英国文学讲义

英国文学讲义

I Shakespeare

(1) Works of Shakespeare

Shakespeare?s earliest task at theatre was the remodeling and partially rewriting of old plays. His first original play written in 1590 was King Henry VI. During the 22years of his literary work, he produced 37 plays, 2 narrative poems and 154 sonnets. The chronological order of his plays is based on three kinds of evidence: external evidence (records of performance and publication or references in contemporary works), internal evidence (allusions in the plays to contemporary events, or quotations from contemporary works) and stylistic evidence (changes and developments in his use of blank verse, rhyme and prose).

1590 Henry VI, Part II

Henry VI, Part III

1591 Henry VI, Part I

1592 Richard III

The Comedy of Errors

1593 Titus Andronicus

The Taming of the Shrew

1594 The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Love?s labor?s Lost

Romeo and Juliet

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1595 Richard II

A Middle Summer?s Night

1596 King John

The Merchant of Venice

1597 Henry IV, Part I

Henry IV, Part II

1598 Much Ado about Nothing

Henry V

The Merry Wives of Windsor

1599 Julius Caesar

As You Like It

1600 Twelfth Night

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1601 Hamlet

1602 Troilus and Cressida

1603 All?s Well that Ends Well

1604 Measure for Measure

Othello

1605 King Lear

Macbeth

1606 Antony and Cleopatra

1607 Coriolanus

Timon of Athens

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1608 Pericles

1609 Cymbeline

1610 The Winter?s Tale

1610 The Tempest

1612 Henry VIII

Two poems: Venus and Adonis (1592) and Lucrec e (1592-03)

Sonnets (1593-98)

(2) Periods of his Dramatic Composition

Four major phases of his dramatic career: his early, mature, flourishing and late periods:

○1The Experimental Period (1590-1594) his apprenticeship in play

Historical plays—

Henry VI (his first theatrical success) in three parts representing the history of the Wars of the Roses.

Then Richard III

Comedies—

The Comedy of Error <错误的喜剧> showing how comic confusions could be produced by the presence of twin brothers with their twin servants in the same city.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona<维洛那二绅士>where a poor servant Launce loves his dog far more than both gentlemen do their ladies.

The Taming of the Shrew<驯悍记> describing the wooing, wedding, and taming of Katharian, the “shrew”, by Petruchio, a man with a stronger will than her own.

Love’s Labour’s Los t <爱的徒劳>telling four young men, dedicated to study to the renunciation of women, meeting four young women; inevitably they abandon their absurd principles. The play ends with hope: each young lover will have his sweetheart after a year, when he has done something to deserve her.

Tragedy—

Romeo and Juliet (an exposure of the old feudal world with its internal strife and its unnatural human relations.) the balcony scene and the parting scene are two great love scenes in the world?s literature.

○2The Period of Comedies and Histories (1595-1600)

The general spirit is optimism, and mirth is the chief note in the comedies.

Comedies—

A Midsummer Night’s Dream <仲夏夜之梦>

The Merchant of Venice <威尼斯商人>

The Merry Wives of Windsor <温莎的风流娘儿们>

Much Ado about Nothing <无事烦恼>

As You Like It <皆大欢喜>

Twelfth Night第十二夜

Historical Plays—

Richard II

Henry IV

Henry V

King John

Julius Caesar

There is a great lift in characterization of heroines, who are depicted with ungrudging and unreserved affection and warmth. Shakespeare shows, with deep respect, their dignity, honesty, wit, courage, determination, and resourcefulness in emergency. They are the daughters of the Renaissance.

○3The period of the Tragedies (1600-1607)

It is the period of “great tragedies” and “dark comedies”. The sunshine and laughter of the 2nd period has turned into clouds and storms. The cause of such a change should be sought from his change of moods as influenced by the social upheaval at the turn of the century.

Tragedies—

Hamlet

Othello <奥瑟罗>

King Lear <李尔王>

Macbeth <麦克佩斯>

Timon of Athens <雅典的泰门>

Antony and Cleopatra <安东尼与克莉奥佩屈拉>

Coriolanus <科利奥兰纳斯>

Comedies—

Troilus and Cressida <特洛埃勒斯与克蕾雪达>

All’s Well That Ends Well <众成眷属>

Measure for Measure <量罪记>

○4The Period of Dramatic Romance (1609-1612)

The tone is calm and reconciliation. He no longer hated the world but accepted it with a smile of resignation. He finds life once more worth living, and the world beautiful, enchanting, and fantastically attractive.

Romances—

Pericles <配力克尔斯>

Cymbeline <辛白林>

The Winter?s Tale <冬天的故事>

Tempest <暴风雨>

Historical Play—Henry VIII

(3) The Great Comedies

The Great Comedies

A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream

The Merchant of Venice

As You Like It

Twelfth Night

Portia—one of Shakespeare?s ideal women (beautiful, cultured, courteous and capable of rising to an emergency)

Shylock—avaricious moneylender, a Jew of pride and deep religious instincts. He has suffered much in the hands of the Christians. His revolting bond is counterbalanced by Antonio?s a rrogant treatment of him. He protests against racial discrimination.

Theme: a satire of the Christiana?s hypocrisy and their false standards of friendship and love, their cunning ways of pursuing worldliness and their unreasoning prejudice against Jews

(4) The Great Tragedies

Othello

King Lear

Macbeth

Hamlet—the summit of Shakespeare’s art

The story comes from an old Danish legend.

The Character of Hamlet:

Humanist—deep love of mankind (a man free from medieval prejudices and superstitions. He has an unbounded love for the world instead of the heaven. And he cherishes a profound reverence for man, and a firm belief in man?s power and destiny.), democracy (In his contact with the people around him, he cares for nothing but human worth and shows a contemp t for rank and wealth. He will not listen to his schoolmate and friend Horatio?s talk of being his servant. A king and a beggar are all one to him.), and his duty of changing the world (his mental world has gone through the shock of a personal wrong to an awakening of his great responsibility in reforming the world as a whole.)

(5) The poems

1) V enus and Adonis a narrative poem, was Shakespeare?s first published work. The story is taken from Ovid?s

Metamorphoses (变形). Venus (Aphrodite阿佛洛狄忒：爱与美的女神), the goddess of love and beauty, is in love with the beautiful youth Adonis (A strikingly beautiful youth loved by Aphrodite). She detains him from the chase through woods and makes efforts to win his love. She begs him to meet her on the morrow (the following day), but he is then to hunt the boar (野猪) and flees from her. When the morning comes, she hears his hounds (猎犬) at bay and, going to look for him, finds him killed by the boar. Venus, stricken with grief, changes his blood into the anemone (银莲花), or windflower. The poem is full of vivid images of the countryside and aphorisms (格言) on life. It is a young man?s work, showing the poet?s love and knowledge of nature, command of words, and fine sense of their music.

2) The Rape of Lucrece, another narrative poem, is the subject tragic. Lucrece, a Roman lady of outstanding virtue and

beauty, is the wife of Collatine. But Sextus, the son of Targuin, King of Rome, tries to seduce her, and when she resists, commits rape upon her. She tells his father and husband of the outrage, and exacts an oath of vengeance from them, then after which she kills herself. In consequence, a relative of her husband leads a rebellion against the Targuine monarchy and expels them from the city. The poem is elaborate and rhetoric, showing the Shakespeare?s virtuosity (精湛技巧) as a poet.

3) Shakespeare’s sonnets

Sonnet, a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameter in English. The English sonnet, also called Shakespearean sonnet, comprise three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg.

Shakespeare?s 154 sonnets can be roughly divided into three groups.

○1Numbers 1-17 are variations on one theme. A handsome young man is being persuaded to marry and beget offspring who will preserve his beauty in a new generation, though he himself will lose it when he grows old.

Gradually this theme gives place to the idea that the beloved youth will survive through the poet?s verse.

○2Numbers 18-126 are on a variety of theme associated with a handsome young man. The poem enjoys his friendship and is full of admiration promising to bestow immortality on the young man by the poems he writes in his honor. The climax of the series comes when the young man seduces the poet?s mistress.

○3 A new series begins principally about a married woman with dark hair and complexion, the so-called “dark lady of the sonnets”.

