Allied Paper II: Background to the study of English Lit II - University of Madras BA English. [Sem 2]

Allied Paper II: Background to the Study of English Literature

Unit I: Drama

WELL-MADE PLAY (Drama of Ideas - Shaw and Ibsen)

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

Well-made play (French pièce bien faite) is a type of play, constructed according to certain strict technical principles, that dominated the stages of Europe and the United States for most of the 19th century and continued to exert influence into the 20th.The technical formula of the well-made play, developed around 1825 by the French playwright Eugene Scribe, called for complex and highly artificial plotting, a build-up of suspense, a climatic scene in which all problems are resolved, and a happy ending.  Originating in France as the pièce bien faite, the well-made play is a style of dramatic writing characterized by a meticulous, methodological purposiveness of plotting. The logically precise construction of the well-made play is typified by a number of conventions. The plot is most often based on a withheld secret—known to the audience but unknown to the characters—which, when revealed at the climax, reverses the fortunes of the play's hero. During the course of the play, the overall pattern of the drama is reflected in the movement of the individual acts, in which a steadily mounting suspense is achieved through the battle of wits between the hero and the villain. The hero's fortune fluctuates during his conflict with the adversary until finally, at the climax, the secret is revealed in an obligatory scene (scène à faire) and the hero is benefitted in the final dénouement, or resolution.

Writers and Works

Drama was to involve the direct observation of human behaviour; therefore, there was a thrust to use contemporary settings and time periods, and it was to deal with everyday life and problems as subjects. Conventional romantic conflicts were a staple subject of such plays (for example, the problem of a pretty girl who must choose between a wealthy, unscrupulous suitor and a poor but honest young man). Suspense was created by misunderstandings between characters, mistaken identities, secret information (the poor young man is really of noble birth), lost or stolen documents, and similar contrivances. Later critics, such as Émile Zola and George Bernard Shaw, denounced Scribe’s work and that of his successor, Victorien Sardou, for exalting the mechanics of playmaking at the expense of honest characterizations and serious content, but both playwrights were enormously popular in their day. 

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

In Norway, Henrik Ibsen is considered to be the father of modern realistic drama. His plays attacked society’s values and dealt with unconventional subjects within the form of the well-made play (causally related). Ibsen perfected the well-made play formula; and by using a familiar formula made his plays, with a very shocking subject matter, acceptable. He discarded soliloquies, asides, etc. Exposition in the plays was motivated, there were causally related scenes, inner psychological motivation was emphasized, the environment had an influence on characters’ personalities, and all the things characters did and all of things the characters used revealed their socio-economic milieu. He became a model for later realistic writers. Among the subjects addressed by Ibsen in his plays are: euthanasia, the role of women, war and business, and syphilis.

Some of Ibsen's Plays:

• Ghosts—1881—dealt with the concept of the sins of the father transferring to the son, resulting in syphilis.
• Pillars of Society – 1877 – dealt with war and business.
• Hedda Gabbler – 1890 – a powerful woman takes her life at the end of the play to get away from her boredom with society.
• A Doll’s House – 1879 – Nora leaves her husband Torvald and her children at the end of the play; often considered "the slam heard around the world," Nora’s action must have been very shocking to the Victorian audience.

Later in life, Ibsen turned to more symbolic and abstract dramas; but his "realism" affected others, and helped lead to realistic theatre, which has become, despite variations and rejections against it, the predominant form of theatre even today.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

The Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the leading playwright of modern Britain, wrote frankly and satirically on political and social topics such as class, war, feminism, and the Salvation Army, in plays such as Arms and the Man (1894), Major Barbara (1905), and, most famously, Pygmalion (1913). His work introduced the theater of ideas to the English stage; where Ibsen turned melodrama into naturalism, Shaw parodied melodrama in order to develop an intellectual comedy of manners. He made fun of societies notion using for the purpose of educating and changing. His plays tended to show the accepted attitude, then demolished that attitude while showing his own solutions.

Some of Bernard Shaw’s Plays

• Arms and the Man (1894) – about love and war and honour.
• Mrs. Warren’s Profession – prostitution.
• Major Barbara (1905) – a munitions manufacturer gives more to the world (jobs, etc.) while the Salvation Army only prolongs of the status quo.
• Pygmalion (1913) – shows the transforming of a flower girl into a society woman, and exposes the phoniness of society. The musical My Fair Lady was based on this play.

EXISTENTIAL DRAMA

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

Existentialism emerged from the early 20th century as a philosophical and cultural movement (theology, drama, art, literature and psychology) wherein the experiences of the individual are at the center of understanding human existence, rather than moral or scientific thought. It was a rejection of systemic modes of thought associated with earlier philosophy, religion or romantic belief, emphasizing a reliance on authentic experience rather than external idea. It stresses the individual’s position as a self-determining agent responsible for his or her own choices. It is an emphasis upon man’s creating his own nature as well as the importance of personal freedom, decision, and commitment.

Themes in Existentialism

Here is a list of themes that are important in existentialism. They are not all taken up by every existentialist thinker and they are not entirely consistent with one another.

1. Importance of the individual: The leading question in this case is "What does it mean to be existing as a human being?" This question leads out in a number of directions.

2. Importance of choice: We are constituted by our decisions. In fact, being human sometimes involves decisions that transcend the realm of moral and conventional concerns.

3. Anxiety regarding life, death, contingencies, and extreme situations: Both the chance events and extreme situations of life make evident the threat of non-being and cause us anxiety.

4. Meaning and absurdity: Sartre spoke of an unfulfillable desire for complete fulfillment and thereby expressed the meaning of absurdity.

5. Authenticity: Sartre’s opposition to bad-faith (or self-deception) is an example of what is meant by authenticity. We need to face up to our situation rather than making things worse with self-deceptive approaches to religion, metaphysics, morality, or science.

6. Social criticism: Many existentialists deconstructed social conventions and practices. They are forms of hiding and expressions of fear and ignorance. Existentialist literature often carried out this unmasking of convention and social patterns with enormous effect (especially in the novels of Camus).

7. Importance of personal relations: It must be said that the existentialist imperative to be an individual is front and center but another imperative becomes important in some existantialists (especially Buber): be an individual-in-community. Religious existentialists see the God-human relation as the ground of all relations between human beings.

8. Atheism and Religion: Here is one of the greatest disagreements among existentialists, testifying perhaps to the inescapable vagueness of the field of life within which human beings must make decisions that create meaning. Though the nature of that field of life and its ground are dramatically contested, all existentialists hold that a decision in relation to it is the key issue for human beings.

9. Religion

Religion is a deeply contested point within existentialism. While some existentialists reject the reality of God, other existentialists have no problem with God and see an appropriate tension between divine and human freedom. However, there is some agreement: all existentialists tend to be suspicious of religion as such (meaning religious organizations and religious systems).

Writers and Works

Soren Kierkegaard was the first philosopher to actually consider that he wrote about Existentialism. Since his time existential approaches to philosophy about life have grown very greatly in influence and also appeared in several forms influenced by numerous writers and thinkers. Soren Kierkegaard has been called the father of existentialism. Existentialism is a non-rigorous form of philosophical enquiry into human nature and the human predicament.  Everything else in existence merely exists; humans are aware of their existence, and therefore have the potential to understand it and control it. We are self-creating creatures: we can choose what we want to be, and choose to be it. The moment of choice, the leap into existence, comes between two fixed points: the nothingness from which we come and the nothingness to which we return after we die. Our glory is the self-defining choice; our agony is that we need to make it. The idea was formulated by Kierkegaard in the first half of the 19th century, was developed by Husserl a century later, and had enormous prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. In literature, the chief existentialist writer was Jean-Paul Sartre. In his (autobiographical) novels Nausea and the three-volume The Roads to Freedom, and in such plays as The Flies and Huis Clos, he examined the idea that a Man is a useless passionate and the plight of the passive hero longing but unable to contrive some self-defining act. Other French writers took up the style, notably Albert Camus. The quest for identity underlies much European drama and prose fiction of the 1950s and beyond, and existentialist thinking underlies (but does not dominate) works as diverse as Gnter Grass's The Flounder, John Updike's Rabbit and the plays of Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot is often called an existentialist drama, which in some ways it is, but Beckett never ascribed the philosophy to his work. In the world of the play, devoid of systems, purpose and markers of time, all that is left is to simply exist. The fact that Vladimir and Estragon do little except exist highlights some existential themes. It is more accurately described as absurdism, which contains the idea that there is no meaning found in the world beyond the meaning we give it.

COMEDY OF MENACE

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

The word ‘menace’ means as a noun ‘A threatening quality’ or ‘a dangerous or troublesome person or thing’ and as a verb it calls ‘threaten’. "Comedy of menace" was a term first used to describe Harold Pinter's plays by the drama critic Irving Wardle. He borrowed the term from the subtitle of one of David Campton's plays, The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace. A comedy is a humorous play which contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations and so on in order to amuse and make the audience laugh. A menace is something which threatens to cause harm, evil or injury which seems quite incompatible with the idea of a comedy. However, as The Birthday Party shows, it is quite possible for a playwright to create both humour and menace in the same play, and even at the same time, in order to produce certain effects and to transmit ideas to the audience. Comedy of menace can also be called “Dark comedy”.

Comedy of menace suggests that although they are funny, they are also frightening or menacing in a vague and undefined way. The phrase “comedy of menace” as a standalone description inspires both positive and negative feelings. Comedy is used during a dangerous situation to cause audiences to draw judgments about a particular character or communication. The words used are the focus of often powerful stories that create conflicting emotions from its audience. The title “Comedy of Menace” immediately brings contradictions to mind, because comedy is generally something that makes people laugh, and the word "menace" implies something threatening. Quite literally, then, this phrase involves laughing at an ominous situation.

Writers and Works

Harold Pinter has used “Comedy of menace”  in his plays such as Birthday Party, The Room, and A Slight Ache. Pinter’s comedies of menace have a rather simplistic setting; they might focus on one or two powerful images and usually are set in just one room. A powerful force that isn’t specifically defined to the audience threatens characters in the plays. Audiences focus on the communications between the characters and generate the feeling and gist of the play from the conversations. Some plays are able to successfully mingle drama with comedy. One specific example from The Birthday Party is a character joking around about being in a menacing situation while cleaning his gun to deal with the threat. The goal of such works is to generate tension around the situation or to alter the views of an audience about a particular character; after all, someone joking while planning to shoot another person is generally not a trustworthy person.

Pinter himself has been quoted as saying he’s never been able to write a happy play, and that a situation can be both true and false. Summarizing his plays as comedy plays might be a misunderstanding; most critics described his characters with negative connotations. By creating humor around a very dramatic or tense situation, audiences are left feeling confused at the end, because of the range of emotions experienced.

                            

     

KITCHEN-SINK DRAMA

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

Kitchen sink realism or kitchen sink drama is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose ‘heroes’ usually could be described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism, which often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.

The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions.

The kitchen-sink drama is placed in an ordinary domestic setting and typically tells a relatively mundane family story. Family tensions often come to the fore with realistic conflict between husband and wife, parent and child, between siblings and with the wider community. The family may also pull together in unity against outer forces that range from the rent-collector to rival families. 

Kitchen sink dramas may also framed as 'serious art', intending to impress rather than entertain. They may capture social setting for posterity and gain admiration in later days by students of history. They may even be a cathartic act by their authors, expunging the traumas of a deprived childhood. Kitchen sink drama is a genre in which the British seem to specialize. Americans prefer their soaps and dramas to be a bit less dismal. There was in particularly a group of 'angry young men' in the 1960s UK playwright scene who specialised in such plays.

Writers and Works

The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the idiom. The gritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as Coronation Street and East Enders.

A Taste of Honey is written by a British dramatist Shelagh Delaney. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalise British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented. A Taste of Honey is set in Salford in North West England in the 1950s. It tells the story of Jo, a seventeen-year-old working class girl, and her mother, Helen, who is presented as crude and sexually indiscriminate. A Taste of Honey comments on, and puts into question, class, race, gender and sexual orientation in mid-twentieth-century Britain. It became known as a "kitchen sink" play, part of a genre revolutionising British theatre at the time.

The Glass Menagerie is a four-character memory play by Tennessee Williams that premiered in 1944 and catapulted Williams from obscurity to fame. The play has strong autobiographical elements, featuring characters based on Williams himself, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister Rose.

PROBLEM PLAY

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

The name problem play is generally given to plays which are about social issues, for example, those of such 19th-century European writers as Dumas, Ibsen and Shaw, and such authors as Galsworthy, Hellman, Miller and so on. Often, though not always, problem plays use the conventions of naturalism, depicting ordinary people in everyday clothes and settings, using ordinary speech. Many problem plays also conform to the conventions of the well-made play, devised in 19th-century France. In this, the drama begins with an exposition which sets the scene and gradually reveals the problem or secret at the heart of the plot. There follows a series of alarms, excursions and developments, often involving the revelation of some crucial secret which has so far not been known to one of the central characters. The moment of disclosure of this secret, the turning-point beyond which no lives will be the same again often the problem is resolved by the destruction or exaltation of the leading character is a main climax. It is followed by an unwinding of the action, recapitulating and revisiting what has gone before in the light of what the characters now know, and there is often a further surprise at the moment of curtain-fall. The structure is analogous to sonata-form in classical music.

Writers and Works

It can engender comedy or tragedy: Ibsen's A Doll's House and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest are outstanding examples of the well-made play. The coincidence of the two structures, problem plays and well-made plays, led to some of the finest European drama between 1850 and 1950, as well as to some of the worst, and it is still regarded by some bourgeois audiences as the ultimate theatrical experience: a play about ordinary people with a convincing, and clearly comprehensible, emotional and intellectual structure.

 

DIDACTIC DRAMA (PROPAGANDA PLAY)

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

Didacticism is a term that refers to a particular philosophy in art and literature that emphasizes the idea that different forms of art and literature ought to convey information and instructions along with pleasure and entertainment. Didacticism describes a type of literature that is written to inform or instruct the reader, especially in moral or political lessons. While they are also meant to entertain the audience, the aesthetics in a didactic work of literature are subordinate to the message it imparts. In modern times, “didactic” has become a somewhat pejorative way to describe a work of literature, as contemporary authors generally do not attempt to teach moral lessons through their writing. However, the original definition of didacticism did not carry this negative connotation.

