English and America literaturesIntroduction of English literature1. Englands inhabitants is Celts. And it is conquered by Romans , AngloSaxons and Normans. The Anglo-Saxons brought the Germanic language and culture toEngland, while Normans brought the Mediterranean civilization, including Greek culture,Rome law and the Christian religion.2. the old English literature extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of theNorman conquest of England.3. Old English literature has survived divided into two groups.Religious group : Genesis AGenesis B based on biblical themes the Old TestamentExodusThe Dream of the RoodThe secular one: The WandererDeorThe seafarerThe wifes complaintBeowulf: a typical example of Old English poetry, is regarded as the national epic of theAnglo-Saxons. It is an example of the mingling of nature myths and heroic legends.After the Normans conquest, three languages co-existed in England. French if theofficial language that is used by king and the Norman lords. Latin is the principaltongue of church affairs and in universities. Old English was spoken only by thecommon English people.In the second half of 14th century, Geroffery Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower,and othersRecite:1. Romance: which uses narrative verse or prose to sing knightly adventures orother heroic deeds is a popular literary form in the medieval period. It has developed thecharacteristic medieval motifs of the quest, the test, the meeting with the evil giant andthe encounter with the beautiful beloved. The hero is usually the knight, who sets outon ajourney to accomplish some missions. There is often mysteries and fantasies inromance. Romantic love is an important part of the plot in romance. Characterization isstandardized, While the structure is loose and episodic, the language is simple andstraightforward. The importance of the romance itself can be seen as a means ofshowing medieval aristocratic men and women in relation to their idealized view of theworld.2. heroic couplet: Heroic couplet is a rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter. It isChaucer who used it for the first time in English in his work The Legend of GoodWoman.3. Define the period of Old English literature and medieval literature:The period of Old English literature begins with the Anglo-Saxons settlement in Englandat about 450 to 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest of England .The Medieval Periodin English literature start at 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and ends at aboutthe 15th century, is almost a barren one in literary creation. While in the later period,starting from the second half of the 14th century, English literature flourishes with theappearance of writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, andothers,4. The theme of Beowulf: the poem presents a vivid picture of how the primitivepeople wage heroic struggles against the hostile forces of the natural world under awise and mighty leader. The poem is an example of the mingling of the nature mythsand heroic legends.5. What does the character the wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales represent?And how does the author develop his characterization?The Wife of Bath is depicted as the new bourgeois wife asserting her independence.Chaucer develops his characterization to a higher artistic level by presenting characterswith both typical qualities and individual dispositions.6. Chaucer is called the father of English poetry and has made greatcontributions to English poetry and English literature. Please discuss Chaucers literaryachievement and why he is called the father of English poetryChaucers achievement:1. he presented a comprehensive realistic picture of his age and created a wholegallery of vivid characters in his works, especially in The Canterbury Tales. 2. Heanticipated a new ear, the Renaissance, to come under the influence of the Italianwriters. 3. He developed his characterization to a higher level by presenting characterswith both typical qualities and individual dispositions. 4. he greatly contributed to thematuring of English poetry. Today, Chaucers reputation has been securely establishedas one of the best English poets for his wisdom, humor and humanity.2. why he is called thefather of English poetry:originally, Old English poems are mainly alliterative verses with few variations. Chaucerintroduced from France the rhymed stanzas of various types to English poetry toreplace it. In The Romaunt of the Rose, he first introduced to the English theoctosyllabic couplet. In The Legend of Good Women, he used for the first time inEnglish heroic couplet. And in his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, he employedheroic couplet with true ease and charm for the first time in the history of Englishliterature . His art made him one of the greatest poets in English, John Dryden calledhim the father of English poetry.Chapter I The Renaissance Period1. Renaissance: it is marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world.Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid 17th centuries. It first startedfrom Italy and then spread all over Europe. The renaissance, which means 1 1 rebirth orrevival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as therediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography andastrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. The Renaissance,therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkersand scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe,to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and torecover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman CatholicChurch.2. the background of the EnglandThe England is unrest, and is a volcanic period of English history. The war-like noblesseized the power of England and turned it into self-destruction. The frightful reign ofRichard III marked the end of civil wars, until the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547) that theRenaissance really began to show its effect in England3. Humanism: it is the essence of the Renaissance. Humanism is a system ofbeliefs upheld by writers and artists of the Renaissance period in their fighting againstmedieval asceticism. It states that man is godly, that man is able to find truth, goodnessand beauty, and that man is in control of the present life rather than being controlled byGod. Briefly, humanism puts man at the center of their beliefs and takes man to be themeasure of every thing while the former asceticism puts God at the center of theirbeliefs and takes personal salvation to be the most important thing on the earth forman.4. Religious reformation: it is Martin Luther, a German Protestant, who initiatedthe Reformation. Luther believed that every true Christian was his own priest and wasentitled to interpret the Bible for himself.Henry VIII was regarded as the faithful son of the Catholic, his wife cut the ties withRomeEdward VI the reform of the churchs doctrine and teaching was carried outMary there was a violent swing to Catholicism.Elizabeths reign Protestantism has been firmly established .The religious reformation was actually a reflection of the class struggle waged by thenew rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology.5. blank verse: is the unrhymed iambic pentameter line, It was Surrey who firstbrought it in and Marlowe who perfected it with his mighty line6. metaphysical poetry: The term metaphysical poetry is commonly used toname the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne.With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from theconventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. The diction is simple and echoesthe words and cadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from the actual life.The form is frequently that of an argument with the poets beloved, with God, or withhimself. Modern poets like T.S. Eliot have been mostly affected by the metaphysicalinfluence.7. The Renaissance her is Marlowes creation, Such a hero is alwaysindividualistic and full of ambition, facing bravely the challenge from both gods andmen. He embodies Marlowes humanistic ideal of human dignity and capacity. Differentfrom the tragic hero in medieval plays, who seeks the way to heaven through salvationand Gods will, he is against conventional morality and contrives to obtain heaven onearth through his own efforts, With the endless aspiration for power, knowledge, andglory, the hero interprets the true Renaissance spirit. Both Tamburlaine and Faustus aretypical in possessing such a spirit.8. give a great incentiveto something9. William Caxton, who introduced printing into England. Including TheCanterbury Tables and Malorys Morte Darthur10. its the mainstream of the sth11. it could be dated back to the.12. interludes and morality plays thriving in the medieval period13. but the development of the drama into a sophisticated art form14. they made a vivid depiction of the sharp conflicts between feudalism and therising bourgeoisie in a transitional period.15. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the first important English essayist, is best known forhis essays which greatly influenced the development of this literary form. He was alsothe founder of modern science in England. His writings paved the way for the use ofscientific method. Thus, he is undoubtedly one of the representatives of the EnglishRenaissance.16. the main writersA. Edmund Spenser(1552-1599) received education first at Merchant TaylorsSchool and then at Pembroke College, Cambridge. The Shepheardes Canlender ,Epithalamionthe most beautiful wedding hymns for their marriage. Spensersmasterpiece is The Faerie Queene, to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuousand gentle discipline. The Redcrosse knight in Book / and Sir Guyon in Book IIThe five main qualities of Spensers poetry are: a. a perfect melody; b. a rare sense ofbeauty; c. a splendid imagination; d. a lofty moral purity and seriousness; e. a dedicatedidealism. In addition to the above, Spenser uses strange forms of speech and obsoletewords in order to increase the rustic effect. It is Spensers idealism, his love of beauty,and his exquisite melody that make him know as the poets poet.B. Christopher Marlowe : (1564-1593) a son of a Canterbury shoemaker. First to theKings School, then Cambridge. As a man of letters. Play Tamburlaine, DrFaustus, is gifted of the University Wits, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, non-dramaticpoetry includes Hero and Leander, 1 1 the Passionate Shepherd to His Love and a versetranslation of Q/ids Amores, pioneer of English dramaTamburlaine is a play about an an ambitious and pitiless Tartar conqueror in thefourteenth century who rose from a shepherd to an overpowering king. By flouting thegiven order and trampling on despairing princes, Tamburlaine displayed a high-aspiringmind that was self-created and carried by love and dreams beyond the limits of moralexistence. His victories were a triumph of immense natural energy and of ruthlessnessover equally cruel but weak and decadent civilizations. By depicting a great hero withhigh ambition and sheer brutal force in conquering one enemy after another. Being acruel conqueror, finds consummate happiness in subduing other kingdoms. No enemy,except Death, can defeat him, his death ends in glory although he finally admits hislimitations of achievements, and even his limitations as a human being.Dr. Faustus is a play based on the German legend of a magician aspiring for knowledgeand finally meeting his tragic end as a result of selling his soul to the Devil. The playsdominant moral is human rather than religious. It celebrates the human passion forknowledge, power and happiness; it also reveals mans frustration in realizing the highaspirations in a hostile moral order. And the confinement to time is the cruelest fact ofmans condition.Dr. Faustus is the greatest of Marlowes plays, in which the old German legend if freelyreshaped. Faustus is a great scholar bored of his present study on the academiccurriculum and turns to black magic. By conjuration he calls up Mephistophilis, theDevilss servant. Faustus makes a bond to sell his soul to the devil in return fortwenty-four years of life in which he may have the services of Mephistophilis to give himeverything he desires. With the help of devil, Faustus brings his magical art into fullplay and sees the Pope, Alexander the Great and even the beautiful Helen of Greece.Meanwhile Faustus has experienced much internal conflict, symbolized in theappearances of both Good Angel and Bad Angel. In the final scene, there remains onlythe terrifying soliloquy in which the anguish of the heros mind is poignantly expressed.The Passionate Shepherd to His Love: this short poem is considered to be one of themost beautiful lyrics in English literature. It derives from the pastoral tradition, in whichthe shepherd enjoys and ideal country life, cherishing a pastoral and pure affection forhis love. Strong emotion is conveyed through the beauty of nature where lovers are notdisturbed by worldly concern.Come live with me and be my loveAnd we will all the pleasures proveThat valleys, groves, hills, and fieldsWoods, or steepy mountain yieldsAnd we will sit upon the rocks,Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks.By shallow rivers to whose fallsMelodious birds sing madrigals.And I will make thee beds of roses,And a thousand fragrant posies,A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;A gown made of the finest wool,Which from our pretty lambs we pull;Fair lined slippers for the cold,With buckles of the purest gold;A belt of straw and ivy buds,With coral clasps and amber studs,And if these pleasures may thee move,Come live with me, and be my love.The shepherds swains shall dance and singFor thy delight each May morning;If these delights thy mind may move,Then live with