See Sonnets 18,29,106 p.118-120

(6) Features of Shakespeare’s Drama

○1Shakespeare is one of the founders of realism in world literature. “Realism implies, besides truth in detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (according to Engels). Living in the historical period of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, he truthfully and vividly reflects, through a host of typical characters in his plays, the major social contradiction of his time. His historical play describes the decaying of the old feudal nobility and the rising of the new class, bourgeoisie. His comedies pain, in bright colors, the life and love of the young men and women freed from the fetters of feudalism. His tragedies depict the life-and-death struggle between the humanists, representing the newly emerging forces, and the corrupt ruling classes, representing the dark power of his time.

○2His dramatic creation often uses the method of adoption. He borrows his plots widely from Greek legends and Roman history, from Italian stories and English chronicles, and from romances by his English contemporaries, or rewrites old plays by certain inferior authors. But whatever he touches sparkle with a peculiar beauty of his own and old stories is thus turned into a superb work of dramatic art. And he writes about his own people and for his own time.

○3His long experience with the stage and his intimate knowledge of dramatic art thus acquired make him a master- hand for play- writing. He breaks the classic three unities. His drama becomes very elastic. The action develops freely, the place changes variously, the time lasts several days, the character bears the manifold quality, and the main plot exists side bys side with the sub-plot or sub-plots.

○4He is skilled in many poetic forms: the Song, the sonnet, the couplet, and the dramatic blank verse. In his hand it becomes a most flexible means of expression to utter all the possible thoughts and feelings of his characters.

○5He is a great master of the English language. He uses about 16,000words. Many of his new coinage and turns of

expression have become everyday usage in English life. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version of the English Bible are two great treasures of the English language.

II Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731), Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders

Defoe was a kind of jack-of-all-trades. He was a merchant, soldier, economist, politician, journalist, pamphleteer, publicist and novelist. He was great at least two occupations: journalism and authorship. His novels benefitted a lot from his journalism. He wrote for newspapers upon such various subjects as banks, schools and education, religion, the army, causes of poverty, methods of improving commerce, robbers and devils. From it, he acquired a pure naked English—smooth, easy, almost colloquial, ye never coarse. He loved short crisp, plain sentences. There is nothing artificial in his language; it is really common English.

1) Defoe’s works

His pamphlets:

The Shortest Way with the Dissenter and Hymn to the Pillory

His Novels:Robinson Crusoe (1719) (marks him immortal.)

Captain Singleton (1720)

Moll Flanders (1722)

Colonel Jacque (1722)

Captain Singleton is novel of adventure, and Singleton is the narrator of his own story. He has been kidnapped and sent to sea. He takes part in the mutiny during the voyage and is put ashore in Madagascar with his comrades. Then he reaches the continent of Africa and crosses it from east to west, encountering many adventures and obtaining much gold, which he squanders away on his return to England. He takes once more to sea and becomes a pirate, carrying on his piracies in the west Indies, the Indian Ocean, and the China seas, acquires great wealth, which he brings home, and finally marries the sister of a shipmate.

Moll Flanders is written in the form of autobiography. Moll Flanders is the daughter of a woman who had been transported to Virginia for theft soon after her child?s birth. Moll, abandoned in England, is brought up in the house of a stranger. The story relates her seduction, her subsequent marriages and liaisons, and her visits Virginia, where she finds her mother and discovers that she (Moll) has unwittingly married her own brother. Leaving her and returning to England, she is presently reduced to poverty. She becomes an extremely successful pickpocket and thief, but is detected and transported to Virginia, in company with one of her former husbands, a highwayman (拦路强盗). With the funds that each has amasses, they set up as planters, and Moll now finds that she has inherited a plantation from her mother.

She and her husband spend their declining years in an atmosphere of penitence and prosperity. The influence of society on man?s nature stands in the center of all enlightening novels for the enlighteners held that man is good and noble by nature, but may succumb to an evil environment. So did Defoe in his novel. Defoe also wants to show that there is no other difference between the world of thieves and vagabonds on one hand and that of the lords and ladies on the other but that the former receives sympathy which the latter does not.

2) Robinson Crusoe (1719)

T oday Defoe is chiefly remembered as the author of Robinson Crusoe, his masterpiece. The story is based on a real fact. In 1704, Alexander, Selkirk, a Scottish sailor was marooned on the island of Juan Fernandez in the Atlantic, and lived there quite alone for four years. The story of his adventures aroused great public interest, and several records of his solitary life on the island appeared on the press. Defoe took up the subject and wrote a novel when he was 60. He embellished the sailor?s story with many incidents of his own imagination. So the novel reads like a true story.

The story takes place in the middle of the 17th century in the family of an old English gentleman, Mr Crusoe. He designs his son Robinson for law, but the young man sets his mind on becoming a sailor. At 19, Robinson flees from his home and sets out to sea. After many perils and adventures, he settles down in Brazil. But the calling of the sea is so strong that he embarks on another voyage to Africa. During a frightful storm, he is wrecked off the coast of an uninhabited island. Only he survives. He spends the night on a tree for fear of wild animals. In the morning he swims to the wrecked ship to find no living creatures except a dog and two cats. He tries hard to carry to the shore the necessities on the ship, consisting of bread, rice, barley, corn, planks, lead and gunpowder, and axe and saws. From then on he lives

all alone on the island. He sets up a tent. He plants barley and corn, and harvests in time. He spends many months of hard toil in shaping a stone- mortar for grinding grain. He strives for days and days to make an earthenware pots. It takes him five months to fell a big tree and fashion into a ship, but he finds it impossible to shift it to the sea. On the island he has to be confronted with the strong wind, heavy rain and earthquake. He explores the island, hunts, makes clothes from the hides of the killed animals, gathers wild grapes and dries them into raisins, domesticates wild goats, smokes and salts meat, grown wise with experience in labor, he makes a living on the island by self-reliance. With the passage of many years, he one day discovers the imprints of man?s foot. Soon he learns that some cannibals come here to celebrate their victory over their enemies and devour their captives. He tries save one of the victim, a clever young Negro, named Friday, who later become Robinson?s true and faithful companion. With the help of an English ship, he takes Friday back to England. Wishing to see the island where he has spent many years, he pays another visit to it.

During an attack from the Indians Friday is killed.

Comments on Robinson Crusoe

The novel so well received by the English readers that where there is a Bible, There is a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

1) As a writer of the Enlightenment, he attaches great importance to the molding of the character and to educate

through the influence of varies environment. Defoe traced the development of Robinson Crusoe from a na?ve, artless youth into a clever, hardened man, tempered by numerous trials in his eventful life. The best part of the novel is the realistic account of the successful struggle of Robinson against the pitiless forces of nature on the island. In describing Robinson?s life, Defoe glorifies human labor. Labor saves Robinson from desperation and labor is presented as the source of human pride and happiness as well as a means to change man?s living conditions from desperation to prosperity.

2) The Character of Robinson Crusoe is representative of the rising English bourgeois class at the earlier stage of its

development. He is practical and diligent, with a restless curiosity to know more about the world and a desire to prove individual power in the face of social and natural challenges.

3) Defoe also beautifies colonialism and Negro slavery for Robinson assumes the role of Friday?s master, which is the

first word Friday learns from Robinson, and he is very active in setting up colonies overseas. Defoe?s attitude towards women is also open to criticism, for he lets Crusoe treat women as articles as property and as a means to breed and establish a lineage.

4) On the whole, the novel is significant as the first English novel which glorifies individual experience and of

ordinary people in plain and simple language, and also as a vivid positive portrayal of the English bourgeoisie at its early development.

III William Blake (1757-1827), a poet and engraver

(1)His works:

Poetical Sketches (1783), a collection of poems

Songs of Innocence (1789), short lyrics

Songs of Experience (1794), short lyrics

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), a prophetic satire in prose

Prophecies, a series of long poems with a symbolism

The French Revolutionary, a Prophecy (1791)

Vision of the Daughter of Albion and American, a Prophecy (1793)

(2) Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), the best poems

1) Songs of Innocence contains poems which is apparently written for children. Using a language which even little

babies can learn by heart, Blake succeeded in depicting the happy condition of a child before it knows anything about the pains of existence. The poet expresses his delight in the suns, the hills, the streams, the insects and the flowers, in the innocence of the child and of the lamb. Here everything seems to be in harmony. However, in the poems The Little Black Boy and The Chimney Sweeper, we find racial discrimination and suffering:

“My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O! My soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child,

But I am black, as if bereav?d of light”

(The Little Black Boy)

“When my mother died, I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet mu tongue

Could scare cry …weep, weep, weep, weep,?

So young chimney I sweep and in soot I sleep.”

