ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE

CHAPTER 1
Introduction to English and American literature

English literature refers to the

collection of written literary
work in the Great
Britain and its colonies since the
7th century to the present day.
As may be
apparent, it has a great and
much-loved history where it
is chronologically
categorized into several eras: Old
English literature (c.658-1100),
Middle English
literature (1100–1500), English
Renaissance (1500–1660), Neo-
Classical Period
(1660–1798), 19th-century
literature, English literature
since 1901 which
includes modern, post-modern,
and 20th century literature.
Among the many
writers from different parts
of the English speaking
world, those who have
immensely contributed to the
development of English
literature are, William
Shakespeare, Jane Austen,
Charlotte Bronte, Virginia
Woolf, William Wordsworth,
W.B. Keats, Robert Frost. As
literature is the presentation of
writers’ expressions
towards life in their socio-
economic background, any type
of literature depicts a
certain culture. English literature,
by its all forms, genres, and
stylistics, reflects
the culture of the British. The
most known features of English
literature include
its wit, depiction of manners,
disparity between classes, themes
being stressed
on plots and characterization.
American literature is a
notion that emerged in the
recent past. It is the
production of literary work
written in the context of
America portraying
American culture and themes.
America, originally being a
British colony, was
part of English literature until the
country won independence and
every aspect
of the country: economy,
education, literature, arts, culture,
and social aspects
changed and new brands
brooded. The origin of the
American literature dates
back to the early 17th century.
American literature was largely
shaped by the
history of the country and
revolutionary ideas emerged
during civil and
revolutionary wars.
English literature refers to the collection of written literary work in the Great Britain and
its colonies since the 7th century to the present day. As may be apparent, it has a great
and much-loved history where it is chronologically categorized into several eras: Old
English literature (c.658-1100), Middle English literature (1100-1500), English
Renaissance (1500-1660), Neo-Classical Period (1660-1798), 19th-century literature,
English literature since 1901 which includes modern, post-modern, and 20th century
literature. Among the many writers from different parts of the English speaking world,
those who have immensely contributed to the development of English literature are,
 William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, William
Wordsworth, W.B. Keats, Robert Frost. As literature is the presentation of writers'
expressions towards life in their socio-economic background, any type of literature
depicts a certain culture. English literature, by its all forms, genres, and stylistics, reflects
the culture of the British. The most known features of English literature include its wit,
depiction of manners, disparity between classes, themes being stressed on plots and
characterization.

American literature is a notion that emerged in the recent past. It is the production of
literary work written in the context of America portraying American culture and themes.
America, originally being a British colony, was part of English literature until the country
won independence and every aspect of the country: economy, education, literature,
arts, culture, and social aspects changed and new brands brooded. The origin of the
American literature dates back to the early 17th century. American literature was largely
shaped by the history of the country and revolutionary ideas emerged during civil and
revolutionary wars.

What is the difference between English Literature and American Literature?

• Literary works written and published in Great Britain and British colonies are referred by
the term English literature while American literature refers to literary works written and
published in America.
• English literature is written in British English while American literature is written in
American English.
• English literature mainly reflects the English culture, English mannerisms while American
literature mirrors American culture, its history, and revolutionary concepts such as
relationships with the church, the state, supernatural elements that emerged in the
country. E.g. Massachusetts battle.
• English literature is older than the American English.
• American literature is often known as a much more realistic in portraying characters
while English literature is known for its wit and portrayal of theme in plots and
characterization.
• Judging by the above distinct and subtle differences, it is comprehensible that English
literature and American literature are two different notions although American literature
was once part of the English literature.

Literary Movements

Native American Literature

Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, native people had their own rich
culture. The Native American literary tradition comprises oral tradition, folktales,
creation stories and other myths that survive in the traditions and stories told by
modern-day Native Americans.
One common element in these stories is repetition of incidents in a culturally significant
number, usually four (the cardinal directions) or seven (the cardinal directions plus
skyward, earthward and center). These stories were told and retold by generations of
storytellers across the many tribes, and the stories vary in the telling not just from
storyteller to storyteller and tribe to tribe, but even across multiple tellings by the same
narrator.

In the 1700s, the Reverend Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan nation, was
among the first Native Americans to publish writings in English. At the beginning of the
20th century, Zitkála-Šá, a Yankton Dakota writer, musician and activist, collected and
published legends drawn from Native cultures for a widespread white, English-speaking
readership — along with personal stories that explored her struggles with cultural
identity and the tension between traditional and assimilation. Another iconic writer of
the early 20th century was Charles Eastman, considered the first to write American
history from the Native American point of view.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the Native American Renaissance saw a surge of Native
American literature, including authors like James Welch and Paula Gunn Allen.
Contemporary Native writers such as Eden Robinson and Sherman Alexie continue to be
vital voices in the American literary tradition.

Colonial Literature
1600s-1700s
As the English colonies were established in the 17th century, the topics of literature
among the colonists reflected their historical context. The earliest English works from
the colonies ranged from practical accounts of colonial history and life written by leaders
such as John Smith, to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America,
likely the first collection of poetry written in and about America.

Since many of the colonies were founded due to religious divisions back in Great Britain,
it should be no surprise that religious themes were common. Such works ranged from
the Puritan writings of ministers such as Increase Mather, to Roger Williams’ arguments
for separation of church and state, and even the anti-religious New English Canaan by
Thomas Morton — a harsh critique of the Puritans’ customs and power structures.

Enlightenment and Revolution

Mid- to Late 1700s
In the years surrounding the American Revolution, literature likewise shifted to
encompass the patriotic spirit that drove the nation toward independence. The
iconic Federalist Papers in the realm of politics were matched by works by other authors
in the realm of science and philosophy, such as Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.
1789 saw the publication of The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown. Widely
recognized as the first American novel, Brown’s work was a cautionary tale about the
dangers of seduction, advocating for rational thinking and moral education of women.
Given its historical context, critics have viewed The Power of Sympathy as an exploration
of virtues most needed by the new nation.

American Gothic
Early 1800s-present
Not to be confused with the famous painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic literature
draws on dark themes from the nation’s historical and contemporary challenges. The
early Gothic writers drew on frontier anxiety and fear of the unknown; Washington
Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) is perhaps the most famous example.

As the nation grew and matured, the Gothic tradition matured with it, through the
works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and others. Southern Gothic writers
used the decaying plantations of the post-Civil War South in place of the castles of
European Gothic literature, as in the works of William Faulkner. The contemporary works
of authors like Stephen King, who draws on his own experiences in rural Maine in his
stories, continue the long American Gothic tradition.

Romanticism and Transcendentalism

1820s-1850s
The romantic era began in Europe in the eighteenth century, but it arrived in America
later, around 1820. American romantic writers explored themes of individualism,
intuitive perception and the inherent goodness of the natural world. Among the best
known American romantic novels are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), a
dramatic story of a woman cast out of a Puritan community for committing adultery; and
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), one of history’s most famous stories of man against
the elements.

Emerging from romanticism later in the 1800s was perhaps the first notable American
intellectual movement, transcendentalism, built on the belief in the inherent goodness
of people, and the idea that self-reliance, transcending the corrupting influence of
society, unlocks that goodness. We see these ideas in the works of Henry David Thoreau,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and others. Perhaps the best-known
transcendentalist book was Thoreau’s Walden, a reflection on his experience living
independently near Walden Pond.
Since transcendental literature was in many respects the opposite of American Gothic, it
should come as no surprise that prominent Gothic writers also penned critiques of
transcendentalism, such as Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.

Literary Realism, Naturalism and Modernism

1860s-1940s
Following the Civil War, American literature was marked by a deep skepticism,
understandable given the historical context. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American
literary realism, in the works of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and others, was marked by
attempts to present realistic things as they are, without supernatural or speculative
 elements. Twain’s vigorous, colloquial style in works such as The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn was a shot across the bow at tired conventions. American naturalism,
heavily influenced by the works of Frank Norris, stood in the middle ground between
romanticism and realism; for instance, Stephen Crane’s short story The Open Boat, a
naturalistic depiction of a group of shipwreck survivors, explores themes of the
indifference of the universe.

From the same current as realism, literature progressed to American modernism in the
interwar period, with some of the most famous works penned by the “Lost Generation”
of expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Modernist works drew from the pain and loss of direction that this generation
experienced in the wake of World War One, but it also contained themes of hope as
individuals could change their surroundings.

Contemporary & Postmodern Literature

1950s-present
The postwar period saw the rise of a whole spectrum of innovative and subversive
themes in literature, from the overtly counter-cultural works of the 1950s “Beat
Generation” to John Updike’s reflective explorations of faith, personal turmoil and
sensuality. Sexually frank content entered the mainstream in this period, as restrictions
on obscenity were loosened and writers were empowered to speak freely about
previously taboo topics.

Over the last several decades, American literature has seen an explosion of
postmodernist themes such as unreliable narrators, internal monologue and temporal
distortion. Contemporary writers have used literature to critique American culture, find
connections across time and place and explore themes such as pluralism, relativism and
self-consciousness.

Significant writers
Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne’s works have
been labelled ‘dark romanticism,’ dominated as they are by cautionary tales that suggest
that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humankind. His novels
and stories, set in a past New England, are versions of historical fiction used as a vehicle
to express themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 –1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for
his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and suspense. He is
generally considered the inventor of detective fiction.
Poe’s work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and
international literature. In addition to his detective stories, he is one of the originators of
horror and science fiction. He is often credited as the architect of the modern short
story. He also focused on the effect of style and structure in a literary work: as such, he
has been seen. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as their
literary model. Baudelaire translated is works into French. Today, Poe is regarded as one
of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature, and there are
many well-known Edgar Allan Poe quotes. He was unusual in that he strived to earn his
living through writing alone, which resulted in a life of financial hardship and near
poverty.

Herman Melville (1819 – 1891)

Herman Melville was an American writer of novels, short stories and poems. He is best
known for the novel Moby-Dick and a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian
life, Typee. His whaling novel, Moby-Dick is often spoken of as ‘the great American novel’
’vying with Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn for that
title.
Melville was the master of dense and complex prose, rich in mystical imagery and
packed with allusions to philosophy, myth, scripture, visual arts and other literary works.
His themes go deep into the human condition: he explores such things as the
impossibility of finding enough common ground for human communication. His
characters are all preoccupied with the quest for that; his plots describe that pursuit and
all his themes and ideas are related to it.

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

Walt Whitman was a poet, essayist, and journalist who transformed poetry around the
world with his disregard for traditional rhyme and meter and his celebration of
democracy and sensual pleasure. His masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, a collection of
poems, is widely studied by poets, students and academics, set to music, translated into
numerous languages, and is widely quoted.
His influence can be found everywhere – in contemporary best seller lists to feature
films and musical works, both “serious” and popular. Whitman has left an indelible mark
on American culture. His influence is evident in the work of contemporaries as well as
poets who wrote in the decades after his death, but it goes beyond that: his style and his
vision of America were very influential in later literary movements as well, including the
poets of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and 60s who gained notoriety for their
counter-cultural lifestyles and controversial publications – Jack Kerouac, William
Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg being the best known Beats. His influence can be seen
especially in Ginsberg’s poetry with Ginsberg’s use of free verse and in the structure of
several of his longer poems, including Howl, which mimics Whitman’s original use of the
technique.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Unknown as a poet during her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now regarded by many as one
of the most powerful voices of American culture. Her poetry has inspired many other
writers, including the Brontes. In 1994 the critic, Harold Bloom, listed her among the
twenty-six central writers of Western civilisation.
After she died her sister found the almost two thousand poems the poet had written. As
her poems entered the public consciousness her reception concentrated on her
eccentric, reclusive nature, but since then she has become acknowledged as an original
and powerful poet. It is fortunate that her sister gained access to the poems as without
them American culture would have been very much poorer.

