nightmares)

Christabel

• nature description, night

• doesn’t focus on the relationship between nature and human

• protagonist: Christabel, narrative: MC leaves the house in the dark,

• structure, long, narrative development

• Narrative poem > Focus on the story

The dark side of Romanticism: The Gothic (Chrisatable)

• situations which evoke extreme emotions (terror, horror)

• loss of control (Reign of the physical, instinctive instead of the rational) and crossing of established boundaries

• taboo subjects: death, decay, far, sexuality, power…

  • typical features: sublime nature, darkness, night, castles/monasteries, dungeon, supernatural occurrences fainting heroines, femmes fatales

• Who or what is Geraldine? Clues? she only passes the door once Christabel takes her over (acts like in pain and then not), dog growls at her without waking up, ashed fireplace lights up (fit of flame, erratic), mysterious, eery, female relation, sudden cut in the story, uneasy feeling,

William Blake

• 1757-1827

• painter and poet

• symbolist poems (The Tyger)

• political implications (London)

• Songs of Innocence (1789)

• Songs of Experience (1794)

London (wILLIAM BLake)

Difference from WW and STC

• focus of the observing individual but in a way different environment - images draw

London

• Political implications

• Observing individual > in the city

• Images draw attention to social problems and negative aspects of human nature

John Keats

• 1795-1821

• trained as apothecary and surgeon

• well-known poems: the great odes (Ode to a nightingale, Ode on a grecian urn, to autumn)

• not well reviewed during his life time (Cockeny poet)

• died of consumption in Rome

• Negative Capability, capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

• Poetical Character, enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.

• Camelion poet: A poet has no identity (Just a channel for the poetry (describing all the senses they have, what they feel, what they hear))

To Autumn

• poetry should not try to find explanations, solutions for everything (Negative capability)

• the poet should have no self: i.e. should be able to feel into the essence of other persons, and things in nature

• season is personified, embodiment, not a lyrical I, not a real person, no individual that is shared, no self, just perceptions

• Effacement of the individual (’you’ /apostrophe instead of focus on lyrical I)

• directed of sensory impressions from nature for the reader (use of sound-effects like alliteration) winnowing wind, mist and mallow, the spring of song,

• no apparent mediation, explanation or interpretation in the poem

Some key issues of the Victorian age

• 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

Vic Lit

• Queen Victoria’s reign 1837 - 1901

• main genre: the novel

  • reading audience: predominantly middle class

• theatre often rejected as “popular entertainment”

  • cf. also the Romantics ‘Anti-theatrical prejudice’

Wuthering Heights

• complex plot structure: diametrical opposition of the two houses Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and the families associated with them > diametrically opposing

• plot spans two generations of these families

  • readers are encouraged to look for correspondences between the different characters

  • encourages active reader involvement

Realism (Authenticity = more real)

• use of regional dialect for local colour (Joseph)

• highly complex narrative structure:

  • first person narrative Mr Lockwood reports the first-person narrative of the servant Mrs Dean (he is an outsider, she knows the other characters personally)

  • additional quotation of embedded texts like Catherine’s diary

• Creates authenticity, sometimes play with narrative unreliability (striving for this)

Realism connected with neo Gothic elements (WH)

• traditional Gothic devices (like ghosts, remote castles as settings, complex villains, sublime nature) are modified and/or given new meanings

• can be used to reflect cultural anxieties of the time (Racism; people from the colonies/ not English, are also mirror within the novels, and portrayed as the villain)

Victorian literature

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

sensation

• Element of shock, breaking taboos on sexuality and violence

• Strong impression/feeling (captivating audience through emotions, not reason)

• Physical element

Typical characteristics of sensation novels

• Secret hidden in a respectable family (similarity with the growing genre of detective fiction)

• Female characters gravely transgressing against the accepted feminine role (murder, bigamy) often under a surface image of perfect conformity (unconventional female characters in Wuthering Heights)

• Complex plot twist as secret is gradually revealed

• Order is restored in the end by removal of the offender (often combined with insanity)

• Re-affirmation of the middle-class family and the masculine order

The sensation novel in its Cultural context

• 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’ novel

Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Baddon

• Description of the Protagonist is over the top, unrealistic, unnatural, magical/charming

  • overly beautiful, kind, happy

• Secrets: She is fake, a murderer etc. Hiding behind a Façade

• intoxicating etc

Dracula - Fin de siècle Novel

Highly completely narrative structure

• Mixture of different text types (letters, diaries) and a multiplicity of different first-person narrators, often limits in outlook and/or knowledge

• Sometimes use of new technology in the recording process (phonograph, telegraph, typewriters)

• Striving for authenticity as each narrator narrates from first hand experience (intensification cf. Wuthering Heights)

• Again, combined with new-Gothic elements (supernatural forces with new meanings) especially the figure of the vampire

  • Image already present in Wuthering Heights re. Hearhcliff

• Breaking a taboo, if a woman goes out at night, dressed immodestly, you will regret it, monsters are out, going to bite you, take advantage of you, not human, very bad.