The word didacticism comes from the Ancient Greek word didaktikos, which meant “relating to teaching, education, or wisdom.” Didacticism in literature aims at offering something additional to its readers than merely intending to offer pleasure and entertainment. Some critics may argue that didacticism may reduce literature to a tool for boring instructions but nevertheless it definitely gives readers a chance to improve their conduct and comprehend evils which may lead him astray. The word didactic is frequently used for those literary texts which are overloaded with informative or realistic matter and are marked by the omission of graceful and pleasing details. Didactic, therefore, becomes a derogatory term referring to the forms of literature that are ostentatiously dull and erudite. However, some literary texts are entertaining as well as didactic.

Morality plays of medieval Europe were perhaps the best exemplars of didactic literature. These plays were a type of theatrical performance which made use of allegorical characters to teach the audience a moral lesson. The most common themes that that were presented in morality plays were what are commonly known as the seven deadly sins: pride, lust, greed, envy, wrath, sloth and gluttony. Another theme that such plays exploited was that repentance and redemption was possible for a person even when that person intentionally gives in to temptation. Historically, morality plays were a transitional step that lay between Christian mystery plays and the secular plays of the Renaissance theatre.

Writers and Works

Every textbook and “how-to” book is an example of didacticism, as their explicit purpose is to instruct and educate. Books written for children also often have a didactic intent, as they are often created to teach children about moral values. Religious sermons are also usually examples of didacticism, as the preacher is intending to use the religious text to give the congregation moral guidance. While didacticism in literature is generally frowned up nowadays, it was a key feature of many ancient texts, and remained popular up until about the 18th century. It was seen as a benefit for the reading audience to have these texts to use as moral guidance. While there are examples of didacticism in more recent literature, they are fewer and further between. Edgar Allen Poe even went so far as to refer to didacticism as the worst thing an author could do in his treatise The Poetic Principal. Poe and others considered didacticism to be a detriment to the literature which it burdened down.

John Bunyan’s novel The Pilgrim’s Progress is a famous didacticism example. Bunyan makes the allegory and lesson he is trying to impart clear: the main character’s name is Christian and he travels from the City of Destruction on his way to Mount Zion. Along the way, Christian comes up against many obstacles, and his journey through and around these obstacles helps to instruct the reading audience how to overcome obstacles themselves by leading moral lives. Bunyan makes the references to Biblical stories obvious so that readers could more easily grasp the moral lessons he was trying to teach therein.

Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, about an orphaned boy in poverty, is an example of a Victorian didactic novel. Dickens wanted to dramatize the difficulties that poor people had in society, thereby making the reading public more sympathetic. The point of didacticism in this novel was to change popular opinion and encourage a more moral viewpoint on the part of citizens of Dickens’s day. In the above excerpt, Dickens describes the horrible options available to poor people, which were either to die slowly inside the workhouse or quickly outside of it. Though poor people had some access to food inside the workhouse, it was meager and accompanied by such grueling work that they could not survive those conditions. Dickens wanted to motivate his reading public to more fully consider the issues in his day surrounding poverty.

ONE-ACT PLAY

Definition, Origin and Characteristics 

A one-act play is a short piece of drama that consists of only one act. It usually has one or more scenes, but does not exceed one act. It is similar to a short story in its limitations. There is a complete drama within one act. It is brief, condensed, and single in effect. One situation or episode is presented, permitting no minor plots or side actions that may distract attention for the single purpose and effect being developed. Characters are few in number, quickly introduced, and very limited in character development. Dialogue and plot must carry the action forward smoothly and quickly. In recent years the 10-minute play known as "flash drama" has emerged as a popular sub-genre of the one-act play, especially in writing competitions. The origin of the one-act play may be traced to the very beginning of drama: in ancient Greece, Cyclops, a satyr play by Euripides, is an early example. Like all drama, one act plays are made up of the same elements that are necessary for short stories : Theme, Plot, Character, and dialogue.

In a full-length play, all characters, plots, and subplots need to point to and support the theme. The one-act is not much different, except the subplots will likely be absent.

Plot

This is much different in the one-act than in the full-length. For a full-length play, the plot is the series and sequence of events that lead the hero (and the audience) on the journey. In a one-act play there is really only time for one significant event. This is the determining place for the hero, where all is won or lost. Events that lead up to this must be incorporated into the script without the benefit of the audience seeing them. And any events that follow must be inferred or understood by the audience that they will occur.

Character

There is really only enough time in this to get to know one character well -- the hero. In the short time that the one-act play is going, it is the hero's event that the audience is experiencing; again, there isn't time for more than that. Some characteristics of the supporting characters, including the antagonist, will need to be portrayed for the story to move forward, but it is the character of the protagonist that is vital to the story line.

Dialogue

Economy is the key here. Each line must be crafted carefully to focus on the theme, the incident, and the character of the protagonist. The dialogue need not be terse, but must be concise and full of meaning. Any lines that do not point to the focus of the play should be carefully considered whether they are needed.

Writers and Works

• Edward Albee -- The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002)
• Samuel Beckett – Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
• Anton Chekhov – A Marriage Proposal (1890)
• Israel Horovitz – Line (1974)
• Eugène Ionesco – The Bald Soprano (1950)
• Arthur Miller – A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)
• August Strindberg – Pariah (1889), Motherly Love (1892), and The First Warning (1892)
• Thornton Wilder – The Long Christmas Dinner (1931)
• Cormac McCarthy - The Sunset Limited (2006)

Unit 2: The Novel

BILDUNGSROMAN- (Formation Novel) This is a term more or less synonymous with Erziehungsroman which literally means an “upbringing” or “education” novel.  It refers to a novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine. This describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life. Wieland’s Agathon (1765-6) is taken to be the earliest example. The most famous examples are: Goethe’s Die Leiden des JungenWerthers (1774) and his Wilhelm MeistersLehrjahre (1795-6) and became well known in Britain through Thomas Carlyle’s translation. Novels in English that fall into this category are Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-50), George Meredith’s The Adventures ofHenry Richmond (1871) and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903).

EPISTOLARY NOVEL

Epistolary Novel is a kind of novel in the form of letters. It was a particularform, popular in the eighteenth century. Among the more famous examples are: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1747, 1748); Smollet’sHumphry Clinker (1771); Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761); and Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). Less well known are Harriet Lee’s Errors of Innocence (1786), John Moore’s Mordaunt(1800) and Swinburne’s Love’s Cross Currents (1877). The epistolary novel slowly fell out of use in the nineteenth century. By the time Jane Austen popularized the technique of the omniscient narrator, the epistolary form had become somewhat archaic. For example, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) was originally written as an epistolary novel, but Austen rewrote it using a third-person omniscient narrator. However, Mark Harris’ Wake Up, Stupid (1959) and John Barth’s Letters (1979) are interesting modern examples. It is usual for letters to make up some part of a novel.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

            The term “stream of consciousness” is coined by William James in Principles ofPsychology (1890) to denote the flow of inner experiences. It refers to the technique which seeks to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind.It is also known as Interior monologue. Lines in Laurence Sterne’s TristramShandy (1760-67) resemble this technique. Lengthy self-communing passages have been found in some nineteenth century novels are also close to interior monologue.

            The interior monologue has been highly developed in LeutnantGustl, a satire on the official code of military honour by Arthur Schnitzler, a German playwright and novelist. However, it wasEdouardDujardin in Les Laurierssont coupés (1888) used the technique in a way that proved influential. James Joyce exploited the possibilities and took the technique almost to a point ne plus ultra in Ulysses (1922), which presents an account of the experiences (the actions, thoughts, feelings) of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, during the twenty-four hours of 16 June 1904, in Dublin. The beginning of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man (1916) is an early indication of his interest in this technique. Meantime, Dorothy Richardson had begun to compile her twelve-volume Pilgrimage (1915-67) and Marcel Proust was at work on the equally ambitious A la recherchu du temps perdu (1913-27). Henry James and Dostoievski had already indicated, through long passages of introspective writing, that they were aware of something like the stream of consciousness technique.

            Since the 1920s many writers have learned from Joyce and emulated him. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1931) are two of the most distinguished developers of the stream of consciousness method.

PICARESQUE NOVEL

            The word “picaro” mean “rogue.” It tells the life of a knave or picaroon who is the servant of several masters. Through his experience the picaroon satirizes the society in which he lives. The picaresque novel originated in the sixteenth century Spain, the earliest example being the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1553). The two most famous Spanish authors of picaresque novels were Mateo Alemán, who wrote Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604), and Francisco Quevedo, who wrote La vidadelBuscón (1626). Both books were widely read in Europe. Other picaresque novels include: Thomas Nashe’sTheUnfortunate Traveller (1594), Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715), Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743) and Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). A more recent example is Thomas Mann’s unfinished Confessions of Felix Krull (1954). The German term for this kind of story is Räuberroman.

Avant –Garde

The term “avant-garde” is an important and much used term in the history of art and literature. It clearly has a military origin (advance guard) and as applied to art and literature denotes exploration, pathfinding, innovation and invention; something new, something advanced (ahead of its time) and revolutionary. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the term and concept appear in both cultural and political contexts. Gradually the cultural-artistic meaning displaced the socio-political meaning. It has been commonplace to refer to avant-garde art or literature. Symbolist poets like Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé as the first members of the avant-garde. The playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd and novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute  also form part of the avant-garde movement.

Historical Novel

Historical Novel is a form of fictional narrative which reconstructs history and re-creates it imaginatively. Both historical and fictional characters may appear. Through writing fiction, the good historical novelist researches his or her chosen period thoroughly and strives for verisimilitude. In Britain this genre appears to have developed form Mme de La Fayette’s Princesse de Cléves (1678) and then via the Gothic novel. Much Gothic fiction was set in the Middle Ages. Maria Edgeworth’sCastle Rackrent (1800), usually taken to be the first example of a regional novel in English. It is the first fully fledged historical novel. She followed this with Adelaide in 1806. Jane Porter publishedThe Scottish Chiefs (1810) and The Pastor’s Fireside (1815).

 In 1814 Sir Walter Scott published Waverley, the first of his many novels. Scott remains the supreme example of the historical novelist in English Literature. As a result of his massive contribution to the genre its popularity spread during the nineteenth century. For example, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-8), Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia(1853), Westward Ho! (1855) and Hereward the Wake (1866); Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) and Griffith Gaunt (1866), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Micah Clarke (1889), The White Company (1891), The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and Rodney Stone (1896), Stanley Weyman’sA Gentleman of France (1893), The Red Cockade (1895), Under the RedRobe (1896), Count Hannibal (1901) and Chippinge (1906), Maurice Hewlett’s The Forest Lovers (1898) and The Queen’s Quair (1904). Charles Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy also wrote historical novels.

In this twentieth century, this kind of fiction has not been so popular but there have been a number of distinguished practitioners. For example Robert Graves, author of I Claudius (1934) and several others; Georgette Heyer who wrote a great many historical romances set in the Regency period such as Devil’s Cub(1934), Regency Buck (1935), Faro’s Daughter (1941), Naomi Mitchison, author of The Corn King and The Spring Queen (1931) and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), Mary Renault, the author of The Lastof the Wine (1956), The King Must Die (1958),The Bull from the Sea (1962) and Funeral Games (1981), William Golding, the author of  The Inheritors (1955), The Spire (1964) and the trilogy Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) and J.G.Farrell who wrote the outstanding novel The Siege of Krishnapur (1973).

            Other historical novelists of note have been Charlotte Yonge, Carola Oman, Patrick O’Brian, Mary Stewart and Alfred Duggan. Among European historical novelists Balzac, Stendhal, Thomas Mann and Ivo Andrić have been pre-eminent. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is the greatest of the Russian historical novels.

Science Fiction

The term “science fiction” was first used, it seems, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, in William Wilson’s A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject.A science fiction story is a narrative of short story, novella or novel length. Attempting to define it,M.H.Abrams says, “is applied to those narratives in which—unlike in pure

fantasy—an explicit attempt is made to render plausible the fictional world by

reference to known or imagined scientific principles, or to a projected advance

in technology, or to a drastic change in the organization of society” (279). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often considered a precursor of science fiction. But, basing a work of fiction on a concrete scientific principle did not occur until later in the nineteenth century through the writings of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and H.G.Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

The term was eventually put into circulation in the late 1920s by Hugo Gernsback (1894-67) who had originally coined the word “scientifiction.” Gradually, Science fiction replaced the term ‘scientific romance’, and science fiction is quite often categorized as speculative fiction. A few important authors of science fiction are Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard, and Doris Lessing. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave NewWorld, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle form a few examples of science fiction.

Detective Fiction

The commission and detection of crime with the motives, actions, arraignment, judgement, and punishment of a criminal is one of the great paradigms of narrative in detective fiction.The investigator functions as the protagonist and studies such as Julian Symon’sBloody Murder (1972) have dealt elaborately on the nineteenth and early to mid-20^th century development of fictional detection. William Godwin’s Caleb Wiliams(1894),EugéneVidocq’sMémoires, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House(1853), Wilkie Collins’The Moonstone (1868)and The Woman in White(1859), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment(1866) have been precursors of detective fiction.

It is agreed that detective fiction came of age in the creation of Sherlock Holmes’ A Study in Scarlet (1887). However, it was with the writings of Dashiell Hammett, James M.Cain, Raymond Chandler that detective fiction began to emerge as a genre in the nineteenth century. Detective fiction has become one of the significant forms of prose in the U.K. and the U.S ever since 1945. Among the modern authors who deserve mention are Linda Barnes, Lawrence Block, Lilian Jackson Braun, Robert Campbell, Patricia Cornwall, John Dunning, JamesEllroy. Manuel VäzquezMontalbán in Spain, Maria-Antonia Oliver in Denmark, Peter Hөeg in South Africa, James McClure in Australia, Umberto Eco and Leonardo Sciascia in Italy.

