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Тема 3. The Renaissance. Elizabethan Poetry, the main sonneteers: Th. Wyatt, H. Surrey. The significance of Ph. Sidney and E. Spenser in English poetry. Development of English theatre and drama in XVI c. The Golden Age of English Drama. Shakespeare and his creative activity.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Epoch of Renaissance in English Literature, its idea of Humanism and Reformation. The development of poetry in the first half of XVI c. The reformers of English poetry - Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard Surrey. Peculiarities of sonnet as a genre. The development of English sonnet. Shakespearian sonnet: its structure, ideas, dedication. Shakespeare’s contribution to the development of English drama.
Тезисы лекций. Elizabethan Age.Strictly speaking, it was the period of the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603); the term "Elizabethan," however, is often used loosely to refer to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even after the death of Elizabeth. This was a time of rapid development in English commerce, maritime power, and nationalist feeling—the defeat of the Spanish Armada occurred in 1588. It was a great age of English literature—the age of Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Thomas More, whose famous Utopia (the island named nowhere) influenced many future generations or readers and many other extraordinary writers of prose and of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poetry.
The Renaissance was in essence an intellectual rebirth. One force of immense importance in the R. was the new knowledge of the world of antiquity, which was obtained through the recovery of the writings and works of art of the classical period. The idea presented in the literatures of Athens and Rome, of life which should be lived for its opportunities of many-sided development and enjoyment, came to have a strong influence on men – an influence denoted by the term Humanism. Humanism assumed the dignity and central position of human beings in the universe, emphasized the importance in education of studying classical imaginative and philosophical literature, although with emphasis on its moral and practical values. They insisted on primacy of reason as opposed the instinctual appetites and the animal passions, stressed the need for a rounded development of an individual’s diverse powers.
The most attractive figure both among the oxford reformers and later at the court of Henry is Thomas More (1478-1535). He threw himself into state affairs, became Lord Chancellor and after fell a victim to the king’s change of policy, was beheaded. He is remembered not only for his spiritual integrity but also for the union of his interests, intellectual and practical, which resulted in Utopia, written in Latin in 1516, and translated into English in 1551. In this famous book a sailor returning to England holds a conversation with the author concerning the state of the realm, in the course of which it appears that many of the evils of government and wrongs of the people, were still in existence. During Elizabethan reign at the second period of Renaissance the two main genres were popular in England: poetry and drama. This was the Golden age of English Drama.
Elizabethan poetry was also taking on its modern form. Sir Thomas Wyatt(1503-1543) and the Henry Howard Surrey or Earl of Surrey(1517-1547) are often mentioned together, but there are many differences in their work. Both wrote sonnets which they learned to do from the Italians but it was Wyatt who first bought the sonnet to England. Petrarch (1304-1374) was established sonnet as a strict form. The sonnet became a literary exercise, devoted to the expression of a love which might be entirely imaginary or directed toward an imaginary person.
Sonne t is a 14-line lyric poem of fixed form and rhyme pattern. It divided into two quatrains – 4 – line groups and two terzets – 3 – line groups. The rhyming of the quatrains is abba abba; as you see, the rhymes in both quatrains are the same. The rhyming of the terzets, according to Petrarch, is either ccd eed, cde cde, or cdc dcd. But the difficulty of composing sonnets is not only in the difficult form; in a classical sonnet a thought is put forth in the first quatrain, and another, contradicting it, in the second, they intersect in the first terzet, and a solution is reached in the second terzet, in the last word of the last line the most significant; this word is called the key of the sonnet.
In the form of sonnet Wyatt mainly followed Italian poet. Wyatt’s sonnets, like those of his Italian masters, need not be regarded as having strict biographical truth, though attempts have been made to find them the history of a personal relation and some have guessed that they were in part inspired by Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn. At all events Wyatt’s poetry suggests that even a conventional form was for him the means for a sincere expression of feeling, even his translations seem charged with his own temperament, and his rendering of psalms is touched with personal religious emotion. Here is part of a lover’s prayer to his girl:
And wilt thou leave me thus
That hath loved thee so long
In wealth and woe among;
And is thy heart so strong
As for to leave me thus?
Say nay! Say nay! Nay-no
The poet who introduced the Elizabethan age proper was Edmund Spenser. He was known as the Prince of Poets in the Elizabethan age. In 1579 he produced the Shepherd’s Calendar, a poem in 12 books, one for each of the year. Spenser was no doubt making experiments in metre and form, examining his own abilities. Spenser’s greatest work, The Faerie Queene (1589-96) was planned in 12 books, but he wrote little more than the first six. It is the brightest expression of the ideal morality of the time, and in a sense is the epic of the English race at one of the great moment of its history. It was his great national epic to celebrate Queen Elizabeth. Spenser and his contemporaries regarded moral purpose as essential to the greatest art; and with Spenser this purpose took the form of dealing with the old problem of the R. – individual character in relation to the state. Spenser invented a special metre for The Faerie Queen. The verse has nine lines; of these the last has six feet, the others five. The rhyme plan is ababbcbcc. This verse, the ‘ Spenserian Stanza’ is justly famous and has often been used since. /Stanza, a group of verse lines which rhyme in a particular pattern/.