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, far better known as Mark Twain, was an American writer,
businessman, publisher and lecturer. He progressed from his day job as pilot of a
Mississippi riverboat to legend of American literature. His work shows a deep
seriousness and at the same time, it is hilariously satirical. His masterpiece is the
novel, Huckleberry Finn, which is regularly referred to as ‘the great American novel.’ His
body of writings is vast and Mark Twain’s many quotes on politics and human nature are
staples among speechmakers. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn have never lost their places as required reading in schools, and they
remain templates for young adult fiction. His writing style has had a profound influence
on generations of American writers. In 1935 Ernest Hemingway wrote “All modern
American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

Henry James (1843 –1916)

Henry James is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He is
noted for writing from a character’s point of view’ which allowed him to explore
consciousness and perception. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue
and unreliable narrators brought a new depth to narrative fiction, all of which were
influential on the writing of the novelists who followed him. He was nominated for the
Nobel prize for literature three times.
James’s writing career was one of the longest and most productive—and most influential
—in American literary history. He enlarged the novel while employing a highly individual
method and style. He wrote 20 novels, 112 tales, 12 plays, several volumes of travel and
criticism, and a great deal of literary journalism over 50 years. His persistent theme was
that of an innocent, exuberant, and democratic America confronting the worldly wisdom
and corruption of Europe’s older, aristocratic culture. His sense of the human scene was
surefooted: he was one of the great prose writers and stylists of his century. He was a
representative of a new realist school of literary art which broke with the English
romantic tradition of which the works of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace
Thackeray were prime examples.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born, British, poet, essayist, playwright, critic,
now regarded as one of the twentieth century’s major poets. He received more rewards
than almost any other writer of the past two centuries, including the Nobel prize, the
Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe Prize, the US Medal of Freedom, and the British Order of
Merit.
Eliot is best known for his great modern 20th century poem, The Waste Land. Other
poems that distinguish his work are Ash Wednesday, The Lovesong of J Alfred
Prufrock, The Four Quartets, and the ever-popular (particularly among children) Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His plays – verse dramas – Murder in the
Cathedral and The Cocktail Party – are among the landmarks of 20th century drama.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist, widely regarded as one of the
greatest, if not the greatest, American writers of the 20th century. He is best known for
his novel, The Great Gatsby, which vies for the title ‘Great American Novel’ with Mark
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
Fitzgerald’s place on this list is justified by the fact that his great novel is actually about
America: it’s an exploration and criticism of the American Dream, the ideal that any
American can aspire to, and achieve, the highest goals. Abraham Lincoln is usually
quoted as having been the realization of the Dream, advancing from birth in a log cabin
to President of the United States– a romantic, oversimplified version of the politician’s
story.

William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

William Cuthbert Faulkner was a Nobel Prize laureate, awarded the literature prize in
1949. He wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and screenplays. He is known mainly for his
novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha Country, Mississippi.
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated American writers, regarded, generally as the
great writer of the American South. Some of his novels are considered to be among the
best in the English language of the 20th century. Light in August, Absolom, Absolom, As I
Lay Dying, and particularly The Sound and the Fury, appear regularly on lists of the top
100. He was also a prolific writer of short stories. His first short story collection, These
13 (1931), includes many of his most acclaimed stories, including A Rose for Emily, Red
Leaves, That Evening Sun and Dry September.

Tennessee Williams (1911 – 1983)

Thomas Lanier Williams III, known as Tennessee Williams is one of America’s most
popular playwrights, and now regarded as one of the most significant writers of the
twentieth century. He wrote more than thirty plays, some of which have become classis
of Western drama. He also wrote novels and short stories but is known almost
exclusively for his plays.
His genius was in the honesty with which he represented society and the art of
presenting that in the form of absorbing drama. The plays offer a stark picture of the
prejudices of the American south, acknowledging economic realities and exploring social
conditions that were taboo when he began writing, such as homosexuality and domestic
violence. He was an admirer of Chekhov and influenced by him. Like Chekhov he was
able to represent tragic situations that are also funny. The plays portray America at its
worst while at the same time showing the human condition as absurd, for all of the
suffering.

Arthur Miller (1915 – 2005)

Arthur Miller was a playwright and ‘great man’ of American theatre, which he
championed throughout his long life. His many dramas were among the most popular
by American authors and several are considered to be among the best American plays,
among them the classics, The Crucible, All My Sons, A View from the Bridge and, above
all, the iconic American drama, Death of a Salesman. He also wrote film scripts, notably
the classic, The Misfits.
As an individual Miller attracted a great deal of attention during his lifetime, particularly
in his early life, and was frequently in the headlines during the 40s, 50s and 60s. He won
the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, he testified before the House Un-American Activities
Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. All of those events were the main talking
topics in America when they occurred.

Joseph Heller (1923 –1999)

Joseph Heller was an American writer of satirical novels, short stories and plays.
Although he wrote several acclaimed novels, his reputation rests firmly on his
masterpiece, the great American anti-war satire, Catch 22. Because of the quality of the
novel and the impact it has made on American culture it has catapulted Heller into the
ranks of the great American writers.
In that novel the main protagonist, Yossarian, poses a question which is one of the great
questions of modern times: has this huge industrial military that we’ve constructed
become more deadly and powerful than the cause for which it was constructed?

Ernest Hemminway (1899 – 1961)

Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist. He published seven
novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works, and won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1954. More works, including three novels, four short story collections,
and three non-fiction works, were published posthumously. Several of his works are now
classics of American literature. In 1961, like his father, a brother and a sister, Hemingway
 committed suicide. A niece, Margaux Hemingway, the Holywood star, also committed
suicide.
What places Hemingway among the twenty top American writers is the style he
developed, that set the benchmark for 20th century prose writing in the whole of the
English speaking world. He changed the nature of American writing by reacting against
the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style, in the words of
literary critic, Henry Louis Gates, of Harvard, ‘in which meaning is established through
dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least
very little—is stated explicitly.’

CHAPTER 2
The Epic Poem Beowulf
Beowulf , Heroic poem considered the highest achievement of Old English literature and the
earliest European vernacular epic. It deals with events of the early 6th century and was
probably composed c. 700–750. It tells the story of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, who gains
fame as a young man by vanquishing the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother; later, as an
aging king, he kills a dragon but dies soon after, honoured and lamented. Beowulf belongs
metrically, stylistically, and thematically to the Germanic heroic tradition but shows a distinct
Christian influence.

What is Beowulf?
Beowulf is a heroic poem, considered the highest achievement of Old English literature and the
earliest European vernacular epic. It deals with events of the early 6th century CE and is
believed to have been composed between 700 and 750. Although originally untitled, it was later
named after the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, whose exploits and character provide its
connecting theme.

Where does Beowulf take place?

Beowulf takes place in early 6th-century Scandinavia, primarily in what is known today
as Denmark and Sweden.

Who was Beowulf written by?

The author of Beowulf is unknown. It is possible that the poem was composed by and
transmitted between several different poets before it was preserved in a single manuscript that
dates to about 1000.

What does Beowulf present to Hrothgar?

Upon his return to Heorot, Beowulf presents to King Hrothgar Grendel’s decapitated head and
the jeweled hilt of the sword he used to kill Grendel’s mother.
Was Beowulf real?
There is no evidence of a historical Beowulf, but other characters, sites, and events in the poem
can be historically verified. For example, the poem’s Danish King Hrothgar and his nephew
Hrothulf are generally believed to have been based on historical figures.

Anglo-Saxon Poetry and the Oral Tradition

Anglo-Saxon Poetry (or Old English Poetry) encompasses verse written during the 600-year
Anglo-Saxon period of British history, from the mid-fifth century to the Norman Conquest of
1066. Almost all of the literature of this period was orally transmitted, and almost all poems
were intended for oral performance. As a result of this, Anglo-Saxon poetry tends to be highly
rhythmical, much like other forms of verse that emerged from oral traditions. However, Anglo-
Saxon poetry does not create rhythm through the techniques of meter and rhyme, derived from
Latin poetry, that are utilized by most other Western European languages. Instead, Anglo-Saxon
poetry creates rhythm through a unique system of alliteration. Syllables are not counted as they
are in traditional European meters, but instead the length of the line is determined by a pattern
of stressed syllables that begin with the same consonant cluster. The result of this style of
poetry is a harsher, more guttural sound and a rhythm that sounds more like a chant than a
traditional song.

Anglo-Norman Literature and the Influence of the Norman Conquest

Anglo-Norman literature, body of writings in the Old French language as used
in medieval England. Though this dialect had been introduced to English court circles in Edward
the Confessor’s time, its history really began with the Norman Conquest in 1066, when it
became the vernacular of the court, the law, the church, schools, universities, parliament, and
later of municipalities and of trade. For the English aristocracy, Anglo-Norman became an
acquired tongue and its use a test of gentility. It was introduced into Wales and Ireland and used
to a limited extent in Scotland. The earliest extant literary texts in the Anglo-Norman dialect
belonged to the reign of Henry I in the early 12th century, the latest to that of Henry IV in the
early 15th century. The alienation toward France during the Hundred Years’ War started an
increasing use of English, the last strongholds of a French dialect being Parliament and the law,
in both of which it still survives in a few formulas.

From the 12th through the 14th century, Anglo-Norman was second only to Latin in its use as a
literary language in England. Most types of literary works were represented in Anglo-Norman as
in French, with a slight difference of emphasis. The chanson de geste was an exception; this
type of French epic poem was not unknown in England, but there seem to have been no original
works of the kind written there. Conversely, Anglo-Norman works were known, copied, or
imitated on the Continent. One important difference between continental and Anglo-
Norman literature is that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 led to an outpouring of doctrinal
and devotional works for the laity in England not paralleled in France, which perhaps explains
the fact that in the early periods England was often in advance of the Continent in the
development of new literary forms. Historical writing was popular both in Normandy and in the
rest of the Continent; and although, after the Norman Conquest, Latin replaced English for use
in documents and chronicles, examples of both are found in Anglo-Norman. Religious houses
caused lives of native saints to be written, and the nobility had a taste for romances about
imaginary English ancestors. Thus social and political differences between the two countries
prevented Anglo-Norman literature from being a mere provincial imitation of French.

Middle English Literature

Poetry
The Norman Conquest worked no immediate transformation on either the language or
the literature of the English. Older poetry continued to be copied during the last half of the 11th
century; two poems of the early 12th century—“Durham,” which praises that city’s cathedral
and its relics, and “Instructions for Christians,” a didactic piece—show that correct alliterative
versecould be composed well after 1066. But even before the conquest, rhyme had begun to
supplant rather than supplement alliteration in some poems, which continued to use the older
four-stress line, although their rhythms varied from the set types used in classical Old English
verse. A postconquest example is “The Grave,” which contains several rhyming lines; a poem
from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the death of William the Conqueror, lamenting his cruelty
and greed, has more rhyme than alliteration.

Influence of French poetry

By the end of the 12th century, English poetry had been so heavily influenced by French models
that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by Lawamon, a Worcestershire priest,
seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with rhyming couplets while
generally eschewing French vocabulary. The Brut draws mainly upon Wace’s Anglo-
Norman Roman de Brut (1155; based in turn upon Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum
Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain]), but in Lawamon’s hands the Arthurian story takes on
a Germanic and heroic flavour largely missing in Wace. The Brut exists in two manuscripts, one
written shortly after 1200 and the other some 50 years later. That the later version has been
extensively modernized and somewhat abridged suggests the speed with which English
language and literary tastes were changing in this period. The Proverbs of Alfred was written
somewhat earlier, in the late 12th century; these proverbs deliver conventional wisdom in a
mixture of rhymed couplets and alliterative lines, and it is hardly likely that any of the material
they contain actually originated with the king whose wisdom they celebrate. The early 13th-
century Bestiary mixes alliterative lines, three- and four-stress couplets, and septenary
(heptameter) lines, but the logic behind this mix is more obvious than in the Brut and
the Proverbs, for the poet was imitating the varied metres of his Latin source. More regular in
form than these poems is the anonymous Poema morale in septenary couplets, in which an old
man delivers a dose of moral advice to his presumably younger audience.