Gothic Fiction

The Gothic Novel is a type of prose fiction, propounded by Horace Walpole’s The Castleof Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels turned out to have natural explanations).The principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting

mystery and a variety of horrors. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford's Vathek(1786)—the setting of which is both medieval and Oriental and the subject both erotic and sadistic—Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries ofUdolpho(1794) and other highly successful Gothic romances, and Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk (1796), which exploited, with considerable literary skill, the shock-effects of a narrative involving rape, incest, murder, and diabolism.

Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford's Vathek(1786)—the setting of which is both medieval and Oriental and the subject both erotic and sadistic—Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries ofUdolpho(1794) and other highly successful Gothic romances, and Matthew Gregory Lewis' The Monk (1796), which exploited, with considerable literary skill, the shock-effects of a narrative involving rape, incest, murder, and diabolism. Jane Austen made good-humoured fun of the more decorous instances of the Gothic vogue in Northanger Abbey(1817)

Unit 3: The Romantic Age

     

         PROSE

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)

LIFE. Lamb was born (1775) in the midst of London, and never felt at home anywhere else. London is a world in itself, and of all its corners there were only three that Lamb found comfortable. The first was the modest little home where he lived with his gifted sister Mary, reading with her through the long evenings, or tenderly caring for her during a period of insanity; the second was the commercial house where he toiled as a clerk; the third was the busy street which lay between home and work,-- a street forever ebbing and flowing with a great tide of human life that affected Lamb profoundly, mysteriously, as Wordsworth was affected by the hills or the sea.

The boy's education began at Christ's Hospital, where he met Coleridge and entered with him into a lifelong friendship. At fifteen he left school to help support his family; and for the next thirty-three years he was a clerk, first in the South Sea House, then in the East India Company. Rather late in life he began to write, his prime object being to earn a little extra money, which he sadly needed. Then the Company, influenced partly by his faithful service and partly by his growing reputation, retired him on a pension. Most eagerly, like a boy out of school, he welcomed his release, intending to do great things with his pen; but curiously enough he wrote less, and less excellently, than before. His decline began with his hour of liberty. For a time, in order that his invalid sister might have quiet, he lived outside the city, at Islington and Enfield; but he missed the work, the street, the crowd, and especially did he miss his old habits. He had no feeling for nature, nor for any art except that which he found in old books. "I hate the country," he wrote; and the cause of his dislike was that, not knowing what to do with himself, he grew weary of a day that was "all day long."

The earlier works of Lamb (some poems, a romance and a drama) are of little interest except to critics. The first book that brought him any considerable recognition was the "Tales from Shakespeare". This was a summary of the stories used by Shakespeare in his plays, and was largely the work of Mary Lamb, who had a talent for writing children's books. The charm of the "Tales" lies in the fact that the Lambs were so familiar with old literature that they reproduced the stories in a style which might have done credit to a writer in the days of Elizabeth. The book is still widely read, and is as good as any other if one wants that kind of book. But the chief thing in "Macbeth" or "The Tempest" is the poetry, not the tale or the plot; and even if one wants only the story, why not get it from Shakespeare himself? Another and better book by Lamb of the same general kind is "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakespeare". In this book he saves us a deal of unprofitable reading by gathering together the best of the Elizabethan dramas, to which he adds some admirable notes of criticism or interpretation.

Here is a little book called "Essays of Elia" which stands out from all other prose works of the age. If we examine this book to discover the source of its charm, we find it pervaded by a winsome "human" quality which makes us want to know the man who wrote it. In this respect Charles Lamb differs from certain of his contemporaries. Wordsworth was too solitary, Coleridge and De Quincey too unbalanced, Shelley too visionary and Keats too aloof to awaken a feeling of personal allegiance; but the essays of Lamb reveal two qualities which, like fine gold, are current among readers of all ages. These are sympathy and humor. By the one we enter understandingly into life, while the other keeps us from taking life too tragically.

William Hazlitt
(1778-1830)

William Hazlitt was the son of a Unitarian minister. He went to Paris in his youth with the aim of becoming a painter, but gradually convinced himself that he could not excel in this art. He then turned to journalism and literature, and came into close association with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Hunt, and others of the Romantic School.

He was, however, of a sensitive and difficult temperament, and sooner or later quarrelled with most of his friends. Though a worshiper of Napoleon, whose life he wrote, he was a strong liberal in politics, and supposed himself persecuted for his opinions.

Of all Hazlitt's voluminous writings, those which retain most value to-day are his literary criticisms and his essays on general topics. His clear and vivacious style rose at times to a rare beauty; and when the temper of his work was not marred by his touchiness and egotism he wrote with great charm and a delicate fancy.

The essay Of Persons One Should Wish To Have Seen shows in a high degree the tact and grace of Hazlitt's best writing, and his power of creating a distinctive atmosphere.

It would be difficult to find a paper of this length which conveys so much of the special quality of the literary circle which added so much to the glory of English letters in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Works

	Disadvantage Of Intellectual Superiority
	The Fight
	My First Aquaintance With Poets
	Good Nature
	Ignorance Of The Learned
	Indian Jugglers
	A Journey
	Knowledge of Character
	Persons One Would Wish To Have Seen

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

POETRY

There is but one way to know Wordsworth, and that way leads to his nature poems. Though he lived in a revolutionary age, his life was singularly uneventful. His letters are terribly prosaic; and his "Excursion", in which he attempted an autobiography, has so many dull lines that few have patience to read it. Though he asserted, finely, that there is but one great society on earth, "the noble living and the noble dead," he held no communion with the great minds of the past or of the present. He lived in his own solitary world, and his only real companion was nature. To know nature at first hand, and to reflect human thought or feeling in nature's pure presence,--this was his chief object. His field, therefore, is a small one, but in that field he is the greatest master that England has thus far produced.

LIFE. Wordsworth is as inseparably connected with the English Lake District as Burns with the Lowlands or Scott with the Border. A large part of the formative period of his life was spent out of doors amid beautiful scenery, where he felt the abounding life of nature streaming upon him in the sunshine, or booming in his ears with the steady roar of the March winds. He felt also a living presence that met him in the loneliest wood, or spoke to him in the flowers, or preceded him over the wind-swept hills. He was one of those favored mortals who are surest of the Unseen. From school he would hurry away to his skating or bird-nesting or aimless roaming, and every new day afield was to him "One of those heavenly days that cannot die."

WORDSWORTH AND THE REVOLUTION. From the Lake Region he went to Cambridge, but found little in college life to attract or hold him. Then, stirred by the promise of the Revolution, he went to France, where his help was eagerly sought by rival parties; for in that day every traveler from America or England, whether an astute Jefferson or a lamblike Wordsworth, was supposed to be, by virtue of his country, a master politician Wordsworth threw himself rather blindly into the Revolution, joined the Girondists (the ruling faction in 1792) and might have gone to the guillotine with the leaders of that party had not his friends brought him home by the simple expedient of cutting off his supply of money. Thus ended ingloriously the only adventure that ever quickened his placid life.

For a time Wordsworth mourned over the failure of his plans, but his grief turned to bitterness when the Revolution passed over into the Reign of Terror and ended in the despotism of Napoleon. His country was now at war with France, and he followed his country, giving mild support to Burke and the Tory party. After a few uncertain years, during which he debated his calling in life, he resolved on two things: to be a poet, and to bring back to English poetry the romantic spirit and the naturalness of expression which had been displaced by the formal elegance of the age of Pope and Johnson.

For that resolution we are indebted partly to Coleridge, who had been attracted by some of Wordsworth's early poems, and who encouraged him to write more. From the association of these two men came the famous "Lyrical Ballads" (1798), a book which marks the beginning of a new era in English poetry.

To Wordsworth's sister Dorothy we are even more indebted. It was she who soothed Wordsworth's disappointment, reminded him of the world of nature in which alone he was at home, and quietly showed him where his power lay.

PERSONAL TRAITS. The latter half of Wordsworth's life was passed in the Lake Region, at Grasmere and Rydal Mount for the most part, the continuity being broken by walking trips in Britain or on the Continent. A very quiet, uneventful life it was, but it revealed two qualities which are of interest to Wordsworth's readers. The first was his devotion to his art; the second was his granite steadfastness. His work was at first neglected, while the poems of Scott, Byron and Tennyson in succession attained immense popularity. The critics were nearly all against him; misunderstanding his best work and ridiculing the rest. The ground of their opposition was, that his theory of the utmost simplicity in poetry was wrong; their ridicule was made easier by the fact that Wordsworth produced as much bad work as good. Moreover, he took himself very seriously, had no humor, and, as visitors like Emerson found to their disappointment, was interested chiefly in himself and his own work. For was he not engaged in the greatest of all projects, an immense poem ("The Recluse") which should reflect the universe in the life of one man, and that man William Wordsworth? Such self-satisfaction invited attack; even Lamb, the gentlest of critics, could hardly refrain from poking fun at it: "Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to town; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind." Slowly but surely Wordsworth won recognition, not simply in being made Laureate, but in having his ideal of poetry vindicated. Poets in England and America began to follow him; the critics were silenced, if not convinced. While the popularity of Scott and Byron waned, the readers of Wordsworth increased steadily, finding him a poet not of the hour but of all time. "If a single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide," says Emerson, "the huge world will come around to him." If the reading world has not yet come around to Wordsworth, that is perhaps not the poet's fault.

WORDSWORTH: HIS THEME AND THEORY. The theory which Wordsworth and Coleridge formulated was simply this: that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful human feeling. Its only subjects are nature and human nature; its only object is to reflect the emotions awakened by our contemplation of the world or of humanity; its language must be as direct and simple as possible, such language as rises unbidden to the lips whenever the heart is touched. Though some of the world's best poets have taken a different view, Wordsworth maintained steadily that poetry must deal with common subjects in the plainest language; that it must not attempt to describe, in elegant phrases, what a poet is supposed to feel about art or some other subject selected for its poetic possibilities.

THE POEMS OF WORDSWORTH. As the reading of literature is the main thing, the only word of criticism which remains is to direct the beginner; and direction is especially necessary in dealing with Wordsworth, who wrote voluminously, and who lacked both the critical judgment and the sense of humor to tell him what parts of his work were inferior or ridiculous:

There's something in a flying horse,

There's something in a huge balloon! To be sure; springs in the one, gas in the other; but if there were anything more poetic in horse or balloon, Wordsworth did not discover it. There is something also in a cuckoo clock, or even in

A household tub, one such as those

Which women use to wash their clothes. Such banalities are to be found in the work of a poet who could produce the exquisite sonnet "On Westminster Bridge," the finely simple "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the stirring "Ode to Duty," the tenderly reflective "Tintern Abbey," and the magnificent "Intimations of Immortality," which Emerson (who was not a very safe judge) called "the high water mark of poetry in the nineteenth century." These five poems may serve as the first measure of Wordsworth's genius.

POEMS OF NATURE. A few of Wordsworth's best nature poems are: "Early Spring," "Three Years She Grew," "The Fountain," "My Heart Leaps Up," "The Tables Turned," "To a Cuckoo," "To a Skylark" (the second poem, beginning, "Ethereal minstrel") and "Yarrow Revisited." The spirit of all his nature poems is reflected in "Tintern Abbey," which gives us two complementary views of nature, corresponding to Wordsworth's earlier and later experience. The first is that of the boy, roaming foot-loose over the face of nature, finding, as Coleridge said, "Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere." The second is that of the man who returns to the scenes of his boyhood, finds them as beautiful as ever, but pervaded now by a spiritual quality,--"something which defies analysis, undefined and ineffable, which must be felt and perceived by the soul."

It was this spiritual view of nature, as a reflection of the Divine, which profoundly influenced Bryant, Emerson and other American writers. The essence of Wordsworth's teaching, in his nature poems, appears in the last two lines of his "Skylark," a bird that soars the more gladly to heaven because he must soon return with joy to his own nest:

Type of the wise, who soar but never roam: True to the kindred points of heaven and home.

POEMS OF HUMBLE LIFE. Of the poems more closely associated with human life, a few the best are: "Michael," "The Highland Reaper," "The Leech Gatherers," "Margaret" (in "The Excursion"), "Brougham Castle," "The Happy Warrior," "Peel Castle in a Storm," "Three Years She Grew," "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways" and "She was a Phantom of Delight." In such poems we note two significant characteristics: that Wordsworth does not seek extraordinary characters, but is content to show the hidden beauty in the lives of plain men and women; and that his heroes and heroines dwell, as he said, where "labor still preserves his rosy face." They are natural men and women, and are therefore simple and strong; the quiet light in their faces is reflected from the face of the fields. In his emphasis on natural simplicity, virtue, beauty, Wordsworth has again been, as he desired, a teacher of multitudes.

THE SONNETS. In the number and fine quality of his sonnets Wordsworth has no superior in English poetry. Simplicity, strength, deep thought, fine feeling, careful workmanship,--these qualities are present in measure more abundant than can be found elsewhere in the poet's work. A few sonnets which can be heartily recommended are: "Westminster Bridge," "The Seashore," "The World," "Venetian Republic," "To Sleep," "Toussaint L'Ouverture," "Afterthoughts," "To Milton" (sometimes called "London, 1802") and the farewell to Scott when he sailed in search of health, beginning, "A trouble not of clouds or weeping rain."

Not until one has learned to appreciate Wordsworth at his best will it be safe to attempt "The Prelude, or the Growth of a Poet's Mind". Most people grow weary of this poem, which is too long; but a few read it with pleasure for its portrayal of Wordsworth's education at the hand of Nature, or for occasional good lines which lure us on like miners in search of gold. "The Prelude", though written at thirty-five, was not published till after Wordsworth's death, and for this reason: he had planned an immense poem, dealing with Nature, Man and Society, which he called "The Recluse", and which he likened to a Gothic cathedral. His "Prelude" was the "ante-chapel" of this work; his miscellaneous odes, sonnets and narrative poems were to be as so many "cells and oratories"; other parts of the structure were "The Home at Grasmere" and "The Excursion", which he may have intended as transepts, or as chapels.

