History of English Literature (from Romanticism to Modern Period)

History of English Literature (from Romanticism to Modern Period) – 1
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Introduction There are as many reasons to study literature as there are to study man. Alongside with other forms of art literature participates in the mighty task of rendering people’s lives, minds and hearts. Human experience contained in the works of literature is a vast continuum of information from which we can benefit in various ways. We read books for educational purposes, intellectual training, escape and enjoyment. We also read books because they can help us better understand what we are.
For centuries people have accumulated and verified knowledge of man, the best works of literature being the quintessence of all intellectual and spiritual achievements of their time. Studying History of Literature we can observe culture in progress. Referring every single literary work to a particular epoch we can interpret its message in a broader context of human evolution. We can observe the development of literary forms against the historical, social, ideological, religious and all other kinds of changes.
This book was designed to highlight a complex approach to the study of history of English literature that would give students of each literary epoch and encourage their appreciation. It covers the 2nd half of the curriculum and offers an overview of the English literature from the end of the 18th century till the end of the 20th century.
The periods of English literature are presented chronologically. The general framework of each section follows a similar pattern. It includes an outline of historical and literary context, information on authors’ life and work, texts for critical analysis, questions and tasks.
The material of the book is supplied with encyclopedic entries that provide interdisciplinary link to other fields of study. This information is introduced in the four main categories: literary terms, philosophy, religion and general knowledge, that embraces a wide range of subjects and is less specified. These categories are marked by symbolic pictures.
Texts are followed by activities designed with many approaches in mind: stylistic analysis, interpretation, creative thinking and writing. They allow students to examine the way writers shape their thoughts and give them an opportunity to experiment with some of the techniques. Some questions and assignments project to broader literary and cultural contexts and offer an extension activity in which students can share their responses to the issues and themes raised by the literary works. The focus of questions and tasks is also enhanced graphically.
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This book aims to provide a general manual of English Literature with the emphasis on a cross-curricular link. It presents the information in multiple perspectives showing how History of Literature overlaps with many other fields of study. The knowledge of historical, philosophic, religious and other cultural facts enriches students’ competence. This background knowledge provides them with a deeper understanding of literary epochs, and consequently gives them more satisfaction from reading, analyzing and discussing literature.
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Pre-Romanticism in English Literature Graveyard School of Poetry Robert Burns Gothic Novels
English Romanticism Historical Context Cultural Context
English Romantic Poetry William Blake William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge George Gordon Lord Byron Percy Bysshe Shelley John Keats
English Prose in the Romantic Period Walter Scott Jane Austen Mary Shelley
English Literature in the Victorian Period Historical and Social Context Literary Context Charles Dickens Bronte Sisters George Eliot Thomas Hardy Oscar Wilde Alfred Tennyson Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
English Literature in the First Half of the 20th Century Historical Context Cultural Context Literary Context Henry James Virginia Woolf James Joyce David Herbert Lawrence Aldous Huxley
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George Orwell Thomas Stearns Eliot George Bernard Shaw
English Literature in the Second Half of the 20th Century Historical Context Development of Fiction Development of Poetry Development of Drama
Reference List
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Pre-Romanticism in English Literature The upheaval in English literature at the turn of the 19th century should not be viewed as a sudden explosion, but rather as the culmination of a process which began during the Age of Sensibility in the middle of the 18th century. The novels of Samuel Richardson with their sentimentalism and a fashionable vogue for the Gothic were the early indication of a shift in taste. The expression of feelings and emotions was no longer inappropriate.
A significant number of poets started to reject the rational rules and artificial conventions of neo-classical verse. There was the so-called Graveyard School of Poetry that suggested a greater concern with individual feeling and emotions.
New sources of inspiration were found in the mysterious pagan traditions of Nordic and Celtic culture, and there was a great interest in the Middle Ages.
The success of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns (1759–1796) was yet another indication of how literary taste was changing. Written mostly in simple Ayrshire dialect, these beautiful lyrics followed the oral tradition and represented a challenge to the established norm.
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Graveyard School of Poetry
Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), Edward Young (1683–1765), James Thomson (1700–1748), Thomas Gray (1716–1771), the representatives of the so-called Graveyard School of Poetry, wrote a kind of meditative poetry describing moral reflections on human condition.