Didactic poetry
The 13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems presenting biblical
narrative, saints’ lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in Latin or French. The
most idiosyncraticof these is the Ormulum by Orm, an Augustinian canon in the north
of England. Written in some 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets,
the work is interesting mainly in that the manuscript that preserves it is Orm’s autograph and
shows his somewhat fussy efforts to reform and regularize English spelling. Other biblical
paraphrases are Genesis and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph, and the vast Cursor mundi, whose
subject, as its title suggests, is the history of the world. An especially popular work was
the South English Legendary, which began as a miscellaneous collection of saints’ lives but was
expanded by later redactors and rearranged in the order of the church calendar. The didactic
tradition continued into the 14th century with Robert Mannyng’s Handling Sin, a confessional
manual whose expected dryness is relieved by the insertion of lively narratives, and the Prick of
Conscience, a popular summary of theology sometimes attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle.

Verse romance
The earliest examples of verse romance, a genre that would remain popular through the Middle
Ages, appeared in the 13th century. King Horn and Floris and Blauncheflour both are preserved
in a manuscript of about 1250. King Horn, oddly written in short two- and three-stress lines, is a
vigorous tale of a kingdom lost and regained, with a subplot concerning Horn’s love for Princess
Rymenhild. Floris and Blauncheflour is more exotic, being the tale of a pair of royal lovers who
become separated and, after various adventures in eastern lands, reunited. Not much later than
these is The Lay of Havelok the Dane, a tale of princely love and adventure similar to King
Hornbut more competently executed. Many more such romances were produced in the 14th
century. Popular subgenres were “the matter of Britain” (Arthurian romances such as Of
Arthour and of Merlin and Ywain and Gawain), “the matter of Troy” (tales of antiquity such
as The Siege of Troy and King Alisaunder), and the English Breton lays (stories of otherworldly
magic, such as Lai le Freine and Sir Orfeo, modeled after those of professional Breton
storytellers). These relatively unsophisticated works were written for a bourgeois audience, and
the manuscripts that preserve them are early examples of commercial book production. The
humorous beast epicmakes its first appearance in Britain in the 13th century with The Fox and
the Wolf, taken indirectly from the Old French Roman de Renart. In the same manuscript with
this work is Dame Sirith, the earliest English fabliau. Another sort of humour is found in The
Land of Cockaygne, which depicts a utopia better than heaven, where rivers run with milk,
honey, and wine, geese fly about already roasted, and monks hunt with hawks and dance with
nuns.
The lyric
The lyric was virtually unknown to Old English poets. Poems such as “Deor” and “Wulf and
Eadwacer,” which have been called lyrics, are thematically different from those that began to
circulate orally in the 12th century and to be written down in great numbers in the 13th; these
Old English poems also have a stronger narrative component than the later productions. The
most frequent topics in the Middle English secular lyric are springtime and romantic love; many
rework such themes tediously, but some, such as “Foweles in the frith” (13th century) and “Ich
am of Irlaunde” (14th century), convey strong emotions in a few lines. Two lyrics of the early
13th century, “Mirie it is while sumer ilast” and “Sumer is icumen in,” are preserved with
musical settings, and probably most of the others were meant to be sung. The dominant mood
of the religious lyrics is passionate: the poets sorrow for Christ on the cross and for the Virgin
Mary, celebrate the “five joys” of Mary, and import language from love poetry to express
religious devotion. Excellent early examples are “Nou goth sonne under wod” and “Stond wel,
moder, ounder rode.” Many of the lyrics are preserved in manuscript anthologies, of which the
best is British Library manuscript Harley 2253 from the early 14th century. In this collection,
known as the Harley Lyrics, the love poems, such as “Alysoun” and “Blow, Northern Wind,” take
after the poems of the Provençal troubadours but are less formal, less abstract, and more lively.
The religious lyrics also are of high quality; but the most remarkable of the Harley Lyrics, “The
Man in the Moon,” far from being about love or religion, imagines the man in the Moon as a
simple peasant, sympathizes with his hard life, and offers him some useful advice on how to
best the village hayward (a local officer in charge of a town’s common herd of cattle).

Prose
Old English prose texts were copied for more than a century after the Norman Conquest; the
homilies of Aelfric were especially popular, and King Alfred’s translations of Boethius and
Augustine survive only in 12th-century manuscripts. In the early 13th century an anonymous
worker at Worcester supplied glosses to certain words in a number of Old English manuscripts,
which demonstrates that by this time the older language was beginning to pose difficulties for
readers.
The composition of English prose also continued without interruption. Two manuscripts of
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle exhibit very strong prose for years after the conquest, and one of
these, the Peterborough Chronicle, continues to 1154. Two manuscripts of about 1200 contain
12th-century sermons, and another has the workmanlike compilation Vices and
Virtues, composed about 1200. But the English language faced stiff competition from both
Anglo-Norman (the insular dialect of French being used increasingly in the monasteries) and
Latin, a language intelligible to speakers of both English and French. It was inevitable, then, that
the production of English prose should decline in quantity, if not in quality. The great prose
works of this period were composed mainly for those who could read only English—women
especially. In the West Midlands the Old English alliterative prose tradition remained very much
alive into the 13th century, when the several texts known collectively as the Katherine
Group were written. St. Katherine, St. Margaret, and St. Juliana, found together in a single
manuscript, have rhythms strongly reminiscent of those of Aelfric and Wulfstan. So to a lesser
extent do Hali Meithhad(“Holy Maidenhood”) and Sawles Warde (“The Guardianship of the
Soul”) from the same book, but newer influences can be seen in these works as well: as the title
of another devotional piece, The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd (“The Wooing of Our Lord”), suggests,
the prose of this time often has a rapturous, even sensual flavour, and, like the poetry, it
frequently employs the language of love to express religious fervour.

Moral and Allegorical Literature of the Middle Ages

The Christian church was the most influential cultural institution in medieval Europe, having far
more influence over every facet of life—including response to and production of texts—than
any temporal or secular political or economic organizing system. From its earliest inception, the
ecclesiastical establishment controlled the dissemination and interpretation of its foundational
text, the Bible, accounting for any apparent inconsistencies through an elaborate system of
reading that attributed multiple levels of meaning to the Scriptures as well as finding
connections between events in the Old Testament and the history of Christ's ministry in
the New Testament. This mode of interpretation was invented and disseminated by the early
church fathers. Most prominent among these were Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose
autobiography The Confessionsand treatise The City of God exemplify fourfold-interpretation of
the Bible, and Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) whose Moralia in Job(Moralizing of the Book
of Job) took every verse of that Old Testament book and found four different ways of
understanding them. These modes of interpreting Scripture not only influenced the expression
of spiritual ideas and sentiments in the Middle Ages, but also had significant impact on the
visual arts and on literature. When applied to literary texts, this pervasive mode of thinking was
known as allegory. In addition to literary works like Piers Plowman or the Romance of the
Rose which were completely allegorical, many works of medieval literature—even those
associated with "realism"—incorporated some limited allegorical aspects in their overall
scheme.

The Four-fold Method of Medieval Alle-gorization.

In interpreting Scripture, the church fathers recognized the potential for up to four levels of
allegorical or "exegetical" interpretation:
1. the literal level, the thing as it really stands in the text;
2. the allegorical level, which refers to the Church or something standing for a universal
truth;
3. the tropological or "moral" level, which pertains to the spiritual life of individuals,
teaching how they should behave; and
4. the anagogical or eschatological level, which stands for something pertaining to the
hereafter.
In short, the literal level teaches things; the allegorical level tells what should be believed; the
tropological or moral level tells what should be done; and the anagogical level explains where a
person goes after death. Although this complex system was seldom used directly in the creation
of literature, it was important as a mode of thinking and occasionally appears in some of the
more self-consciously religious allegorical texts. In the late fourteenth-century poem that
modern editors call Pearl, a touching story of a father struggling with the death of his young
daughter, the poet meditates on the meaning of the word which has become the poem's title in
ways very similar to the "fourfold scheme." The major symbol of the "pearl" is, literally, a lost
gem or the dead daughter; allegorically it represents primal innocence before the fall or the
state of a baptized infant; tropologically it emphasizes one's duty to regain innocence; and
anagogically it points to a beatific vision in the heavenly paradise. Much more common than
this complex fourfold allegory was a type of narrative built entirely on personifications, which
allowed writers to explore directly the interactions between abstract moral qualities (often
characterized as vices and virtues) fighting for control of the human will.

Arthurian Legends and Romance in Medieval Literature

Arthurian legend, the body of stories and medievalromances, known as the matter of Britain,
centring on the legendary king Arthur. Medieval writers, especially the French, variously treated
stories of Arthur’s birth, the adventures of his knights, and the adulterous love between his
knight Sir Lancelot and his queen, Guinevere. This last situation and the quest for the Holy
Grail (the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper and given to Joseph of Arimathea) brought
about the dissolution of the knightly fellowship, the death of Arthur, and the destruction of his
kingdom.
Stories about Arthur and his court had been popular in Wales before the 11th century;
European fame came through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38),
celebrating a glorious and triumphant king who defeated a Roman army in eastern France but
was mortally wounded in battle during a rebellion at home led by his nephew Mordred. Some
features of Geoffrey’s story were marvelous fabrications, and certain features of the Celtic
stories were adapted to suit feudal times. The concept of Arthur as a world conqueror was
clearly inspired by legends surrounding great leaders such as Alexander the
Great and Charlemagne. Later writers, notably Wace of Jersey and Lawamon, filled out certain
details, especially in connection with Arthur’s knightly fellowship (the Knights of the Round
Table).

CHAPTER 3
Renaissance Literature in England

In a tradition of literature remarkable for its exacting and brilliant achievements,

the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods have been said to represent the most brilliant century
of all. (The reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603; she was
succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland, who took the title James I of England as well.
English literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625, is properly called Jacobean.) These
years produced a gallery of authors of genius, some of whom have never been surpassed, and
conferred on scores of lesser talents the enviable ability to write with fluency, imagination, and
verve. From one point of view, this sudden renaissance looks radiant, confident, heroic—
and belated, but all the more dazzling for its belatedness. Yet, from another point of view, this
was a time of unusually traumatic strain, in which English society underwent massive
disruptions that transformed it on every front and decisively affected the life of every individual.
In the brief, intense moment in which England assimilated the European Renaissance, the
circumstances that made the assimilation possible were already disintegrating and calling into
question the newly won certainties, as well as the older truths that they were dislodging. This
doubleness, of new possibilities and new doubts simultaneously apprehended, gives the
literature its unrivaled intensity.

Social conditions
In this period England’s population doubled; prices rocketed, rents followed, old social loyalties
dissolved, and new industrial, agricultural, and commercial veins were first tapped. Real wages
hit an all-time low in the 1620s, and social relations were plunged into a state of fluidity from
which the merchant and the ambitious lesser gentleman profited at the expense of the
aristocrat and the labourer, as satires and comedies current from the 1590s complain. Behind
the Elizabethan vogue for pastoral poetry lies the fact of the prosperity of the enclosing sheep
farmer, who sought to increase pasture at the expense of the peasantry. Tudor platitudes about
order and degree could neither combat nor survive the challenge posed to rank by these
arrivistes. The position of the crown, politically dominant yet financially insecure, had always
been potentially unstable, and, when Charles I lost the confidence of his greater subjects in the
1640s, his authority crumbled. Meanwhile, the huge body of poor fell ever further behind the
rich; the pamphlets of Thomas Harman (1566) and Robert Greene (1591–92), as well
as Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605–06), provide glimpses of a horrific world of vagabondage and
crime, the Elizabethans’ biggest, unsolvable social problem.