This great work was left unfinished, and one may say of it, as of Spenser's "Faery Queen", that it is better so. Like other poets of venerable years Wordsworth wrote many verses that were better left in the inkpot; and it is a pity, in dealing with so beautiful and necessary a thing as poetry, that one should ever reach the point of saying, sadly but truthfully, "Enough is too much."

TIT BITS: •  

     'The Prelude' or 'The Growth of a Poet's Mind' is an autobiographical poem in blank verse addressed to Coleridge.

 •   'Resolution and Independence' (1807) is also known as 'The Leach Gatherer'.

 •   'Peter Bell' (1819) is dedicated to Southey. The ludicrous nature of part of the poem made it the subject of many parodies, including Shelley's 'Peter Bell The Third'.

 •   Became poet laureate in 1843, succeeding Southey.

 •   Byron and Shelley mocked Wordsworth as 'simple' and 'dull', Keats distrusted what he called the 'egostical sublime', and Hazlitt and later Browning, deplored him as 'The Lost Leader' who had abandoned his early radical faith. While Arnold praised his art as "The bare, sheer. penerating power " of Wordsworth.

COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY. The story of these two men is a commentary on the uncertainties of literary fortune. Both won greater reward and reputation than fell to the lot of Wordsworth; but while the fame of the latter poet mounts steadily with the years, the former have become, as it were, footnotes to the great contemporary with whom they were associated, under the name of "Lake Poets," for half a glorious century.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834): The tragedy "Remorse", which Coleridge wrote, is as nothing compared with the tragedy of his own life. He was a man of superb natural gifts, of vast literary culture, to whose genius the writers of that age--Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Shelley, Landor, Southey--nearly all bear witness. He might well have been a great poet, or critic, or philosopher, or teacher; but he lacked the will power to direct his gifts to any definite end. His irresolution became pitiful weakness when he began to indulge in the drug habit, which soon made a slave of him. Thereafter he impressed all who met him with a sense of loss and inexpressible sorrow.

LIFE. Coleridge began to read at three years of age; at five he had gone through the Bible and the Arabian Nights; at thirty he was perhaps the most widely read man of his generation in the fields of literature and philosophy. He was a student in a famous charity school in London when he met Charles Lamb, who records his memories of the boy and the place in his charming essay of "Christ's Hospital." At college he was one of a band of enthusiasts inspired by the French Revolution, and with Southey he formed a plan to establish in America a world-reforming Pantisocracy, or communistic settlement, where all should be brothers and equals, and where a little manual work was to be tempered by much play, poetry and culture. Europeans had queer ideas of America in those days. This beautiful plan failed, because the reformers did not have money enough to cross the ocean and stake out their Paradise.

The next important association of Coleridge was with Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in Somerset, where the three friends planned and published the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798. In this work Wordsworth attempted to portray the charm of common things, and Coleridge to give reality to a world of dreams and fantasies. Witness the two most original poems in the book, "Tintern Abbey" and "The Ancient Mariner."

During the latter part of his life Coleridge won fame by his lectures on English poetry and German philosophy, and still greater fame by his conversations,--brilliant, heaven-scaling monologues, which brought together a company of young enthusiasts. And presently these disciples of Coleridge were spreading abroad a new idealistic philosophy, which crossed the ocean, was welcomed by Emerson and a host of young writers or reformers, and appeared in American literature as Transcendentalism.

STORIES OF COLERIDGE. Others who heard the conversations were impressed in a somewhat different way. Keats met Coleridge on the road, one day, and listened dumbfounded to an ecstatic discourse on poetry, nightingales, the origin of sensation, dreams (four kinds), consciousness, creeds, ghost stories,--"he broached a thousand matters" while the poets were walking a space of two miles.

Walter Scott, meeting Coleridge at a dinner, listened with his head in a whirl to a monologue on fairies, the classics, ancient mysteries, visions, ecstasies, the psychology of poetry, the poetry of metaphysics. "Zounds!" says Scott, "I was never so bethumped with words."

Charles Lamb, hurrying to his work, encountered Coleridge and was drawn aside to a quiet garden. There the poet took Lamb by a button of his coat, closed his eyes, and began to discourse, his right hand waving to the rhythm of the flowing words. No sooner was Coleridge well started than Lamb slyly took out his penknife, cut off the button, and escaped unobserved. Some hours later, as he passed the garden on his return, Lamb heard a voice speaking most musically; he turned aside in wonder, and there stood Coleridge, his eyes closed, his left hand holding the button, his right hand waving, "still talking like an angel."

Such are the stories, true or apocryphal, of Coleridge's conversations. Their bewildering quality appears, somewhat dimmed, in his prose works, which have been finely compared with the flight of an eagle on set wings,

sweeping in wide circles, balancing, soaring, mounting on the winds. But we must note this difference: that the eagle keeps his keen eye on the distant earth, and always knows just where he is; while Coleridge sees only the wonders of Cloudland, and appears to be hopelessly lost.

HIS PROSE AND POETRY. The chief prose works of Coleridge are his "Biographia Literaria" (a brilliant patchwork of poetry and metaphysics), "Aids to Reflection", "Letters and Table Talk" (the most readable of his works), and "Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare". These all contain fine gold, but the treasure is for those doughty miners the critics rather than for readers who go to literature for recreation. Among the best of his miscellaneous poems (and Coleridge at his best has few superiors) are "Youth and Age," "Love Poems," "Hymn before Sunrise," "Ode to the Departing Year," and the pathetic "Ode to Dejection," which is a reflection of the poet's saddened but ever hopeful

life.

Two other poems, highly recommended by most critics, are the fragments "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel"; but in dealing with these the reader may do well to form his own judgment. Both fragments contain beautiful lines, but as a whole they are wandering, disjointed, inconsequent, mere sketches, they seem, of some weird dream of mystery or terror which Coleridge is trying in vain to remember.

THE ANCIENT MARINER. The most popular of Coleridge's works is his imperishable "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a wildly improbable poem of icebound or tropic seas, of thirst-killed sailors, of a phantom ship sailed by a crew of ghosts,--all portrayed in the vivid, picturesque style of the old ballad. When the "Mariner" first appeared it was dismissed as a cock-and-bull story; yet somehow readers went back to it, again and again, as if fascinated. It was passed on to the next generation; and still we read it, and pass it on. For this grotesque tale differs from all others of its kind in that its lines have been quoted for over a hundred years as a reflection of some profound human experience. That is the genius of the work: it takes the most fantastic illusions and makes them appear as real as any sober journey recorded in a sailor's log book.

At the present time our enjoyment of the "Mariner" is somewhat hampered by the critical commentaries which have fastened upon the poem, like barnacles on an old ship. It has been studied as a type of the romantic ballad, as a moral lesson, as a tract against cruelty to animals, as a model of college English. But that is no way to abuse a poet's fancy! To appreciate the "Mariner" as the author intended, one should carry it off to the hammock or orchard; there to have freedom of soul to enjoy a well-spun yarn, a gorgeous flight of imagination, a poem which illustrates Coleridge's definition of poetry as "the bloom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, thoughts, emotions, language." It broadens one's sympathy, as well as one's horizon, to accompany this ancient sailor through scenes of terror and desolation:

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide, wide sea:

So lonely 't was, that God himself

Scarce seemed there to be.

In the midst of such scenes come blessed memories of a real world, of the beauty of unappreciated things, such as the "sweet jargoning" of birds:

And now 'twas like all instruments,

Now like a lonely flute;

And now it is an angel's song,

That makes the heavens be mute.

It ceased; yet still the sails made on

A pleasant noise till noon,

A noise like of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night

Singeth a quiet tune.

Whoever is not satisfied with that for its own sake, without moral or analysis, has missed the chief interest of all good poetry.

TIT BITS: •  

      His contribution to "Lyrical Ballads" the following poems - 'The Ancient Mariner', 'The Foster-Mother's Tale', 'The Nightingale' and 'The Dungeon'

 •   "Biographia Literaria" is a combination of biography, aesthetics and philosophy. Part I is broadly autobiographical describing Coleridge's friendship with Southey and Wordsworth. Chapter XIII contains his famous distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Part II is almost entirely crucial, attacking Wordsworth's preface to the "Lyrical

Ballads".

 •   J. L. Lowes, in 'The Road to Xanadu' (1927), traces the sources and imagery of 'The Ancient Mariner'.

 •   'Remorse' is a tragedy written in 1797 as 'Osorio'. The story is set in Granada at the time of the Spanish Inquisition, tells of the slow corruption of the character of Osorio, a man who is gradually led by temptations and events into guilt and evil.

 •   'Frost at Midnight' (1798) is a blank verse poem addressed to his sleeping child Hartley.

P. B. SHELLEY (1792-1822)

The career of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is, in comparison with that of Byron, as a will-o'-the-wisp to a meteor. Byron was of the earth earthy; he fed upon coarse food, shady adventures, scandal, the limelight; but Shelley Seemed nourished upon starbeams, and the stuff of rainbows and the tempest and the foam. He was a delicate child, shy, sensitive, elflike, who wandered through the woods near his home, in Sussex, on the lookout for sprites and hobgoblins. His reading was of the wildest kind; and when he began the study of chemistry he was forever putting together things that made horrible smells or explosions, in expectation that the genii of the "Arabian Nights" would rise from the smoke of his test tube.

A YOUNG REBEL. At Eton the boy promptly rebelled against the brutal fagging system, then tolerated in all English schools. He was presently in hot water, and the name "Mad Shelley," which the boys gave him, followed him through life. He had been in the university (Oxford) hardly two years when his head was turned by some book of shallow philosophy, and he printed a rattle-brained tract called "The Necessity of Atheism." This got him into such trouble with the Dons that he was expelled for insubordination.

THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND. Forthwith Shelley published more tracts of a more rebellious kind. His sister Helen put them into the hands of her girl friend, Harriet Westbrook, who showed her belief in revolutionary theories by running away from school and parental discipline and coming to Shelley for "protection." These two social rebels, both in the green-apple stage (their combined age was thirty-five), were presently married; not that either of them believed in marriage, but because they were compelled by "Anarch Custom."

After some two years of a wandering, will-o'-the-wisp life, Shelley and his wife were estranged and separated. The young poet then met a certain William Godwin, known at that time as a novelist and evolutionary philosopher, and showed his appreciation of Godwin's radical teaching by running away with his daughter Mary, aged seventeen. The first wife, tired of liberalism, drowned herself, and Shelley was plunged into remorse at the tragedy. The right to care for his children was denied him, as an improper person, and he was practically driven out of England by force of that public opinion which he had so frequently outraged or defied.

Life is a good teacher, though stern in its reckoning, and in Italy life taught Shelley that the rights and beliefs of other men were no less sacred than his own. He was a strange combination of hot head and kind heart, the one filled with wild social theories, the other with compassion for humanity. He was immensely generous with his friends, and tender to the point of tears at the thought of suffering men,--not real men, such as he met in the streets (even the beggars in Italy are cheerful), but idealized men, with mysterious sorrows, whom he met in the clouds. While in England his weak head had its foolish way, and his early poems, such as "Queen Mab", are violent declamations. In Italy his heart had its day, and his later poems, such as "Adonais" and "Prometheus Unbound", are rhapsodies ennobled by Shelley's love of beauty and by his unquenchable hope that a bright day of justice must soon dawn upon the world. He was drowned (1822) while sailing his boat off the Italian coast, before he had reached the age of thirty years.

THE POETRY OF SHELLEY. In the longer poems of Shelley there are two prominent elements, and two others less conspicuous but more important. The first element is revolt. The poet was violently opposed to the existing order of society, and lost no opportunity to express his hatred of Tyranny, which was Shelley's name for what sober men called law and order. Feeding his spirit of revolution were numerous anarchistic theories, called the new philosophy, which had this curious quality: that they hotly denied the old faith, law, morality, as other men formulated such matters, and fervently believed any quack who appeared with a new nostrum warranted to cure all social disorders.

The second obvious element in Shelley's poetry is his love of beauty, not the common beauty of nature or humanity which Wordsworth celebrated, but a strange "supernal" beauty with no "earthly" quality or reality. His best lines leave a vague impression of something beautiful and lovely, but we know not what it is.

Less conspicuous in Shelley's poems are the sense of personal loss or grief which pervades them, and the exquisite melody of certain words which he used for their emotional effect rather than to convey any definite meaning. Like Byron he sang chiefly of his own feelings, his rage or despair, his sorrow or loneliness. He reflected his idea of the origin and motive of lyric poesy in the lines:

Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong;

They learn in suffering what they teach in song,-- an idea which Poe adopted in its entirety, and which Heine expressed in a sentimental lyric, telling how from his great grief he made his little songs:

Aus meinen groszen Schmerzen

Mach' ich die kleinen Lieder.

Hardly another English poet uses words so musically as Shelley (witness "The Cloud" and "The Skylark"), and here again his idea of verbal melody was carried to an extreme by Poe, in whose poetry words are used not so much to express ideas as to awaken vague emotions.

ALASTOR. All the above-named qualities appear in "Alastor" (the Spirit of Solitude), which is less interesting as a poem than as a study of Shelley. In this poem we may skip the revolt, which is of no consequence, and follow the poet in his search for a supernally lovely maiden who shall satisfy his love for ideal beauty. To find her he goes, not among human habitations, but to gloomy forests, dizzy cliffs, raging torrents, tempest-blown seashore,--to every place where a maiden in her senses would not be. Such places, terrible or picturesque, are but symbols of the poet's soul in its suffering and loneliness. He does not find his maiden (and herein we read the poet's first confession that he has failed in life, that the world is too strong for him); but he sees the setting moon, and somehow that pale comforter brings him peace with death.

PROMETHEUS. In "Prometheus Unbound" Shelley uses the old myth of the Titan who rebelled against the tyranny of the gods, and who was punished by being chained to a rock. [The original tragedy of "Prometheus Bound" was written by Aeschylus, a famous old Greek dramatist. The same poet wrote also "Prometheus Unbound", but the latter drama has been lost. Shelley borrowed the idea of his poem from this lost drama.] In this poem Prometheus (man) is represented as being tortured by Jove (law or custom) until he is released by Demogorgon (progress or necessity); whereupon he marries Asia (love or goodness), and stars and moon break out into a happy song of redemption.

