英国文学史笔记

Index

The Sixteenth Century

The works of William Shakespeare are a great landmark in the history of world literature for he was one of the first founders of realism, a master hand at realistic portrayal of human characters and relations.

Works

First period: Romeo and Juliet

Second Period:

1. Hamlet, Prince of Demark

2. Othello, the Moor of Venice

3. King Lear

4. The Tragedy of Macbeth

The Seventeenth Century

Puritan Age

Burrton?s Anatomy of Melancholy.

The spiritual gloom sooner or later fastens upon all the writers of this age. This so called gloomy age produced some minor poems of exquisites workmanship, and one of great master of verse whose work would glorify any age or people---John Milton, in whom the indomitable Puritan spirit finds its noblest expression.

Restoration Age

As a critic, poet and playwright was the most distinguished literary figure of the restoration age. The most popular genre was that of comedy whose chief aim as to entertain the licentious aristocrats.

John Donne

1. Poetry

Form

Part of his poetry is in such classical forms as satires, elegies, and epistles---though it style has anything but classical smoothness---and part is written in lyrical forms of extraordinary variety.

Characteristics

1.Most of it purports to deal with life, descriptive or experimentally, and the first thing

to strike the reader is Donne?s extraordinary and penetrating realism.

2.The next is the cynicism which marks certain of the lighter poems and which

represents a conscious reaction from the extreme idealization of woman encouraged by the Patrarchan tradition.

Love-poem

In his serious love-poems, however, Donne, while not relaxing his grasp on the realities the love experience, suffuses it with an emotional intensity and a spiritualized ardor unique in English poetry.

2. Sonnet

Contrast between conventional and Donne?s sonnet

In moments of inspiration his style becomes wonderfully poignant and direct,

heart-searching in its simple human accents, with an originality and force for which we look in vain among the clear and fluent melodies of Elizabethan lyrists.

Conceit

1.Sometimes the “conceits”, as these extravagant figures are called, are so odd that we

lose sight of the thing to be illustrated, in the startling nature of the illustration. 2.The fashion of conceiting writing, somewhat like euphuism in prose, appeared in Italy

and Spain also. Its imaginative exuberance has its parallels in baroque architecture and painting.

Song

Go and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me where all the past years are,

Or who cleft the Devil?s foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy?s stinging,

And find

What wind

Servers to advance an honest mind.

If thou beest bornto strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return?st, wilt tell me

All strange wonders that befell thee,

And answer

No where

Lives a woman true, and fair,

If thou find?st one, let me know,

Such a pilgrimage were sweet,

Yet do not, I would no go

Though next door we might meet,

Though she were true when you met her,

And last till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

John Milton

Days in Horton

Pamphlets

Paradise Lost

1.It represents the author?s views in an allegorical religious form,

2.And the reader will easily discern its basic idea---the exposure of reactionary forces

of this time and passionate appeal for freedom.

3.It is based on the biblical legend of the imaginary progenitors of the human

race---Adam and Eve, and involves God and his eternal adversary, Satan in plot.

John Bunyan

Milton and Bunyan

Books helpful for Bunyan significantly

1.The books from his wife The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety

gave fire to his imagination, which he saw new visions and dream terrible new

dreams of lost souls.

2.Without fully digestion of Bible and Scripture, he was tossed about alike a feather by

all the winds of doctrine.

The Pilgrim?s Progress

Bunyan?s most important work is The Pilgrim’s Progress, written in old fashioned, medieval form of allegory and dream.

The Eighteenth century

1. Enlightenment

1.1 First representatives of Enlightenment

1.2 Founders of novel

The development of industry and trade brought to the foremen of a new stamp, who had to be typified in the new literature.

1.3 Innermost life Writers

Along with the depiction of morals and manners and social mode of life the writers of the Enlightenment began to display interest of the inmost life of an individual.

2. Sentimentalism

The middle of the 18?century in England sees the inceptions of a new literary current---that of sentimentalism.

The sentimentalism came into being as a result of bitter discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social society.

The representatives of sentimentalism continued to struggle against feudalism but they vaguely sensed at the same time the contradictions of bourgeois progress that brought with it enslavement and ruin to the people. The philosophy of the enlighteners, though rational and materialistic in its essence, did not exclude sense, or sentiments, as a means of

p erception and learning. Moreover, the cult of nature and, a cult of a “natural man” whose feelings display themselves in a most human and natural manner, contrary to the artful and hypocritical aristocratic---this cult was upheld by the majority of the enlighteners and

helped them to fight against privileges of birth and descent which placed the aristocracy high above common people.