(The Chimney Sweeper)

2) Songs of Experience: Experience had brought a fuller sense of the power of evil, and of the great misery and pain of

the people?s life. Now the poet had set himself against the current of the capitalist world:

“Thou hast a lap full of seed

And this is a fine country:

Why dost thou not cast thy seed

And live in it merrily?”

“Shall I cast it on the sand

And turn it into fruitful land?

For on no other ground

Can I sow my seed

Without tearing up

Some stinking weed”

(a poem written about 1793)

(3) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), a prophetic satire in prose

This prose work is important of its expression of Blake?s spirit of revolt against oppression. Here he maintains Liberty against the law of bourgeois society. One central idea in this work is his denial of the authority of injustice.

Blake attacks all evil, moral and religious code of the time, while he affirms the sanctity of natural impulse.

(4)Blake’s Position in English literature

The whole temper of Blake?s genius was essentially opposed to the classical tradition of his age. He identifies classicism with formalism. His lyrical poetry displays the characteristics of the romantic spirit, according to which natural sentiment and individual originality are essential to literary creation. Blake and Shelley share the same revolutionary passion: the imagery and symbolism and the underlying spirit of revolutionary epic. For these reason, Blake is called a Pre-Romantic or forerunner of the Romantic poetry of the 19th century.

See the poems pp.187-290

IV William Wordsworth

Two schools of Romanticists

Owing to difference in political attitudes, Romanticists split into two schools: the elder or passive or escapist romanticists represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and the younger or active romanticists by Byron, Shelley and Keats. The active romanticists reflected the thinking of classes ruined by the bourgeoisie, and by way of protest against capitalist development, turned to the feudal past, i.e. the “merry old England”, as their ideal, or frightened by the coming of industrialism and the nightmare town of industry, they were turning to nature for protection. The active romanticism expressed the aspirations of the class created by capitalism and held out an ideal, tough a vague one, of a future society free from oppression and exploitation. The general feature of the works of romanticists is a dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society, which finds expression in a revolt against or and escape from the prosaic, sordid daily life, the “prison of actual”under capitalism. Their writings are filled with strong-minded heroes, formidable events, tragic situations, powerful conflicting passions and exotic pictures. Sometimes they restore to symbolic methods. With the active, symbolic pictures represent a vague idea of some future society while with the passive, these take on a mystic color. The passions of man and the beauties of nature strongly appealed to the imagination of the romantic writer. Poetry is the best medium for the romanticists to express all these sentiments.

(4) Characteristic features of the Romantic Movement

1) Subjectivity: The romantic poets describe poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, rather than regarding poetry as “a mirror to nature”. Their interest is in the feelings, thoughts, and the experiences of the poets themselves. In short, Romanticism is related to subjectivism whereas neo-classicism to subjectivism.

2) Spontaneity:The emphasis on spontaneity, i.e. the spontaneous overflow of feelings, is opposed to the “rules”, “regulations” of neo-classicism, and the emphasis is also on the originality, the role of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of “the heart”.

3) Singularity:Romantic poets have a strong love for the remote, the unusual, the strange, the supernatural, the mysterious, the splendid, the picturesque, and all the illegal.

4) Worship of Nature: Romantic poets worship nature, especially the sublime aspect of a natural scene, read in nature some mysterious force, treat nature as a living entity, regard nature as the revelation of God.

5) Simplicity: Romantic poets take to using everyday language spoken by the rustic people. Hence there is a revival of folk literature, a real awakening of interest in the life of common people, a sense of universal brotherhood, and a growing sympathy for the suffering of the people.

6) Melancholy: The theme of exile, isolation, and a longing for the infinite, for an indefinable and inaccessible goal is commonly found in their works.

7) Poetic Age: Romantic poets love to a freer verse form to outpour their feelings and emotions.

2. William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Lyrical Ballads

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways

I Travelled Among the Unknown Men

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

The Solitary Reaper

William Wordsworth is the representative poet of the early romanticism, and was made poet laureate after the death of Southey. He is most celebrated for his poetry of nature. His love for nature is boundless. To him nature means more than rivers, trees, rocks, mountains, lakes and so on. Nature has a moral value and its philosophical significance. Nature is for him the embodiment of the Divine Spirit. He believes that God and universe are identical, that God is everything and everything is God. To him nature is the greatest of all teachers, and those who are uncorrupted by urban society, especially those simple rustic people, can communicate directly with nature which gives them power, peace and happiness.

The Lake Poets refer to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey because they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England. The three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservative.

His works include: The Recluse, a long unfinished poem, The Prelude (1850), along poem telling the growth of his mind, and Lyrical Ballads (1789), collaborated with Coleridge.

The Prelude is Wordsworth?s autobiographical poem, in 14 books, written in 1799-1805, but not published until 1850. It is the spiritual record of the poet?s mind, honestly recording his own intimate mental experiences which cover his childhood, school days, years at Cambridge, his first impression of London, his first visit to France, his residence in France during the Revolution, and his reaction to these various experiences, showing the development of his own thought and sentiment.

Lyrical Ballads: The publication of Lyrical Ballads marked the break with the conventional poetical tradition of the18th century, i.e. with classicism, and the beginning of the romantic revival in England. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set forth his principle of poetry. As contrasted with the classicists who made reasons, order and the old, classical traditions the criteria in their poetical creation, Wordsworth based his own poetical principle on the premise that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”. He appealed directly to individual sensations, i.e. pleasure, excitement and enjoyment, as the foundation in creation and appreciation of poetry. Poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranqui lity”. A poet?s emotion extends human affairs to nature, but emotion immediately expressed is as raw as wine newly bottled. Tranquil contemplation of an emotional experience matures the feeling and sensation, and makes possible the creation of good poetry like the refining of old wine. The function of poetry lies in its power to give an

unexpected splendor to familiar and common things, to incidents and situations from common life just as a prism can give

a ray of commonplace sunlight in manifold miracle of color. As to the language used in poetry, he “endeavored to bring

his language near to the real language of men.”

Wordsworth’s deep love for nature runs through short lyrics as Lines Written in Early Spring, To the Cuckoo, I wandered lonely as a Cloud, My Heart Leaps up, Intimations of Immortality, and Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, called his “lyrical hymn of thanks to nature”.

V Charles Dickenson (1812-1870): the greatest representative of English critical realism.

Posthumous Papers of Pickwick

Oliver Twist

(1) Dickens’s works: roughly divided into three periods

The First Period

1836 Sketches by Boz

1836-1837 The Pickwick Papers

1837-1838 Oliver Twist

1838-1839 Nickolas Nickleby

1840-1841 The Old Curiosity Shop

1841 Barnaby Rudge

The Second Period

1842 American Notes

1843-1845 Martin Chuzzlewit

1843 A Christmas Carol (a Christmas book)

1844 The Chimes (a Christmas book)

1845 The Cricket on the Hearth (a Christmas book)

1846-1848 Dombey and Son

1849-1850 David Copperfield

The Third Period

1852-1853 Bleak House

1854 Hard Times

1855-1857 Little Dorrit

1859 Tales of Two Cities

1860-1861 Great Expectations

1864-1865 Our Mutual Friend

1870 Edwin Drood (unfinished)

1)The First Period: The morals illustrated by the novels of this period are “cheats never thrive”, “be sure your sin will

find you out”, and “virtue will triumph in the long run”. Dickens thought that the whole social question would be settled if only every employer reformed himself according to the model set by the benevolent gentlemen in his novels.

○1The Pickwick Papers: The posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club

This story made Dickens famous as a popular writer of novels. The story evolves round the adventures of Mr. Pickwick,

a retired well-to-do merchant and a somewhat eccentric old fellow who is the founder and chairman of the Pickwick

Club. Mr. Pickwick and his friends set out on their travels about England. Mr. Tupman, one of his friends, falls in love with Miss Rachel, an old spinster. Mr. Jingle, a rival of theirs, takes Miss Rachel away to London. They pay Mr. Jingle a lot of money for giving up Miss Rachel. Meanwhile, Pickwick meets and engages Sam Weller. Pickwick and his friends come across an election. Mr. Tupman wonders which party he is to cheer with, Mr. Pickwick tells him: “Shout with the largest”. When they return to London, the dad news reaches that Mrs. Bardell, his landlady, starts a lawsuit against him, accusing him of a breach of promise of marriage. But it is not true. Mr. Pickwick fails for the judicious machinations. Mr.

Pickwick refuses to pay 750 pounds and is put into prison. Mrs. Bardell, unable to pay the lawyers, is also put into prison.