Obviously there is no reality or human interest in such a fantasy. The only pleasurable parts of the poem are its detached passages of great melody or beauty; and the chief value of the work is as a modern example of Titan literature. Many poets have at various times represented mankind in the person of a Titan, that is, a man written large, colossal in his courage or power or suffering: Aschylus in "Prometheus", Marlowe in "Tamburlaine", Milton in Lucifer, of "Paradise Lost", Goethe in "Faust", Byron in "Manfred", Shelley in "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek Titan is resigned, uncomplaining, knowing himself to be a victim of Fate, which may not be opposed; Marlowe's Titan is bombastic and violent; Milton's is ambitious, proud, revengeful; Goethe's is cultured and philosophical; Byron's is gloomy, rebellious, theatrical. So all these poets portray each his own bent of mind, and something also of the temper of the age, in the character of his Titan. The significance of Shelley's poem is in this: that his Titan is patient and hopeful, trusting in the spirit of Love to redeem mankind from all evil. Herein Shelley is far removed from the caviling temper of his fellow rebel Byron. He celebrates a golden age not of the past but of the future, when the dream of justice inspired by the French Revolution shall have become a glorious reality.

HIS BEST POEMS. These longer poems of Shelley are read by the few; they are too vague, with too little meaning or message, for ordinary readers who like to understand as well as to enjoy poetry. To such readers the only interesting works of Shelley are a few shorter poems: "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "Ode to the West Wind," "Indian Serenade," "A Lament," "When the Lamp is Lighted" and some parts of "Adonais" (a beautiful elegy in memory of Keats), such as the passage beginning, "Go thou to Rome." For splendor of imagination and for melody of expression these poems have few peers and no superiors in English literature. To read them is to discover that Shelley was at times so sensitive, so responsive to every harmony of nature, that he seemed like the poet of Alastor. When Shelley's lute was tuned to nature it brought forth aerial melody; when he strained its strings to voice some social rebellion or anarchistic theory it produced wild discord.

TIT BITS:

•'Queen Mab' (1813) is a visionary and ideological poem in nine cantos. The work shows                                                        Shelley as the direct heir to the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s.

•Peacock drew a portrait of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry in 'Nightmare Abbey'.

•'The Revolt of Islam' (1818) is an epic political poem in 12 cantos of Spenserian stanzas.

•'The Mask of Anarchy' (1832) is a poem of protest written in response to the 'Peterloo Massacre'.

•'The Cenci' (1819) is a verse tragedy.

•'A Philosophical View of Reform' (1820) is a political essay by Shelley confirming his                     position as a Radical, but not a revolutionary.

•'Defence of Poetry' (1840) is a reply to Peacock's 'The Four Ages of Poetry'. Here Shelley associates poetry with social freedom and love. He argues that the 'poetry of life' provides the one sure response to the destructive 'accumulating and calculating processes' of modern civilization. It contains the famous peroration, ending 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.

•'Adonais' (1821) is an elegy written on the death of Keats.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness, but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing. he above lines, from "Endymion", reflect the ideal of the young singer whom we rank with the best poets of the nineteenth century. Unlike other romanticists of that day, he seems to have lived for poetry alone and to have loved it for its own sake, as we love the first spring flowers. His work was shamefully treated by reviewers; it was neglected by the public; but still he wrote, trying to make each line perfect, in the spirit of those medieval workmen who put their hearts into a carving that would rest on some lofty spire far above the eyes of men. To reverence beauty wherever he found it, and then in gratitude to produce a new work of beauty which should live forever,--that was Keats's only aim. It is the more wonderful in view of his humble origin, his painful experience, his tragic end.

LIFE. Only twenty-five years of life, which included seven years of uncongenial tasks, and three of writing, and three of wandering in search of health,--that sums up the story of Keats. He was born in London; the son of a hostler; his home was over the stable; his playground the dirty street. The family prospered, moved to a better locality, and the children were sent to a good school. Then the parents died, and at fifteen Keats was bound out to a surgeon and apothecary. For four years he worked as an apprentice, and for three years in a hospital; then, for his heart was never in the work, he laid aside his surgeon's kit, resolving never to touch it again.

TWO POETIC IDEALS. Since childhood he had been a reader, a dreamer, but not till a volume of Spenser's "Faery Queen" was put into his hands did he turn with intense eagerness to poetry. The influence of that volume is seen in the somewhat monotonous sweetness of his early work. Next he explored the classics (he had read Virgil in the original, but he knew no Greek), and the joy he found in Chapman's translation of Homer is reflected in a noble sonnet. From that time on he was influenced by two ideals which he found in Greek and medieval literature, the one with its emphasis on form, the other with its rich and varied coloring.

During the next three years Keats published three small volumes, his entire life's work. These were brutally criticized by literary magazines; they met with ridicule at the hands of Byron, with indifference on the part of Scott and Wordsworth. The pathetic legend that the poet's life was shortened by this abuse is still repeated, but there is little truth in it. Keats held manfully to his course, having more weighty things than criticism to think about. He was conscious that his time was short; he was in love with his Fannie Brawne, but separated from her by illness and poverty; and, like the American poet Lanier, he faced death across the table as he wrote. To throw off the consumption which had fastened upon him he tried to live in the open, making walking trips in the Lake Region; but he met with rough fare and returned from each trip weaker than before. He turned at last to Italy, dreading the voyage and what lay beyond. Night fell as the ship put to sea; the evening star shone clear through the storm clouds, and Keats sent his farewell to life and love and poetry in the sonnet beginning:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art. He died soon after his arrival in Rome, in 1821. Shelley, who had hailed Keats as a genius, and who had sent a generous invitation to come and share his home, commemorated the poet's death and the world's loss in "Adonais", which ranks with Milton's "Lycidas", Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and Emerson's "Threnody" among the great elegiac poems of our literature.

THE WORK OF KEATS. The first small volume of Keats ("Poems", 1817) seems now like an experiment. The part of that experiment which we cherish above all others is the sonnet "On Chapman's Homer," which should be read entire for its note of joy and for its fine expression of the influence of classic poetry. The second volume,

"Endymion", may be regarded as a promise. There is little reality in the rambling poem which gives title to the volume (the story of a shepherd beloved of a moon-goddess), but the bold imagery of the work, its Spenserian melody, its passages of rare beauty,--all these speak of a true poet who has not yet quite found himself or his subject. A third volume, "Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems" (1820), is in every sense a fulfillment, for it contains a large proportion of excellent poetry, fresh, vital, melodious, which improves with years, and which carries on its face the stamp of permanency.

HIS BEST POEMS. The contents of this little volume may be arranged, not very accurately, in three classes, In the first are certain poems that by their perfection of form show the Greek or classic spirit. Best known of these poems are the fragment "Hyperion," with its Milton-like nobility of style, and "Lamia," which is the story of an enchantress whom love transforms into a beautiful woman, but who quickly vanishes because of her lover's too great curiosity,--a parable, perhaps, of the futility of science and philosophy, as Keats regarded them.

Of the poems of the second class, which reflect old medieval legends, "The Pot of Basil," "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" are praised by poets and critics alike. "St. Agnes," which reflects a vague longing rather than a story, is the best known; but "La Belle Dame" may appeal to some readers as the most moving of Keats's poems. The essence of all old metrical romances is preserved in a few lines, which have an added personal interest from the fact that they may reveal something of the poet's sad love story.

In the third class are a few sonnets and miscellaneous poems, all permeated by the sense of beauty, showing in every line the genius of Keats and his exquisite workmanship. The sonnets "On the Sea," "When I have Fears," "On the Grasshopper and Cricket" and "To Sleep"; the fragment beginning "In a drear-nighted December"; the marvelous odes "On a Grecian Urn," "To a Nightingale" and "To Autumn," in which he combines the simplicity of the old classics with the romance and magic of medieval writers,--there are no works in English of a similar kind that make stronger appeal to our ideal of poetry and of verbal melody. Into the three stanzas of "Autumn," for example, Keats has compressed the vague feelings of beauty, of melancholy, of immortal aspiration, which come to sensitive souls in the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness."

KEATS: AN ESSAY OF CRITICISM. Beyond recommending a few of his poems for their beauty, there is really so little to be said of Keats that critics are at their wit's end to express their appreciation. So we read of Keats's "pure aestheticism," his "copious perfection," his "idyllic visualization," his "haunting poignancy of feeling," his "subtle felicities of diction," his "tone color," and more to the same effect. Such criticisms are doubtless well meant, but they are harder to follow than Keats's "Endymion"; and that is no short or easy road of poesy. Perhaps by trying more familiar ways we may better understand Keats, why he appeals so strongly to poets, and why he is so seldom read by other people.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY. The first characteristic of the man was his love for every beautiful thing he saw or heard. Sometimes the object which fascinated him was the widespread sea or a solitary star; sometimes it was the work of man, the product of his heart and brain attuned, such as a passage from Homer, a legend of the Middle Ages, a vase of pure lines amid the rubbish of a museum, like a bird call or the scent of violets in a city street. Whatever the object that aroused his sense of beauty, he turned aside to stay with it a while, as on the byways of Europe you will sometimes see a man lay down his burden and bare his head before a shrine that beckons him to pray. With this reverence for beauty Keats had other and rarer qualities: the power to express what he felt, the imagination which gave him beautiful figures, and the taste which enabled him to choose the finest words, the most melodious phrases, wherewith to reflect his thought or mood or emotion.

Such was the power of Keats, to be simple and reverent in the presence of beauty, and to give his feeling poetic or imaginative expression. In respect of such power he probably had no peer in English literature. His limitations were twofold: he looked too exclusively on the physical side of beauty, and he lived too far removed from the common, wholesome life of men.

SENSE AND SOUL. The poetry of Keats deals largely with outward matters, with form, color, melody, odors, with what is called "sensuous" beauty because it delights our human senses. Such beauty is good, but it is not supreme. Moreover, the artist who would appeal widely to men must by sympathy understand their whole life, their mirth as well as their sorrow, their days of labor, their hours of play, their moments of worship. But Keats, living apart with his ideal of beauty, like a hermit in his cell, was able to understand and to voice only one of the profound interests of humanity. For this reason, and because of the deep note of sadness which sounds through all his work like the monotone of the sea, his exquisite poems have never had any general appreciation. Like Spenser, who was his first master, he is a poet's poet.

TIT BITS:

 •'Endymion' is dedicated to Chatterton.

 •'Isabella' or 'The Pot of Basil' (1820) is anarrative poem based on a story in Boccaccio's 'Decameron'.

 • Keats has always been regarded as one of the principal figures in the Romantic Movement. Tennyson considered him as the greatest poet of the 19th century, and Arnold commended his 'intellectual and spiritual passion' for beauty. His 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is regarded as

 his most mature work, almost final word on the vision of Hellas which he first discovered

 through Lempriere's 'Dictionary', Chapman's 'Homer' and Elgins 'Marbles'.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

NOVEL

The rare genius of Miss Austen (1775-1817) was as a forest flower during her lifetime. While Fanny Burney, Jane Porter and Maria Edgeworth were widely acclaimed, this little woman remained almost unknown, following no

school of fiction, writing for her own pleasure, and destroying whatever did not satisfy her own sense of fitness. If she had any theory of fiction, it was simply this: to use no incident but such as had occurred before her eyes, to describe no scene that was not familiar, and to portray only such characters as she knew intimately, their speech, dress, manner, and the motives that governed their action. If unconsciously she followed any rule of expression, it was that of Cowper, who said that to touch and retouch is the secret of almost all good writing. To her theory and rule she added personal charm, intelligence, wit, genius of a high order. Neglected by her own generation, she has now an ever-widening circle of readers, and is ranked by critics among the five or six greatest writers of English fiction.

HER LIFE. Jane Austen's life was short and extremely placid. She was born (1775) in a little Hampshire village; she spent her entire life in one country parish or another, varying the scene by an occasional summer at the watering

place of Bath, which was not very exciting. Her father was an easy-going clergyman who read Pope, avoided politics, and left preaching to his curate. She was one of a large family of children, who were brought up to regard elegance of manner as a cardinal virtue, and vulgarity of any kind as the epitome of the seven deadly sins. Her two brothers entered the navy; hence the flutter in her books whenever a naval officer comes on a furlough to his native village. She spent her life in homely, pleasant duties, and did her writing while the chatter of family life went on around her. Her only characters were visitors who came to the rectory, or who gathered around the tea-table in a neighbor's house. They were absolutely unconscious of the keen scrutiny to which they were subjected; no one whispered to them, "A chiel's amang ye, takin' notes"; and so they had no suspicion that they were being transferred into books.

 The first three of Miss Austen's novels were written at Steventon, among her innocent subjects, but her precious manuscripts went begging in vain for a publisher. The last three, reflecting as in a glass the manners of another parish, were written at Chawton, near Winchester. Then the good work suddenly began to flag. The same disease that, a little later, was to call halt to Keats's poetry of beauty now made an end of Miss Austen's portrayal of everyday life. When she died (1817) she was only forty-two years old, and her heart was still that of a young girl. A stained-glass window in beautiful old Winchester Cathedral speaks eloquently of her life and work.

NOVELS AND CHARACTERS. If we must recommend one of Miss Austen's novels, perhaps "Pride and Prejudice" is the most typical; but there is very little to justify this choice when the alternative is "Northanger Abbey", or "Emma", or "Sense and Sensibility", or "Persuasion", or "Mansfield Park". All are good; the most definite stricture that one can safely make is that "Mansfield Park" is not so good as the others. Four of the novels are confined to country parishes; but in "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion" the horizon is broadened to include a watering place, whither genteel folk went "to take the air."