In the case of the Graveyard School of Poetry, the focus shifted from the neoclassical didacticism to the expression of the poet’s own emotions. Also as a reaction against the Augustan principle of decorum and the rational approach to subjects, a number of poets started writing a type of sentimental, melancholic and personal poetry with the emphasis on brevity of life. The poets combined description with meditation on human existence and attempted to correlate in the literary texts emotionalism with philosophy.
Edward Young is considered the most representative poet of the Graveyard School. His poem Night Thoughts (1742–1745) is an enormous work in blank verse, about 10 000 lines long. The full title of the poem is The Complaint: or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death & Immortality. It describes the poet’s reflections on death over a series of nine "nights" in which he ponders the loss of his wife and friends, and human frailties in general. The best-known line in the poem is the axiom "procrastination is the thief of time", which is part of a passage in which the poet discusses how quickly life and opportunities can slip away. "Night Thoughts" had a very high reputation for many years after its publication, but is now best known for the fact that William Blake (1757–1827) made a series if illustrations for it.
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Text From Night Thoughts, Night I.
BE wise to-day; ’t is madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life. Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled, 5 And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene. If not so frequent, would not this be strange? That ’t is so frequent, this is stranger still. Of man’s miraculous mistakes this bears 10 The palm, "That all men are about to live," Forever on the brink of being born. All pay themselves the compliment to think They one day shall not drivel: and their pride On this reversion takes up ready praise; 15 At least, their own; their future selves applaud: How excellent that life they ne’er will lead!
Read the extract from the poem and speak about its message. Comment on lines 11-12. Is this the first time you come upon the idea of evanescence of human life? Remember other poems, stories, films, in which the same idea was expressed.
Another leading figure among the poets of pre-romanticism was Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). The poem presents a meditation on death and remembrance after death. The narrator finds comfort in contemplating the lives of the obscure country men buried in the churchyard.
Text From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day; The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea; The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
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Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r, The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r, Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
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Robert Burns Robert Burns (1759–1796) is also known as Bobbie Burns, Rabbie Burns, Scotland's Favorite Son, the Ploughman Poet, the Heaven-Taught Ploughman, and the Bard of Ayrshire. In Scotland he has no possible rivals for the title of Scotland's national poet.
Burns Night, a second national day (after St. Andrew’s Day) in Scotland, is celebrated on Burns's birthday, 25 January, with Burns suppers around the world.
He wrote in three languages: Scots, English and the Scots-English dialect for which he is best known today. Burns collected Folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem and song, Auld Lang Syne is often sung at Hogmanay.
Hogmanay [hmne] is the Scots word for the last day of the year and is synonymous with the celebration of the New Year.
Other poems and songs that remain well-known today, include A Red, Red Rose, A Man's A Man for A' That, To a Louse, To a Mouse, The Battle of Sherramuir, and Ae Fond Kiss. His themes included republicanism and Radicalism, Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs).
Burns is generally regarded as a pre-Romantic poet, who influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly. He also became a source of inspiration to the founders of democratic, liberal and socialist movements around the world.
Robert Burns was born in Alloway, South Ayrshire. The eldest of the seven children of William Burness (1721–1784) Robert Burns spelled his surname Burness until 1786. He grew up in poverty and hardship, and the severe manual labour on the farm left its traces in a premature stoop and a weakened constitution.
Burns’s first collection of verse, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), created a sensation and was recognized as a significant literary event. The success of the work was immediate, and soon Robert Burns was known across the country.
In Edinburgh he was received as an equal by the city's brilliant men of letters and was recieved at aristocratic gatherings. Here he encountered, and made a lasting impression on the 16-year-old Walter Scott (1771–1832): "His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents." In Edinburgh in early 1787 Burns met James Johnson, a historian and engraver with a love of
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old Scots songs and a determination to preserve them. Burns shared this interest and became an enthusiastic contributor to The Scots Musical Museum, the collection of Scottish folksongs and music, which eventually ran to six volumes. The collection included the world-famous Auld Lang Syne (Old Times Past) and the poem A Red, Red rose. Fame did not bring a reliable income to Burns. The farming continued to prove unsuccessful and Burns eventually gave it up to become a tax collector.