Mr. Pickwick expresses his wish to pay for the expense for Mrs. Bardell. The story ends happily with the clinking of the

wedding glasses.

The Pickwick Papers gives a rather comprehensive picture of early 19th-century England, and affords the reader a whole gallery of vivid portraits of the people of all strata. Artistically, the novel show, in embryo, many of the features of Dickens?s novel writing: an encyclopedic knowledge of London, inexhaustible powers of character creation, a strong narrative impulse and a highly individual and inventive prose style.

○2Oliver Twist tells the story of an orphanage, whose adventures provide a description of the lower depths of London. Oliver is of unknown parentage. He was born in a workhouse and brought up under cruel conditions. After serving an unhappy apprenticeship to an undertaker, he runs away to London, where he falls into hands of a gang of thieves. They make every effort to convert him into a thief. Though he is once rescued, he is kidnapped and made to participate in their foul dealings. After several adventures, Oliver finds out his parentage and is adopted by Mr. Brownlow. And all the bad men are finally punished respectively. It is said that the publication of Oliver Twist brought about some bettering of conditions in the English workhouse during the author?s day.

○3Nicholas Nickleby touches upon another burning question of the time—the education of children in private schools. Nicholas Nickleby becomes a teacher of a typical English boarding-school for children of parents of moderate means. The down-trodden and half-starved pupils are shamelessly exploited by Mr. Squeers, the heartless master of the school and his wife, who make the children do all sorts of house drudgery without giving them any real education. Mr. Squeers, a total ignoramus, is beastly cruel to the children and his only aim in running the school is to squeeze as much profit as possible out of it. After the facts about some boarding-schools were ascertained, a school reform is carried out in England.

○4The Old Curiosity Shop is the story of the sufferings and hardships of an old man, named Trent, and his granddaughter, Nell, who live and keep an old curiosity shop. Driven by poverty and misery, Trent escapes from the capital with Nell. Ill fortune pursues them and they perish far away from home. The readers were so moved by the touching picture of little Nell that they wrote to Dickens, entreating him not to let her die at the end of the novel.

In each of these early novels Dickens attacks one or more specific evils in Victorian England: debtor?s prisons, workhouse, Yorkshire schools, legal fraud (欺诈行为), capital punishment, envy and self-righteousness (伪善) disguised by religion and justice.

2) The second Period (1842-1850)

What impressed him most in America after his visit was the rule of dollars and the enormously influence of wealth and power. Vulgar selfishness prevailed everywhere and concealed the fine qualities of the people. Then he wrote American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit.

○1Martin Chuzzlewit, is one of Dickens?s masterpieces of social satire, famous for its criticism of both the British and American bourgeoisie. The plot is built around the fate of the Chuzzlewits, a typical English bourgeois family with a great variety of characters. Also famous is the portrait of Mr. Pecksniff ((以甜言蜜语侈谈仁爱的)佩克斯列夫(英国作家狭更斯小说中的人物)式的,伪善人), a hypocrite.

Young Martin Chuzzlewit, the hero of the novel, is the grandson of old Martin Chuzzlewit, a rich old gentleman who, disgusted with the self-interest of his whole family, turns young Martin out of the house and stops paying his expenses as pupil to Mr. Pecksniff, an architect and a relative of theirs. Then Young Martin goes to America with his servant “jolly”Mark Tapley, trying to seek fortune there. In America he meets with all sorts of adventures, suffers many hardships, and finds social vices prevalent there, especially the worship of dollars. After Martin?s return to England, he seems to be cured by his experiences abroad of his selfishness. Meanwhile his grandfather has lived in Pechsniff?s house and has seen enough of the latter?s meanness and treachery, and finally the hypocrite is exposed. Martin is restored to the old man?s favor and marries his sweetheart Mary Graham, an orphan adopted by old Martin.

A sub-plot is concerned with Jonas Chuzzlewit, the son of old Martin?s brother. Jonas is a typical representative of the English bourgeoisie. The first word he learned in his childhood was “profit” and the second word was “money”. To him money is everything. He decides to murder his father because he cannot be reconciled to the idea that the old man should continue to live and keep his property. Jonas marries one of Pechsniff?s daughters and treats her with brutality, and then he murders the director of a bogus (假冒的) insurance company, who has cheated him of money. He is arrested and

commits suicide.

In this novel, both the cult of money and hypocrisy are the target of bitter satire in bourgeois society. In England the money motive was concealed beneath the outward show of morality and so turned into hypocrisy, while in America the cult of the dollar was openly acknowledged and it led shameless display of motives and actions with money-grubbing as the only objective.

○2The Chimes: Between 1843 and 1848 Dickens wrote and published five Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol, the Chimes, The Cricket in the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Products of “the Hungry Forties”, these little books or novelettes overflow with the author?s love for the poor and down-trodden people. The Chimes Shows a definite understanding that there was a deep reconcilable conflict between the rich and the poor in Victorian England, and that it was only the poor who helped the poor while the rich, with rare exceptions, tried “to put them down?. It is the story of Trotty, a porter an drunner of errands of 60, who lives in poverty, hunger and worrying about his daughter meg, who has waited three years with her lover Richard for some better time to get married, but suddenly decides, on the eve of the New Year, not to waste their time and plans a wedding for the very next day. But Trotty is warned against this “conspiracy” by three respectable gentlemen who overhear their design. Trotty returns home, and spends the next few hours in a wild nightmare, in which he witnesses awful misfortunes befalling his daughter: poverty, sweated labor and suicide. He cries out against such ill luck of the poor. Soon he wakes to find the bells ringing in the New Year. The neighbors rush in to surprise Meg and Richard with a celebration of their wedding eve. The story ends abruptly and happily.

○3Dombey and Son: After the failures of the 1848 revolutionary movement all over the Europe, Dickens, in his novel Dombey and Son, made more open and ruthless attacks on the vices of the bourgeoisie than ever. His social criticism became deeper and more powerful. The hero in the novel is a capitalist, a rich and proud head of the shipping house of Dombey and Son. To secure the continuity of the House, Mr. Dombey needs a son. To him his wife is only the means of producing the son. He is Mr. Dombey to her when she marries him, and Mr. Dombey he is to when she dies—in giving birth to the son. But the son, lttle Paul, is delicate in health. What is worse, he is deprived of all the joys of a child at school, and is soon killed by the strict education there. To get a son, Mr. Dombey has to marry Edith, a beautiful, proud but very poor woman as his second wife, who is as obdurate as he. He does not care about Edith?s lack of love. All he wants is a woman who can produce his needed son. With the breach widening and developing into crisis, Edith elopes with Carker, a villain business manager. Mr. Dombey, in pursuit of Edith for revenge, meets Carker, who has now spurned by Edith, in a railway station. Carker, in a great shock, stumbled from the station platform before a coming train and gets killed. The House of Dombey goes bankrupt in the financial crisis. Dombey loses his fortune, his son and his wife. He lives in humility and repentance. His daughter, Florence, who has been driven from home, now returns to him. The proud Edith ends her days in voluntary seclusion.

Dickens describes Dombey as follows, “The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and the moon were made to give them light. Rivers and planets circled in their orbits to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.”

D ombey and Son marked a great advance in Dickens?s art of novel writing. From now on he replaced the easy-going picaresque romance or series of adventures which constituted the story lines of his early novels with the closely knit and logical plot of his more mature works.