The characters of all these novels are: first, the members of five or six families, with their relatives, who try to escape individual boredom by gregariousness; and second, more of the same kind assembled at a local fair or sociable. Here you meet a dull country squire or two, a feeble-minded baronet, a curate laboriously upholding the burden of his dignity, a doctor trying to hide his emptiness of mind by looking occupied, an uncomfortable male person in tow of his wife, maiden aunts, fond mammas with their awkward daughters, chatterboxes, poor relations, spoiled children,--a characteristic gathering. All these, except the spoiled children, talk with perfect propriety about the weather. If in the course of a long day anything witty is said, it is an accident, a phenomenon; conversation halts, and everybody looks at the speaker as if he must have had "a rush of brains to the head."

HER SMALL FIELD. Such is Jane Austen's little field, an eddy of life revolving endlessly around small parish interests. Her subjects are not even the whole parish, but only "the quality," whom the favored ones may meet at Mrs. B's afternoon at home. They read proper novels, knit wristlets, discuss fevers and their remedies, raise their eyebrows at gossip, connive at matrimony, and take tea. The workers of the world enter not here; neither do men of ideas, nor social rebels, nor the wicked, nor the happily unworthy poor; and the parish is blessed in having no reformers.

In this barren field, hopeless to romancers like Scott, there never was such another explorer as Jane Austen. Her demure observation is marvelously keen; sometimes it is mischievous, or even a bit malicious, but always sparkling with wit or running over with good humor. Almost alone in that romantic age she had no story to tell, and needed none. She had never met any heroes or heroines. Plots, adventures, villains, persecuted innocence, skeletons in closets, all the ordinary machinery of fiction seemed to her absurd and unnecessary. She was content to portray the life that she knew best, and found it so interesting that, a century later, we share her enthusiasm. And that is the genius of Miss Austen, to interest us not by a romantic story but by the truth of her observation and by the fidelity of her portrayal of human nature, especially of feminine nature.

INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH FICTION. There is one more thing to note in connection with Miss Austen's work; namely, her wholesome influence on the English novel. In "Northanger Abbey" and in "Sense and Sensibility" she satirizes the popular romances of the period, with their Byronic heroes, melodramatic horrors and perpetual harping on some pale heroine's sensibilities. Her satire is perhaps the best that has been written on the subject, so delicate, so flashing, so keen, that a critic compares it to the exploit of Saladin (in "The Talisman") who could not with his sword hack through an iron mace, as Richard did, but who accomplished the more difficult feat of slicing a gossamer veil as it floated in the air.

Such satire was not lost; yet it was Miss Austen's example rather than her precept which put to shame the sentimental romances of her day, and which influenced subsequent English fiction in the direction of truth and naturalness. Young people still prefer romance and adventure as portrayed by Scott and his followers, and that is as it should be; but an increasingly large number of mature readers (especially those who are interested in human nature) find a greater charm in the novel of characters and manners, as exemplified by Jane Austen.

THE CRITICS AND ESSAYISTS. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century (or from Shakespeare to Wordsworth) England was preparing a great literature; and then appeared writers whose business or pleasure it was to appreciate that literature, to point out its virtues or its defects, to explain by what principle this or that work was permanent, and to share their enjoyment of good prose and poetry with others,--in a word, the critics.

In the list of such writers, who give us literature at second hand, the names of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Walter Savage Landor, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey are written large. The two last-named are selected for special study, not because of their superior critical ability (for Hazlitt was probably a better critic than either), but because of a few essays in which these men left us an appreciation of life, as they saw it for themselves at first hand.

Themes: Surface of the novel and the surface of her life - do not have anything striking, uneventful. Works move around Middle Class, Disappointment in Love, and the threat of seduction; in short the constant routine of middle class life. Therefore it's said that "She works on two or three inches of ivory". Deals with a quite mode of life. She explores human experience to the all thoroughness possible with an element of comic mode. Though contemporary of high Romantic writers, she was not interested in Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics, she rejected the cult of personality, because she derived her inspiration from the Neo- Classical writers. Walter Scott praised her works saying 'that exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting', while Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Browning found her limited.

Unit 4: The Victorian Age (1832 – 1901)

Aestheticism (also the Aesthetic Movement) is an intellectual and art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts.[1][2] This meant that Art from this particular movement focused more on being beautiful rather than having a deeper meaning - 'Art for Art's sake'. It was particularly prominent in Europe during the 19th century, supported by notable figures such as Oscar Wilde, but contemporary critics are also associated with the movement, such as Harold Bloom, who has recently argued against projecting social and political ideology onto literary works, which he believes has been a growing problem in humanities departments over the last century.

In the 19th century, it was related to other movements such as symbolism or decadence represented in France, or decadentismo represented in Italy, and may be considered the British version of the same style.

The British decadent writers were much influenced by the Oxford professor Walter Pater and his essays published during 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, with an ideal of beauty. His text Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was very well regarded by art-oriented young men of the late 19th century. Writers of the Decadent movement used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art), the origin of which is debated. Some claim that it was invented by the philosopher Victor Cousin, although Angela Leighton in the publication On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word (2007) notes that the phrase was used by Benjamin Constant as early as 1804.[3] It is generally accepted to have been promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, who interpreted the phrase to suggest that there was not any real association between art and morality.

The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and George MacDonald's conception of art as something moral or useful, "Art for truth's sake".[4] Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed a cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor of art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the style were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, great use of symbols, and synaesthetic/ Ideasthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. Music was used to establish mood.

Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His works on Renaissance subjects were popular but controversial, reflecting his lost belief in Christianity.

            The Renaissance

            Marius the Epicurean and Imaginary Portraits

            Appreciations and Plato and Platonism

            Greek Studies, Miscellaneous Studies and other posthumous volumes

PRE-RAPHAELITES

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The group's intention wasto reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach adopted by the Manneristartists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegantcompositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hencethe name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, thefounder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him 'Sir Sloshua', believing that his sloppytechnique was a formulaic and cliché form of academic Mannerism. In contrast they wanted to return tothe abundant detail, intense colors, and complex compositions of quattrocento Italian and Flemish art.

The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though theyhave also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the concepts of history paintingand of 'mimesis', or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelitesundoubtedly defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and

published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the "Pre-Raphaelite Journal".

Beginnings of the Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais' parents' house on Gower Street,London in 1848 At the initial meeting John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William HolmanHunt were present. Hunt and Millais were students at the Royal Academy of Arts. They had previously metin another loose association, a sketching society called the Cyclographic club. Rossetti was a pupil of FordMadox Brown. He had met Hunt after seeing Hunt's painting The Eve of St. Agnes, based on Keats's poem.As an aspiring poet Rossetti wished to develop the links between Romantic poetry and art. By Autumn fourmore members had also joined to form a seven-strong Brotherhood. These were William Michael Rossetti

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti's brother), Thomas Woolner, James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens. FordMadox Brown was invited to join, but preferred to remain independent. He nevertheless remained closeto the group. Some other young painters and sculptors were also close associates, including Charles Alston

Collins, Thomas Tupper and Alexander Munro. They kept the existence of the Brotherhood secret frommembers of the Royal Academy.

Early Doctrines

The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: 1. To have genuine ideasto express; 2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3. To sympathize withwhat is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading

and learned by rote; 4. And most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures andstatues.

These principles are deliberately undogmatic, since the PRB wished to emphasise the personalresponsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and method of depiction. Influenced byRomanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Nevertheless, they wereparticularly fascinated by Medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity lost in

later eras. This emphasis on Medieval culture was to clash with the realism promoted by the stress onindependent observation of nature. In its early stages the PRB believed that the two interests wereconsistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two directions. The realist sidewas led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward

Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated withCourbet and Impressionism.

In their attempts to revive the brilliance of colour found in quattrocento art, Hunt and Millaisdeveloped a technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. In this way theyhoped that their colours would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity. This emphasis of brilliance ofcolour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists such as Reynolds, David

Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect whichthe Pre-Raphaelites despised.

Public Controversies

In 1850 the PRB became controversial after the exhibition of Millais's painting "Christ in the Houseof His Parents", considered to be blasphemous by many reviewers, notably Charles Dickens. Theirmedievalism was attacked as backward-looking and their extreme devotion to detail was condemned asugly and jarring to the eye. According to Dickens, Millais made the Holy Family look like alcoholics andslum-dwellers, adopting contorted and absurd 'medieval' poses. A rival group of older artists, The Clique,also used their influence against the PRB. Their principles were publicly attacked by the President of theAcademy, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake.However, the Brotherhood found support from the critic John Ruskin, who praised their devotionto nature and rejection of conventional methods of composition. He continued to support their work bothfinancially and in his writings.Following the controversy, Collinson left the Brotherhood. They met to discuss whether he shouldbe replaced by Charles Alston Collins or Walter Howell Deverell, but were unable to make a decision.From that point on the group disbanded, though their influence continued to be felt. Artists who hadworked in the style still followed these techniques (initially anyway) but they no longer signed works"PRB".

Later Developments and Influence

Artists who were influenced by the Brotherhood include John Brett, Philip Calderon, ArthurHughes, Evelyn de Morgan and Frederic Sandys. Ford Madox Brown, who was associated with them fromthe beginning, is often seen as most closely adopting the Pre-Raphaelite principles.After 1856 Rossetti, became an inspiration for the medievalising strand of the movement. Hiswork influenced his friend William Morris, in whose firm he became a partner and with whose wife he mayhave had an affair. Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones also became partners in the firm. ThroughMorris's company the ideals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood influenced many interior designers andarchitects, arousing interest in medieval designs, as well as other crafts. The led directly to the Arts and

Crafts movement headed by William Morris. Holman Hunt was also involved with this movement to reformdesign through the Della Robbia Pottery company.

After 1850, both Hunt and Millais moved away from direct imitation of medieval art. Both stressedthe realist and scientific aspects of the movement, though Hunt continued to emphasise the spiritualsignificance of art, seeking to reconcile religion and science by making accurate observations and studiesof locations in Egypt and Israel for his paintings on biblical subjects. In contrast, Millais abandoned Pre-Raphaelitism after 1860, adopting a much broader and looser style influenced by Reynolds. This reversalof principles was condemned by William Morris and others.The movement influenced the work of many later British artists well into the twentieth century.Rossetti later came to be seen as a precursor of the wider European Symbolist movement.In the twentieth century artistic ideals changed and art moved away from representing reality.Since the Pre-Rapaelites were fixed on portraying things with photographic precision, their work was

devalued by critics. Recently there has been a resurgence in interest in the movement, as Postmodernistideas have challenged modernist values.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (/ˈdænti ˈɡeɪbriəlrəˈzɛti/;[1] 12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882) was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Rossetti 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. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.

Rossetti's art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life. Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti's work. He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as "Goblin Market" by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.

Rossetti's personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is famous for writing Goblin Market and Remember, and the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.

"Goblin Market" (composed in April 1859 and published in 1862) is a narrative poem by Christina Rossetti. In a letter to her publisher, Rossetti claimed that the poem, which is interpreted frequently as having features of remarkably sexual imagery, was not meant for children. However, in public Rossetti often stated that the poem was intended for children, and went on to write many children's poems. When the poem appeared in her first volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems, it was illustrated by her brother, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

"In the Bleak Midwinter" is a Christmas carol based on a poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti written before 1872 in response to a request from the magazine Scribner's Monthly for a Christmas poem. It was published posthumously in Rossetti's Poetic Works in 1904.

The poem became a Christmas carol after it appeared in The English Hymnal in 1906 with a setting by Gustav Holst.

Harold Darke's anthem setting of 1911 is more complex and was named the best Christmas carol in a poll of some of the world's leading choirmasters and choral experts in 2008.

VICTORIAN POETRY

The Victorian period is characterized by intense and prolific activity in literature, especially by

novelists and poets, philosophers and essayists. Dramatists of any note are few.As with all the literature of the Victorian era, much of the poetry of the day was concernedwith contemporary social problems. Change, rather than stability, came to be accepted for the first timeas normal in the nature of human outlook. Culturally and in many ways socially, the Victorian period saw

the outset and display of the problems which the 20th century had to solve. Victorian Poetry, which canbe classified as Early (1837-51), Mid(1851-70) and Late (1870-1901), saw the progress in poetic sensibilityfrom the Romantic Era to the Modernist Era.

The sonnet was a popular form in Victorian poetry, notably in the work of Christina Rossetti,

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Gerard Manley Hopkins experimented very boldlyin the form, and produced some of his best work in what he claimed to be sonnets, though they are oftenscarcely recognizable as such.

The preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although romantic in

subject matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of social certitude andreligious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth BarrettBrowning, was immensely popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their lifetimes.Browning is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of theempire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the soldiers of British expansion. Some finereligious poetry was produced by Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Christina Rossetti, and Lionel Johnson. In the middle of the 19th century the so-called Pre-Raphaelites, led by the painter-poet DanteGabriel Rossetti, sought to revive what they judged to be the simple, natural values and techniques ofmedieval life and art. Their quest for a rich symbolic art led them away, however, from the mainstream.William Morris—designer, inventor, printer, poet, and social philosopher—was the most versatile of the

group, which included the poets Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore.Algernon Charles Swinburne began as a Pre-Raphaelite but soon developed his own classicallyinfluenced, sometimes florid style. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy, Victorian figures who lived on into

the 20th cent., share a pessimistic view in their poetry, but Housman's well-constructed verse is rathermore superficial. The great innovator among the late Victorian poets was the Jesuit priest Gerard ManleyHopkins. The concentration and originality of his imagery, as well as his jolting meter (“sprung rhythm”), had a profound effect on 20th-century poetry.

During the 1890s the most conspicuous figures on the English literary scene were the decadents.

The principal figures in the group were Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and, first among them in bothnotoriety and talent, Oscar Wilde. The Decadents' disgust with bourgeois complacency led them toextremes of behavior and expression. However limited their accomplishments, they pointed out thehypocrisies in Victorian values and institutions. The sparkling, witty comedies of Oscar Wilde and thecomic operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the brightest achievements of 19thcentury British drama.

ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-92)

Tennyson’s earliest volume of poems was published in collaboration with his brother—Poems by

Two Brothers (1826). While at Cambridge, he got the Chancellor’s English Medal forTimbuctoo. Tennyson’s dear friend Arthur Hallam died in 1833, which occasioned In Memoriam. Other major worksinclude The Princess, Maud, Idylls of the King, Enoch Arden, Queen Mary, Becket, etc.Tennyson’s character was remarkable for the combination of ruggedness and delicacy. Morbidlyshy of strangers and publicity, he shunned public life and social interaction. His recluse-like habitsnarrowed his outlook on life and left their mark upon his work.Tennyson was haunted by the mystery of life, its mingled joys and pains. But he found firmground in two positive affirmations—God and immortality. In politics, Tennyson was an exponent of thevery cautious Liberalism of the mid-Victorian age. Dread of revolution, of rash rupture with the past, ofintemperate experiments lay at the very root of his thought, and made him essentially the poet oftradition and order. Yet he was an apostle of gradual progress. In early manhood he was enthusiasticabout science and commerce, but alarmed at the drastic changes it brought to life. His belief inevolution, always a steadying element in his thought, brought a certain hope back to him at the end. Indemocracy he had no confidence, and while he showed genuine sympathy with the masses, it wasobviously the sympathy of an aristocratic outsider.Tennyson had the highest conception of the poet’s vocation. The moral and spiritual power ofpoetry was always uppermost in his mind. ‘Art for art’s sake’ was for him heresy. He attached thegreatest importance to technique and to the labour which is necessary to attain perfection.The classic poems including Lotos-Eaters, Ulysses, and Tithonuscomprise some of Tennyson’sfinest work. Like Keats, he was attracted by the beauty of classic stories; like Wordsworth, he broughtout its implicit moral meaning. It was in these semi-dramatic, semi-lyrical pieces that he found the rightvehicle for his forte—the expression of a complex mood, with exquisite landscape harmonies. In theEnglish Idylls and kindred poems, Tennyson followed Wordsworth in the poetry of simple life. ThePrincess is a contribution to the question of the higher education of women in the form of a serio-comicfantasy. The thesis explored is the eternal dualism of sex: “Woman is not undeveloped man, butdiverse.” In Memoriam expanded from a personal elegy to a great religious poem. It records the spiritualstruggles that followed upon Hallam’sdeath, and sets forth Tennyson’s faith in God and immortality. Tennyson brooded over the religious question all his life, which has reflected in many of his poems.

Tennyson’s three historical plays, Harold, Becket and Queen Mary deal with great crises in the history ofthe English people.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-89)

Browning’s first published poem was the autobiographical Pauline. In 1846, he married Elizabeth Barrett,then more popular a poet than Browning himself. Browning had an intense and vigorous personality, aboundless capacity for enjoyment. Sound in body and mind, he was altogether unaffected by themelancholy which accompanied the spiritual upheaval of his age. His robust optimism had its roots in itshealthy and happy nature.

Browning takes his stand upon two absolute truths—a spiritual faculty in man which enables him

to know spiritual reality, and a spiritual reality that is to be known. These truths are above the intellect.God may be conceived as power, as Wisdom and as Love. The soul craves divine love and finds it mainlythrough the God-given faculty of love. This thought of a God of love and the correlative principle of thesoul’s immortality provide the philosophical grounds of Browning’s optimism. Browning’s ethical teachingis strenuous and militant. Life is to be met boldly, not evaded; all experience is to be made subservientto individuality and growth.Browning’s views on art correspond completely with these ethical principles. Here again he

combines high spirituality with the frankest acceptance of the natural world; here again he proclaimsthat the final standard of values is to be found, not in achievement, but in effort and aspiration. Art issubordinate to life and is only valuable so far as it expresses it. The artist is seer and interpreter; heperceives, as the ordinary man does not, the beauty and divine meaning of life.

With his deeply rooted faith in freedom as the essential condition for spiritual growth, Browning

was in general terms a Liberal, but his Liberalism was highly individualistic and hostile to Socialism. There is little in the enormous mass of his work that bears upon contemporarysocial and political questions.

Victorian Era:

The period from 1837 to 1901 is called the Victorian Age when Queen victoria was the reigning empress of England and the British Empire throughout the world.

Her period marked a lot of inventions, discoveries in many fields. Roadways, railways, the cotton industries, coal industries, steam locomotives, invention of machines that started the industrial revolution, invention of many cures for diseases, interest in the sciences are a few.

This led to two new changes in the English Society – the rise of the urban society and the rise of the middle class as the most powerful class.

Rise of the English Novel

But the moral confusion of the people were rampant because the Church had lost its value in society. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had ripped people of their beliefs in God and the writers and other intellectuals had to bring in a sense of propriety in the minds of the people.

Thus the novel was born to edify and entertain the british middle clas. The novelists of the Victorian era are Charles Dickens, William Makepiece Thackeray, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George meredith, Anthony Trollope etc.

Charles Dickens:

He was the greatest novelist of the victorian era. He was a champion of children’s rights. Most of his novels are about children and the abuses they faced in The English workhouse.

Later, when he turned his hand to writing, his experiences would form the foundation for Little Dorrit, which was set in Marshalsea Prison. The horrors of prison as seen through young eyes also informed his second novel – Oliver Twist – in which young Oliver visits Fagan in Newgate Prison.

Victorian London was notorious for its prisons, and prison became a recurring theme for Dickens. So Pickwick was incarcerated in Fleet Prison in Pickwick Papers and the Kings Bench Prison housed Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. Dickens’ observations of the wild, baying crowds at executions at Newgate and Horsemonger Lane gaols were captured in Barnaby Rudge and a letter to the Morning Chronicle, respectively.

Thankfully, many of the aspects of Victorian London that Dickens immortalised have disappeared, such as the pitiless conditions in the workhouses famously woven into Oliver Twist. The noisy, heaving livestock market at Smithfield is described in less than flattering terms in both Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, even though it was moved during Dickens’ lifetime. Not only was Dickens immensely popular during his own lifetime but, over a century later, it is still Dickens’ stories, letters and essays that bring Victorian London to life.

His Social Conscience — He crusaded for children’s rights. — He was an advocate of child labor laws to protect children. — He opposed cruelty, deprivation, and corporal punishment of children. — He protested a greedy, uncaring, materialistic society through such works as A Christmas Carol

He is buried in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London— Dickens’ epitaph: “He was a sympathizer to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England’s greatest writers is lost to the world.”

William Makepiece Thackeray

Thackeray was born in India in 1811. In the fall of 1840 Thackeray's wife suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. This experience profoundly affected his character and work. He became more sympathetic and less harsh in his judgments, and came to value domestic affection as the greatest good thing in life. These new attitudes emerged clearly in the best of his early stories, "The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond"(1841). In this tale an obscure (not distinct) clerk rises to sudden success and wealth but finds true happiness only after ruin has brought him back to hearth and home.

Vanity Fair (1847–1848) established Thackeray's fame permanently. Thackeray's writing style was formed in opposition to Dickens's accusation of social evils, and against the artificial style and sentimentality (emotionalism) of life and moral (having to do with right and wrong) values of the popular historical romances. Although critical of society, Thackeray remained basically conservative (a person who prefers to preserve existing social and political situations without change). He was one of the first English writers of the time to portray the commonplace with greater realism. This approach was carried on in the English novel by Anthony Trollope (1815–1882).
 Victorian Prose Writers

The early Victorian prose is in keeping with the energetic temperament of the time. An expansive energy seems to be characteristic of the whole period, displaying itself as freely in literature as in the development of science,geographical exploration and the rpidity of economic change.

This energetic mood prescribes the inventiveness and fertility of the prose-writers of the period and explains the vitality of so many of their works. Carlyle’s The French Revolution, Ruskin’sModern Painters and Arnold’s Essays in Criticism are not modest and light-hearted compositions, but they represent the aesthetic equivalent of self-assertion and an urgent ‘will to survive’ which was characteristic of the early Victorians.

John Ruskin:

John Ruskin, an only child, was largely educated at home, where he was given a taste for art by his father’s collecting of contemporary watercolours and a minute and comprehensive knowledge of the Bible by his piously Protestant mother.

John Ruskin has long been admired by the world because of his subtle insight into all forms of beauty i-e art. It is now understood that Ruskin forth alone , as the supreme master of English prose (language). He has done more as a preacher and prophet than as master of art. It is his aesthetic impulse that has won him a supreme and high honour.

Ruskin not only surpasses all the contemporary writers of prose but also calls out matchless English language notes. He bends language to many uses as a flexible instrument _argument , pictorical description , eulogy, invective, persuation and passionate appeal etc. Thus the mighty fantasies, the pathetic melodies in words and the composition of long books are the qualities rolled forth by none but Ruskin. Ruskin’s style has all the qualities such as diction, sentence structure , variety, imagery, rhythm, coherence , emphasis and arrangement of ideas.

Another feature of Ruskin’s style is the length of his sentences. Since seventeenth century, he is the first writer who wrote the sentences of twenty or thirty lines and even more of a whole page. Simetimes his sentence has 200, 250 or 280 words without a single puase _ each sentence with , 40, 59, 60 commas, colons and semicolons. But this extraordinary length of his sentences does not create any disturbance because of a subtle case and harmony. 

His most famous prose work Is Sesame and Lilies and the Stones of Venice.

Thomas  Carlyle:

Carlyle was the dominanat figure of the Victorian period. He made his influence felt in every department of Victorian life. In the general prose literature of his age, he was incomparably the greate st figure, and one of the greatest moral forces. In his youth, he suffered from doubts which assailed him during the many dark years of infidelity trying to recover his lost faith in God. Suddenly, there came moments of courage and faith. The history of the years of his struggle and his ultimate triumph was the theme of his second book Sartor Resartus.

His style reflects his personality. He twists the language to suit his needs. In order to achieve this he makes use of many foreign words and english translations of foreign words. His famous works are French Revolution and Heroes and Hero Worship.

Impressionism in literature

 Impressionistic literature can be defined as a work created by an author that centers on the thinking and feelings of the characters and allows the reader to draw his or her own interpretations and conclusions about their meaning.

Absolutely, Heart of Darkness is often cited as one of the preeminent examples of Impressionistic literature.  

Marcel Proust:

Proust spent several years reading Carlyle, Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading Proust began to refine his own theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Proust’s masterpiece was Remembrnce of Things Past. Although Proust had by 1909 gathered most of the material that became À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), he still felt unable to structure the material. In January 1909 the combination of flavors in a cup of tea and toast brought him sensations that reminded him of his youth in his grandfather's garden. These feelings revealed the hidden self that Proust had spoken of in Contre Sainte-Beuve, and he felt that the process of artistic rebirth was the theme his novel required. In À la recherche du temps perdu Proust was mainly concerned with describing not real life but his narrator Marcel's view of it. Marcel traces his growth through a number of remembered experiences and realizes that these experiences reflect his inner life more truly than does his outer life.

James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Ireland and was known to be intelligent with a wit to writing right from his childhood. Also he could speak 17 languages including Arabic and Sanskrit. His first two works made him known to other writers who liked his unconventional style. The two works wre Dubliners and the Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The same year that the Dubliners came out, Joyce embarked on what would prove to be his landmark novel: Ulysses. The story recounts a single day in Dublin. The date: June 16, 1904, the same day that Joyce and Barnacle met. On the surface, the novel follows the story three central characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly Bloom, as well as the city life that unfolds around them.

Symbolist movement in Literature: W.B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats is considered as the founder of symbolic school of poetry. Yeats was a symbolist and he was a symbolist from the beginning of his career to the end.

The term symbolism is derived from a Greek verb: ‘Symbollein’, means ‘to put together.’ A symbol means, a mark, token or sign. It means representation of some hidden things through a sign or mark that is called a symbol.

When an unseen thing or idea is expressed through seen, we use a symbol. The symbolism is the presentation of objects, moods and ideas through the medium of symbols.

Yeats was much influenced by French writers but his symbolism was based on the poetry of Blake, Shelley and Rossetti. He had been called as the greatest poet. According to him, symbol gives voice to the dumb things; it gives body to the bodiless things. He was against personal symbols. Tower is also one of the greatest symbols of Yeats. It is a symbol of spiritual worship.

In A Prayer for My Daughter, the Tower symbolizes the dark future for mankind. In another poem, he compares the Swan with a solitary soul. The Second Coming is a famous poem of Yeats and also remarkable for using symbols. Yeats says:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The Falcon cannot hear the falconer:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Unit 5: The Modern Age (Post 1901)

Imagist Poetry

Imagism is a type of poetry that describes images with simple language and great focus. It came out of the Modernist movement in poetry. In the early 1900s, poets abandoned the old ways of writing poems and created a new movement in poetry called Modernism. Modernist poets changed the style and content of poetry by abandoning rhyme and meter, among other things.

Some Modernist poets began to focus on imagery in poetry. In traditional poetry, images are described in great detail with many words, and then they are linked to a philosophical idea or theme. But some of the Modernist poets decided that the best way to write poetry was to describe things with simple and few words. In addition, many of them did not explicitly discuss the ideas and themes of the poem.

Imagism is a subset of Modernism that focuses on simply described images and little more. In Imagist poetry, the writer does not talk about the themes behind the image; they let the image itself be the focus of the poem. There were many famous American Imagist poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Amy Lowell.

The Rules of Imagism

Ezra Pound, one of the founders of Imagism, said that there were three tenets, or rules, to writing Imagist poetry.

1. Direct treatment of the subject. That is, the poem should deal directly with what's being talked about, not try to use fancy words and phrases to talk about it.
2. Use no word that does not contribute to the presentation. Use as few words as possible.
3. Compose in the rhythm of the musical phrase, not in the rhythm of the metronome. In other words, create new rhythms instead of relying on the old, boring ones.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot.

His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

Poets of the Thirties

Wilfred Owen

On March 18, 1893, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born in Shropshire, England. After the death of his grandfather in 1897, the family moved to Birkenhead, where Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute. After another move in 1906, he continued his studies at the Technical School in Shrewsbury. Interested in the arts at a young age, Owen began to experiment with poetry at 17.

After failing to gain entrance into the University of London, Owen spent a year as a lay assistant to Reverend Herbert Wigan in 1911 and went on to teach in France at the Berlitz School of English. By 1915, he had become increasingly interested in World War I and enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles group. After training in England, Owen was commissioned as a second lieutenant.