As his health began to weaken, Burns began to age prematurely and fell into fits of despondency. The habits of intemperance are said to have aggravated his long-standing possible rheumatic heart condition. In fact, his death was caused by an infection reaching his blood after a dental extraction in winter 1795. The funeral took place on 25 July 1796, the day his son Maxwell was born. A memorial edition of his poems was published to raise money for his wife and children, and within a short time of his death, money started pouring in from all over Scotland to support them.
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Ae Fond Kiss
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; Ae farewell, alas, for ever! Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee!
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him While the star of hope she leaves him? Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me, Dark despair around benights me.
I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy; Naething could resist my Nancy; But to see her was to love her, Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met--or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest! Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest! Thine be ilka joy and treasure, Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure!
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Ae fond kiss, and then we sever! Ae farewell, alas, for ever! Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee!
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Read the poem and find the features of the medieval ballad in it. Compare the mood of the poem Ae Fond Kiss with that of The Parting Kiss. How does the author describe the parting of lovers in the first and the second poem?
The Parting Kiss
Humid seal of soft affections, Tenderest pledge of future bliss, Dearest tie of young connections, Love's first snowdrop, virgin kiss!
Speaking silence, dumb confession, Passion's birth, and infant's play, Dove-like fondness, chaste concession, Glowing dawn of future day!
Sorrowing joy, Adieu's last action, (Lingering lips must now disjoin), What words can ever speak affection So thrilling and sincere as thine!
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Poems by Burns inspired the titles of two classic novels: John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and J .D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.
Coming Thro’the Rye
O, Jenny's a' weet, poor body, Jenny's seldom dry: She draigl't a' her petticoatie, Comin thro' the rye!

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Comin thro' the rye, poor body, Comin thro' the rye, She draigl't a' her petticoatie, Comin thro' the rye!
Gin a body meet a body Comin thro' the rye, Gin a body kiss a body, Need a body cry?
Gin a body meet a body Comin thro' the glen Gin a body kiss a body, Need the warl' ken?
Gin a body meet a body Comin thro' the grain; Gin a body kiss a body, The thing's a body's ain.
Ilka lassie has her laddie, Nane, they say, ha’e I Yet all the lads they smile on me, When comin' thro' the rye.
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To A Mouse On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi' bickering brattle! I was be laith to rin an' chase thee, Wi' murd'ring pattle!
I'm truly sorry man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion An' fellow-mortal!
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I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request; I'll get a blessin wi' the lave, And never miss't!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin, Baith snell an' keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste, An' weary winter comin fast, An' cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel coulter past Out thro' thy cell.
That wee bit heap o' leaves an stibble, Has cost thee mony a weary nibble! Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble, But house or hald, To thole the winter's sleety dribble, An' cranreuch cauld!
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!
Still thou art blest, compared wi' me! The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast my e'e, On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I cannot see, I guess an' fear!
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Gothic Novels The Gothic Novel emerged in the literary context of the middle 18th century. The word "Gothic" was used to describe novels dealing with macabre or mysterious events in a medieval setting. This type of fiction is characterized by horror, violence, supernatural effects, and medieval elements, representing the atmosphere of terror found in graveyards. Usually the story is set against the background of gothic architecture, especially gloomy, isolated and haunted castles, with mysterious underground passages and trapdoors. It may include insanity, often in the form of a mad relative kept locked in a room in the castle, as well as ghosts and spirits.
In 1764 Horace Walpole (1717–1797) published The Castle of Otranto. The book created a sensation and paved the way for many other writers – Clara Reeve (1729–1807) with The Old English Baron, (1777), Mathew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818) with The Monk (1796), Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) – who explored the mysterious and terrible, and discussed the topics of death, creation and destruction, darkness, horror, madness, terror, evil and sometimes weird sexuality.
Horace Walpole’s novel was so full of fantastic elements (caves, animate statues, ghosts, appearances and disappearances) that the author was afraid of ridicule on publication and decided to publish it anonymously and pretend that the novel was a translation of a 16th-century Italian manuscript.
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Manfred is the lord of the castle of Otranto, whose sickly son Conrad is going to marry princess Isabella. As the ceremony is due to begin, Conrad is crushed to death by a gigantic helmet, which echoes the eerie prophecy that "the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should…