○4David Copperfield: David, a posthumous child, is born soon after the death of his father. His mother, a gentle weak woman, then marries Mr. Murdstone, a vile-natured man. Under the guise of teaching David and forming his character, he tortures David and his mother, driving the poor young mother to an early grave. David is sent to school, where he is badly treated by Creakle, sadistic head-humored, and makes two friends Tommy, a tearful good-humored boy and the handsome and brilliant Steerforth, the spoiled son of a foolish and aristocratic mother. After the death of David?s mother, he has to leave school and sets to work as a child-laborer in a blacking factory. David decides to run away. He walks from London to Dover to throw himself on the mercy of his great aunt, an eccentric but good-hearted old lady, who later on adopts him and sends him to a good school. Thereafter he begins a new life. After schooling, David enters Doctor?s Commons to study law. Meeting Steerforth again, David introduces him to his old nurse, Clara Peggotty. This family

consists of Mr. and Mrs. Peggotty, their nephew, Ham and Little Em?ly, engaged to be married to Ham. Steerforth induces Little Em?ly to run away with him under a promise of marriage, which he doesn?t intends to fulfill, and then abandons her. Steerforth is shipwrecked and drowned on his return to London. Ham is also drowned in an attempt to save Steerforth. Em?ly is found by Mr. Peggotty and they emigrate to Australia to live “happily ever after”. David has undergone a series of love adventures. He falls in love with and marries, his employer?s daughter, Dora, a pretty, empty-headed child. After a brief comedy-idyll of married life, the child-wife Dora dies. Now David becomes famous as an author. Latter on he marries Agnes, the daughter of his aunt?s lawyer, Mr. Wickfield, and so achieves the happy ending of his adventures. There is a sub-plot about Uriah Heep, Mr. Wickfield?s clerk and a less polished (有教养的), more hypocritical, and even more villainous Carker. Under the pretence of cringing humility, Heep obtains complete control over Mr. Wickfield, and tries to seize his business, and forces Agnes to marry him. He uses all means to achieve that end, and all but succeed. But his misdeeds is exposed by Wickfield and at last is seen in prison. The portrait of Uriah Heep ranks high in Dickens?s list of Villains.

In this novel, Dickens makes use of his own life experience to expose the social evils of the day, such as the miseries of child-labor, the tyranny in schools, the debtor?s prison, as well as the cruelty, the immorality and the treachery prevalent in the English bourgeois world. It is also worth noticing that in the novel the good characters are forced to face hardships, disappointment, trial and affliction while the bad ones do not suffer much.

David Copperfield is Dickens?s own favorite. It is written in the first person and is the most autobiographical of all his books. In writing the novel, Dickens threw into it deep feelings and much of his own experience in his younger days. It was written at a time when his creative powers had reached their height. All this has given the book a combination of verisimilitude, sense of familiarity and artistic maturity seldom met with in his other novels. That is why the novel is loved by so many readers. It is one of the few greatest English novels.

3) The Third Period

His novels of this period are much “darker” in content than before. “Dickens, consciously and subconsciously, shows himself more and more at odds with bourgeois society and more and more aware of the absence of any readily available alternative.” Beginning from Bleak House, Dickens begins to change from the hope of reform under capitalism to his loss of hope for English bourgeois society.

○1Bleak House: The main butt of the novel is aimed at the abuses of the English courts. The plot is built around the lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce over the inheritance of a family fortune, which has dragged for many generations, setting relatives quarreling with one another, driving some of them to ruin and others to suicide, while the lawyers engaged in it obtain large fees from the case. In the end it turns out that the law costs have swallowed the entire estate, so there is no more need, nor possibility for the both sides of the disputants to go on with the case. Bleak House is not merely the name of the book and of a house, but also an apt description of the society in which the action takes place. The spontaneous combustion of “Lord Chancellor” (the nickname of Mr. Krook, a character of the novel) is symbolic of Dickens?s realization of the absolute rottenness of Victorian capitalism and his conviction that it would be destroyed by its own evil.

○2Hard Times fiercely attacks the bourgeois system of education and ethics and utilitarianism. The scene is laid in the North of England, in an industrial city called Cokettown, about 1853. The main plot turns on the complete failure of the “perfect” system of education and of ethics carried into effect by two capitalists, Thomas Gradgrind and his friend Josiah Bounderby both followers of the utilitarian Manchester school. Mr. Gradgrind, M.P. and millowner, advocates a philosophy of “facts”. He says, “What I want is facts! ...Facts alone is wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. …This is the principle on which he brings up his children.” By “facts”, he means statistic data, modes of formal classification and a keen appreciation of the need and duty “to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest”. He puts his hard-headed principle of education into practice in his own family. He brings up his son Tom and his daughter Louisa on the philosophy of facts, carefully extinguishing any imaginativeness or youthful tendencies in them. As a result, Tom becomes an unprincipled youth, mean, cringing, dishonest and selfish, committing theft and then going out of England. Meanwhile his daughter Louisa, as another victim of her father?s heartless principle, is sacrificed in marriage to Bounderby though she doesn?t love him. After marriage, she feels unhappy and is carried away by the

attentions of another man. But when it comes to an elopement, she flies to her father?s home. The unhappy state of his children opens Gradgrind?s eyes to the knowledge that life contains sentiment as powerful as facts. Here we see the novelist?s criticism of bourgeois utilitarianism.

Marx has thus summed up the ideal of bourgeois economics: “Its main dogma is self-abnegation ((为信仰或为他人而)自欺欺人克制, 自我牺牲, 克己), the renunciation (放弃) of life and of all human wants. The less you eat, drink, buy books, the more seldom you attend theatres, dances, café, the less you write, love, theorize, sing, paint, fish, etc., the more you save, the greater grows your fortunes, which neither moth or rust can corrupt—your capital.”

○3Little Dorrit is a novel with imprisonment. William Dorrit has lived over 20 years in the Marshalesea prison for debtors, and is called “Father of the Marshalesea”. William?s misfortune has been caused by an uncompleted contract with the Circumlocution office, a symbol of the British Government of the day with mismanagement, muddle, incompetence and its obstructive officials. William is alleviated by the devotion of Amy or Little Dorrit, his younger daughter born in prison. Old Dorrit and his daughter Amy are befriended by Arthur Clennam, the unromantic, middle-aged hero of the novel, for whom she cherishes a secret love, and who enters the Marshalesea owing to Bankruptcy. There little Dorrit nurses and consoles him during an illness. He now learns the value of her love, but her family status stands in the way of their union. At that time the unexpected discovery that William is heir to a large fortune raises him to a rich gentleman. Then William Dorrit loses his fortune, and the lovers get married on Clennam?s release. In this novel the author tells us that the calamities spring not so much from the evil will of a single person, but from the corruption of the whole condition of things.

○4 A Tale of Two Cities: the two cities are Paris and London during the French Revolution. The basic plot is the fate of Dr. Manette closely interwoven with the development the French Revolution. One night in December in 1767, Dr. Maneete, a young physician, is stooped in the street of Paris by two aristocrats and asked to visit a patient. He finds a young woman in delirium and a young man mortally wounded, serfs of the two aristocrats, the Marquis of Evremond and his brother. The young brother has taken a fancy to the woman, and tormented her husband to death. Her brother, breaking through the window, attacks the younger nobleman and was wounded by the latter. Both patients die, and Dr. Manette returns home, indignantly refusing a fee. But he writes an account of the facts and delivers it to the Minister of State. The next night Dr. Manette is seized by the two aristocrats, shown his letter, which is burned before his face, and carried off gagged and blindfold to the Bastille. During the next 18 years there, his reason gives away. He loses his memory and becomes dead to all else but the craft of shoe-making, which he learns as a means of mental relief.

After 18 years, his wife being dead and his daughter living in England, Dr. Manette is released from the Bastille. He lives for a time with his old servant Defarge, and then goes to London, where under her daughter?s care, he recovers his reason. Lucie, his daughter, is courted by Charles Darnay, a Frenchman living in London. On the eve of their marriage, Darnay tells Dr. Manette his real name, Evremond, the son of the younger aristocrat. Dr. Manette, greatly shocked by the name, falls into mental disorder again, but soon recovers.

Meanwhile the Bastille is stormed and the trials of the aristocrats are beginning in France. Darnay receives an appeal from a steward of his family estates he has renounced. He goes to Paris at the appeal, is brought to trial, but is released after a year?s imprisonment. However, he is immediately rearrested. His accusers are found to be Defarge, his wife and Dr. Manette. After the storm of the Bastille, Defarge makes his way to Dr. Maneete?s cell and finds an account of the bad deeds by the two aristocrats, written by Dr. Manette. Then the document Defarge produces is read. Darnay-Evremond is sentenced, immediately, to death within 24 hours.

It is here that a man is called Sydney Carton appears on the scene. Carton is and Englishman and admirer of Lucie?s. An unhappy failure in life, Carton makes a self-sacrifice to save Darnay?s life, being prompted by his hopeless love of Lucie. He is especially fit to do so, because he resembles Darnay very closely. So he makes his way into prison, changes his clothes with Darnay, and sends him out of prison to the coach in which Lucie and Dr. Manette have been waiting for him. They immediately start for London. Meanwhile Sidney Carton, in the place of Darnay-Evremond, goes to the guillotine. The theme underlying The Tales of Two Cities is the idea “where there is oppression, there is revolution”.

○5Dickens?s final novels include Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood (unfinished).