me and be my love.C. William Shakespeare(1564-1616) is one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the world has everknown. His works include38 plays, 154sonnets and 2 long poems. Born in amerchants family. In London he write the playwrite: Lord Chamberlains Men which waslater renamed Kings Men. Robert Greene, one of the1 1 University Wits, declared him tobe an upstart crow. Two poems: Venus and Adfonis and The Rape of LucreceThree periods:One period:History plays : Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III, Richard III, Titus Andronicus; four comedies:The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the shrew, andLoves Labours LostTwo periodSecond period: five histories: Richard II, King John, Henry IV, Parts I and II, Henry VSix comedies: A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado AboutNothing, As you like it, Twelfth Night, and The Merry Wives of WindsorTwo tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar.Third period:Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus andCressida, and Coriolanus.Two comedies : Alls Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.Last period:Romantic tragicomedies: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale and The TempestTwo plays: Henry VIII and The Two Noble KinsmenMain works:Merchant of Venice: he states the sophistication derives in part from the play betweenhigh, outgoing romance and dark forces of negativity and hate. The traditional theme ofthe play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio.to idealize Portia asa heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed andbrutality of the Jew. Bur now the views changed, it is very difficult to see Shylock as aconventional evil figure. And many people today tend to regard the play as a satire ofthe Christians hypocrisy and their false standards of friendship and love, their cunningways of pursuing worldliness and their unreasoning prejudice against Jews. comparethe others works of him, it takes a step forward in its realistic presentation of humannature and human conflict.Romeo and Juliet: which eulogizes the faithfulness of love and the spirit of pursuinghappiness. The play .though a tragedy, is permeated with optimistic spirit.Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth: They have some characteristics in common.Each portrays come noble hero, who faces the injustice of human life and is caught in adifficult situation and whose fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation.Each hero has his weakness of nature: Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, facesthe dilemma between action and mind. Othellos inner weakness is made use of by theoutside evil force; and King Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power himselfsuffer from treachery and infidelity; and Macbeths lust for power stirs up his ambitionand leads him to incessant crimes.Hamlet: the first of the great tragedies, is generally regarded as Shakespeares mostpopular play on the stage, for it has the qualities of a blood-and =thunder thriller anda philosophical exploration of life and death. It based on a widespread legend innorthern Europe, Shakespeare takes the bare outlines of Revenge Tragedy, but what headds in infinitely more interesting than what he adopts. And the timeless appeal of thismighty drama lies in its combination of intrigue, emotional conflict and searchingphilosophic melancholy1 1 to be, or not to be that is the question.D. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a representative of the Renaissance in England, isa well-known philosopher, scientist and essayist. He lays the foundation for modernscience with his insistence on the scientific way of thinking and fresh observationrather than authority as a basis for obtaining knowledge. His Essays is the first exampleof that genre in English literature, which has been recognized as an important landmarkin the development of English prose. And some phrases have even entered the Englishliterary tradition. At the height of his career, under King James, he became Lord Keeperand then Lord Chancellor of England. But he was later accused of taking bribes inoffice.Main works:His works can be divided into three groups.First group: The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, and enlarged Latinversion of The Advancement of Learning. His philosophical works also belong to thefirst group.Second group: main literary works. The most famous is Essays. Included ten shortarticles, the enlarged edition of 1612 and thirty-eight essays. Other works of the groupare Apophthagmes New and Old, The History of the Reign of Henry VII, and unfinishedThe New Atlantis.Third period: Maxims of Law, The Learned Reading upon the Statute of USES.The Advancement of Learning: it is a great tract on education. In book I, Bacon highlypraises knowledge, refuting the objections to learning and outlining the problems withwhich his plan is to deal. Also he answers the charge that learning is against religion. Inorder to illustrate this idea, he divides knowledge into two kinds. One is the knowledgeobtained from the Divine Revelation. The other is the knowledge from the workings ofhuman mind. He separates theology from scientific observations and experiments, thusmaking a great step forward in science. The second book is a survey of learning, whichexplains its importance in scholarship. According to Bacon, mans understandingconsists of three parts: history to mans memory, poetry to mans imagination andcreation, and philosophy to mans reason.Novum Organum: is a successful treatise written in Latin on methodology. It is the mostimpressive display of Bacons intellect. The argument is for the use of inductive methodof reasoning in scientific study. But Bacon first expounds the four great falseconceivings that beset mens mind and prevent them from seeking the truth. Then in hissecond book, Bacon suggests the inductive reasoning, i.e. proceeding from theparticular to the general, in place of the Aristotelian method, the deductive reasoning,i.e. proceeding from the general to the particular. By putting forward this theory, Bacon,as a humanist intellect, shows the new empirical attitudes toward truth about natureand bravely challenges the medieval scholasticists.Montaigne is the Bacons teacher, learn economic and flexible way of writing.Bacon cares more about axioms under the guidance of which man thinks and acts thanhuman nature or morality.Bacons essays are famous fortheir brevity, compactness and powerfulness. Yet thereis an obvious stylistic change in the Essays. The sentences in the first edition arecharged and crowded with symmetries. They are composed in a rather affected way.However, the final edition not only enlarges the range of theme, but also brings forth thelooser and more persuasive style. The essays are well-arranged and enriched byBiblical allusions, metaphors and cadence.Of Studies is the most popular of Bacons 58 essays. It analyzes what studies chieflyserve for, the different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies, and howstudies exert influence over human character. Forceful and persuasive, compact andprecise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacons mature attitude towards learningE. John Donne (1572-1631), is the leading figure of the1 1 metaphysical poetry, its maincharacter is with a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from theconventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. The diction is simple as comparedwith that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassic periods. And echoes the words andcadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from the actual life. The form isfrequently that of an argument with the poets beloved, with God, or with himself.His poems give a more inherently theatrical impression by exhibiting a seeminglyunfocused diversity of experiences and attitudes, and a free range of feelings andmoods. The mode is dynamic rather than static, with ingenuity of speech, vividness ofimagery and vitality of rhythms, which show a notable contrast to the other Elizabethanlyric poems which are pure, serene, tuneful, and smooth-running. The most strikingfeature of Donnes poetry is precisely its tang of reality, in the sense that it seems toreflect life in a real rather than a poetical world. Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell andCowley are also considered to be metaphysical poets., he main writing sermons andreligious poems.Main works: The Elegies and Satires, The Songs and Sonnets. Holy Sonnets, A hymn toGod the Father.The Songs and Sonnets, in this poems Donne is probably best known, contains most ofhis early lyrics. Love is the basic theme. Donne holds that the nature of love is theunion of soul and body. Idealism and cynicism about love coexist in Donnes lovepoetry., sometimes expresses the futility and instability of love in his poems. Hisinterest lies in dramatizing and illustrating the state of being in love.In his poetry, Donne frequently applies conceits. His conceits may be divided into twokinds: easy ones and difficult ones. Easy conceits, found in all Elizabethan poetry withimages concerning mythology and natural objects, are not a novelty; the difficult onesrely largely on the choice of imagery. Donnes images are linked with new resourcessuch as law, psychology and philosophy which endow his poetry with learning and wit.His poetry involves a certain kind of argument, sometimes in rigid syllogistic form. Heseems to be speaking to an imagined hearer, raising thetopic and trying to persuade,convince or upbraid him.VI John Milton(1608-1674) take part in the struggle for human liberty, thus putting hispen to the service of the revolutionary cause,Main works: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes. Miltons literaryachievements can be divided into three groups: the early poetic works, the middleprose pamphlets, the early period, Lycidas, Areopagitica, the Paradise Lost is the onlygenerally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowrlf; and the last one is themost perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.Paradise Lost is a long epic divided into 12 books. The theme is the1 1 Fall of Man. Inheaven, Satan led a rebellion against God. Defeated, he and his rebel angels were castinto Hell. However, Satan refused to accept his failure, vowing that1 1 al I was not lost.The poem goes on to tell how Satan took revenge by tempting Adam and Eve, the firsthuman beings created by God, to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge against Godsinstructions. Fortheir disobedience, Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise. Theywere sorry for what they had done and prayed to God. In the last book they were giventhe hope for redemption. The poem ended with Adam and Eve walking away fromParadise, hand in hand, and the gates of Eden were closed behind them.Paradise lost: is Miltons masterpiece. The story is taken from the Old Testament: Satanand other angels rebel against God, but they are defeated and driven from Heaven intoHell. Even amidst the furnace of Hell, Satan is determined to fight back. He assumes theshape of a snake and comes to the Garden of Eden, a paradise where Adam and Evelive. God, after knowing Satans plot, sends the Archangel Raphael to warn Adam andEve of Satan. However, Satan still succeeds in seducing Eve to eat the fruit from theTree of Knowledge, which has been totally forbidden by God. As a result, Adam and Eveare exiled by God from the paradise and thereafter live a life full of hardship.5. Questions and Answers1 . the five main qualities of Spensers poetry are: a. a perfect melody; b. a rare sense ofbeauty; c. a splendid imagination; d. lofty moral purity and seriousness; e. a dedicatedidealism.2 .Whafs the of studies: it analyzes what studies chiefly serve for, the different waysadopted by different people to pursue studies, and how studies exert influence overhuman character. Forceful and persuasive, compact and precise, ,lof studies reveals tous Bacons mature attitude towards learning.1. Marlowes greatest achievement lies in that he perfected the blank verse andmade it the principle medium of English drama. His second achievement in his creationof the Renaissance hero for English drama.2. whats kind of Character of Dr. Faustus: he is the hero in Dr. Faustus byChristopher Marlowe. He is one of the Renaissance heroes in Marlowes plays. He isindividualistic and full of ambition, facing bravely the challenge from God. He showsMarlowes humanistic idea of human dignity and capacity. In portraying Faustus, andintrospective and philosophical figure, Marlowe praises his soaring aspiration ofknowledge while warning against the sin of pride since Faustuss downfall was causedby his despair in God and trust in Devil.3. Why Milton the greatest writer writer of his time?In his life, Milton shows himself a real revolutionary, a master poet and a great prosewriter. He fought for freedom in all aspects as a Christian humanist, while hisachievements in literature make him tower over all the other English writers of him timeand exert a great influence over later ones.2. What are the characteristics of Tamburlaine?Tamburlaine is the hero in Tamburline by Marlowe. He is an ambitious and pitilessconqueror. He has the desire for infinite power and authority. In fact, Tamburline is aproduct of Marlowes characteristically Renaissance imagination, fascinated by theearthly magnificence available to men of imaginative power who have the energy oftheir convictions.3. What common characters do the four heros in Shakespeares Great tradedieshave?All of them face the injustice of human life and are caught in a difficult situation andtheir fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation. Each hero has hisweakness of nature: Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemmabetween action and mind; the old