Industrial and religious revolution

The barely disguised social ferment was accompanied by an intellectual revolution, as
the medieval synthesis collapsed before the new science, new religion, and new humanism.
While modern mechanical technologies were pressed into service by the Stuarts to create the
scenic wonders of the court masque, the discoveries of astronomers and explorers were
redrawing the cosmos in a way that was profoundly disturbing:

And freely men confess that this world’s spent,

When in the planets, and the firmament
They seek so many new….
(John Donne, The First Anniversary, 1611)

The majority of people were more immediately affected by the religious revolutions of the 16th
century. A person in early adulthood at the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 would, by her death
in 1603, have been vouchsafed an unusually disillusioning insight into the duty owed by
private conscience to the needs of the state. The Tudor church hierarchy was an instrument of
social and political control, yet the mid-century controversies over the faith had already
wrecked any easy confidence in the authority of doctrines and forms and had taught people to
inquire carefully into the rationale of their own beliefs (as John Donne does in his third satire [c.
1596]). The Elizabethan ecclesiastical compromise was the object of continual criticism, from
radicals both within (who desired progressive reforms, such as the abolition of bishops) and
without (who desired the return of England to the Roman Catholic fold), but
the incipientliberalism of individuals such as John Milton and the scholar and churchman
William Chillingworth was held in check by the majority’s unwillingness to tolerate a plurality of
religions in a supposedly unitary state. Nor was the Calvinist orthodoxy that cradled most
English writers comforting, for it told them that they were corrupt, unfree, unable to earn their
own salvations, and subject to heavenly judgments that were arbitrary and absolute. Calvinism
deeply affects the world of the Jacobean tragedies, whose heroes are not masters of their fates
but victims of divine purposes that are terrifying yet inscrutable.

The race for cultural development

The third complicating factor was the race to catch up with Continental developments in arts
and philosophy. The Tudors needed to create a class of educated diplomats, statesmen, and
officials and to dignify their court by making it a fount of cultural as well as political patronage.
The new learning, widely disseminated through the Erasmian (after the humanist Desiderius
Erasmus) educational programs of such men as John Colet and Sir Thomas Elyot, proposed to
use a systematic schooling in Latin authors and some Greek to encourage in the social elites a
flexibility of mind and civilized serviceableness that would allow enlightened princely
government to walk hand in hand with responsible scholarship. Humanism fostered
an intimatefamiliarity with the classics that was a powerful incentive for the creation of an
English literature of answerable dignity. It fostered as well a practical, secular piety that left its
impress everywhere on Elizabethan writing. Humanism’s effect, however, was modified by the
simultaneous impact of the flourishing Continental cultures, particularly the Italian. Repeatedly,
crucial innovationsin English letters developed resources originating from Italy—such as
the sonnet of Petrarch, the epic of Ludovico Ariosto, the pastoral of Jacopo Sannazzaro, the
canzone, and blank verse—and values imported with these forms were in competition with the
humanists’ ethicalpreoccupations. Social ideals of wit, many-sidedness,
and sprezzatura (accomplishment mixed with unaffectedness) were imbibed from Baldassare
Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, translated as The Courtyer by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and
Elizabethan court poetry is steeped in Castiglione’s aristocratic Neoplatonism, his notions of
universal proportion, and the love of beauty as the path to virtue. Equally significant was the
welcome afforded to Niccolò Machiavelli, whose lessons were vilified publicly and absorbed in
private. The Prince, written in 1513, was unavailable in English until 1640, but as early as the
1580s Gabriel Harvey, a friend of the poet Edmund Spenser, can be found enthusiastically
hailing its author as the apostle of modern pragmatism. “We are much beholden to Machiavel
and others,” said Francis Bacon, “that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.”

The Works of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire,
Eng.—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon), English poet and playwright, often
considered the greatest writer in world literature.

Shakespeare spent his early life in Stratford-upon-Avon, receiving at most a grammar-

school education, and at age 18 he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway. By 1594 he
was apparently a rising playwright in London and an actor in a leading theatre company,
the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later King’s Men); the company performed at the Globe
Theatre from 1599.

The order in which Shakespeare’s plays were written and performed is highly uncertain.
His earliest plays seem to date from the late 1580s to the mid-1590s and include the
comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; history plays based on the lives of the English kings,
including Henry VI (parts 1, 2, and 3), Richard III, and Richard II; and the
tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

The plays apparently written between 1596 and 1600 are mostly comedies,
including The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About
Nothing, and As You Like It, and histories, including Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), Henry V,
and Julius Caesar.

Approximately between 1600 and 1607 he wrote the comedies Twelfth Night, All’s Well
That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure, as well as the great
tragedies Hamlet (probably begun in 1599), Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, which
mark the summit of his art.

Among his later works (about 1607 to 1614) are the tragedies Antony and
Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, as well as the fantastical romances The
Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

He probably also collaborated on the plays Edward III and The Two Noble Kinsmen. In
2010 a case was made for Shakespeare as the coauthor (with John Fletcher) of Double
Falsehood.

Shakespeare’s plays, all of them written largely in iambic pentameter verse, are marked
by extraordinary poetry; vivid, subtle, and complex characterizations; and a highly
inventive use of English. His 154 sonnets, published in 1609 but apparently written
mostly in the 1590s, often express strong feeling within an exquisitely controlled form.

Shakespeare retired to Stratford before 1610 and lived as a country gentleman until his death. The
first collected edition of his plays, or First Folio, was published in 1623. As with most writers of the
time, little is known about his life and work, and other writers, particularly the 17th earl of Oxford,
have frequently been proposed as the actual authors of his plays and poems.

William Shakespeare is widely considered the greatest dramatist of all time as well as the most
influential writer in the history of the English language. He originated hundreds of words and
phrases that English speakers use to this day. His impact on literature is so massive that one
could make an argument that every one of his works deserves a spot on this list, but these
seven plays and one poetry collection are undoubtedly among his most important
achievements.
Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594–96)

Although not usually considered among his greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet remains one of
Shakespeare’s most popular works. This tale of two star-crossed lovers who both meet tragic
ends has been adapted countless times for the stage and screen. The universality of the story of
young people in love trying to be together in an uncaring world has resonated with audiences
and readers from across the globe for centuries.
Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–99)

While Shakespeare’s best-known plays are his tragedies, he also wrote a number of comedies,
including this tale of a woman falsely accused of being unfaithful. The plotline—centered on the
couple Claudio and Hero—involves humorous misunderstandings and bumbling supporting
characters. Much Ado About Nothing is also notable for its secondary plot, in which Hero’s
cousin Beatrice and her potential romantic interest, Benedick, trade witty insults and express
skepticism about love throughout the play. Their “merry war” ends with the two on equal
footing, admitting their love for one another.

Julius Caesar (c. 1599–1600)

The majority of Shakespeare’s history plays concern events that occurred in his native England, but he did
occasionally explore historical eras in other parts of the world. The most notable example of this is Julius
Caesar. In Shakespeare’s drama Caesar, the leader of Rome, is conspired against and eventually assassinated
by his former republican allies, including his trusted friend Brutus. The play is famous for Mark Antony’s
speech that begins “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The speech is one of the best-known of
Shakespeare’s monologues.

Hamlet (c. 1599–1601)

Hamlet is arguably the greatest drama ever written. In it Hamlet, the prince of Denmark,
struggles with the recent death of his father and with his mother having married Claudius, his
father’s brother and successor. Claudius is later revealed to have murdered Hamlet’s father. A
visit from his father’s ghost spurs Hamlet to seek revenge. One of the most notable aspects of
the play are Hamlet’s soliloquies, which beautifully express the character’s inner turmoil.

King Lear (1605–06)

The play opens with King Lear deciding to divide his kingdom among his three daughters in
proportion to their love for him. He disinherits Cordelia, the daughter who actually loves him
but refuses to falsely flatter him. His other two daughters, the deceitful Goneril and Regan, take
over his kingdom. They then turn on Lear and cast him out. Lear descends into madness but is
eventually reconciled with Cordelia, who is later hanged before Lear himself dies. King Lear is
one of Shakespeare’s most pessimistic works. Hope, however, can be found in the character of
Cordelia, who displays an enduring moral strength in the face of injustice.

Macbeth (c. 1606–07)

Along with Hamlet and King Lear, Macbeth is the third of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. It is
the story of a Scottish nobleman who, following the prophecy of three witches, becomes the
ruler of his country after killing Duncan, the reigning king. Macbeth continues to kill potential
political rivals. The guilt drives his wife, Lady Macbeth, mad. Ultimately, Macbeth is killed as a
consequence of his political ambitions. The tragic rendering of Macbeth’s downward spiral and
the iconic depiction of Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness make this one of Shakespeare’s
major works.

Sonnets (1609)
Written in the 1590s when Shakespeare’s theatrical career was paused during an outbreak of
plague, the sonnet cycle was finally published in 1609. The possibly autobiographical sonnets
are divided into two sections. The first and much larger group of sonnets address an unnamed
“Fair Youth,” a male friend of the poet’s. The second set focuses on a “Dark Lady.” As a
narrative, the sonnet sequence tells of strong attachment, of jealousy, of grief at separation, and
of joy at being together and sharing beautiful experiences. The Dark Lady sonnets end the
sequence on a disturbing note of sorrow and self-loathing.

The Tempest (1611)

The plot of The Tempest centers on Prospero, a magician and former duke of Milan, and his
daughter, Miranda. The pair are stranded on a deserted island after Prospero was usurped from
his dukedom by his brother, Antonio. Prospero uses his magic to create a storm that strands a
group of people, including Antonio, on the island. Among that group is also Ferdinand, who falls
in love with Miranda and helps precipitate the actions that lead to reconciliation among the
main characters. Although not Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest seems like his farewell to
the theater. It contains moving passages of reflection on what his powers as artist have been
able to accomplish.

Elizabethan Drama and Theater

In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, the theatre was the focal point of the age. Public life
was shot through with theatricality—monarchs ruled with ostentatious pageantry, rank and
status were defined in a rigid code of dress—while on the stages the tensions and
contradictions working to change the nation were embodied and played out. More than any
other form, the drama addressed itself to the total experience of its society. Playgoing was
inexpensive, and the playhouse yards were thronged with apprentices, fishwives, labourers, and
the like, but the same play that was performed to citizen spectators in the afternoon would
often be restaged at court by night. The drama’s power to activate complex, multiple
perspectives on a single issue or event resides in its sensitivity to the competing prejudices and
sympathies of this diverse audience.

Elizabethan poetry and prose

English poetry and prose burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift of taste
toward a fluent artistry self-consciously displaying its own grace and sophistication was
announced in the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an upsurge in literary
production that came to fruition in the 1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing
productivity by writers of every persuasion and calibre.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a period of slowly increasing confidence in
the literary competence of the language and tremendous advances in education, which for the
first time produced a substantial English readership, keen for literature and
possessing cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the technological maturity
and accelerating output (mainly in pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing.
The Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of books, was incorporated in 1557,
and Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet and audience by
making publicly available lyric poetry, which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly
coterie. Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately to use print to advertise his
talents.

Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe, (baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—died May 30, 1593,
Deptford, near London), Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in
English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse.
Early years
Marlowe was the second child and eldest son of John Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker.
Nothing is known of his first schooling, but on Jan. 14, 1579, he entered the King’s School,
Canterbury, as a scholar. A year later he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Obtaining
his bachelor of arts degree in 1584, he continued in residence at Cambridge—which may imply
that he was intending to take Anglican orders. In 1587, however, the university hesitated about
granting him the master’s degree; its doubts (arising from his frequent absences from the
university) were apparently set at rest when the Privy Council sent a letter declaring that he had
been employed “on matters touching the benefit of his country”—apparently in Elizabeth
I’s secret service.
Last years and literary career.
After 1587 Marlowe was in London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into trouble
with the authorities because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and probably also
engaging himself from time to time in government service. Marlowe won a dangerous
reputation for “atheism,” but this could, in Elizabeth I’s time, indicate merely unorthodox
religious opinions. In Robert Greene’s deathbed tract, Greenes groats-worth of witte, Marlowe
is referred to as a “famous gracer of Tragedians” and is reproved for having said, like Greene
himself, “There is no god” and for having studied “pestilent Machiuilian pollicie.” There is
further evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the denunciation of him written by the spy
Richard Baines and in the letter of Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe’s
death. Kyd alleged that certain papers “denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that were found in his
room belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two years before. Both Baines and Kyd
suggested on Marlowe’s part atheism in the stricter sense and a persistent delight
in blasphemy. Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order
for Marlowe’s arrest; two days later the poet was ordered to give daily attendance on their
lordships “until he shall be licensed to the contrary.” On May 30, however, Marlowe was killed
by Ingram Frizer, in the dubious company of Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, at a lodging
house in Deptford, where they had spent most of the day and where, it was alleged, a fight
broke out between them over the bill.

In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe’s achievements
were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already
written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published
1590). Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had
translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the Latin.
About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint
work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production of Tamburlaine he received
recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay
ahead. Both parts of Tamburlaine were published anonymously in 1590, and the publisher
omitted certain passages that he found incongruouswith the play’s serious concern with history;
even so, the extant Tamburlaine text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe’s. No other of his
plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but splendid
poem Hero and Leander—which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic Elizabethan poem
apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser—appeared in 1598.

There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent
to Tamburlaine were written. It is not uncommonly held that Faustus quickly
followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social” kind of
writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. His last play may have been The Jew of
Malta, in which he signally broke new ground. It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The
Jew of Malta were performed by the Admiral’s Men, a company whose outstanding actor
was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.

The Tragedy of the Renaissance

The Roman world failed to revive tragedy. Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) wrote at least eight tragedies,
mostly adaptations of Greek materials, such as the stories of Oedipus, Hippolytus,
and Agamemnon, but with little of the Greek tragic feeling for character and theme. The
emphasis is on sensation and rhetoric, tending toward melodrama and bombast. The plays are
of interest in this context mainly as the not entirely healthy inspiration for the precursors of
Elizabethan tragedy in England.

The long hiatus in the history of tragedy between the Greeks and the Elizabethans has been
variously explained. In the Golden Age of Roman literature, roughly from the birth of Virgil in
70 BCE to the death of Ovid in 17 CE, the Roman poets followed the example of Greek
literature; although they produced great lyric and epic verse, their tragic drama lacked the
probing freshness and directness fundamental to tragedy.

With the collapse of the Roman world and the invasions of the barbarians came the beginnings
of the long, slow development of the Christian church. Churchmen and philosophers gradually
forged a system, based on Christian revelation, of human nature and destiny. The mass, with its
daily reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, its music, and its dramatic structure, may have
provided something comparable to tragic drama in the lives of the people.

With the coming of the Renaissance, the visual arts more and more came to represent the
afflictive aspects of life, and the word tragedy again came into currency. Geoffrey Chaucer used
the word in Troilus and Criseyde, and in The Canterbury Tales it is applied to a series of stories in
the medieval style of de casibus virorum illustrium, meaning “the downfalls (more or less
inevitable) of princes.” Chaucer used the word to signify little more than the turn of the wheel
of fortune, against whose force no meaningful human effort is possible. It remained for the
Elizabethans to develop a theatre and a dramatic literature that reinstated the term on a level
comparable to that of the Greeks.

CHAPTER 4
The Rise of the Novel in the 18th Century
Factors that Contributed in The Rise of The Novel

Various reasons can be adduced for the rise and popularity of the novel in the eighteenth
century. Here are some factors that contributed in the Rise of the 18th Century Novel:

1. The Decline of Drama

The Rise of the Novel in the early stage of eighteenth century was greatly affected by the
Decline of Drama. Drama was very famous in Elizabethan Age. As the Licensing Act passed in
1737, Fielding and some others attacked Walpone. The situation raised as something like –

Cut out the hearts of Drama.

Now, Drama which had helped to satisfy the natural human desire for reading or stories was
about to moribund. Something had to take the place of drama. Thus, to fill up the gap,
dramatists turned into novelists and the Novel raised in replace of the Drama. The writings of
the dramatists in the modern period got its root established by that time and appeared as
Novel.

2. Rise of The Periodical Essays

The seeds of Novel of the characters was laid in the Periodical essays of Addison and Steele
during this age. The foundation of the Novel of characters was laid in the pages of Spectator. In
Spectator, we also found the origin of the social and domestic novels. Because these papers
were widely read, it cultivated the taste of public for the future rise of the novel.

3. Ready Material
We have to bear in mind that the growth of the Novel was not sudden but it had already
been done by numerous writers. Realism and Romance, Morality and Adventure had been
introduced earlier by Defoe and Bunyan, Mrs. Aphra Behn and Swift. Before Fielding and
Richardson started, the seeds of the Novel had already been sown. These pioneers had only to
take the last step in the process of its growth.
4. Rise of Common People
The rise of the Novel was also result of the democratic movement in the eighteenth
century England. Like tragedy, romance made an appeal to the rich and left the common people
untouchable. The romanticism of Defoe remained popular for sometime but it didn’t last long
because it was far away from the ordinary social world. During this age, a consciousness of the
rights of the people began to come in the public mind and the novelists took advantages of this
situation; and so they began to write something that deals with the life of common people. The
common people found that the novels deal with their own life and problems, so they started to
support the novels of realism that were presented by Henry Fielding. As time passed, the
democratic feelings of the people and the democratic support of the government made novel
popular in the country. The rise of the common people with the democratic consciousness gave
a great support to the development of the Novel.

5. No Limitation for Classicism

The novel was a sign that the literature was beginning to outgrow the cramping limitations
of classicism. It was impossible in the epic and drama where the men should reject altogether
the authority of antiquity. In Fielding’s case, there was some discussion of technical questions
from the classicist standpoint and classical learning; but in general, the novel offered a fresh
field in which the modern writers were able to work independently.

6. Rise of The Realism

Novel is a literary form that is related to the common life. The spirit of realism and
romantic features like enthusiasm, passion and imaginations that declined in the period were
the main characteristics of the 18th century. The English novel of the eighteenth century has all
these characteristics. As novel is related to the common life, the names that were used in the
eighteenth century novel were common names of the people. Like, Henry Fielding named his
main character Joseph Andrews to make it easily. There’s a clear description of the character
which added realism in the novel. Thus, realism greatly contributed in the rise of the Novel.

American Literature in the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century–1830)

The first colonists of North America wrote, often in English, about their experiences starting in
the 1600s. This literature was practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great
Britain, and focused on the future.
John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and as
president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, include his
controversial accounts of the Powhatan girl Pocahontas.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in
colonial America.
Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest
collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new
writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on
what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers
consumed also came from Great Britain.
The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped
the political direction of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, tells a
quintessentially American life story.

 By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge.
Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from
1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American
landscape in an unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It includes “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van
Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo.
These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the
American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

 The Romantic Period (1830–70)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over
the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of
nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in
the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a
genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up
to his mysterious death in 1849.
Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its
meter and rhyme scheme.
The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846)
are gripping tales of horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each
exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.
James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict
everyday life in the Northeast.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the
upper-class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models and
sensibilities.

The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified
whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David
Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was
editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine.

Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing

novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-
enduring works of American literature.
As a young man, Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical
“Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists
before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The
House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence
on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of traveling
and writing.

Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional
constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his
frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went
through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized
the ethos of the Romantic period.

During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and
about enslaved and free Black people were written.
William Wells Brown published what is often considered the first Black American novel, Clotel,
in 1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).
In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first Black women to
publish fiction in the United States.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially in 1851–52, is credited with
raising opposition in the North to slavery.
Harriet Jacobs published a searing account of her life as an enslaved woman in 1861, the same
year that the Civil War began. It became one of the era’s most influential slave narratives.

Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely
in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she
was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems
express a Romantic vision as clearly as Whitman’s or Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and
emotionally intense. Here are five of her notable poems:
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
“Because I could not stop for Death –”
“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”
“A Bird, came down the Walk –”
“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

 Realism and Naturalism (1870–1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2,300,000
soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt
Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and
what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and
unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence
of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a
devastating war, these styles became writers’ primary mode of expression.
Mark Twain in Constantinople, c. 1867, during the travels he later described in The Innocents
Abroad (1869).Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LC-USZ62-28851

Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer
before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on
politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s
story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual
Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his
writing. The following are some of Twain’s notable works:
Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors
of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw
around them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.
Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister
Carrie (1900) is the most important American naturalist novel.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane,
and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that
vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in Black dialect
—“Possum” and “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and
gave them what they believed was reality for Black Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not in
dialect—“We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in America
during Reconstruction and afterward.

Sophia Alice Callahan, who was of Muskogee Creek descent, published in 1891 what is often
considered the first novel by a Native woman: Wynema: A Child of the Forest. Zitkala-Sa, whose
mother was Yankton Sioux, published a collection of Dakota stories, Old Indian Legends, in 1901.
She used this collection and other early writings to document her experience of forced
assimilation, and she spent the rest of her life advocating for Native peoples.

Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present
reality, but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic
experience, not simply document truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between
the United States and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and
naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels include:
The American (1877)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Golden Bowl (1904)

 The Modernist Period (1910–45)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the
20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World
War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in Europe and the United
States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in
the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break was often an
act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or
perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the
richest and most productive in American literature.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense
may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or
toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may
express hope at the prospect of change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).
Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).
Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were
Watching God(1937).
Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises(1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929)
articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.
Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O
Pioneers!(1913) and My Ántonia (1918).
William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to
break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).
John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937)
and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His
fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but
his was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.
Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the
Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.
The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee
Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.
Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important
organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.
During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a
spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century.
Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and
enduringly American.
Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into
Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity
that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh(written
1939, performed 1946).
During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed
injustice in America.
Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America
in Our Town, first produced in 1938.

 The Contemporary Period (1945–present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong,
entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics
for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to
define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second half of
the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States
driven by the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. By the turn of the 21st
century, American literature was recognized as being a complex, inclusive story that is grounded
on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different
backgrounds and is open to the experiences of more and more Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many
ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the
United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he
faced as a Black man in America; other Black writers working from the 1950s through the ’70s
also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed Black man adrift in, and
ignored by, America.
James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his
first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first
performed in 1959.
Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of Black nationalism and sought to
generate a uniquely Black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm
X and Alex Haley, is among its most-lasting literary expressions.
Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the
lives of Black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.
In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her
involvement in the civil rights movement.

The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist,
metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist,
stream of consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of
American novelists. Little holds them together beyond their chronological proximity and
engagement with contemporary American society. These are representative novels:
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)
Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
N. Scott Momaday: House Made of Dawn (1968)
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)
Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)
Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)
Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)
Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)
Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)
Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)
Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting
influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956)
pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate
American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for
poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the important poets of
this period are the following:
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
John Berryman
Donald Hall
Elizabeth Bishop
James Merrill
Nikki Giovanni
Robert Pinsky
Adrienne Rich
Rita Dove
Yusef Komunyakaa
W.S. Merwin
Tracy K. Smith
In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three
men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949)
questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while
Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his
characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered
what might have been a benign domestic situation into something vicious and cruel. By the
1970s the face of American drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the
21st century. Notable dramatists include:
David Mamet
Amiri Baraka
Sam Shepard
August Wilson
Ntozake Shange
Wendy Wasserstein
Tony Kushner
David Henry Hwang
Richard Greenberg
Suzan-Lori Parks
Young Jean Lee
Jeremy O. Harris

Puritan Literature and its Religious and Moral Themes

Puritanism, a religious reform movement in the late 16th and 17th centuries that sought to
“purify” the Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic “popery” that the Puritans
claimed had been retained after the religious settlement reached early in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I. Puritans became noted in the 17th century for a spirit of moral and religious
earnestness that informed their whole way of life, and they sought through church reform to
make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation. Their efforts to transform the nation
contributed both to civil war in England and to the founding of colonies in America as working
models of the Puritan way of life.