(2) Dickens’s artistic techniques:

○1Dickens has a tendency to depict the grotesque (very old or unusual, fantastically ugly or absurd) characters or events.

Most of his characters have a peculiar habit, manner, behavior, dress, and catch phrase of his own.

○2Dickens loves to instill life into inanimate things and to compare animate beings to inanimate things.

○3Dickens is noted for his description of pathetic scenes that aim to arouse people?s sympathy. Dickens knew what his readers liked, and he loved to avail himself of every opportunity to appeal to the emotions of his readers.

(3) Dickens: Man and Writer

1) The Man:

Dickens the man is as interesting as Dickens the writer. He enjoyed life and was a man of action and business in the world as well as a student and writer of books. In the early years of his careers, he was the best shorthand reporter on the London press and the best amateur actor on the stage. After great success as a novelist, he became one of the most successful periodical editors of his time. His conversation was genial. His laugh was brimful of enjoyment. His enthusiasm was boundless. At home he entertained his many friends. He devoted a lot of time to his enthusiastic search and generous assistance to young talents. All above all, he was on intimate terms with his readers. Later, this intimacy tooke the form of giving public readings from his works, which continued right to the end of his life.

2) The Writer

Politically and ideologically, Dickens was a Radical. He saw life from the point of view of the poor of a great city. He showed great concern about social problems, supported all proposals for social reform, advocated an increase of democracy in all spheres of life, and championed (支持) the cause of the oppressed. As a novelist, Dickens is remembered first of all for his character-portrayal. Every character his creative figure touched came alive. Another feature of Dickens?s art is his humor and satire.

VI William Makepeace Thackeray: V anity Fair

(1) His Works:

The Snobs of England (1846-47), collected under the title The book of Snobs

Vanity Fair (1847-48)

Pendennis (1849-50)

The Newcomers (1853-55)

Henry Esmond (1852) and Virginians (1859), two historical novels

Denis Duval (unfinished)

A snob is a person who fawns upon his social superiors and looks down upon his inferiors.

(2) V anity Fair: A novel Without a Hero

1) The Origin of the Title: Vanity Fair is taken from Bunyan?s Pilgrim Progress. The pilgrim arrive to the city of

vanity, where he finds Vanity Fair, that is, “a fair, wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity…Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferment (提升到更高职位或职务的行为), titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores (娼妓，妓女), bawds (鸨母：妓院女老板), wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silvers, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not. ”

2) The Story: The scene of the story is England in the first half of the 19th century. The book opens with the departure of

two girls from their in London suburb, where they have studied for six years. One of them is Amelia Sedley, the daughter of a wealthy London merchant. The other is Rebecca (Becky) Sharp, an orphan. They two are together for a short time in Amelia?s home. Becky, shrewd and unscrupulous, sophisticated and beyond her years, is determined to worm her way into upper society at all costs. She attempts but fails to entrap Amelia?s brother Joseph for a husband, so she is obliged to become governess in the family of a certain baronet, Sir Pitt Crawley, M.P.

Coming to Sir Pitt?s country seat, Rebecca finds herself in an atmosphere of avarice, hypocrisy and immorality. She does her best to gain the confidence of her employers and makes herself agreeable. She soon gains the favor of Sir Pitt Crawley, who is captivated by her charms to such a degree that after the death of his wife he proposes to her. But Rebecca has to give up this dazzling chance, for she has been already secretly married to the old man?s younger son Rawdon Crawley because the young man has the bright prospect of inheriting his rich aunt?s property. The perverse

wealthy old woman, however, disinherits Rawdon on account of his marriage with a dowryless girl, and so Becky?s hopes of being wedded to a rich husband are dashed. After a number of adventures, Rebecca (Becky) makes her way into “good society”and enters into a liaison (私通) with Lord Steyne, a rich, wicked old aristocrat. The Crawley couple manage to live in grand style on nothing a year. But Rawdon Crawley is imprisoned for debt. When he returns home, he finds Becky entertaining Lord Steyne alone. As a result, Rawdon Crawley breaks with his wife. Then he leaves England for the West Indies and ides for fever there.

Amelia is about to be married to George Osborne, a light-minded and well-to-do life. The two families have long been on friendly terms. Unexpectedly, Amelia?s father goes bankrupt and leaves his daughter penniless. Old Osborne turns his back on his old friend and orders his on to break with Amelia. Captain Dobbin, an intimate friend of George Osborne?s, is secretly and hopelessly in love with Amelia. Being a good man and wishing to see Amelia happy, Dobbin manages the marriage between her and George and as a result, the angry Osborne disowns his son. Now the war with Napoleon has come to a climax and British troops are sent to the Continent. George goes to the war and is killed in the Battle of Waterloo. After the death of her husband, George, widowed Amelia gives birth to a son and entirely devotes to herself to his upbringing. The war being over, Dobbin, now a distinguished officer leaves for India.

After many vicissitudes (兴衰；枯荣；变迁) and wanderings, Rebecca meets her former friend Amelia again. Amelia still holds dear the memory of her dead husband George Osborne. But Rebecca discloses an old secret, showing George?s letter asking Becky to elope with him on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. Amelia?s idolatry shattered, she decides to reward Dobbin?s life-long affection by marrying him. Becky goes on living with Joseph, Amelia?s brother, until he dies, leaving all his property to her. She returns to England and lives like a grand lady.

3) A Novel Without a Hero:

○1Vanity Fair is published in 1847-48 in monthly parts. The sub-title of the book, “A Novel Without a Hero”

emphasizes the fact that the writer?s intention was not o portray individuals, but the bourgeois and aristocratic society as

a whole. Building his plot around the fates of Amelia Sedley and Rebecca (Becky) Sharp, Thackeray managed to show a

picture of the life of the English ruling classes. The novel remains a classical example of social satire up to the present day.

○2There are hardly any positive characters in Vanity Fair. Becky Sharp is a classic example of this money-grubbing instinct. Her only aspiration in life is to gain wealth and position by any means, through lies, mean actions and unscrupulous speculating with every sacred ideal. Thackeray does not regard Becky Sharp as an exception. Everyone wishes to gain something in the Vanity Fair and acts almost in the same way as Becky. Amelia Sedley, another heroine of the novel, is merely a tame, sentimental but useless woman. The only person that appears somewhat like a positive character is Dobbin. He is a good man, honest and helpful to others. But he is also a product of his age, particularly of the moral codes of the bourgeois society. So he falls far short of being a real hero, a positive character. There are no common people in the novel.

○3The sub-title not only shows Thackeray?s cynical view toward life but also declares that epoch in which capitalists, or aristocrats, posed themselves as heroes is over.

VII Some Women Novelist: Jane Austen

The Bronte Sisters: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

(1) Jane Austen (1775-1817)

1) Her works:

Pride and Prejudice

Northanger Abbey (1798)

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Emma (1815)

Mansfield Park

Persuasion

2) Brief comments on the authoress:

Living a quiet life in the countryside, Austen kept her eyes steadily upon the people and incidents about her,

and wrote about the small world she lived in. She herself compared her work to a fine engraving made upon a little piece of ivory only two inches square. The ivory surface is small enough, but the woman who made drawings of human life on it is a real artist. Jane Austen was the founder of the novel which deals with the unimportant middle-class people and of which there are many fine examples in latter English fiction. His style is easy and effortless,

a perfect example of what De Quincy meant when he said that we should have to turn to the prose of cultivated

gentlewoman for English uncorrupted by the slang and cant of the world. Walter Scott praised her, “That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life…What a pity such a gifted creature died so early.”

“It is universally acknowledged that s single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” (The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice)

(2) The Bronte Sisters:

1) The Three Sisters and Their Works:

The story of the three sisters, all literary, all talented and all dying young, is one of the saddest pages in the history of English literature.

Charlotte Bronte (1815-55): Professor

Jane Eyre (1847)

Shirley (1849)

Villette (1853)

Emily Bronte (1818-1848): Wuthering Heights (1847) (Unmarried)

Anne Bronte (1820-49): Agnes Gray (1847) (Unmarried)

The Tennant of the Wildfell Hall (1849)

2)Jane Eyre:Jane Eyre is Charlotte?s best literary production. One of the central themes is the criticism of the

bourgeois system of education. She compares the English country squires to the uncultivated and narrow-minded Philistines, but Rochester is an exception. Another problem raised in the novel is the position of woman in society. Jane Eyre maintains that women should have equal rights as men. In Jane Eyre, together with her other novels, Charlotte Bronte attacked the greed, petty tyranny and lack of culture among the bourgeoisie and sympathized with the sufferings of the poor people. Her realism was colored by petty-bourgeois Philanthropy (慈善事业). Like Dickens, she believed that education is the key to all social problems, and that by the improvement of school system and teaching, most of the evils of capitalism could be removed.

3) Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte was a poet and novelist. In the opinion of many critics, Emily was the most gifted

of the three Bronte?s sisters. In the small volume of poems by the three sisters, her contribution was far more important. It includes the well-known Old Stoic and Last Lines, which show the writer?s indomitable spirit:

No Coward soul is mine,

No tremble in the world?s storm—troubled sphere:

I see Heaven?s glories shine,

And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

(Last Lines)

Heathcliff is a rebel against the bourgeois matrimonial system. Heathcliff is at first the oppressed and decides to have his revenge on his oppressor, but in the end, having had his revenge, the oppressed turns the oppressor. Here lies the novel?s theme that “a full human life in a capitalist society was impossible of attainment

VIII Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)Tess of the D’Urbervilles

(1) Life and works: Thomas hardy, novelist and poet, is one of the representatives of English critical realism at the turn of

the 19th century. Hardy wrote prodigiously. His principal works are the Wessex Novels, i.e. the novels describing the characters and environment of his native countryside. He truthfully depicts the impoverishment and decay of small farmers who became hired field-hands and roamed the country is search of seasonal jobs. So the growing pessimistic vein runs throughout his novels and his novels have the strong elements of naturalism, combined with a tendency towards symbolism. According to Hardy?s pessimistic philosophy, mankind is subjected to the rule of some hostile mysterious fate,

which brings misfortune into human life. Because of the hostile reception of his novels by the bourgeois public, almost at 60, he turned entirely to poetry. He achieved great mastership in the field of philosophical lyrics.

His works: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

The Return of the Native (1878)

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

Tess of D’Urbervilles (1891), regarded as the submit of his realism

Jude the Obscure (1896), regarded as the submit of his realism

(2)Tess of the D’Ubervilles: Its full name is Tess of the D’Ubervilles, a Pure Woman Faithfully Portrayed. It tells a tragic life story of a beautiful country girl, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor villager. In her youth she is seduced by Alec D?Urbervilles, the son of a rich merchant who has brought his title into the class of gentry. Tess gives birth to an illegitimate child, thus scandalizing the narrowed-minded people around her. So she leaves home and works at a distant farm as a dairymaid. There she meets Angel Clare, a clergyman?s son, who has broken with the traditions of his family to seek the ideal in a quiet life. The young people fall in love and are engaged to each other. On their wedding night, Tess confesses to Angel the affair of Alec. Angel, himself a sinner who has had some affair with a bad woman, casts her off. Soon he leaves for Brazil. Misfortune and hardship come upon Tess and her family. Her father dies and her whole family are threatened with starvation. Now Alec D? Urbervilles has become a preacher, still rich and influential. Tess has made some pathetic appeals to her husband abroad but in vain, and Alec presses his attention on her. She is driven to accept his protection and to live with him. Clare, returning from Brazil and repentant of his harshness to Tess, finds her in such a situation. Maddened by this second wrong that has been done her by Alec, she murders him in a fit of despair. After hiding with Clare in a forest for a short time, Tess falls into the claws of law. She is arrested, tried and hanged. At the end of the story, Hardy writes sarcastically: “…Justice? was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aechylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess”.

The whole story is filled with a feeling of dismal foreboding and doom. Fateful circumstances and tragic coincidences abound in the book, this do not, however, eclipse the chief message of the truthful portrayal of the tragic lot of a poor country girl ruined by the bourgeois society, which is responsible for the miseries and sufferings of the small people whom Hardy described in his books.

IX George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925

(1) Dramatic works:

1) His only essay:

The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), a commentary on Ibsen?s dramatic works

2) Three cycles of Shaw’s plays:

○11892-1893, Plays Unpleasant, two plays

Widower’s Houses satirizes bourgeois businessmen whose ill-gotten money is squeezed out of poor, suffering people. While traveling in Germany, Henry Trench, a young English doctor, makes the acquaintance of an English businessman Mr. Sartorius and his daughter Blanche. Trench and Blanche fall in love, and are engaged to each other on returning to England. But from Sartorius?s clerk Lickcheese, Trench learns that Sartorius is the owner of squalid tenement-houses in the poorest quarter of London. His fortune has been ground out of the tears of starving tenants and their children. Disgusted with his future father-in-law, Trench wants to break the engagement to Blanche. But Sartorius reveals to Trench the source of his income. It turns out that Sartorius?s houses are built on the land belonging to Trench?s aunt and the young man lives on the interest of the mortgage. Thus Trench proves to be no better than Sartorius and Lickcheese. This puts an end to Trench?s revolt and he marries Blanche.

Mrs. Warren’s Profession: Mrs. Warren, in league with the bourgeois “bird of prey” Crofts, is the proprietress of brothels and considers the profits derived from this “business” quite honorable.

○21894-1897, Play Pleasant, two plays

Candida satirizes the liberal talkers and preachers of “Christian Socialism”

Arms and Man condemns militarism and wars.

○31897-1899, Plays for Puritans

Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) assails bourgeois morality.

The Devil’s Disciple derides the much lauded puritan piety. The play is set in the national liberation movement of American colonies against British rule in 1777. The war is sweeping close to a little town of Westerbridge. The British troops enter the town. To intimidate the people they resolve to hang one of the most respected men, Reverend Andersen. The English soldiers who come to arrest the minister mistake Richard Dudgeon, one of the citizens in the town, for Andersen. Now Richard is known to be an outspoken enemy of the Puritan community.

He mocks at his relatives and fellow-citizens, calling them bigots and “honest profiteers”. To defy the respectable community Richard proclaims himself to be the Devil?s Disciple. However, in reality it is he who proves to be capable of a courageous deed no puritan hypocrite would dare to think of. Wishing to save Andersen?s life, Richard plays the role of the minister and unhesitatingly goes to his death. At the critical moment, Andersen, pistol in hand, arrives as a representative of the victorious American army, ans saves Richard from death.

3) Shaw’s other Plays:

Man of Destiny (1897), a heroic-mock skit on Napoleon

You Never Can Tell (1900), a farcical treatment of the new women

John Bull’s Other Island (1904) invents the usual conception of Englishman and Irishman, the former depicted a soft-headed sentimentalist, the latter as a type of practical sense

Major Barbara (1905) exposes British militarism. The main Character, the cannon king Undershaft, a death-monger, never hesitates to destroy millions of lives for the sake profit.

The Doctor’s dilemma (1906) tilts against the professional humbug that surrounds medical practice.

Getting Married (1908) condemns the prudery which conceals the true relation of sexes.

Fanny’s First Play (1911) is a satire on dramatic criticism.

Androcles and the lion (1912) is on Christmas martyrdom.

Pygmalion(1912) is a poignant satire on high life. The refined bourgeois aristocrats are mocked while a simple flower-girl is lovely portrayed.

Heartbreak House (1917), in which this “house”embodies Bourgeois England and whose conclusion is that bourgeois civilization is approaching its end

Saint Joan (1924) is a historical play devoted to the great daughter of French, Joan of Arc, and her struggle for the liberty of her country.

The Apple Cart deals with the theme of rivalry between the U.S.A. and England in the political arena and criticizes bourgeois parliamentalism.

Too True to Be Good dwells upon the decay of the bourgeois system and depicts the birth and growth of new progressive forces in the world.

Man and Superman

(2)Mrs. Warren’s Profession: Mrs. Warren, the heroine of the play, comes from a very poor family. After working for some time as a waitress and bar-maid, she becomes a prostitute and then a part-owner and manager of a chain of brothels in different capitals of central Europe. Sir George Crofts, an old aristocrat, is her partner in this business. Mrs. Warren?s daughter, Vivie, is brought up and educated in a very moral atmosphere. Upon her graduation from Cambridge, she returns home and discovers accidently the source of her mother?s income. She talks with her mother and Sir George Crofts, but the unscrupulousness of earning a fortune by way of dirty exploitation and immorality disgusts Vivie more than ever. After her mother tells her about her real life history, she then breaks away from her mother and lives an independent life, earning her bread by honest work.