king Lear whos is unwilling to totally give up hispower makes himself suffer from treachery and infidelity; and Macbeths lust for powerstirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crimes.6 Topic discussion1. The social significance of Hamlet:The play is Shakespeares most detailed expose of a corrupted court1 1 an unweededgarden in which there is nothing but afoul and pestilent congregation of vapours. Byrevealing the power=seeking, the jostling for place, the hidden motives, the courteoussuperficialities that veil lust and guilt, Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy andtreachery and general corruption at the royal court.The character of hamlet:Hamlet is neither a frail and week-minded youth nor a thought-sick dreamer. He hasnone of the single-minded blood lust of the earlier revengers. It is not because he isincapable of action, but because the cast of him mind is so speculative, so questioningand so contemplative that action, when it finally come, seems almost like defeat,diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero. Trapped in a nightmare worldof spying, testing and plotting, and apparently bearing the unbearable burden of theduty to revenge his fathers death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to livesuspended between fact and fiction, language and action. His life is one of constantrole-playing examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is toosophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a revenger. Bycharacterizing Hamlet, Shakespeare successfully makes a philosophical exploration oflife and death. Hamlet is also a humanist, a man who is free from medieval prejudicesand superstitions. He has an unbounded love for the world rather than heaven. Hecherishes a profound reverence for man and a firm belief in mans power over destiny.7 Shakespeares four periods of dramatic career:Generally Shakespears dramatic career is divided into four periods. The first period ofShakespeares dramatic career was one of apprenticeship. He wrote five historyplays(such as Henry Vi),four comedies(such as The Comedy of Errors). In the secondperiod, Shakespeares style and approach became highly individualized. He wrote fivehistories (such as Henry IV), six comedies (such as The Merchant of Venice) and twotragedies(such as Romeo and Juliet). His third period includes his greatesttragedies(such as Hamlet) and his so-called dard comedies(such as Measure forMeasure). The last period includes his principal romantic tragicomedies (such as TheTempest.)Shakespeares views on literature:He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kind-ness and truth, andshould reflect nature and reality.The characteristics of Shakespeares characters:His major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones: they areindividuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities;meanwhile, they may share features with others.The characteristics of Shakespeares plot:Shakespeares plays are well-known fortheir adroit plot construction, Shakespeareseldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays orstorybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources.The characteristics of Shakespeares language:The language is his subtle instrument. Shakespeare can write skillfully in differentpoetic forms, like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. He has anamazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. His coinage of new words and distortion of themeaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader.Chapter 2 The Neoclassical PeriodNeoclassical period: is the one in English literature between the return of Stuarts to theEnglish shrone in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with thepublication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1978.Its in fact a turbulent period: A . Great political and social events there were theRestoration of King Charles II in 1660 B. the Great Plague of1665 which took 70000 lives in London aloneA. the Great London Fire which destroyed a large part of the city, leavingtwo-thirds of the population homeless,D. the Glorious Revolution in which King James II was replaced by his protest antdaughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, duke of Orange, in 1689, and son on.There was constant strife between the monarch and the parliament, between the two bigpartiesthe Tories and Whigsover the control of the parliament and government,between opposing religious sects such as the Roman Catholicism, the Anglican Churchand the Dissenters, between the ruling class and the laboring poor, etc. in short, it wasan age full of conflicts and divergence of values.B. background: the eighteenth century saw the fast development of England as anation. Abroad, avast expansion of British colonies in North America, India, the WestIndies, and a continuous increase of colonial wealth and trade provided England with amarket for which the small-scale hand production methods of the home industry werehardly adequate, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, England had become thefirst powerful capitalist country in the world. The British bourgeois or middle class alsogrew rapidly. It was the major force of the Revolution and was mainly composed of citypeople.C. literature character: in the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement broughtabout a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known asneoclassicism. According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to bemodeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers(Homer, Virgil,Horace, Ovid, etc.) they believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic,restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of itsservice to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony and gracein literary expressions, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings,primarily as social animals. Thus a polite urbane, witty, and intellectual art developed.Neoclassicists had some fixed laws and rules for almost every genre of literature.Prose should be precise, direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical,didactic, satiric or dramatic, and each class should be guided by its own principles.Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets.The neoclassical emphasis upon reason, intellect, wit and form was rebelled againstor challenged by the sentimentalists, and was, in due time, gradually replaced byRomanticism. The neoclassical period witnessed the flourish of English poetry in theclassical style from Restoration to about the second half of the century. Muchattention was given to the wit, form and art of poetry. Mock epic, romance, satire andepigram were popular forms adopted by poets of the time. Besides the elegant poeticstructure and diction, the neoclassical poetry was also noted for its seriousness andearnestness in tone and constant didacticism.The main writers:1. John Bunyan: (1628-1688): received little formal education. He joined aNonconformist church and began to preach, by the roadside or on the village green,telling people of his vision and interpretation of Gods doctrine.Works:The Pilgrims Progree: is the most successful religious allegory in the English language.Its purpose is to urge people to abide by Christian doctrines and seek salvation throughconstant struggles with their own weaknesses and all kinds of social evils. It is not onlyabout something spiritual but also bears much relevance to the time. Its predominantmetaphor-life is a journeyis simple and familiar.Grace abounding to the Chieff of Sinners, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The HolyWar, The pilgrims ProgressCharacter(personal): Bunyan had a deep hatred for the corrupted, hypocritical rich whoaccumulated their wealth by hook and by crook. As a stout Puritan, he had made aconscientious study of the Bible and firmly believed in salvation through spiritualstruggle.Works Character: his style was modeled after that of the English Bible. With hisconcrete and living language and carefully observed and vividly presented details, hemade it possible for the reader of the least education to share the pleasure of readinghis novel and to relive the experience of his characters.2. Alexander Pope(1688-1744): born well. But III health accompanied him almost fromthe cradle to the grave. He is the representative of the Enlightenment. For him thesupreme value was order-cosmic order, political order, social order, aesthetic order,and this emphasis on order found expression in all of his works. An Essay on Criticismmade him famous.Main wroks: An Essay on Criticism make him famousThe Rape of the Lock, a finest mock epic.The Dunciad, his best satiric workAn Essay on ManEloisa to AbelardEpistle to Dr. ArbuthnotTranslated Homers Iliad and OdyseeyPersonal character: Pope was the greatest poet of his time. He strongly advocatedneoclassicism, emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rules oforder, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum. He workedpainstakingly on his poems, developed a satiric, concise, smooth, graceful andwell-balanced style and finally brought to its last perfection the heroic couplet Drydenhad successfully used in his plays.An Essay on Criticism: it is a didactic poem written in heroic couplets. It consists of744 lines and is divided into three parts. It sums up the art of poetry as upheld andpracticed by the ancients like Aristotle. Horace, Boileau, etcIts written in a plain style, hardly containing any imagery or eloquence and thereforemakes easy reading.3. Daniel Defoe(1660-1731): was born in London in a butchers family. First wrotepamphlets on the current political issues.Main works: The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. His works are the first literaryworks devoted to the study of problems of the lower-class people.The True-born EnglishmanThe ReviewRobinson Crusoe (most famous of his work, his masterpiece)Captain SingletonMoll FlandersColonel JackRoxanaA Journal of the Plague Year.His workss character: His sentences are sometimes short, crisp and plain, andsometimes long and rambling, which leave on the reader an impression of casualnarration. His language is smooth, easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular. There isnothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best.4. Jonathan Swift(1667-1745): success as a prose satirist. He became not only a popularclergyman, but also a leader in the Irish resistance to the English oppressionMain Works: A Tale of a Tub (satirist)The Battle of the BooksThe ExaminerGullivers Travels(his greatest satiric work)A Modest Proposal(more powerful)The Drapiers LettersPersonal character: he had a deep hatred for all the rich oppressors and a deepsympathy for all the poor and oppressed. His understanding of human nature isprofound. He is making the most devastating protest against the inhuman exploitationand oppression of the Irish people by the English ruling class. The apparent eagerness,sincerity and detachment of the author adds force to the bitter irony and biting sarcasm.Language character: his satire is usually masked by an outward gravity and anapparent earnestness which renders his satire all the more powerful. He is one of thegreatest masters of English Prose, He is almost unsurpassed in the writing of simple,direct, precise prose. He defined a good style as proper words in proper places. Clear,simple, concrete diction, uncomplicated sentence structure, economy and concisenessof language mark all his writingsessays, poems and novels.Gullivers Travels: Jonathans best fictional work,5. Henry Fielding(1707-1754): born of an old aristocratic family. Is the most successfulliving playwright of the time. His plays were mostly comedies and farces filled withpolitical and social satire. Became editor of a paper called The Champion. As adramatist. Father of the English Novel, of all the eighteenth-century novelists he was thefirst to set out, both in theory and practiceMain works: The True Patriot and the Liberty of Our Own Times, The JacobitesJournal, The Convent-garden Journal,Plays: The Coffee-House PoliticianThe Tragedy of TragediesPasquinThe Historical Register for the YearNovels: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his friend Mr.Abraham AdamsWritten in Imitation of the Manner of CervantesPamelaComic epic in proseThe History of Jonathan Wild the GreatTom JonesPersonal character: he was poor himself all his life; that is why he was very sympathetictoward the poor and political corruption in his writings., he adopted llthe third-personnarrationHis workss character: his language is easy, unlaboured and familiar, but extremelyvivid and vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm, andhis structure carefully planned towards and inevitable ending. His works are also notedfor lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices such as suspense,coincidence and unexpectedness.6. Samuel Johnson(1709-1784): son of a book-seller. He was the last neoclassicistenlightener in the later eighteenth centery.Main works: DictionaryPoem: LondonThe Vanity of Human WishesA romance: The History of Rasselas, Prince of AbyssiniaA tragedy: IreneHundred essays: The Rambler and The IdlerLives of the PoetsA Dictionary of the English LanguagePersonal character: he was an energetic and versatile writer. He had a hand in all thedifferent branches of literary activities. He was a poet, dramatist, prose romancer,biographer, essayist, critic, lexicographer and publicist.Language character: his language is characteristically general, often Latinate andfrequently polysyllabic. His sentences are long and well structured, interwoven withparallel words and phrases. However, no matter how complex his sentences are, thethought is always clearly expressed ; and though he tends to use learned words, theyare always accurately used Reading his works gives the reader the impression that heis talking with a very learned man.7. Richard Brinsley Sheridan(1751-1816): the son of actor and theatre manager.Main works: The School for Scandal (his masterpiece)The RivalsSt. Patricks DayScheming LieutenantThe DuennaA comic opera: The CriticPizarroThe School for Scandal: it is mainly a story about two brothers, the hypocritical JosephSurface and the good-natured, imprudent spendthrift Charles Surface.It is one of the great classics in English drama. It is a sharp satire on the moraldegeneracy of the aristocratic bourgeois society in the eighteenth-century England, onthe vicious scandal-mongering among the idle rich, on the reckless life of extravaganceand love intrigues in the high society and, above all, on the immorality and hypocrisybehind the mask of honorable living and high-sounding moral principles. And in termsof the article art, it shows the playwright at his best. No wonder, the play has beenregarded as the best comedy since Shakespeare.1. Thomas Gray(1716-1771), son of a London exchange broker.Main Works: Gothic novel: The Old Castle of OtrantoElegy Written in a Country ChurchyardThe Graveyard SchoolOde on the SpringOde on a Distant Prospect of Eton CollegeOde on the Death of a Favourite CatHymn to AdversityThe Descent of OdinThe Fatal SistersLanguage character: he wrote slowly and carefully, painstakingly seeking perfectionof form and phrase. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. Hisstyle is sophisticated and allusive. His poems are often marked with the trait of a highlyartificial diction and a distorted word order.Elegy Written in a Country Chruchyard: the poem abounds in images and arousessentiment in the bosom of every reader. Though the use of artificial poetic diction anddistorted word order make understanding of the poem somewhat difficult, the artisticpolishthe sure control of language, imagery, rhythm, and his subtle moderation ofstyle and tonegives the poem a unique charm of its own. The poem has been rankedamong the best of the eighteenth century English poetry.Phrase:Enlightenment movement: it was a progressive intellectual movement which flourishedin France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement wasa furtherance of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its purposewas to enlighten thewholeworld with the light of modern philosophical and artisticideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. At thesame time, the enlighteners advocated university and science. At the same time, theenlighteners advocated universal education. The eighteenth century marked thebeginning of an intellectual movement in Europe known as the EnlightenmentMovement.Neoclassicism: in the field of literature, the Enlightenment movement brought about arevival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism.Gothic novels: gothic novels are mostly stories of mystery and horror which take placein some haunted or dilapidated Middle Class castles. They appeared from the middlepart of the 18th century and were turned out profusely by male and female writers.Questions and Answers:A. Whats the neoclassical period in English literature?The neoclassical period is the one in English literature between 1660 and 1798. That is,between the return of the Stuards to the English throne and the full assertion ofRomanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth andColeridge.B. Whats the Belief of the neoclassicists about literature?According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after theclassical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers and those of the contemporaryFrench ones. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrainedemotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service tohumanity.C. Standards for literature of the neoclassical period?Prose should be precise, direct, smooth and flexible; Poetry should be lyrical, epical,didactic, satiric or dramatic, and each class should be guided by its own principles;Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets, the Three Unities should be strictlyobserved, regularity in construction should be adhered to, and the typical charactersrather than individuals should be represented.D. The common features of Defoes four minor novels and their their socialsignificances?Defoes four minor novels deal with the personal history of some hero or heroine,usually a whore, a pirate, a pickpocket, a rogue or some other criminal. Their history istraced from their unfortunate childhood, through their many vicissitudes in life, to theirfinal prosperity or repentance and death. The all-powerful influence of materialcircumstances or social environment upon the thoughts and actions of the hero or theheroine is highlighted. The struggle of the poor unfortunate for mere existence, mixedwith their desire for great wealth, comes into conflict with the social environment whichprevents them from obtaining the goal under normal circumstances and thus forcesthem into criminal actions or bold adventures. The group of the four novels clearlymanifest Defoes deep concern for the poor and the unfortunate in his society. They arethe first literary works devoted to the study of problems of the lower-class people.E: What makes Sheridan the only important English dramatist of the 18th century?There are two reasons. First, his plays, especially The Rivals and The School forScandals, are generally regarded as important links between the masterpieces ofShakespeare and those of Bernard Shaw, and as true classics in English comedy.Second, his greatness also lies in his theatrical art. His plays are the product of adramatic genius as well as of a well-versed theatrical man.Topic Discussion:A. The Change and growth of CrusoeThe growth of Robinson Crusoe:Robinson Crusoe changes a lot with his experiences and adventures. When he ranaway from home, he was an inexperienced teenager and a young man full of brightfancies about the future. He naturally chose going to sea, because in those days itmeant a chance to live a chivalrous life, to see the wonders of the world and to make afortune. Since then he had a lot of adventures and he also grew from naive and artlessyouth into a shrewd and hardened man, tempered by numerous trials in his eventful life.The characteristics of Robinson Crusoe:Robinson Crusoe is a real her atypical eighteenth-century English middle-class man,with a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage, patience and persistencein overcoming obstacles, in struggling against the hostile natural environment. He is anew mana man sure of himself and sure of being able to establish himself anywherein the world. He is a man of new age, in which doubt and uncertainty are replaced byhope and confidence. Robinson Crusoe is the enterpriser of his age. He is ready tocommand nature, his enemy, and to found his colony beyond the seas. He is amerchant-adventurer, interested in material profits. He is the colonist, the empirebuilder. Robinson Crusoe is an embodiment of the spirit of individual enterprise andcolonial expansion of the rising bourgeoisie.B. Why Swift is a master satirist?Swift has the talent of being a prose satirist. In his life, he wrote many satires. Theyare A Tale of aTub, The Battle of the Books, The Drapiers Letters, Gullivers Travelsand A Modest Proposal. The first two books are on corruption in religion and learningand they established his name as a satirist. Gullivers Travels is one of the mosteffective and devastating criticisms and satires of all aspects in the them English andEuropean lifesocially, politically, religiously, philosophically, scientifically, andmorally. Its social significance is great and its exploration into human nature profound.Swifts satire is usually masked by an outward gravity and an apparent earnestnesswhich renders his satire all the more powerful. ln,lA Modest Proposal, by suggestingthat poor Irish parents sell their one-year-old babies to the rich English lords and ladiesas food, Swift is making the most devastating protest against the inhuman exploitationand oppression of the Irish people by the English ruling class. The apparent eagerness,sincerity and detachment of the author adds force to the bitter irony and biting sarcasm.So he is a master of satireChapter 3 The Romantic Period1. The Romantic Period: The Romantic period is the period is generally said tohave begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Balladsand to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scotts death and the passage of the firstReform Bill in the Parliament. It is emphasized the special qualities of each individualsmind.2. international Background: in this period, we note a new interest in literaturesand legends other than those of Greece and Rome. It was in effect a revolt of theEnglish imagination against the neoclassical reason which prevailed from the days ofPope to those of Johnson. And some of the great imaginative writings in Englishliterature sprang from the confrontation of radicals and conservatives at the close of the18th century, as the history in England started to move with anew urgency. Thisurgency was provoked by two important revolutions: The French Revolutions, EnglishIndustrial Revolution, the storming of Basstille. Thomas Paines The Declaration ofFlights of /Vfan claiming Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. And Edmund Burke publishedhis Reflections on the Revolution in France. William Godwins Inquiry ConcerningPolitical Justice. Against the injustice, economic system and the oppression of the poor.Mary Wollstonecraft urged the equal rights for women in her 4 Vindication of the Rightof Woman. But when Jacobeans took over power in France, he started to push a policyof violent terror at home and aggressive expansion abroad. And English governmenteven waged wars against France till the fall of Napoleon in 1815.1. England background: during this period, England itself had experiencedprofound economic and social changes. The primarily agricultural society had beenreplaced by a modern industrialized one. The biggest social change in English historywas the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside to the towns.By the 19th century , as a result of the Enclosures and the agricultural mechanization,the peasants were driven out their land. After the Napoleonic War, the English peoplesuffered severe economic depressions. While the price of food rose rocket-high, theworkerss wages went sharply down; sixteen hours labor a day could hardly pay for thedaily bread. This caused the large-scale workers disturbances in England. Thenotorious1 1 Peterloo Massacre which roused indignation even among the upper class.And constantly, there arose sharp conflicts between capital and labor.2. literature characters: they started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature,which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge were themajor representatives of this movement. Wordsworth defines the poet as a1 1 manspeaking to men, and poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelingsImagination, defined by Coleridge, is the vital faculty that creates new wholes out ofdisparate elements. It is in solitude, in communion with the natural universe, that mancan exercise this most valuable of faculties. Its also a great age of prose. Witheducation greatly developed for the middle-class people, there was a rapid growth inthe reading public and an increasing demand for reading materials.3. Ballads: the most important form of popular literature; flourished during the 15thcentury; Most written down in 18th century; mostly written in quatrains; Most importantis the Robin Hood ballads.4. Romanticism: it is romanticism is a literary trend. It prevailed in England duringthe period of 1798-1832. Romanticists were discontent with and opposed to thedevelopment of capitalism. They split into two groups.Some Romantic writers reflected the thinking of those classes which had been ruinedby the bourgeoisie called Passive Romantic poets represented by Wordsworth,Coleridge and Southey.Others expressed the aspiration of the labouring classes called Active or RevolutionaryRomantic poets represented by Byron and Shelley and Keats.5. Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey have often beenmentioned as the1 1 Lake Poets because they lived in the Lake District in thenorthwestern part of England6. Byronic Her a proud, mysterious rebelling figure of noble origin rights all thewrongs in a corrupt society, and is against any kind of tyrannical rules; It appeared firstin Childe Harolds Pilgrimage and then further developed in later works as the OrientalTales, Manfred and Don Juan; the figure is somewhat modeled on the life andpersonality of Byron himself, and makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.7. Main Writers:A. William Blake(1757-1827): the son of the merchant of a small hosiery business.Personal character: he strongly criticized the capitalists cruel exploitation, and hecherished great expectations and enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and regarded itas a necessary stage leading to the millennium predicted by the biblical prophets.Main works: Poetical SketchesSongs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poemsHoly Thursday reminds us terribly of a world of loss and institutional cruelty.Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, warand repression with a melancholy tone.Marriage of Heaven and HellThe book of UrizenThe Book of LosThe Four ZoasMiltonHis works Characters: Childhood is central to Blakes concern in the Songs ofInnocence and Songs of Experience, and this concern gives the two books a strongsocial and historical reference.In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he explores the relationship of the contraries.Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to humanexistence.Language Character: he write his poems in plain and direct language. His poems oftencarry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts theabstractness and tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in widerange is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.B. William Wo rd s wo rt h (1770-1850), born in thefamily of an attorney. He had along poetic career. He is regarded as a worshipper of nature. Its nature that giveshim1 1 strength and knowledge full of peaceMain Works: Descriptive Sketches, and Evening WalkLyrical Ballads.The PreludePoems in Two VolumesOde: Intimations of ImmortalityResolution and Independence.The ExcursionPoets: The Sparrows Nest, To a Skylark, To the Cuckoo, To a Butterfly, I WanderedLonely as a Cloud( is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature.), AnEvening Walk, My Heart Leaps up, Tintern AbbeyThe ThornThe sailors motherMichael,The Affliction of MargaretThe Old Cumberland BeggarLucy PoemsThe Idiot BoyMan, the heart of man, and human life.The Solitary ReaperTo a Highland GirlThe Ruined CottageThe PreludeHis Works divided into two groups: Poems about nature and poems about human lifeLanguage character: he can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the verylife of nature. And he thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. Thejoys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes tothe suffering poor.He is the leading figure of the English romantic poetry, the focal poetic voice of theperiod. His is a voice of searchingly comprehensive humanity and one that inspires hisaudience to see the world freshly, sympathetically and naturally. The most importantcontribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the poetryof the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by usingordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to natureC. Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834): the son of a clergyman. He joined RobertSouthey in a utopian plan of establishing an ideal democratic community in America,named 1 1 Pantisocracy.Main Works: Lyrical Ballads.The Rime of the Ancient MarinerKubla KhanChristabelThis Lime-Tree Bower My PrisonFrost at MidnightThe NightingaleDejection, and OdeAnd the lectures on Shakespeare were particularly successful.Tragic Drama: RemorseBiographia LiterariaHis actual achievement as poet can be divided into two remarkably diverse groups: Thedemonic and the conversational. The demonic group includes his threemasterpieces:1 1 The Rimeof the Ancient Mariner1 1 Christabel Kubla Khan Mysticismand demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive features of this group.His conversational groups include: Kubla Khan, Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, ThisLime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at MidnightThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner told an adventurous story of a sailor. By neglecting thelaw of hospitality, the mariner cruelly shot an albatross which flew to the ship throughthick fog. Then disaster fell onto the ship. The breeze died down; the ship stopped, thehot tropical sun shone all day long. The other sailors died of thirst one after another,whilethe mariner alone was alive, being tortured all the time with thirst and the horrorof death. Only when the mariner finally repented and blessed for the water snake did thespell break and the ship was then able to go back home. The story moves on through aworld of wonder, from mysterious preface to inevitable close. Of course, the marinerfinally recovered from the isolation joyfully; but the joy came only from his ownchanged attitude and his willingness to look differently on the world. From this poem,we can infer that Coleridge believed the universe as the projection not of reasonedbeliefs but of irrational fears and guilty feelings. He had created the kind of universewhich his own inexplicable sins and their consequences might have suggested to him.His religious conflicts enforced him to describe the universe in his work as theChristian universe gone mad.Language character: he was esteemed by some of his contemporaries and is generallyrecognized today as a lyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themesrange from the supernatural to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, and compellingconversational powers made his one of the most influential English literary critics andphilosophers of the 19th centuryA. George Gordon Byron(1788-1824): was born into an ancient aristocratic family.He plunged himself into the struggle for the national independence of that country, onthe whole, his poetry is one of experience. His heroes are more or less surrogates ofhimself.Main works: Hours of Idleness, Edinburgh Review, English Bards and ScotchReviewers。n this poem, lashed not noly his reviewers,but also the conservativeschools of contemporary poetry and vulgarity of the Lake poet),Cantos: four cantos of Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (brought Byron fame), Oriented Tales,Childe Harold, Donjuan(his masterpiece, famous, in this work, its about a gloomy,passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked and traveledaround the continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizablefeatures of Romantic poetry. The medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred oftyranny, preoccupation with the remote and savage, and so on. Its also contains manyvivid and exotic descriptive passages on mountains, rivers, and seas, the author just topresent a panoramic view of different types of society by the Don Juans adventure.)Narrative poem: The Prisoner of Chillon, The IslandDrama: Manfred, Cain, The IslandPolitical satires: Vision of JudgmentHis works character: his persistence attacks at on 1 1 cant political, religious, and moral.His descriptions are simple and fresh, often bring vivid objects before the reader, astream sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid and sometimes rushing down incataractsa mixture of philosophy and slangof everything. He was regarded inEngland as the perverted man, the satanic poet; while on the continent, he was hailedas the champion of liberty, poet of the people. He enriched European poetry with andabundance of ideas, images, artistic forms and innovations.B. Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822) was born into a wealthy family at Sussex.Born in family of the conservative man of the landed gentry.Main works: The Necessity of Atheism, Queen Mab: a Philosophical Poem, Alastor, orThe Spirit of SolitudePoem: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont BlancJulian and Maddalo, The Revolt of Islam, the Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais,Hellas,Prose: Defence of PoetryLyrics: genuine society,1 1 Ode to Liberty：Old to Naples1 Sonnet: England in 1819, TheCloud, To a Shylark, Ode to the West WindPolitical lyrics: Men of EnglandElegy: Adonais is a elegy for John Keatss early deathTerza rimaFouract drama: Prometheus Unbound. The play is an exultant work in praise ofhumankinds potential, and Shelley himself recognized it as the most perfect of myproducts.Personal Characters: he grew up with violent revolutionary ideas under the influence ofthe free thinkers like Hume and Godwin, so he held a life long aversion to cruelty,injustice, authority, institutional religion and the formal shams of respectable society,condemning war, tyranny and exploitation. He expressed his love for freedom and hishatred toward tyranny in several of his lyrics such as Ode to Liberty/Old toNaples1 1 Sonnet: England in 1819Shelley is one of the leading Romantic poets, and intense and original lyrical poet in theEnglish language. Like Blake, he has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite,imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions. His style abounds inpersonification and metaphor and other figures of speech which describe vividly whatwe see and feel. Or express what passionately moves us.E: John Keats(1795-1821): born the son of a livery-stable owner who died when the boywas nineMain Works:Poems: On First Looking into Chapmans Homer, Sleep and Poetry is one of it.EndymionLamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.including: Ode on aGrecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to PsycheLyrics: To AutumnUnfinished: HyperionLanguage Characters: his poetry is always sensuous, colorful and rich in imagery,which expresses the acuteness of his senses. Sight, sound, scent, taste and feeling areall taken in to give an entire understanding of an experience. He has the power ofentering the feelings of others.either human or animal. His poetry, characterized byexact and closely knit construction, sensual descriptions, and by force of imagination,gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.F: Jane Austen(1755-1817): born in a country clergymans family:Main Works:Novel: Sense and SensibilityPride and Prejudice(the most popular)Northanger AbbeyMansfield ParkEmmaPersuasionThe WatsonsFragment of a NovelPlan of a NovelPersonal Characters: she holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religionand moral principles; and her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance ofreason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and clear-sightedjudgment over the Romantic tendencies of emotion and individuality.Her Works Characters: his workss concern is about human beings in their personalrelationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. It is herconviction that a mans relationship to his wife and children is at least as important apart of his life as his concerns about his belief and career. Her thought is that if onewants to know about a mans talents, one should see him at work, but if one wants toknow about his nature and temper, one should see him at home. Austen shows ahuman being not at moments of crisis, but in the most trivial incidents of everyday life.She write within a very narrow sphere. The subject matter, the character range, thesocial setting, and plots are all restricted to the provincial life of the late 18th centuryEngland. Concerning three or four landed gentry families with their daily routine life.Her novels structure is exquisitely deft, the characterization in the highest degreememorable, while the irony has a radiant shrewdness unmatched elsewhere. Her worksat one delightful and profound, are among the supreme achievements of Englishliterature. With trenchant observation and in meticulous details, she presents the quiet,day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English.G: Questions and answers:1. what are the characteristics of the Romantic literature? Please discuss the abovequestion in relation to one or two examples.a. in poetry writing, the romanticists employed new theories and innovated newtechniques, for example, the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads acts asa manifesto for the new school.b.the romanticists not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also elevate theconcepts of spontaneity and inspiration.c. they regarded nature as the major source of poetic imagery and the dominantsubject.d. romantics also tend to be nationalistic.2.Make a contrast between the two generations of Romantic poets during theRomantic AgeThe poetic ideals announced by Wordsworth and Coleridge provided a majorinspiration for the brilliant young writers who made up the second generation of EnglishRomantic poets. Wordsworth and Coleridge both became more conservative politicallyafter the democratic idealism. The second generation of Romantic poets arerevolutionary in thinking. They set themselves against the bourgeois society and theruling class.3 .what are Austens writing features?Jane Austen is one of the realistic novelists. Austens work has a very narrowliterary field. Her novels show a wealth of humor, wit and delicate satire.4 . what is the historical and cultural background of English Romanticism?a. Historically, it was provoked by the French Revolution and the EnglishIndustrial Revolution.b. Culturally, the publication of French philosopher Rousseaus two booksprovided necessary guiding principles for the French Revolution which aroused greatsympathy and enthusiasm in England;c. England experienced profound economic and social changes: the enclosuremovement and the agricultural mechanization; the capitalist class grasped the politicalpower and came to dominate the English society.5.what are the characteristics of Byrons works?In most of his works, we can see Byrons violent attack on cant politics, religion andmorals, his novelty of the oriental scenery, the romantic character of Byronic hero andeasy, fluent and natural beauty of his verse.H. topic discussion:1. Discuss the artistic features of Shelleys poems.A. Percy Bysshe Shelly is an intense and original lyrical poet in the Englishlanguage.B. His poems are full of classical and mythological allusions.C. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speechD. He describes vividly what we see and feel, or expresses what passionatelymoves us.b. What does Wordsworth mean when he said ,lAII good poetry is thespontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility?This sentence is considered as the principle of Wordsworths poetry creation which wasset forth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth appealed directly onindividual sensations, as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry.c. What is your understanding of Coleridges philosophy and his viewpointstowards literary criticism?Coleridge opposed the limitedly rationalistic trends of the 18th century thought. Hebelieves that art is the only permanent revelation of the nature of reality.Coleridge is one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language,maintaining that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure1 1 th rough the medium ofbeauty.He offered the critic a new principle, that is , not to judge, but to appreciate andinterpret.d. How do you describe the writing style of Jane Austen? What is thesignificance of her works?Jane Austen is a writer of the 18th century through she lived mainly in the 19th century.She holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religion, and moral principles.Austens main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships.Austen defined her stories within a very narrow sphere.Chapter 4 The Victorian Periodi. Victorian period: chronologically the Victorian period roughly coincides with the reignof Queen Victoria over England from 1836 to 1901 o The period has been generallyregarded as one of the most glorious in the English history.2. background: the early ears of the Victorian England was a time of rapid economicdevelopment as well as serious social problems.A. after the Reform Bill of 1832 passed the political power from the decaying aristocratsinto the hands of the middle-class industrial capitalists, the Industrial Revolution soongeared up.B. Scientific discoveries and technologic inventions from railways to steamships, fromspinning looms to printing machines quickly brought amazing changes to the country.C. Large amounts of profit were accumulated both from expanding its foreign trademarkets and from exploiting its huge-sized colonies.D. the working class were striking for the basic right and better living and workingconditions.E. this was the first mass movement of the English working class and the early sign ofthe awakening of the poor, oppressed people.F. during the next twenty years, with the industrial Revolution in full swing, the nationwas well ahead of others in development.G. the Victorians experienced fundamental changes. The rapid development of scienceand technology, new inventions and discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology andanthropology drastically shook peoples religious convictions.H. the religious collision that started from the early nineteenth century science.3. Victorian literatures characters:A. took on its quality of magnitude and diversity. It was many-sided and complex, andreflected both romantically and realistically the great changes that were going on inpeoples life and thought. Great writers and great works abounded. It is truthfullyrepresents the reality and spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earthearnestness, the good-natured humor and unbounded imagination are allunprecedented.B. the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challengingexpression the progressive thought.c. they all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with theinhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by themoney-worshiped and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice.d. also produced a host of great prose writerse. the poetry of this period was mainly characterized by experiments with new stylesand new ways of expression.4. Chartist Movement: From 1836 to 1848, the English workers got themselvesorganized in big cities and brought forth the Perples Charter. In which they demandedbasic rights and better living and working conditions.5. Utilitarianism: the ethical doctrine that virtue is based on utility, and that conductshould be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number ofpersons.6.Critical Realism: it is the main trend of the literary thoughts in the 19th century. Itreveals the corrupting influences of the rule of cash upon human nature. Critical realistsset themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint ofbouregeois reality. The 19th century critical realists made use of the form of novel toexpress their ideas.7. Dramatic Monologue: a single speaker is saying something to someone, even it onlyto himself. But whereas the speaker of a lyric usually seems to be the poet. The speakerof a dramatic monologue is a fictional character or an historical figure caught at acritical moment.8. Celtic Renaissance: The creative outburst in Ireland late in the nineteenth century,continuing into the twentieth. William Butler Yeats and others sought dignify culture byproducing art related to Irish traditionsII. Main writers:A. Charles Dickens: son of a petty navy office clerk.I.main works:Sketches by BozThe Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick ClubOliver Twist: this novel is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life ofthe underworld in the nineteenth-century London. The authors intimate knowledge ofpeople of the lowest order and of the city itself apparently comes from his journalisticyears. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens first child hero and Faginthe first grotesque figure.Nicholas NicklebyPic h wick PaperDavid CopperfieldMartin ChuzzlewitDombey and SonA Tale of Two CitiesLittle DorritHard TimesGreat ExpectationsOur Mutual FriendThe Old Curiosity Shophis works character:a. Dickens writes best when he writes from the childs point of view. And he isalso famous for the depiction of those horrible and grotesque characters like Fagin, BillSikes, and Quilp, and those broadly humorous or comical ones like Mr. Micawber.b. His works are also characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos.c. Dickens is one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age.2. The Charlotte Bronte(1816-1855), Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte, came from a largefamily of Irish origin.Main works:Jane Eyre: The work is one of the most popular and important novels of theVictorian age. It is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society. At the same time,it is an intense moral fable. Rochester, has to undergo a series of physical and moraltests to grow up and achieve her final happiness. She was the an orphan child with afiery spirit and a longing to love and be loved, a poor, plain, little governess who daresto love her master, a man superior to her in many ways, and even is brave enough todeclare to the man here love for him, cuts a completely new woman image, sherepresents those middle-class working women who are struggling for recognition oftheir basic rights and equality as a human being. The vivid description of here intensefeelings and her thought and inner conflicts brings her to the heart of the audience.Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?You are wrong!-l have as much soul as you-and full as much heart!VilletteAngrianGondalPoems by Currer, Ellis and Action BellThe ProfessorWuthering Heights: its about two families and an intruding stranger. TheEarnshaw family-Mr. Earnshaw, a bluff prosperous Yorkshire Farmer, his wife, their sonHindley and their dauthther Catherine, live in their handsome farmhouse WutheringHeights up in the folds of the moors(Wuthering is Yorkshire dialect for Weathering,which is indicative of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormyweather). The Linton familyMar. Linton, his wife, their son Edgar and their daughterIsabella-, a richer and more civilized landed gentry family, live down in the flat valley atThrushcross Grange. One day, Mr. Earnshaw brings home a sallow, rugged foundlinghe has picked up in the streets of a city. He calls the boy Heathcliff, the Children growup together; Catherine comes to love Heathcliff while Hindley hates him out of jealousyof his fathers fondness for the waif. When the parents die, Hindley degrades Heathcliffin every way he can, and the lad grows brutal and sullen. Whats more, Heathcliff oneday overhears part of the speech by Catherine that she intends to marry the handsomeand mild Edgar. He runs away. Five years later, he returns to take his revenge onHindley. But now, Catherine has become Mrs. Linton. Tormented by her love for herhusband and her over whelming passion for Heath cl iff, Catherine grows sick and dies ingiving birth to a daughter, Cathy. Heathcliff, driven mad at her death, hastens hisrevenge on people of both houses who he thinks have hindered his union withCatherine. First, he reduces Hindley to a gambler and a drunkard and takes possessionof Wuthering Heights. Then he takes possession of Thrushcross Grange by marryingEdgars sister Isabella and later by marrying little Cathy to his sickly son Linton. In duetime, he drives Hindley, Isabella and Edgar to death and has Hindleys son Hareton andCathy at his mercy. But at this time, events take another turn Now 18 years afterCatherines death, Heathcliff begins to see her ghost. He forgets his revenge, forgetseven to eat and to sleep. With eyes fixed on his supernatural visitor, he starves himselfto death. Meanwhile, little Catherine is able to change the savage Hareton and the towfall in love with each other. At Heathcliffs death, the young couple retire to ThrushcrossGrange, leaving the spirits of Heathcliff and the first Catherine, united at last, inpossession of Wuthering Heights.The novel is a riddle which means different things to different people. From the socialpoint of view, it is a story about a poor man people. From the social point of view, it is astory about a poor man abused, betrayed and distorted by his social betters because heis a poor nobody, as a love story, this is one of the most moving: the passion betweenHeathcliff and Catherine proves the most intense, the most beautiful and at the sametime the most horrible passion ever to be found possible in human beings.Agnes GreyThe Tenant of Wildfell HallShirleyTheir works character: their works are all about the struggle of an individualconsciousness towards self-realization, about some lonely and neglected young womenwith a fierce longing for love, understanding and afull, happy life. Charlotte wouldusually stick to the Puritanical code. She loves the beauty of nature but despisesworldly ambition and success. In her mind, mans life is composed of perpetual battlebetween sin and virtue, good and evil. She is writer of realism combined withromanticism. She not only presents a vivid realistic picture of the English society byexposing the cruelty, hypocxrisy and other evils of the upper classes, and by showingthe misery and suffering of the poor. Her works are famous for the depiction of the lifeof the middle -class working women, particularly governesses. But also her writings aremarked through-out by an intensity of vision and of passion. She creating characterswho are possessed of strong feelings, fiery passions and some extraordinarypersonalities by resorting to some elements of horror, mystery and prophesy, she isable to recreate life in a wondrously romantic wayIII. Alfred Tennyson: (1809-1892) is the most representative, if not the greatest, Victorianpoet. The son of a rather learned clergyman.Main works:1827 Poems by Two Brothers (he and his brother)Poems, Chiefly Lyrical1831 Poems (dramatic monologue: Ulysses; the epic narrative: MortedArthur; the exquisite idylls: Dora and The Gardeners Daughter)1847 Princess (written in blank verse, deal with the theme of womensrights and position, it contained some of his best lyrical pieces: Tears, Idle Tears; Comedown, 0 Maid; Sweet and Low; The Splendor Falls)1850 In Memoriam(i is an elegy on the death of Hallam, it is not onlydwell on the personal bereavement. As a poetic diary, the poem is also an elaborate andpowerful expression of the poets philosophical and religious thoughts. Hisdoubt about the meaning of life, the existence of souls instinct and immortality.)1855 monodrama: Maud, a collection of short lyricsFlizpahEnoch ArdenMerlin and the GleamCrossing the BarIdylls of the King, his most ambitious work which took him over 30years to complete. It is made up of 12 books of narrative poems.His works characters: he is a real artist. He has the natural power of linkingvisual pictures with musical expressions, and these tow with the feelings. He hasperfect control of the sound of English, and a sensitive ear, an excellent choice andtaste of words. His poetry is rich in poetic images and melodious language, and notedfor its lyrical beauty and metrical charm. His works are not only the products of thecreative imagination of a poetic genius but also products of the creative imagination ofa poetic genius but also products of a long and rich English heritageIV. Robert Browning(1812-1889): is another great Victorian poet. Born in a well-offfamily.Main works: 1833 Pauline1840 So rd el IoDramatic LyricsDramatic Romances and LyricsBells and PomegranatesMen and WomenDramatic PersonaeThe Ring and the BookDramatic IdyllsSonnets from the Portuguese(his wife)The Ring and the BookPippa PassesMy Last DuchessFra Lippo LippiThe Bishop Orders His TombPorphyrias LoverA Grammarians FuneralThe Ring and the BookHis works characters: his name of Browning is often associated with theterm: dramatic monologue. Although it is not his invention, it is in his hands that thispoetic form reaches its maturity and perfection. His poem is not easy to read. Hisrhythms are often too fast, too rough and unmusical. The syntax is usually clipped andhighly compressed. The similes and illustrations appear too profusely. The allusionsand implications are sometimes odd and farfetched.V. George Eliot(1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, was born into anestate agents family in Warwickshire, England.Main works: Westminster ReviewTranslation: Leben Jesu(Life of Jesus)Das Wesen des Christentums(The Essence of Christianity)Scenes of Clerical LifeAdam BedeThe Mill on the FlossSilas MarnerRomolaFelix Holt, the RadicalMiddle-march: a study of Provincial life, has been known as one of themost mature works in Englsih literary history. The book provides a panoramic view oflife in a small English town, Middlemarch, and its surrounding countryside in themid-nineteenth century. It is mainly centered on the lives of Dorothea Brooke andTertius Lydgate, both of whom are shown to have great potentials and ambitions, butboth fail in achieving their goals owing to the social environment as well as their ownvulnerabilities.Content: Dorothea Brooke is a beautiful, intelligent young