Theology
Puritanism may be defined primarily by the intensity of the religious experience that it fostered.
Puritans believed that it was necessary to be in a covenant relationship with God in order to be
redeemed from one’s sinful condition, that God had chosen to reveal salvation through
preaching, and that the Holy Spirit was the energizing instrument of salvation. Calvinist theology
and polity proved to be major influences in the formation of Puritan teachings. This naturally led
to the rejection of much that was characteristic of Anglican ritual at the time, these being
viewed as “popish idolatry.” In its place the Puritans emphasized preaching that drew on images
from scripture and from everyday experience. Still, because of the importance of preaching, the
Puritans placed a premium on a learned ministry. The moral and religious earnestness that was
characteristic of Puritans was combined with the doctrine of predestination inherited
from Calvinism to produce a “covenant theology,” a sense of themselves as the elect chosen by
God to live godly lives both as individuals and as a community.

The Revolutionary Period and the Emergence of Political Writings

Literature and the Arts in the Revolutionary Era
By the time of the American Revolution(1775–83), American writers had ventured beyond the
Puritan literary style and its religious themes and had developed styles of writing that grew
from distinctly American experiences. (The Puritans were a group of Protestants who broke with
the Church of England; they believed that church rituals should be simplified and that people
should follow strict religious discipline.) The colonial fascination with science, nature, freedom,
and innovation came through in the writings of the Revolutionary period. The colonists
developed their own way of speaking as well, no longer copying the more formal style of British
writers. (Noah Webster's Blue-Backed Speller, published in 1783, helped to standardize the new
American version of English.)

Author David Hawke offered an example of the American literary style in The Colonial
Experience. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin(1706–1790), he noted, "took the seventeenth-
century saying 'Three may keep counsel, if two be away' and converted it into 'Three may keep a
secret, if two of them are dead.'"

Some of the best literature of the colonial era described everyday life in New England and, in
the process, depicted aspects of the fledgling American character. The colonists who would
form a new nation were firm believers in the power of reason; they were ambitious, inquisitive,
optimistic, practical, politically astute, and self-reliant.

What colonial children read

Up until about twenty-five years before the Revolutionary War began, the reading material for
American children was restricted basically to the Bible and other religious works. Gradually,
additional books were published and read more widely. Rivaling the Bible in popularity were
almanacs. Children loved to read them for the stories, weather forecasts, poetry, news events,
advice, and other assorted and useful information they contained. The most famous of these
was Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, first published in 1732. Franklin (see box
titled "The Many Sides of Benjamin Franklin") claimed to have written Poor Richard because his
wife could not bear to see him "do nothing but gaze at the Stars; and has threatened more than
once to burn all my Books… if I do not make some profitable Use of them for the good of my
Family." We have Poor Richard to thank for such lasting sayings as: "Eat to live, and not live to
eat"; "He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas"; "Little strokes fell big oaks"; and
"Early to bed and early to rise/Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

All the American colonies had printing presses by 1760, but Americans and their children
continued to rely on England as the source for most of their books. A London publisher by the
name of John Newberry (1713–1767) is said to have had the greatest influence on children's
literature in pre-Revolutionary America. He began publishing children's books in the 1740s.
Most of them were educational, with titles such as A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies
or A private tutor for little Masters and Misses (1750; a how-to book on proper behavior)
and The Pretty Book for Children(1750; a guide to the English language).

Books were quite expensive in the 1700s, though, so children usually advanced from the Bible
and religious verses straight to adult-type literature. Especially popular in that category were
storybooks such as Robinson Crusoe and Arabian Nights.

Prior to the Revolution, schoolbooks were imported from England and were available only to
the wealthy. These books stressed self-improvement through hard work and careful spending.
Such qualities, it was believed, could lead to wealth, which was the lesson learned in the
popular storybook Goody Two-Shoes: The Means by which she acquired her Learning and
Wisdom, and in consequence thereof her Estate [everything she owned](1765). Goody Two-
Shoes was a girl named Margery Meanwell, an orphan who was thrilled to receive two shoes to
replace her one. She rose from humble beginnings, learning to read and later becoming a
teacher; she went on to marry a wealthy man and matured into a "Lady" and a generous
person.

The role of satire in the Revolutionary era

Up until the Revolutionary era, the Puritans who had settled New England had a profound
influence on what was printed in the colonies: nearly all publications centered on a religious
topic of some sort. The Puritans frowned on dramatic performances, as well. But by the mid-
1700s, the Puritan influence was fading. In 1749 the first American acting troupe was
established in Philadelphia. Seventeen years later, America's first permanent playhouse was
built in the same city; in 1767 the Southwark Theatre staged the first play written by a native-
born American, Thomas Godfrey's (1736–1763) Prince of Parthia.

By the mid-1760s, political writings by colonists were increasingly common and more and more
forceful in nature. James Otis (1725–1783), a lawyer from Boston, published The Rights of
British Colonists Asserted and Proved in 1764. And the hated Stamp Act, a tax law passed by the
British in 1765 (see Chapter 4: The Roots of Rebellion [1763–1769]), prompted an even greater
outpouring of writing of a political nature. (Parliament, England's lawmaking body, passed
the Stamp Act to raise money from the colonies without receiving the consent of the colonial
assemblies, or representatives.)

One of the most popular forms of political writing was satire, especially plays, essays, and
poems. Satire pokes fun at human vices and foolishness. While most satiric works were written
by men, some of the best-known plays of the day were written by a woman named Mercy Otis
Warren (1728–1814).

Warren was the sister and wife of two patriots (James Otis and James Warren, respectively) and
an eager participant in the political meetings held so often at her home. She was strategically
placed in Boston to follow the events leading up to the American Revolution. Her first political
drama, The Adulateur, was published anonymously (without her name) in Boston in 1773, soon
after the shocking publication of Governor Thomas Hutchinson's (1711–1780) letters revealing
his anti-patriot views (see Chapter 4: The Roots of Rebellion [1763–1769]). Not surprisingly,
Warren's gift for satire was directed at pro-British leaders. The play's last words are spoken by a
character based on Warren's brother, James Otis. Although he foresees war, he also predicts
fame, victory, and eternal prosperity for the party of liberty.

During the war, Warren wrote several other dramatic satires that actively promoted the
revolutionary cause, but her plays were never performed on stage. They were read by many
people, though, and were performed privately for Warren's family and friends, including
prominent Revolutionary figures such as Samuel, John, and Abigail Adams (see Chapter 4: The
Roots of Rebellion [1763–1769].)

Other notable satirists put the war on stage. John Leacock's play The Fall of British
Tyranny,which was performed in 1776, portrayed the notorious Battle of Bunker Hill (see
Chapter 6: Lexington, Concord, and the Organization of Colonial Resistance) and the military
discussions of American war leader George Washington. In plays by Warren and Leacock,
Americans appeared as mythical or real figures from Greek and Roman days. In
Warren's Adulateur, for example, the characters inspired by James Otis and his friend Samuel
Adamsare renamed Brutus and Cassius (early Roman political leaders). Audiences enjoyed the
game of identifying the dramatists' thinly disguised portraits of public figures.

Benjamin Franklin, who seemed to be able to do anything, produced a long stream of political
satires making fun of British policies. In his 1773 Edict by the King of Prussia, for example, he
drew parallels between the settlement of England in the fifth century by Germans (then called
Prussians) and the settlement of America. His intention was to show how ridiculous it was
for Great Britain to think that just because she had settled America, she had the right to lay
heavy taxes on her subjects. (The British held just the opposite view.) In the Edict, the King of
Prussia makes the same trade and tax demands on the former German colonists in England that
England was making on the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s.
American lawyer and poet John Trumbull's (1750–1831) epic poem "M'Fingal," first published in
1776, became the most popular satirical poem of the American Revolution. The silly hero,
M'Fingal, is a clownish Loyalist who argues at a town meeting that tyranny (unjust, severe, and
often cruel rule) is justice. He is bested in this battle of words by the patriot Honorius, a
character apparently based on American statesman (and, later, U.S. president) John Adams.

CHAPTER 5
Romanticism and Transcendentalism
The connection between romanticism and transcendentalism exists in the confluence of several
elements. Both movements were a philosophical and artistic response to the reason-based
Enlightenment ideals that preceded each. Where the Enlightenment focused on intellectual,
concrete meditations on the human condition, both romanticism and transcendentalism formed
an epistemological framework devoted to the pursuit of emotional and spiritual exploration.
Both movements focus on the state of the human condition, treating the emotional and
spiritual not as obstacles to be overcome, but as fundamental traits of humanity that should be
embraced. romanticism and transcendentalism influenced the philosophic schools of
existentialism, post-modernism, and post-structuralism that flourished in the post-WWII era.

The Enlightenment, fascinated with logical and empirical progress, created a strong back-lash by
those who sought a more instinctual, spiritual, and ephemeral methodology for intellectual
endeavors. It is important to understand the movement that directly proceeded romanticism to
establish the link between romanticism and transcendentalism. Both schools created an
aesthetic model focused on imagery based on natural elements and processes in contrast to the
Enlightenment's art and literature, which focused on human achievement in a cold, tactical way.
romanticism and transcendentalism were, essentially, intellectual protest movements.

Henry David Thoreau was a transcendentalist writer.

Romanticism focused on the exaltation of the natural order to separate aesthetic ideals from
the force of human civilization. One of the primary concerns for romantic expressionists was the
idea that social forces are not the distillation of a human ideal but a corruption of it. A babbling
brook, a rolling meadow, and a sunset lazily descending into the horizon behind a shimmering
lake are all examples of uncorrupted inspiration, engendering awe in the human soul.

The Poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats
Poetry
Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity
among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it
had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the
intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the
current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary
thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a
world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An
Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside
sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged
him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the
hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic
reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not
likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the
universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a
repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by
his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and
then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas),
written from about 1796 to about 1807.

Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem
(1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist
as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic)
condition.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the
implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and
fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared
war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those
events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the
pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The
first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both
to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his
sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with
Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in
her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and
speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume
began with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying
delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded
with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to
set out his mature faith in nature and humanity.

His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long
autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two
books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously,
1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and
by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant
English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The
poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael”
and “The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800),
Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly
brought together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted
himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious
Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics,
however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature
and the human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and
“Frost at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge
himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with
subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that
Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing,
which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished
“Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between
the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters,
notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output
became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape
as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the
suspension of his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”

The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of
Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The
death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder
that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice
themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political
essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the
Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in
deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the
time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a
longer projected work, The Recluse, “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature,
and Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own
right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the
failure of French revolutionary ideals.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which
brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became
fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla
Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an
account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and
made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in
1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the
essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian
readers.

Romantic Themes of Nature, Imagination, and Individuality

Romanticism is a change that happened in art, literature, and music during the 19th century.
There are five distinct ways that Romanticism is described: imagination, intuition, idealism,
inspiration, and individuality.

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation
of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over
intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its
moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the
exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view
of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than
strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a
gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture,
national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the
remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the
satanic.

Imagination:
What do you use when you apply your imagination? Yes, you use your mind. Most individuals
didn't have a willingness to fail. They saw the imagination as a possible failure in their life
because it takes them out of their comfort zone. However, imagination was considered
necessary for creating art. Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal
rules. Imagination is the doorway to ultimate understanding and truth. As Rene' Descartes said,
"I think; therefore, I am."