In this play, Shaw shows that under the guise of respectability, horrible crimes and corruption are concealed, and accuses the bourgeoisie of making profit by fostering prostitution. Through Mrs. Warren?s speeches Shaw tries to make us understand that there are only two paths open for those poor women: either to be respectable and remain poor and miserable, and eventually die of this poverty and misery, or to give up respectability and to do what is immoral. Shaw points out that Mrs. Warren?s way, the way of prostitution, is one of the two possible ways for poor girls and therefore

she cannot be blamed for taking to that path. That is true, but he does not draw a line between be a prostitute herself and becoming the owner of prostitution house. He has forgotten that Mrs. Warren has changed her social position from one of the exploited to one of the exploiters as she stops being a prostitute and takes up the profession of running brothels. However, in this novel, he exposes and satirizes the whole capitalist system, shows his infinite sympathy for the exploited, and therefore sharply and daringly touches on the most fundamental problem of capitalist system. Thus Mrs. Warren’s Profession is one of the best plays written by Shaw.

(3)Major Barbara is a play about two conflicting ideas and touches upon the fundamental issues of capitalism. Major Barbara is the daughter of a millionaire named Andrew Undershaft, who is a foundling and a poor boy when young but has become a munitions magnate. Barbara wants to save both the bodies and souls of the poor, and she has joined the Salvation Army (a reformist Christian organization), a kind of religious faction, which is organized by the army and latter on becomes a “major”. Her father is unashamed of his business and boasts that with his money the worker in the munitions factory are living contently. He tells his daughter that with his money, he can buy anything in the world, including the Salvation Army. Later it is found out that it is indeed the merchant of death who financially supports the Salvation Army. So the girl who tries to save the people?s souls is defeated by the merchant of death. At last she capitulates and withdraws from the Salvation Army. She thinks that the only thing for her to do is to let her future husband, who is also a foundling and a professor of Greek, inherit the munitions factory, and in this way she will covert the souls of the rich.

In this play, Shaw shows us that the cash is the all-important thing and with this cash great power naturally follows in capitalist society. As Undershaft declares, he sells arms “to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to Royalist and Republican, to communist and capitalist, to Protestant and to Catholic, to burglar and to policeman, to black man and white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.” His motto is “Blood and Fire” and war is his “business”.

(4) Heartbreak House, written during the years of WWI, comments on the bourgeois society of England, showing the

decline and fall of “modern civilization”. The Heartbreak House symbolizes England. Here England is compared to s ship. The atmosphere of the play is that of gloom and despair, with the obvious suggestion that bourgeois society has degenerated and is heading for inevitable ruin and doom. In the final act of the play, Shaw makes German aeroplanes appear in the sky and drop a bomb on to Heartbreak House. The capitalist Mangan is killed, along with a tramp-thief, and thus perish the “thieves”. The danger of war passes and a period of calm returns. But the survivors feel that though they are once more safe and alive, life will again be intolerably dull and meaningless. Some other greater catastrophe seems to be lingering in the air.

X (1) Modernism and its characteristics:

Modernism is a rather vague term which is used to apply to the works of a group of poets, novelists, painters, musicians, etc. between 1910 and the early year after WWII. The term includes various trend or schools, such as imagism, expressionism, Dadaism, stream of consciousness, and existentialism. It means a departure from the conventional criteria or established values of the Victorian age. The basic themes of modernism are alienation and loneliness. In the eyes of modernist writers, the modern world is a chaotic one and is incomprehensible. Although modern society is materially rich, it is spiritually barren. It is a land of spiritual and emotional sterility. Human beings are hopeless before an incomprehensible world and no longer able to do things their forefathers once did.

The Characteristics of modernism can roughly be summed up as follows:

1) Complexity and Obscurity:Writers express the subjective world individually; their consciousness and

subconsciousness shifts from time to time; the past, present and future are mixed together; no limitation of space exists in their works.

2) The use of symbols:A symbol is something that represents or stands for something else. A symbol has a larger

meaning than metaphor or simile—a meaning which can be often multiple or ambiguous. It is more suggestive, more complex, and often hard to interpret. The modern poets and writers find in symbol a mean to express their inexpressible selves. As a symbol is subject to different interpretations, the reader is often bewildered to find the real meaning.

3) Allusion: Allusion is an indirect reference to another work of literature, art, history, or religion. By means of allusion,

the modernist writer tries to unite the past, present and future. He assumes the reader has the same knowledge as he has.

Allusion enriches the meaning of the work, gives it depth, and makes the work understandable to the elite. The use of allusion also helps to achieve effect of irony, for allusions set the past against the present, and thus exhibit a decay of past standards of morality and glory, showing the shallowness and degradation of the modern world.

4) Irony: Irony is an expression of one?s meaning by using words that means the direct opposite of what one really

intends to convey. In this way a writer is able to ridicule a person, or a thing he dislikes or abhors, or o show contempt, or to express his humorous attitude. In short, it shows a contrast between what is and what is said. As modernist writers think themselves helpless in this chaotic world, they find their life ironical. Sometimes it is difficult for a reader to catch the irony.

(2) Imagism: Imagism was an Anglo-American poetic movement flourishing in the 1910s. Its program was formulated

about 1912 by the American poet, Ezra Pound. The imagist poetry is a kind of vers libre (i.e. free verse) shaking most 19th-centurey poetry as cloudy verbiage and emphasizing the use of common and “exact” words, creation of new rhythm, absolute freedom in choice of subjects, presentation of clear image, and also conciseness and directness in short lyric poems around single images. Imagist poetry left a notable impact on the development of both English and American poetry. The two most important poets of the first half of 20th century are W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot.

XI David Herbert Laurence (1885-1930)

1) His life:

Laurence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. His father was a coal-miner. His mother was a middle-class woman and a school teacher, and had a deep influence upon his life. In 1912, he met Frieda V on Richtholfen, a German noblewoman and the wife of a professor at Nottingham University. They fell in love, eloped to Europe, and were married when she was divorced by her husband. After WWI, he lived a wandering life. Laurence was a prolific writer. His literary output includes poems, stories, novelettes, novels, plays, literary criticism, essays and travel books. But first of all he is a novelist.

2) Sons and Lovers (1913), the first of Laurence?s important novels, is largely autobiographical. It is set in a coal-mining

district and based on the author?s early life. The Hero, Paul Morel, resembles Laurence in family situation. His father, Walter Morel, is a miner, easy-going, pleasure-seeking and irresponsible. His mother is a refined and strong-willed woman from the middle class, who can have no satisfaction in the roughness and illiteracy of her uneducated husband.

Mentally isolated, she pins her hopes on her children. After the death of her elder son, she invests in Paul, her younger son, all her hopes and passions. But her all-possessive affection for her son becomes a hindrance to his independent development as a man. She opposes his love for Miriam, a farmer?s daughter, who is “romantic in her soul…and inclined to be mystical”. Meantime, Paul, feeling Miriam?s love egocentric and intolerable, turns from her to Clara, a woman estranged from her husband and potentially sensual. But finding her passion stifling (令人窒息的), he also leaves her. In the end, Mrs. Morel dies of cancer. Paul, casting off three forms of unreal love, stands free and intends to seek for a more valid mode of life. In the novel, Mrs. Morel, Miriam and Clara all want to possess Paul. The complicated relations of Paul with his mother and his two sweethearts, together with their psychological activities, are depicted in great detail.

This shows the influence of Freud?s theory of psychoanalysis, especially that of the “Oedipus Complex”.

3) The Rainbow (1915) tells about three generations of the Brangwans, a Nottingham family of farmers, especially about

the relations between men and women in marriage.○1Tom Brangwan, the first of the main characters, marries Lydia Lensky, a Polish doctor?s widow and exile in England, who has a small daughter, Anna. Their marriage is happy in the main.○2When Anna grows up, she falls in love with her stepfather?s nephew, Will, a lace-designer and a wood-carver with a strong artistic imagination. But their marriage is much less happy. After the rapturous (i.e. filled with great joy or rapture; ecstatic) honeymoon, Anna begins to find Will?s uxoriousness (i.e. excessively submissive or devoted to one's wife.) tedious. Moreover, Will is a devout Christian, showing great interest in the village church, where he becomes choirmaster and restores carvings. She is jealous of this religious and creative spirit of his, and succeeds in destroying it.

But in doing so, she turns him from an original artist to a mere craftsman. And their union degenerates into that of bed-fellows at night instead of intimate companion in daylight. Meanwhile, Anna becomes wholly absorbed in bringing up her 6 children.○3Ursula, the eldest daughter, grows up to be a modern woman, who wants to affirm her