lady of an ardent andtheoretic nature. She isnt satisfied with the common fate of gentle-women. She is fullof manly, lofty ideas and wants to do something great for Middlemarch. First shedevotes herself to the improvement of the cottages of the farmers and them, when shesees the elderly pedant Casaubon, she decides to marry the man so as to be able torealize her ideal by helping him in his lofty pursuit of the fundamental truth aboutChristianity. Soon after her marriage, however, she finds herself totally disillusioned asto both the character of Casaubon and to that ambitious work of his. In the end she isable to retrieve her error and find a new way of life by marrying Will Ladislaw, the manshe loves, and is content with giving him her wifely help and exercising a diffusiveinfluence upon those aroundDaniel DerondaThe Impressions of Theophrastus SuchShe seeks to presented in the development of a soul and to reveal the motives,impulses and hereditary influences which govern human action. She is interested in thedevelopment of a soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power of the character. Inher works, she shows a particular concern for the destiny of women, especially thosewith great intelligence, potential and social aspirations, in her mind, the pathetictragedy of women lies in their very birth. Their inferior education and limited social lifedetermine that they must depend on men for sustenance and realization of their goals,and they have only to fulfill the domestic duties expected of them by the societyVI. Thomas Hardy(1840-1928) the son of a mason. Known as novels of character andenvironmentMain works: 1871 Desperate Remedies1872 Under the Greenwood Tree1874 from the Madding Crowd1891 Tess of the D Urbervilles: Tess is a beautiful, innocent peasant girl.The poverty of the family forces her to claim kinship with the sham but rich dUrbervilles. Alec, the young master of the d Urbervilles, a dandy, seduces Tess andimpregnates her. Tess returns home and later gives birth to a baby, who dies soon.Peoples opinion forces Tess to leave home to work on a dairy farm. There she meetsAngle Clare, son of a clergyman. The two fall in love with each other. On their weddingnight, angel makes a confession about his past dissipation and is readily forgiven byTess, but when Tess reveals her own past. Angel just wouldnt forgive her and desertsher that very night. Helpless and hopeless, Tess has to wander from place to place,doing the hardest work and bearing the harshest Insult. When her fathers deathtransfers the whole burden of the family on her, she is forced to go back to Alec, now apreacher. Before long, the repentant Angle returns from abroad. Tess, putting all theblames of her unhappiness on Alec, kills him. She flees with Angle but is caught by thepolice and hanged.This novel is one of the best and most popular work by Hardy. It is a fierce attack onthe hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society and the capitalist invasion into thecountry and destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century. TheTess as a pure woman brought up with the traditional idea of womanly virtues, isabused and destroyed by both Alec and Angle, agents of the destructive force of thesociety. And the misery, the poverty and the heartfelt pain she suffers and her finaltragedy give rise to a most bitter cry of protest and denunciation of the society.1896 Jude the ObscureThe Dynasts(a long epic-drama about the Napoleonic Wars.)The Return of the NativeThe Trumpet MajorThe Mayor of CasterbridgeThe WoodlandersHis works characters: he is intellectually advanced the emotionally traditional.In his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of thesimple and beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining anddisappearing as England marched into an industrial country. On the other hand, theimmense impact of scientific discoveries and modern philosophic thoughts upon theman is quite obvious. Though Naturalism seems to have played an important part inHardys works, there is also bitter and sharp criticism and even open challenge of theirrational, hypocritical and unfair Victorian institutions, conventions and morals whichstrangle the individual will and destroy natural human emotions and relationships, theconflicts between the traditional and modern, between the old rural value ofrespectability and honesty and the new utilitarian commercialism, between the old, falsesocial moral and natural human passion, etc.VII: Questions and Answers:1. How are naturalism and criticism reflected in Hardys works?A. in his works , man is shown inevitably bound by his own inherent nature andhereditary traits which prompt him to go and search for some specific happiness orsuccess and set him in conflict with the environment. The outside nature the naturalenvironment or Nature herself is shown as some mysterious supernatural force.B. Though Naturalism seems to have played an important part in t Hardys works,there is also bitter and sharp criticism and even open challenge of the irrational,hypocritical and unfair Victorian institutions, conventions and morals which stranglethe individual will and destroy natural human emotions and relationships.2. Whats art of Browings poems?a. In his poems, Browning chooses a dramatic moment or a crisis, in which hischaracters are made to talk about their lives, and about their minds and hearts.b. Browings poetry is not easy to read. His rhythms are often too fast, too roughand unmusical. The syntax is usually clipped and highly compressed. The similes andillustrations appear too profusely.c. The allusions and implications are sometimes odd and fetched. All this makesup his obscurityd. there are abundant metaphors in his poems.3. What are the features of the Charles Dickens novels?a. Dickenss novels offer a most complete and realistic picture of the English bourgeoissociety of his age.b. Dickens is a petty bourgeois intellectualc. Almost all his novels have happy endings.d. His novels tell much of the experiences of his childhood.e. Dickens is a great humorist.4. What are the main characteristics of English critical realism?The English critical realists of the 19th century not only gave a satirical portrayal ofthe bourgeoisie and all the ruling classes, but also showed profound sympathy for thecommon people. Hence humor and satire abound in the English realistic novels of the19th century. The critical realists of the 19th century did not find away to eradicatesocial evils.5. What are the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy?In Thomas Hardys novels, most of them are set in afictional and crude ruralregionWessex, which is really the home place he both loves and hates.V川:Topic Discussion:1. The fate of Tess:a. Tess is a beautiful, innocent peasant girl. The poverty of the family forces herto claim kinship with the sham but rich dUrbervilless. Alec, the young master of the dUrbervilles, a dandy, seduces Tess and impregnates her. Tess, finally kills him and sheflees with Angel but is caught by the police and hanged.Tess is actually a victim of her society. Hardy created the heroine Tess in Tess ofthe D Urbervilles just to criticize the society in his time. Hardys works are known asnovels of the character and environment. Tess is a tragic person simply because sheis not accepted by the society in which agriculture is menaced by the forces ofimvading capitalism. So in a way, we say, Tess fate is decided by her society.2. the theme of Charlottes work, and the image of woman protagonists and thecomprehensive sense for contemporary society?a. Charlottes works are all about the struggle of an individual consciousnesstowards self-realization, about some lonely and neglected young women with a fiercelonging for love, understanding and afull, happy life.b. all her heroines highest joy arises from some sacrifice of self or some humanweakness overcome.c. The image of woman protagonists in her works is mostly the life of the middle-classworking women, particularly governesses.d. Her works present a vivid realistic picture of the English society by exposing thecruelty, hypocrisy and other evils of the upper classes, and showing the misery andsuffering of the poor. Especially in Jane Eyre by her, she sharply criticizes the existingsociety, e.g. religious hypocrisy of charity institutions.Chapter 5 The Modern PeriodI. Modern period: from the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the20th century.II. Background: both natural and social sciences in Europe had enormously advanced.Their rapid development led to great gains in material wealth. But when capitalism cameinto its monopoly stage, the sharpened contradictions between socialized productionand the private ownership caused frequent economic depressions and massunemployment. The gap between the rich and the poor was further deepened. To crownit all, the catastrophic First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire andbrought about great sufferings to its people as well. The postwar economic dislocationand spiritual disillusion produced a profound impact upon the British people, who cameto see the prevalent wretchedness in capitalism. The Second World War marked the laststage of the disintegration of the British Empire. Britain suffered heavy losses in thewar: thousands of people were killed; the economy was ruined; and almost all its formercolonies were lost.III. Culture background: All these radical changes gave rise to all kinds of philosophicalideas in Western Europe. In the mid-19th century,a. Karl Marx and Engels put forward the theory of scientific socialism, which not onlyprovided a guiding principle for the working people, but also inspired them to makedauntless fights fortheir own emancipation.b. Darwins theory of evolution exerted a strong influence upon the people, causingmany to lose their religious faith, survival of the fittest.c. Einsteins theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time andspace.d. Freuds analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature.e. Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher, started a rebellion againstrationalism, stressing the importance of will and intuition.f. Friedrich Nietzsche went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines ofpower and superman and by completely rejecting the Christina morality.g. Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy, which put the emphasis oncreation, intuition, irrationality and unconsciousness.h. Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism.i. French symbolism, appearing in the late 19th century.j. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared:expressionism, surrealism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness.IV. Modernism: It is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism which is thetheoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective,material world, which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a freeexperimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts awayalmost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character,chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. Modernism takes theirrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base.V. Stream of consciousness: in his opinion, the artist, who wants to reach the higheststage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should rise tothe position of a godlike objectivity; he should have the complete conscious controlover the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. Heshould appear as an omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly fromthe psyche of the characters, or make the characters tell their own inner thoughts inmonologues. This literary approach to the presentation of psychological aspects ofcharacters is usually termed as stream of consciousness.VI: Main writers:A. George Bernard Shaw(1856-1950) a brilliant dramatist,.Main works: 1886 Cashel Byrons Prefession1931 Our Theaters in the Nineties1892 Widowers Houses1895 CandidaMrs. Warrens Profession.Caesar and CleopatraSt. JoanMan and SupermanBack to MethuselahThe Apple CartJohn Bulls Other IslandPygmalionGetting MarriedMisallianceFannys First PlayDoctors DilemmaToo True to Be GoodHis works character:a. structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As arealistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim ofdirecting social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, moral,or religious problems, and, thus, can be termed as problem plays. His play has onepassion.b. One features of Shaws characterization is that he makes the trick of showing upone character vividly at the expense of another. Another feature is that Shawscharacters are the representatives of ideas, points of view, that shift and alter during theplay.c. Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of theconventional theatrical situation. The inversion, a device found in Shaw from beginningto end, is an integral part of an interpretation of lifed. Shaws plays have plots, but they do not work by plots. The plot is usually thedisregarded backbone to one long, unbroken conversation. It is the vitality of the talkthat takes primacy over mere story.B. John Galsworthy(1867-1933), was born into an upper-middle class family.Main works:From the Four Winds (short stories)The Man of Propertys first novel of Forsyte trilogies which tell the ups anddowns of the Forsyte family from 1886 to 1926, This novel centers itself on theSoames-Irene-Bosinney triangle. Soames Forsyte, atypical Forsyte, represents theessence of the principle that the accumulation of wealth is the sole aim of life, for heconsiders everything in terms of ones property. Irene, his young and beautiful wife, onthe contrary, loves art and cherishes noble ideals of life. But Soames never pays anyattention to her thoughts and feelings; he takes her merely as part of his own property.Thus, Irene is not happy about her marriage, In order to please his wife, Soams asksBosinney, a young architect, to build a country house for them. Like Irene, Bosinney isalso interested in art and not in practical things in life,Druing the designing and buildingof the house, the two come to enjoy a great deal of each others company and finally fallin love with each other. Rumors arise and Soames wants his revenge. He suesBosinney at the court for spending more money than stipulated. The conflict of thetriangle ends tragically with Bosinneys death in a car accident and Irenes leavingSoames for good JThe Silver BoxThe Forsyte Saga(his first trilogy: The Man of Property; In Chancery; To Let)A Modern ComedyEnd of the Chapter His works characters: he was a conventional writer, havinginherited the fine traditions of the great Victorian novelists of the critical realism suchas Dickens and Thackeray. Technically, he was more traditional than adventurous,focusing on plot development and character portrayal. With an objective observationand a naturalistic description, Galsworthy had tried his best to make an impartialpresentation of the social life in a documentary precision. By emphasizing the criticalelement in his writing, hedauntlessly laid bare the true features of the good and the evilof the bourgeois society. He was also successful in his attempt to present satire andhumor in his writing. He wrote in a clear and unpretentious style with a clear andstraightforward language.C: William Butler Yeats(1865-1939) was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family inDublin. He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature.Main works:The Lake Isle of InnisfreeThe Man Whos Dreamed of Faeryland.No Second TroySeptember 1913Sailing to ByzantiumOnce out of natureMonuments of unaging intellectArtifice of eternityOf what is past, or passing, or to comeLeda and the SwanThe Countess CathleenCathleen ni HoulihanThe Land of Hearts DesireThe Shadowy WatersPurgatoryHis works characters: first stage, the major themes are usually Celtic legends,local folktales, or stories of the heroic age in Irish history, Many of his early poems havea dreamy quality, expressing melancholy, passive and self-indulgent feelings. He is notonly the great poet, but also the dramatist, writing verse plays in most of the cases. Hewrote more than 20 plays in a stretch of 48 years.Second stage : He disgust the bourgeois phili8stinism soured his political optimism.Later stage: in order to reflect the deeps of the mind, he began experimenting withtechniques borrowed from the Japanese Noh plays, such as the use of masks, ofritualized actions, and of symbolic languages together with the combination of musicand dance, in a certain way, his experiments anticipated the abstract movement ofmodern theater.D: T.S.Eliot(1888-1965), first studied at Smith Academy in his hometown, then atHarvard where he concentrated his energies on studying philosophy and logic. Thestudy in France, Germany and Oxford. Editor of the The Egoist and The Criterion. Herewarded the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit in 1948Main works: poem:1915-1925Poems(many poems)Prufrock and Other ObservationsThe Waste Land(the most famous poem, comparable to WordsworthsLyrical Ballads.)Most of his early poems are about a state of mind. There is little action in aphysical sense; the action is totally psychological. The poems are dominated by thedark horror of an earthly hell. The more important poems of this period are: Profrock,Gerontion(is a poem of dramatic monologue), The waste Land, The Hollow Men.The Love Song of J. Alfred PrufrockThe Burial of the DeadUnreal cityA Game of ChjessHURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIMEThe Fire SermonDeath by WaterWhat the Thunder Said1927 are the plays have something to do with Christian themes.Ash WednesdayFour QuartetsMurder in the CathedralThe Family ReunionThe Cocktail PartyThe Confidential ClerkThe 日d er StatesmanEverymanThe Family ReunionTradition and Individual Talent.His works characters: his major achievement in play writing has been the creation of averse drama in the 20th century to express the ideas and actions of modern society withnew accents of the contemporary speech. He is also an important prose writer. Hisessays are mainly concerned with cultural, social, religious, as well as literary issues,E: D.H.Larence(1885-1930 )the son of the coal-miner with little education.Main Works: Sons and Lovers: The story of Sons and Lovers starts with the marriageof Pauls parents. Mrs. Morel, daughter of a middle-class family, is a strong-willed,intelligent and ambitious woman who is fascinated by a warm, vigorous and sensuouscoal miner, Walter Morel, and married beneath her own class. After an initial stage ofhappiness in their marriage, the class difference between them of happiness in theirmarriage, the class difference between them starts to estrange them from each other.The disillusion in her husband makes her lavish all the affections upon her sons. Shedetermines that her sons should never become miners; they will be educated to realizeher ideals of success, happiness and social esteem. Thus, the sons gradually comeunder the strong influence of the mother in affections, aspirations and mental habits,and see their father with their mothers eyes, despising their father whose personalitydegenerates step by step as her feels his exclusion.nated by a warm,The White PeacockThe TrespasserThe RainbowWomen in LoveAarons RodKangarooThe Plumed SerpentLady Chatterleys LoverSt. Mawr,The Daughter of the VicarThe Horse Dealers DaughterThe Captains DollThe Prussian OfficerThe Virgin and the GypsyA Golliers Friday NightThe Daughter-in-lawThe Widowing of Mrs. HolroyedHis works characters: in his novels of the later period, Lawrence deals moreextensively with themes of power, dominance, and leadership, the relationships thatmen form with one another, rather than with women, are also under exploration. In hisshort stories, he turns his eyes outward to human society in his short stories. He usingthem to expose the bankruptcy of the mechanical civilization and to find an answer to it.He is also a proficient poet. His poems all roughly into three categories, satirical andcomic poems, poems about human relationships and emotions, and poems aboutnature. He tries to do in poetry is to catch the instant life of the immediate present. Andhe is an important playwright, it has in common the typical working-class environmentsset in Nottinghamshire. The main conflict is between the ignorant, drunken and brutishfather or husband and the weary, frustrated mother or wife who tries to find emotionalfulfillment in her children. What the plays focus on is the direct and violent emotions ofthe main characters in times of crisis in their married life. In his writings, Lawrence hasexpressed a strong reaction against the mechanical civilization. He was one of the firstnovelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. He believed that thehealthy way of the individuals psychological development lay in the primacy of the lifeimpulse, or in another term, the sexual impulse. Lawrences artistic tendency is mainlyrealism, which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary. And therealistic feature is most obviously seen in its detailed portraiture. With theworking-class simplicity and directness, Lawrence can summon up all the physicalattributes associated with the common daily objects.F: James Joyce(1882-1941): was born into a Catholic family in Dublin. His novels whichhave the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same subject: the Irish peopleand their life.Main Works: Dubliner 15 short stories (Araby is the third of the fifteen stories inDubliners. This tale of the frustrated quest of beauty in the midst of drabness is bothmeticulously realistic in its handling of details of Dublin life and the Dublin scene andhighly symbolic in that almost every image and incident suggests some particularaspect of the theme. Joyce was drawing on his own childhood recollection, and theuncle in the story is a reminiscence of Joyces father. But in all the stories in Dublinersdealing with childhood, the child lives not with his parents but with an uncle and aunt-asymbol of that isolation and lack of proper relation between consubstantiarCin theflesh) parents and children which is a major theme in Joyces workA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.Ulysses(his masterpiece)Finnegans WakeHis works characters: he was one of the most prominent literary figures of the firsthalf of the 20th century. As a great artistic genius, Joyce has created a body of workworthy of comparison with the other masterpieces of English literature. He is regardedas the most prominent stream-of-consciousness. He adopts a kind of mock-heroic style.The essence of the mock-heroic lies in the application of apparently inappropriatestyles. He achieves this mainly by elaborating his style into parody, pastiche, symbolicfantasy, and narration by question and answer from an omniscient narrator. Manycritics think that Joyce is a great master of innovation. His radical experimentationranges from stream-of -consciousness to his fantastic engagements with rhetoric,sentimental romance, historical stylistics, counterpoint and expressionist drama. Hismastery of the English language and style is always highly praised.VII: Questions and Answers:1. What are the characteristic of British Modernism literary?One characteristic of British Modernism if the dehumanization of art. The majorthemes of the British Modernist Literature are the distorted, alienated and illrelationships. The modernist writers are mainly concerned with the inner being of anindividual. The modernist works are also characterized by a conscious rejection ofestablished rules, traditions and conventions.2. The theme of The Man of Property?The theme of this novel is that of the predominant possessive instinct of the Forsytesand its effects on the personal relationships of the family with the underlyingassumption that human relationships of the contemporary English society are merelyand extension of property relationships.3. How many periods William Butlers Yeafs work career divided into andrepresentation of his representative works respectively?A. As a young man in the last decades of the 19th century, Yeats began his poeticcareer in the romantic tradition. The majors are usually Celtic legends, local folktales, orstories of the heroic age in Irish history. The representative works are:The Lake Isle ofInnisfree, The Man Who Dreamed of Faery I and and 1 1 Roses.B. Yeats turned from the traditional poetry to a modernist one during the first towdecades of the 20th century. Now Yeats began to write realistic and concrete themes onvariety of subjects, exploring the profound and complicated human problems, such aslife, love, politics, and religion. The representative works are: Easter of 1916,1 1 NewEra.C. Yeats reached the last stage of his poetic creation when he was over fifty. Hisconcern has turned to the great subjects of dichotomy, such as youth and age, love andwar, vigor and wisdom, body and soul, life and art. The representative worksare :Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, Monuments of Un aging Intellect4. James Joyce is a writer whose mastery of English language and style is alwayshighly praised. What are the setting and the subject in almost all his works? What isJoyces most famous novel? In what way is the novel unconventional?A. Setting: Ireland, especially Dublin; subject: the Irish people and their life;B. Ulysses;C. There is virtually no story, no plot, almost no action, and little characterization in theusual sense. Joyce adopted stream of consciousness in his masterpiece.5. What are the five section of The Waste Land?Section I, The Burial of the Dead, deals chiefly with the theme of death in life. SectionII, A Game of Chess, gives a rather detailed illustration of the sterile situation. Section III,The Fire Sermon, expresses a painful elegiac feeling by juxtaposing the vulgarity andshallowness of the modern with the beauty and simplicity of the past. In section IV,Death by Water, the drowned Phoenician Sailor is a symbol of futile worries over profitand loss, youth and age. In section V, What the Thunder said, as the drought breaks andthe thunder speaks, various elusive suggestions of hopes are given; but despite thethunders adviceto give, to sympathize, and to control, which projects the possibilityof regeneration, the issue is left uncertain at the end.VIII: Topic Discussion1. What are the main characteristics of Bernard Shaws plays?A He makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another.His characters are the representatives of ideas, points of view, that shift and alterduring the play;B. Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventionaltheatrical situation. The inversion is an intergral part of an interpretation of life.C. Shaws plays have plots, but they dont work by plots. The plot is usually thedisregarded backbone to one long, unbroken conversation.D. Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As arealistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim ofdirecting social reform.2. Analyze the main character Paul in Sons and Lovers.Pauls psychological development is traced with great subtlety. He depends heavilyon his mothers love and help to make sense of the world around him. In order tobecome an independent man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions abouthis life and work, and has to struggle to become free from his mothers influence.However, Paul is proved to be incapable of escaping the overpowering emotional bondimposed by his mothers love, so he fails to achieve a fulfilling relationship with Miriamor Clara. Finally, his mother died and he was left alone in despair. But the book endswith Pauls determination to face the unknown future.