Vic Lit and social anxieties

• Literary works tests limits of social conventions more and directly from the 1860s onwards

• Important role of new Gothic elements in this development

• Literature as safe space for confronting dominant anxieties of the time / novelistic forms become popular which allow readers to enjoy such effects

  • Victorian literature in Britain is usually ‘realistic’ on a deeper, more subliminal level

Modernism in Britain

• Most representative 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

James Joyce Dubliners

• attempt at recording different but finally similar scenes of Dublin life

• Stories complement each other but do not add up to a coherent whole

• Very negative image of Dublin and its effect on its inhabitants: stasis, (mental) paralysis

Most important literary innovation concerns narrative technique:

• increasing focus on individual perception

• Reader shares protagonist’s thoughts and feelings directly stream of consciousness / interior monologue

  • Traces of the ‘free indirect discourse’ that will become very typical of Joyce

  • Can be seen ad intensification of Victorian striking for authenticity

• Often moment of ‘epiphany’ (character’s sudden insight into his/her situation),

  • no change in behaviour, mental block, paralysis, stasis (Evaline)

Kew Gardens, Virginia Woolf

• Woolf intensifies subjectivity compared to the early Joyce

• Context: ‘Bloomsbury’ circle of writers, poets, philosophers and articles

  • Highly unconventional life-style for the time

• Recording of successive but unconnected impressions, often apparently neutral, as if recorded by a technical device

• But: includes the thoughts of those who pass by in Kew Gardens (i.e. boundaries between different forms of perception become blurred)

  • Succession of highly subjective perspectives, mixture of different narrative techniques to convey this

Woolfs characteristic use in the short story formant:

• Very detailed descriptions

• Focus on seemingly unimportant details

• A total denial of narrative continuity, no plot progression

  • Extreme intensification of the classical short story’s focus on one important event in the protagonist’s life

• Focus on momentary visual impressions, perception apparently blues from the intensity of looking at very small details

  • Principles of impressionist painting

  • Intermedial of Woolf’s writing/blurring of media boundaries

Key characteristics of British Modernism

• Fragmentation/ discontinuity

• Foregrounding subjective perception

• Disillusionment / sense of isolation

• Formal innovation/turning away from literary traditions

• Transcending established genre / media boundaries

Cultural Context: Modern United States

Industrialization, technology, urbanization, complete secularization, advances in the sciences (relativity theory), psychoanalysis (Freud: it, ego, super-ego), World War I, (attempted) shifts in gender and race relations

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?

Literary Reactions AM

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

F.S. Flint’s “rules”:

• Direct treatment of the “Thing”

• All words must contribute to the presentation of the “thing”

• Rhythm as a sequence of the musical phrase

Ezra Pound iMAGISM

• Image presents an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time”

• Experience of “sudden liberation”

• Language of common speech

• New rhythms; often a changed rhythm = a new idea

• Presentation of an image, not it description

• No didacticism > artistic effect

Oread by H.D.

• Oread Mountain Nymph

• Speech situation: The Oreads are speaking, commanding, demanding

• Stylistic devices: anaphora, epiphora, alliteration,

• Greek mythology: mountain nymph

• Imagist: two images merge in the poem: Land/forest, Water/sea

• How is this merging achieved?

  • No similes or comparisons

  • Language of two worlds are combined, set side by side, almost melting into each other

  • Rather by fusion: no unnecessary etc

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• 1896-1940

• American novelist, essayist, and short story writer who chronicled the so called Jazz Age

• Part of the Lost Generation of American expatriates in Europe (Alongside Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound); writers and artists often disillusioned, WWI figures looms large in their lives and works

TGG as Modernist Experiment

1. Multiple perspectives and fragments: narrative situation

2. Urban confusion, desolation, and consumerism

3. Failure of romantic vision

Narrative situation Gatsby

• First impression: Nick is a minor character and silent observer. Homodiegetic narrator

• Nick puts fragments together and highlights the mingling of narration in the beginning

• Later, he does not indicate this mingling anymore: he describes Myrtle’s death as though he had witnessed it

• Mingling of intradiegetic passages and extradiegetic narration hints at unreliability

Nick’s motivation for telling us about Gatsby is that Jay Gatsby had an impact on him:

Motif of AMBIVALANCE on the level of content as well as the level of narration - furthers a sense of UNCERTAINTY

Focus on: Beauty, decadence, and materialism

T.J. Eckleburg and the Valley of Ashes

• A place of desolation and urban despair > eyes are the remnants of a billboard

  • T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” > Consumerism

• comment on Religion, new and old ideals

Harlem Renaissance: Context

• Great Migration: mass migration of Black Southerners to the urban centres of North an Midwest beginning in the 1890s as a trickle,

• Harlem, NYC

• searching for better opportunities, jobs education > place of possibilities

• Red Summer of 1919 > horrible things happened to them