Intuition:
Intuition is a certain feeling or instinct. Romantics believed that knowledge is gained through
intuition rather than reasoning. William Wordsworth said that "all good poetry is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." There is a reliance on natural feelings. Romantic
literature emphasizes a love of nature.

Idealism:
Some people believe idealism is impracticality. Idealism is the concept that the world can be a
better place through the spirit and the mind. Romantics believed in the natural goodness of
humans. They believed that the savage is noble, childhood is good, and the emotions inspired
by both beliefs cause the heart to soar.
Inspiration:
Art should be spontaneous rather than precise. Nature presented itself as a work of art. It could
be joyful and peaceful or frightening and worrisome. Emotions and passion are inspiration to
the creator because human experience gives people the freedom of through and expression.

Individuality:
Romantics celebrated the individual. Individuals have unique and endless potential. The
Romantic hero embodies bravery, strength, and chivalry. Birth and class are unimportant
because the individual transcends in society. He may be brooding and dark; not interested in
authority, a nonconformist. He may be young and innocent, but he also has a knowledge of
people and of life based on intuition.

American Romanticism and Transcendentalism

Individualism: American Romanticism, Transcendentalism and Anti-Transcendentalism

1. Time period: early to mid 1800s.

2. Brought about as a reaction to the Age of Reason and the strict doctrines of Puritanism
(very strict religious beliefs and practices in America from 1600-late 1700s)
3. Major themes or characteristics of Romanticism: importance of the individual, values the
imagination, and emotional side of human nature rather than rational (logical) side of hu-
man nature. Some writers had a fascination with the supernatural. Writers had an opti-
mistic outlook.
4. The natural world was glorified.
5. Famous Romantic writers: Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Devil and Tom
Walker”) Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“A Psalm of Life”), Poet William Cullen
Bryant (“Thanatopsis”), and novelist James Fennimore Cooper (created the frontier‟s
man character; Last of the Mohicans).

Washington Irving Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Transcendentalism:
(An optimistic offshoot of Romanticism)

1. Time period: mid 1800s to late 1800s.

2. A belief that „transcendent forms‟ of truth exist beyond reason and experience.

3. Values intuition as a means of gaining this higher truth.

4. Communing with nature made possible an intuitive connection with the entire universe.

5. This connection with all: God, mankind, the natural world was known as the Universal
Oversoul. All living things could tap into this spirituality.

6. Valued non-conformity.
7. Major writers of the time: Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Self-Reliance”), Henry David Thoreau
(Walden and “Civil Disobedience”) and Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass).

Henry David Thoreau Walt Whitman

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anti-Transcendentalism or Gothic
(A pessimistic offshoot of Romanticism)

1. Time period: mid 1800s to late 1800s.

2. Known as the Dark Side of Individualism.

3. The focus on the imagination in Romanticism led to a focus on the demonic, the fantastic and
the insane for the Gothic.

4. Gothic writers took a pessimistic view of humans and saw the potential for evil in all people.

5. „Essential truths’ about life were found in extreme situations or the darker side of human
nature (greed, betrayal, fear, etc.).

6. Major writers: Edgar Allan Poe (“The Raven” and “Fall of the House of Usher”) and
Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The Minister‟s Black Veil”).

Edgar Allan Poe Nathaniel Hawthorne

7. Gothic lives on: Southern Gothic (William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” and Flannery
O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”), and contemporary writers (Anne Rice, Interview
With A Vampire).

CHAPTER 6
Victorian Literature
“The modern spirit,” Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In 1859 Charles
Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Historians,
philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to new areas of
study of the human experience. Traditional conceptionsof man’s nature and place in the world
were, as a consequence, under threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by stating
that “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in
place of the ‘absolute.’ ”
The economic crisis of the 1840s was long past. But the fierce political debates that led first to
the Second Reform Act of 1867 and then to the battles for the enfranchisement of women were
accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief.

The novel
Late Victorian fiction may express doubts and uncertainties, but in aesthetic terms it displays a
new sophistication and self-confidence. The expatriate American novelist Henry James wrote in
1884 that until recently the English novel had “had no air of having a theory, a conviction,
a consciousness of itself behind it.” Its acquisition of these things was due in no small part to
Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot. Initially a critic and translator, she was
influenced, after the loss of her Christian faith, by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste
Comte. Her advanced intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated sense of the novel
form to shape her remarkable fiction. Her early novels—Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the
Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861)—are closely observed studies of English rural life that
offer, at the same time, complex contemporary ideas and a subtle tracing of moral issues. Her
masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), is an unprecedentedly full study of the life of a provincial
town, focused on the thwarted idealism of her two principal characters. George Eliot is a realist,
but her realism involves a scientific analysis of the interior processes of social and personal
existence.

Victorian literary comedy

Victorian literature began with such humorous books as Sartor Resartus and The Pickwick
Papers. Despite the crisis of faith, the “Condition of England” question, and the “ache of
modernism,” this note was sustained throughout the century. The comic novels of Dickens and
Thackeray, the squibs, sketches, and light verse of Thomas Hood and Douglas Jerrold, the
nonsense of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and the humorous light fiction of Jerome K. Jerome
and George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith are proof that this age, so often
remembered for its gloomy rectitude, may in fact have been the greatest era of comic writing in
English literature.

Robert Browning and Dramatic Monologues

Celebratons honoring the bi-centennial of Robert Browning’s birth are taking place on each side
of the Atlantic. In late June, a conference sponsored by the Browning Society of London focused
on a particular aspect of Browning’s work–the dramatic monologue. For those who are
unfamiliar with the term, the following definition is offered.

M. H. Abrams, one of the general editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and a
respected American critic known especially for work on Romanticism, lists three features of the
dramatic monologue as it applies to poetry:

1. A single person, who is clearly not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the
poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment.
2. This person addresses and interacts with one or more people; but we know of the auditors’
presence, and what they say or do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.
3. The main principle controlling the poet’s choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker
says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker’s temperament
and character
Robert Browning is considered to be the perfecter of the dramatic monologue, which had its
heyday in the Victorian Period. Other Victorian poets to produce one or more dramatic
monologues include Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. None, however, produced
as many, or as striking, dramatic monologues as Robert Browning.

The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson

Major literary work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

In 1842 Tennyson published Poems, in two volumes, one containing a revised selection from the
volumes of 1830 and 1832, the other, new poems. The new poems included “Morte d’Arthur,”
“The Two Voices,” “Locksley Hall,” and “The Vision of Sin” and other poems that reveal a strange
naïveté, such as “The May Queen,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” and “The Lord of Burleigh.” The
new volume was not on the whole well received. But the grant to him at this time, by the prime
minister, Sir Robert Peel, of a pension of £200 helped to alleviate his financial worries. In 1847
he published his first long poem, The Princess, a singular anti-feminist fantasia.

The year 1850 marked a turning point. Tennyson resumed his correspondence with Emily
Sellwood, and their engagement was renewed and followed by marriage. Meanwhile, Edward
Moxon offered to publish the elegies on Hallam that Tennyson had been composing over the
years. They appeared, at first anonymously, as In Memoriam (1850), which had a great success
with both reviewers and the public, won him the friendship of Queen Victoria, and helped bring
about, in the same year, his appointment as poet laureate.

In Memoriam is a vast poem of 131 sections of varying length, with a prologue and epilogue.
Inspired by the grief Tennyson felt at the untimely death of his friend Hallam, the poem touches
on many intellectual issues of the Victorian Age as the author searches for the meaning of life
and death and tries to come to terms with his sense of loss. Most notably, In Memoriam reflects
the struggle to reconcile traditional religious faith and belief in immortality with the emerging
theories of evolution and modern geology. The verses show the development over three years
of the poet’s acceptance and understanding of his friend’s death and conclude with an epilogue,
a happy marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia.

After his marriage, which was happy, Tennyson’s life became more secure and outwardly
uneventful. There were two sons: Hallam and Lionel. The times of wandering and unsettlement
ended in 1853, when the Tennysons took a house, Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson
was to spend most of the rest of his life there and at Aldworth (near Haslemere, Surrey).

Tennyson’s position as the national poet was confirmed by his Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington (1852)—though some critics at first thought it disappointing—and the famous poem
on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, published in 1855 in Maud and Other Poems.
Maud itself, a strange and turbulent “monodrama,” provoked a storm of protest; many of the
poet’s admirers were shocked by the morbidity, hysteria, and bellicosity of the hero. Yet Maud
was Tennyson’s favourite among his poems.

A project that Tennyson had long considered at last issued in Idylls of the King (1859), a series of
12 connected poems broadly surveying the legend of King Arthur from his falling in love with
Guinevere to the ultimate ruin of his kingdom. The poems concentrate on the introduction of
evil to Camelot because of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, and on the
consequent fading of the hope that had at first infused the Round Table fellowship. Idylls of the
King had an immediate success, and Tennyson, who loathed publicity, had now acquired a
sometimes embarrassing public fame. The Enoch Arden volume of 1864 perhaps represents the
peak of his popularity. New Arthurian Idylls were published in The Holy Grail, and Other Poems
in 1869 (dated 1870). These were again well received, though some readers were beginning to
show discomfort at the “Victorian” moral atmosphere that Tennyson had introduced into his
source material from Sir Thomas Malory.

In 1874 Tennyson decided to try his hand at poetic drama. Queen Mary appeared in 1875, and
an abridged version was produced at the Lyceum in 1876 with only moderate success. It was
followed by Harold (1876; dated 1877), Becket (not published in full until 1884), and the “village
tragedy” The Promise of May, which proved a failure at the Globe in November 1882. This play
—his only prose work—shows Tennyson’s growing despondency and resentment at the
religious, moral, and political tendencies of the age. He had already caused some sensation by
publishing a poem called “Despair” in The Nineteenth Century (November 1881). A more
positive indication of Tennyson’s later beliefs appears in “The Ancient Sage,” published in
Tiresias and Other Poems (1885). Here the poet records his intimations of a life before and
beyond this life.

Tennyson accepted a peerage (after some hesitation) in 1884. In 1886 he published a new
volume containing “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” consisting mainly of imprecations against
modern decadence and liberalism and a retraction of the earlier poem’s belief in inevitable
human progress.

In 1889 Tennyson wrote the famous short poem “Crossing the Bar,” during the crossing to the
Isle of Wight. In the same year he published Demeter and Other Poems, which contains the
charming retrospective “To Mary Boyle,” “The Progress of Spring,” a fine lyric written much
earlier and rediscovered, and “Merlin and the Gleam,” an allegorical summing-up of his poetic
career. In 1892 his play The Foresters was successfully produced in New York City. Despite ill
health, he was able to correct the proofs of his last volume, The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s
Dream, and Other Poems (1892).

The Brontë Sisters and Gender Identity

The history of women’s education is a slow-moving narrative of long-lasting patriarchal
oppression with numerous female champions who consistently fought for equal rights to
education. The Brontë sisters were nineteenth-century role models, as they subverted social
conventions by becoming writers, a typically male role at the time. Their education granted
them the ability to write some of the most well-known novels of all time, and they serve as a
historic example of the power of equal education. Their works emphasised the progress that
was set in motion for women’s education in the nineteenth century, signifying a positive
evolution of education that allowed women greater autonomy.

The Brontë sisters came from an upper-class, affluent family, which allowed them to receive a
greater education than women from lower social classes at the time. For example, they received
an extraordinary education at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in 1824. Their
position as the daughters of an Anglican clergyman enabled them access to a school which went
beyond the traditional education for girls on religion and basic literacy.

The person who inspired their passion for education was their father, Patrick Brontë, who had
attended Cambridge University and escaped poverty. This instilled in his daughters the desire
for autonomy through education, especially the eldest, Charlotte. She recognised the power of
education as a tool for self-liberation in a patriarchal society. In 1849, she openly showed her
support by giving praise for the daughter of WS Williams when she was admitted to Queen’s
College. Her famous quote, ‘An education secured is an advantage gained – a priceless
advantage. Come what may it is a step towards independency’, alongside her attempted
creation of a school shows she was aware of the power of equal education to enfranchise
women in the nineteenth century. While her position as a governess and a writer was
unpredictable and unstable, it does represent that the growing diversity of education for
women inspired Charlotte to be self-sufficient.