But later enlighteners of England having come to the conclusion that, contrary to all reasoning, social injustices, still held strong, found the power of reason to be insufficient, and therefore, appealed to sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and social justice.

3. Pre-romanticism

Another conspicuous trend in the English literature of the latter half of the 18?century was the so-called pre-romanticism. It originated among the conservatives group of men of letters as a reactions against enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the Gothie novel”, the terms ar ising from the fact that the greater part of such romance were devoted to the medieval times.

End

The task of upholding revolutionary struggle of the people for their rights in the 18?century was initiated by Robert Burns and later taken up in the 19?century by the writers of revolutionary romanticism.

Daniel Defoe

Four facts stand out clearly, which help the reader to understand the characters of his works.

Henry Fielding

Jonathan Swift

The eighteenth century in English literature is an age of prose, but because the poetry is very bad but because the prose is very good.

Oliver Goldsmith

William Blake

The Romantic Period

Background

Industrial Revolution and French Revolution had a strong influence in Britain literature. Fighting for “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” also becomes British national spirit.

Age of Wordsworth

Literature

Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. William Wordsworth

Gorge Gordon, Lord Byron

Percy Bysshe Shelly

“Mad Shelly” his schoolmates called him, and in the judgmen t of the world he remained “mad Shelly” to the end of his life.

John Keats

In 1817 he published a little volume of verse, most of it crude and immature enough, but contain the magnificent sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman‘s Homer, which reveals one source of his inspiration. From the first his imagination has turned out to the old Greek work with instinctive sympathy; and he now choose as the subject for a long time narrative poem the story of Endymion, the Latmian shepherd beloved by the moon-goodness.

Endymion was published in 1818. The exordium of poem, the Hymn to Pan in the opening episode, and a myriad other lines and short passages are worthy of the Keats that was to be; but as a whole Endymion is chaotic, and cloyed with ornament. Nobody knew better than Keats himself.

Great odes including On Melancholy, On a Grecian Urn, To Psyche, and To a Nightingale had done wonders in deepening and strengthening his gift. In turning from Spenser and Ariosto the great masculine poets of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare, Webster, Milton, and Dryden, he had found the iron which was lacking in his earlier intellectual food, and had learned the lessons of artistic calmness and severity, without sacrifice of the mellow sweetness native to him; to charm, he had added strength.

Walter Scott

Walter Scott is the creator and a great master of the historical novel. Scott?s novels give a panorama of feudal society from its early stages to its downfall. The writer describes the different phases of this epoch: the Crusades, the rise of absolute monarchy, the bourgeois revolution in England, the attempts to restore feudalism in the 18?century.

Scott?s novels were written from a definite class standpoint. Despite his aristocratic inclination, Scott was greatly interested in fate of the people, of the patriarchal peasant in particular, portraying the decay of their mode of life by the onslaught of industrial capitalism. Scott?s historical approach to lifewas a result of the great changes wrought by the industrial revolution in England and the first bourgeois revolution in France. A contemporary of these events, the writer learnt from the lessons given by the history of his time that one cannot understand history without taking into account the role of the masses of the people.

The central heroes of Scott?s novels are young men of valor. They are usually of noble birth. It is noteworthy however, that these heroes appear in the novels as common men, poor, persecuted and faced with innumerable hardship. They are thrown into comradery with men in the ordinary rank of life and often establish a close friendship with them (Ivanhoe and others). In the end Scott?s heroes acquire their titles and return to the prosperous life of the ruling class. Taken as whole, Scott?s main hero is rather spastically, lacking in virility and lacking dept of psychological characterization.

Scott?s novel is the consummation and development of two different trends of the English literature of the 18?and the beginning of the 19?centuries: that pertaining to the realistic novel of H. Fielding and T.G. Smollett and of the earlier 19th century realists, such as Jane Austen and others on the one hand, and that of the so-called Gothic novel of the

pre-romanticists, such as H. Walpole and A. Radcliff and of whole romantic school of poetry on the other.

The great realists of the 19th century made use of, and developed, the method of a realistic presentation of the past in their description and treatment of contemporary life. Thus we may sa y that Walter Scott?s historical novel paved the path for the development of the realistic novel of the 19th century.