He was wounded in combat in 1917 and evacuated to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh after being diagnosed with shell shock. There he met another patient, poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as a mentor and introduced him to well-known literary figures such as Robert Graves and H. G. Wells.

It was at this time Owen wrote many of his most important poems, including “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” His poetry often graphically illustrated the horrors of warfare, the physical landscapes that surrounded him, and the human body in relation to those landscapes. His verses stand in stark contrast to the patriotic poems of war written by earlier poets of Great Britain, such as Rupert Brooke.

Owen rejoined his regiment in Scarborough in June 1918, and in August, he returned to France. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens. He was killed on November 4 of that year while attempting to lead his men across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors. He was 25 years old. The news reached his parents on November 11, Armistice Day. The collected Poems of Wilfred Owen appeared in December 1920, with an introduction by Sassoon, and he has since become one of the most admired poets of World War I.

A review of Owen’s poems published on December 29, 1920, just two years after his death, read, “Others have shown the disenchantment of war, have unlegended the roselight and romance of it, but none with such compassion for the disenchanted nor such sternly just and justly stern judgment on the idyllisers.”

About Owen’s post-war audience, the writer Geoff Dyer said, “To a nation stunned by grief, the prophetic lag of posthumous publication made it seem that Owen was speaking from the other side of the grave. Memorials were one sign of the shadow cast by the dead over England in the twenties; another was a surge of interest in spiritualism. Owen was the medium through whom the missing spoke.”

W H Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn’t until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna on September 29, 1973.

Essay: Huxley

The variety of his essays

In his preface to his Collected Essays, Aldous Huxley tells us that essays belong to “a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within three poles of reference.” The first is the personal and auto­biographical. The second is the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular. The third is the abstract-universal. Huxley did not make use of the autobiographical material on any big scale, but it does make its appearance, time and again, and lends grace to his essays. Under the second heading we can place the pamphleteering essays about the bomb, and drugs, and the two cultures. The third kind of essays he wrote rather late in his life. He thus describes the range of his essays: “Essays autobiographical. Essays about things seen and places visited. Essays in criticism of all kinds of works of art, literary, plastic, musical. Essays about philosophy and religion, some of them couched in abstract terms, others in the form of an anthology with comments, others again in which general ideas are approached through the concrete facts of history and biography. Essays finally, in which, following Montaigne, I have tried to make the best of all The essay’s three worlds, have tried to say everything at once in as near an approach to contrapuntal simultaneity as the nature of literary art will allow of.”

His essays relevant to his times

To be an essayist, a writer must have the gift of style and this Huxley undoubtedly had and in an abundant measure too. Huxley had a vast knowledge also, which was gained from much travel, immense reading, and constant meeting with intelligent people. He had a full mind and an unquenchable spirit of inquiry. His essays are relevant to the situation in his time and ours, and give us a real view of the intellectual life of the western man during the period in which they were written. It was a time of revolution and upheaval. It was a time of the knowledge explosion. The knowledge explosion was bringing forward so much that was old and had been forgotten, as well as what was altogether new and revolutionary. Huxley believed that behind all the appearances there is reality, and for him the reality was the unitive knowledge of God. All his work leads to that, and his essays record the search and the affirmation.

The discursive quality of his essays

Huxley had an intelligence which always amused and braced the reader. He had the discursive quality which is native to the essay-form. In writing his essays he could begin anywhere; anything started him off, and he proceeded without, any jerks or jumps to a serious consideration of one of the many subjects which absorbed him. He himself had the quality which he found in Montaigne and which he thus describes: “Free association artistically controlled—this is the paradoxical secret of Montaigne’s best essays. One damned thing after another—but in a sequence that, in some almost miraculous way, develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience.” Huxley is nearly always easy to read, though sometimes he expects close attention to an abstract argument. He is never trivial. The world and the times were too wonderfully exciting to permit light-heartedness or triviality. However, some of his essays are as gay and light as a short story. And the endings may be a rounding of the subject into a calm finale, or an unexpected flash of wit, or a jest. The final gesture was part of his style.

Drama: G B Shaw

Before George Bernard Shaw started his career as a dramatist, the English drama had already entered into a new phase of development under the influence of the Norweigian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The romantic tradition of the Elizabethan drama which held the English stage for more than three centuries began to lose its influence from the middle of the nineteenth century. “Is drama to be limited to the surface characteristics of a life that is no longer lived in surface, or will drama characteristics of a life that is no longer lived in surface, or will drama reflect in form and substances the deepest life of the time?” This was the question which vigorously agitated the mind of the mid-Victorian dramatists. They finally realized that the new drama had a serious purpose to server and it should be brought in line discarded the romantic tradition of the Old English drama and accepted the real and serious problem of the age as the themes of the new English drama. In the absence of any British playwright to supply them with motive and model they drew inspiration from the continental playwrights particularly from Ibsen who had already made social problems of his time the subjects of his plays.

By the time young  Bernard  appeared on the scene of the English drama, Ibsen had been sufficiently known to the English playwrights and his creative influence felt by them. “Ibsen had taught men that drama, if it was to live a true life of its own, must deal with human emotions, with things near and dear to ordinary men and women. Hence the melodramatic romanticism and the chill pseudo-classic remoteness alike disappeared in favor of a treatment of actual English life, first of aristocratic existence, then of middleclass lives, and finally of laboring conditions. With the treatment of actual life the drama became more and more a drama of ideas, sometimes veiled in the man action, sometimes didactically set forth. These ideas were for the most part revolutionary, so that drama came to form an advanced battleground for a rising school of young thinkers. Revolt took the form of reaction to past literacy models, to current social conventions and to the prevailing morality of Victorian England.” They were T. W. Robertson, A. W. Pibero and Arthur Henry Jones. They wrote plays both of social interest and literary merit for the first time in England in imitation of the continental playwrights and initiated the movement for a new type of play called “The Naturalistic Play”. The plays written by these three playwrights contained “the rudiments of an Ibsenist motive” but they could not attain the excellence of an Ibsenist play. These plays are characterized by an abundant display of “artificial sentiment, verbal polish, and cynical elegance.” Whatever be their defects, it is true that they rescued the English drama from a state of chaos and set it on the right course. Along with these plays of social interest appeared also the plays of Oscar Wilde who wrote on the principle of “art for art’s sake” and attained considerable popularity at the time.

George Bernard Shaw

When young  Bernard  came to London this movement for the new drama had already set in. He got the movement quite ready for him. He at once plunged vigorously into the movement and made himself known first as a dramatic critic and then as a dramatist. He was a staunch champion of Ibsen and his new drama. He was a formidable opponent of the pure aesthetic principle of art. He vigorously denounced the “art for art’s sake” attitude prevailing at the time when he started writing Plays. His watch word was “art for art’s sake”. “For art’s sake’ alone I would not face the toil of writing a single sentence” said he. He was “a natural literary artist fettered by reforming zeal,” and his plays were “a continuous record of the long struggle between artist and moralist”.

George Bernard Shaw was an artist by nature but a propagandist by profession. He subordinated his artistic ability to his moral purpose. Thinking that “the stage was the finest platform in the world,” he “climbed on to the stage. Taught himself the dramatists job, and in addition to being a great controversialist became am almost supremely great dramatist.” His drams are vehicles of propaganda and his characters are “mechanical mouth-pieces” to express his own views on social, political, religious and moral problems of the age. He sought for and achieved a significant and harmonious union of literacy and theatrical qualities.

H. Pearson has made the following estimate of Shaw’s achievement as a dramatist:

“From 1895 to 1898 Shaw, as a dramatic critic, ceaselessly attacked fashionable drama of the age, championed Ibsen, prepared the way for his own comedies and incidentally wrote the wittiest and most provocative essays in the history of journalism. His attack was successful. The so-called ‘well made play gave place to the drama of ideas, and the Shavian Theatre was finally established in the early years of the present century.’

At first the London managers would not look at George Bernard Shaw’s plays. Instead of the denouements and state situation and commonplace sentiments to which they were accustomed, he gave them social satire, unconventional philosophy and brainy dialogue. One of his early plays was booed and brainy dialogue. One of his early plays was booed, another was censored, a third failed. Still he pegged away, and when his chance came in 1904 at the Court Theatre, he produced his own comedies, trained his own actors and created his own audiences. After that the London managers clamored for his plays. But the critics, uninfluenced by box-office considerations, were not so easily persuaded, and for more than a generation many of them went on repeating that his plays were not plays; an attitude he derisively encouraged by calling them conversations, discussions, history lessons, and so on. What made his works so novel was that he revived the classical technique of play writing, applying it to modern problems; he adopted the method of the Greek dramatists in order to deal with the topics of the hour. While the essence of his plays is as original as Shaw himself, their novelty lay in the fact that he used the theatre as another man would use a newspaper, a pulpit, or a platform; many of his comedies are half-sermon, half-debate, and every conceivable subject is discussed, from love. Marriage and family life to religion, science and politics, his laboriously acquired knowledge of social conditions, and his creed as a socialist informing most of them. Being an inspired dramatist, not a manufacturer of entertainment, he did not plan or plot his plays in advance. While engaged on them he never saw a page ahead and never knew what was going to happen. The forms they took were inevitable, though he worked as carefully at the writing of them as the most industrious craftsman.”  

Novels: H G Wells

H.G. Wells, in full Herbert George Wells (born Sept. 21, 1866, Bromley, Kent, Eng.—died Aug. 13, 1946, London) English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly.

Early writings

Wells’s first published book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). With his first novel, The Time Machine (1895), which was immediately successful, he began a series of science fiction novels that revealed him as a writer of marked originality and an immense fecundity of ideas: The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). He also wrote many short stories, which were collected in The Stolen Bacillus (1895), The Plattner Story (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899). For a time he acquired a reputation as a prophet of the future, and indeed, in The War in the Air (1908), he foresaw certain developments in the military use of aircraft. But his imagination flourished at its best not in the manner of the comparatively mechanical anticipations of Jules Verne but in the astronomical fantasies of The First Men in the Moon and The War of the Worlds, from the latter of which the image of the Martian has passed into popular mythology.

Behind his inventiveness lay a passionate concern for man and society, which increasingly broke into the fantasy of his science fiction, often diverting it into satire and sometimes, as in The Food of the Gods, destroying its credibility. Eventually, Wells decided to abandon science fiction for comic novels of lower middle-class life, most notably in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). In these novels, and in Tono-Bungay (1909), he drew on memories of his own earlier life, and, through the thoughts of inarticulate yet often ambitious heroes, revealed the hopes and frustrations of clerks, shop assistants, and underpaid teachers, who had rarely before been treated in fiction with such sympathetic understanding. In these novels, too, he made his liveliest, most persuasive comment on the problems of Western society that were soon to become his main preoccupation. The sombre vision of a dying world in The Time Machine shows that, in his long-term view of humanity’s prospects, Wells felt much of the pessimism prevalent in the 1890s. In his short-term view, however, his study of biology led him to hope that human society would evolve into higher forms, and with Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), and A Modern Utopia (1905), he took his place in the British public’s mind as a leading preacher of the doctrine of social progress. About this time, too, he became an active socialist, and in 1903 joined the Fabian Society, though he soon began to criticize its methods. The bitter quarrel he precipitated by his unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the Fabian Society from George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1906–07 is retold in his novel The New Machiavelli (1911), in which the Webbs are parodied as the Baileys.

Middle and late works

After about 1906 the pamphleteer and the novelist were in conflict in Wells, and only The History of Mr. Polly and the lighthearted Bealby (1915) can be considered primarily as fiction. His later novels are mainly discussions of social or political themes that show little concern for the novel as a literary form. Wells himself affected not to care about the literary merit of his work, and he rejected the tutelage of the American novelist Henry James, saying, “I would rather be called a journalist than an artist.” Indeed, his novel Boon (1915) included a spiteful parody of James. His next novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), though touched by the prejudice and shortsightedness of wartime, gives a brilliant picture of the English people in World War I.

World War I shook Wells’s faith in even short-term human progress, and in subsequent works he modified his conception of social evolution, putting forward the view that man could only progress if he would adapt himself to changing circumstances through knowledge and education. To help bring about this process of adaptation Wells began an ambitious work of popular education, of which the main products were The Outline of History (1920; revised 1931), The Science of Life (1931), cowritten with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells (his elder son by his second wife), and The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1932). At the same time he continued to publish works of fiction, in which his gifts of narrative and dialogue give way almost entirely to polemics. His sense of humour reappears, however, in the reminiscences of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934).

In 1933 Wells published a novelized version of a film script, The Shape of Things to Come. (Produced by Alexander Korda, the film Things to Come [1936] remains, on account of its special effects, one of the outstanding British films of the 20th century.) Wells’s version reverts to the utopianism of some earlier books, but as a whole his outlook grew steadily less optimistic, and some of his later novels contain much that is bitterly satiric. Fear of a tragic wrong turning in the development of the human race, to which he had early given imaginative expression in the grotesque animal mutations of The Island of Doctor Moreau, dominates the short novels and fables he wrote in the later 1930s. Wells was now ill and aging. With the outbreak of World War II, he lost all confidence in the future, and in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) he depicts a bleak vision of a world in which nature has rejected, and is destroying, humankind.

Virginia Woolf

Stream of consciousness, narrative technique in nondramatic fiction intended to render the flow of myriad impressions—visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal—that impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. The term was first used by the psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890). As the psychological novel developed in the 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the total flow of their characters’ consciousness, rather than limit themselves to rational thoughts. To represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of the mind at work, the writer incorporates snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level.

The stream-of-consciousness novel commonly uses the narrative techniques of interior monologue. Probably the most famous example is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a complex evocation of the inner states of the characters Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Other notable examples include Leutnant Gustl (1901) by Arthur Schnitzler, an early use of stream of consciousness to re-create the atmosphere of pre-World War I Vienna; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), which records the fragmentary and impressionistic responses in the minds of three members of the Compson family to events that are immediately being experienced or events that are being remembered; and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), a complex novel in which six characters recount their lives from childhood to old age.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941), known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.