In 1842, the sisters had the opportunity to study in Brussels in order to improve their French
language skills. While Emily and Anne did not stay long, Charlotte returned to continue her
studies. Their education sets a precedent for the future equality of education in post-
nineteenth-century Britain and presents it as an essential tool for women to become
autonomous.

The influence of education is extremely prominent in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, since
her Gothic imagery–for example her description of the moors–reflects the early nineteenth-
century turning point where education began to revolve around Gothic teachings and
Romanticism. This proves that her education was essential to her becoming a successful writer
and contributing to the canon of Gothic literature in the nineteenth century.
Books such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights included sexual imagery which superseded the
expectations of male readers and surprised them, as sexuality was considered a delicate subject
for women. The fact that their books were well-received exemplifies that the Brontës had
helped nineteenth-century readers acclimatise to the idea of female writers. The education of
the Brontë sisters and their complex literature suggests that education for women was
becoming increasingly more important in the nineteenth century, at least for upper-class
women.

Initially, the sisters were forced to use the pseudonyms Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell, revealing the
sexist ideas of the time. Namely, it was believed books written by women would not sell due to
being considered plain and full of ‘flowery’ themes. Despite this, the sisters were still
revolutionary, since they utilised their fortunate education to promote progress for women in
their books.

Unexpectedly, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights shaped British society and literary history as
one of the first times that a book focused on women’s issues became so successful. The book
shows the male character, Heathcliff, as a dehumanising character due to his violent and ragged
nature, while the protagonist, Catherine, represents the effects of women’s entrapment in
marriage. Therefore, Emily’s use of subtle feminist themes in the novel makes an important
social message about women’s freedom of expression since Catherine’s entrapment is the root
cause of her insanity.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, too, promotes ideals of an independent woman, as Jane escapes a
repressive household and becomes self-sufficient, making choices unaffected by male opinions.
Charlotte uses this character as an example of the idealistic image of a free woman. The fact
that in the present there are numerous books based upon female characters and their liberation
proves that the Brontës’ work was innovative and influential. Nowadays, women’s
independence is widely celebrated and socially acceptable because of previous works such as
those of the Brontë sisters. The Brontës’ writing helped to contribute to the changing social
conventions surrounding women and their growing self-determination at the time and would
have an effect on later generations of feminists as well as they worked towards developing
equal education.

In retrospect, we can see that the Brontë sisters’ work to change the attitudes of their time
helped lead to equal rights of education in the present. However, with modern-day heroes such
as Malala Yousafzai and Michelle Obama still campaigning for girls’ education worldwide, it
remains clear that remnants of the inequality that existed in the nineteenth century continue to
be entrenched in society. It is important to highlight the lack of change in equality of women’s
education in countries such as Afghanistan, Lebanon, India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Brazil, Pakistan,
and Turkey. Therefore, while the Brontës represent a turning point for the equal rights of
education for women in Britain, their work is still relevant in the present since it reminds us that
progress for education in some countries has been stagnant since the nineteenth century.

Chapter 7
Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism rebelled against traditional literary forms and subjects. Modernists subverted basic
conventions of prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, violating traditional syntax, and
disrupting the coherence of narration—through the use of stream-of-consciousness, that is, a
narrative style providing the uninterrupted flow of an individual’s thoughts and feelings—
among other innovative modes of narration. They also departed from standard ways of
representing characters by questioning identity as a real as opposed to an artificial construct, by
eliminating the possibility of character coherence, and by conflating characters’ inwardness with
their external representation.
Modernism itself gave way to a post-modernism that even further questioned narrative and
verbal structures through fragmentation and unreliable narrators, among other methods.
Writers’ intentions were called into question, as literary texts came to be seen as dependent on
both the author and the reader. The idea of a critical fallacy, where the author may not even
know what they are writing, moved away from the subjective/objective view of art toward more
of an emphasis on the work itself and the reader’s response to it. Textual unity, even through
use of the mythic method, was not integral to the text but instead imposed on it, and readers
work through textual indeterminacy, fragmentation, and unreliability to derive meaning, if any
meaning is available at all.

Postmodernism destabilized the relationship among author, text, and reader by highlighting
fictive methods through metafiction, when a work deliberately draws attention to its artificiality;
the sprawl, excess, and fragmentation of maximalism; and the stripping to the bone of
minimalism. It also made no distinction between so-called high and low culture through
pastiche, parody, and intertextuality, with texts commenting upon each other and existing
within their own literary continuum.

The Influence of World War I on Literature

Literature serves as a fairly accurate gauge concerning the ideas and tendencies of a specific
society. In the years immediately preceding World War I, British literature was primarily geared
toward entertainment. After the emergence of "penny dreadfuls" and pulp fiction at the end of
the nineteenth century, shelves were full of fiction that was entertaining because of its shallow,
visceral, thrilling, or comedic tendencies. The First World War jolted society into the reality of
war, significantly altering the face of literature because it changed the way people thought
about life. The realities of an all-encompassing war revealed the frivolous nature of sheer
entertainment and opened questions about life and death, purpose and direction, justice,
patriotism, love, and sacrifice. The tone of literature shifted from light-hearted, carefree story-
telling to the bitter remembrances and cynical outlooks of a generation who now knew pain and
suffering on a massive scale.

Poetry dominated literature at this time, with thousands of poems produced regarding the
experience at war, whether in the trench, in the factory, or at home. In addition to poetry,
memoirs and diaries became popular methods of communicating the realities of war, giving
firsthand accounts of the experience of being at war. These pieces of work are now invaluable
resources as historians delve into the history of the war and the experiences of those who lived
it. After the War, a general sense of purposelessness and defeat led to a movement both in
modernism and in anti-authoritarianism and nihilism in literature and in art. A sense of
separation between the artist and writer and the general public was created during this time.
No longer could the public fully understand the creator, because it had not experienced what
the creator had. An elitism in the arts developed alongside the cynicism that came with
experience.

James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as Pioneers of Modernist Fiction

Modernism Time Period
Modernism was born out of a time of great societal upheaval caused by industrialisation,
modernisation and the first World War.

War
WW1 (1914–1918) shattered the concept of progress to many, resulting in fragmentation in
both content and structure. The ideals of the Enlightenment claimed that new technology
would bring progress to humans: technological advances would improve society and quality of
life. Yet this was destroyed by WW1, as technological advances simply increased the mass
destruction of life. The war resulted in the disillusionment of society and a deep pessimism of
human nature; themes picked up by Modernism such as in the poem 'The Waste Land' (1922)
by T. S. Eliot.

Industrialisation & Urbanisation

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the western world was using various inventions of
the Industrial Revolution, such as the automobile, aeroplane and radio. These technological
innovations challenged traditional notions of what was possible in society. Modernists could see
the whole of society being transformed by machines.

Yet the Industrial Revolution and resulting urbanisation and industrialisation also led to
significant social and economic inequalities. Many modernist authors such as Franz Kafka and T.
S. Eliot explored the effects of these events on the population and the disillusionment and sense
of loss people experienced.

The mass urban movement meant that the city became the key context and reference point for
both human nature and humans. As a result, the city often starred as the main character in
modernist texts.

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

The tremendous social upheavals brought everything into doubt that was once fixed. The world
was no longer reliable and set. Instead, it became slippery and dependent on one's perspective
and subjectivity. Requiring new models to express this uncertainty, Modernism is characterised
by experimentation in form, multi-perspectives, interiority and non-linear timelines.

Experimentation
Modernist writers experimented with their writing styles and broke with previous storytelling
conventions. They went against narrative conventions and formulaic verse by writing
fragmented stories to represent the state of society after great upheavals.

Ezra Pound's 'Make it new!' statement in 1934 about the Modernist movement emphasises the
role of experimentation. This slogan was an attempt to encourage writers and poets to be
innovative in their writing and experiment with new writing styles.1
Modernist poets also rejected traditional conventions and rhyme schemes and started to write
in free verse.
Subjectivity & Multi-Perspectives
Modernist texts are characterised by a growing mistrust of language to be able to reflect
reality. Modernist writers rejected the neutrality and objectivity of third-person omniscient
narrators often used in Victorian literature.

Interiority and Individualism

Believing that traditional forms of storytelling were no longer fit to describe the world they
were in, many experimental forms of writing increasingly turned inward into the characters. The
following literary techniques allowed the writers to enter the interiority of the characters and
emphasis the individual:
 Stream of consciousness: a narrative device that attempts to express the character's
thoughts as they come. A type of interior monologue, the text is more associative that
often has sudden leaps in thought, long sentences and limited punctuation.
 Interior monologue: is a narrative technique where the narrator enters the characters'
minds to present their thoughts and feelings.
 Free indirect speech: a narrative technique where a third-person narration uses some el-
ements of first-person narration by presenting characters' inner workings.

Modernism Movement: Themes

Individualism & Alienation
Modernist writers focused on individuals instead of society. They followed the lives of these
characters, coming to terms with a changing world and overcoming their trials and tribulations.
Often these individuals felt alienated from their world. Caught up in the rapid pace of
modernity, the characters are unable to find their bearings in the constantly changing
environment through no fault of their own.

Nihilism
Modernism was inspired by the philosophy of nihilism in the sense that it rejected moral and
religious principles that were perceived as the only way to achieve social progress. Modernists
often believed that for people to be their authentic selves, individuals needed to be free from
the overwhelming and restrictive control of conventions.

Absurdity
War made a significant impact on the public and also on writers. As poets and writers died or
were greatly wounded during World War I, globalisation and capitalism re-created society. This
contradiction in people's lives created a sense of absurdity. Franz Kafka's novella The
Metamorphosis (1915) presents the absurdity of modern life when the protagonist, a travelling
salesman, wakes up one day as a giant cockroach.

Modernism's Writers
James Joyce
James Joyce is regarded as one of the great masters of modernist writing, with his incredibly
complex texts often requiring intense studying to grasp them fully. Joyce pioneered the radical
use of narration, turning such texts as Ulysses (1922) into the modernist canon. The
experimental novelUlysses (1922) mirrors Homer's Odyssey (725–675 BCE), yet in the former, all
the events take place in one day. Joyce uses symbolism, stream of consciousness and various
types of narration to explore the complexity of the inner consciousness.

Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka's work is so unique that it has even received its own adjective, 'kafkaesque'. Yet it
clearly draws on many hallmarks of Modernism. Kafka's experimental use of narrative
perspective blurs the subject and object. Moreover, his non-linear use of time is framed through
the characters' subjectivity. For example, the passing of time in the novella The
Metamorphosis (1915) is inextricably linked to the protagonist Gregor Samsa. The length that
Gregor passes out at the end of each part is directly linked to the length of time passing in the
novella.
Franz Kafka's works: The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926)

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is often hailed as one of the great modernist writers. Her texts pioneered the
literary device of stream of consciousness. Through interior monologue, she created developed
and inward-looking characters that exhibited complex emotions.
Virginia Woolf's work: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927)

Ezra Pound
As well as being well known in Modernism in which he used allusion and free verse extensively,
Ezra Pound was also one of the first to use imagism in Modernist poetry.
Ezra Pound's works: 'In a Station of the Metro' (1913), 'The Return' (1917).

Modernism vs Postmodernism
While some critics argue that we still are in the movement of modernism, others suggest that a
new literary movement of postmodernism has evolved since the 1950s. Postmodernism is
characterised by fragmentation and intertextuality in a hyperconnected world.
Modernist literature rejected previous forms of poetry and prose as it felt that they were no
longer sufficient to represent modern life. In contrast, postmodernism consciously used
previous forms and styles to comment on intertextuality.