The Elizabethan age produced a surprising flow of lyrics. Lyric poetry gives expression to the poet’s own thoughts and feelings, and for this reason we tend to picture the lyric poet as a rather dreamy unpractical person with his thoughts turned inwards; as a description of the Elizabethan lyric poets, nothing could be further from the truth. We know few details of Spenser’s life, but his friend Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was a true Elizabethan gentleman of many activities – courtier, statesman, post and soldier. Sidney was interested in the plan of using Latin metres to the exclusion of the rhyming verse natural to the English tongue. This attempt was in line with similar undertakings in France and Italy, and serves to show how strong and how dangerous an influence the revival of learning exerted upon the beginnings of modern literature. In his book “ Defence of Poesie ” (1579) he wrote one of the earliest pieces of English criticism, he showed his classicism by his approval of plays built on the Latin model, but he defended English poetry even the folk ballad, exclaiming “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet”.
The chief glory of the great Elizabethan age was its drama. The classical influence on development of English drama was very strong. The classic dramatist selected for emulation was the Latin playwright, Seneca. Latin drama, is usually careful to preserve unity of time and place, that is to make all the action pass in a given locality and to cover no more than the events of a single day. English playwrights, on the contrary, had no hesitation in shifting the scene to half a dozen different countries in the course of a single play, and they thought nothing of introducing in the first act a child who grew to manhood in the second and in the third died.
The most important of these dramatists were Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and George Peele, with Marlowe the undisputed leader. They were named as ‘ University Wits ” – the young generation of writers who were educated at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) He was born and educated at Stratford-on-Avon, married Anne Hathaway in the age of 18, and later went to London, where he worked in a theatre. During the 20 years of his working life S. wrote 37 plays and was involved in three separate aspects of the theatre. For one, he was a “Sharer” in a company of actors called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. This meant that he was one of an inner circle of six or eight actors who determined the company’s artistic and business policies and shared the profits. He was also part owner of the Globe Theatre and shared those consequent responsibilities and revenues as well. In addition, he was the company poet. This meant that he supplied his fellow actors with the popular comedies, tragedies, histories and romances which were the cornerstone of their success and led them, finally to gain the patronage of King, James I. S’s three-way participation in the professional theatre enabled the hardworking actor-playwright-businessman to buy a house in London and a handsome piece of property in his native Stratford, where he began his retirement at the age of 48. Most critics divide his wok into 3 periods: the first period of experiment and external influence: poems and sonnets, history plays-chronicles and comedies; (1591-1601) – Richard 3, Titus Andronicus, Henry 4 and Henry5, Julius Caesar, comedies – Love’s Labor’s Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Merchant of Venice; the ‘joyous comedies - Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it, Twelfth Night. The second period of satire and tragedy (1601-1608) – The dark and bitter tragedies – Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, later Roman plays – Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus. The third period of plays is named as the period of romances (1608-1613) – A Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest.
Список литературы. Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Академия», 2007
Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002
Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Сонеты Шекспира http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sonnets
Шекспир «Гамлет» http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hamlet
«Ромео и Джульетта» http://publicliterature.org/?s=Shakespeare
«Сон в летнюю ночь» http://publicliterature.org/?s=Shakespeare
«Буря» http://publicliterature.org/?s=Shakespeare
Тема 4. The Seventeenth Century Literature. The development of drama and poetry. Metaphysical poetry, John Milton and his time.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Literature of English bourgeois revolution in XVII century. Puritanism and its influence on English literature. John Milton and his epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain. Humanism in characterization of Adam and Eve. The period of Restoration (1660-1688).
Тезисы лекций.. Jacobean Age was named by the king of James I (in Latin, "Jacobus"), 1603-25, which followed that of Queen Elizabeth. There are many striking differences between Age of Elizabeth and Jacobean age. In the first place, the nation unity, of which devotion to Elizabeth was the symbol, was already impaired by the time of her death.
King Charles was supported by the old nobility and by the Church. The Parliamentary Army, headed by Oliver Cromwell, consisted of representatives of the bourgeoisie and the gentry – new nobility; they also gained the support of the yeomen, artisans, and other working people, who by that time had realized that the taxes they had paid to the king under the old feudal laws had been used not for national purposes, but in the interests of the crown and the old nobility.
The political struggles involving the broad masses of the English population led to the publication of news pamphlets and political pamphlets, and laid the foundation of journalism and the periodical press. The English people took a tremendous interest in all the political events of the time. There appeared pamphlets which not only reported events, but also explained them to the people. Satirical ballads on contemporary themes were also published in Pamphlet form. The greatest of all publicists during the Puritan Revolution was the poet John Milton. His pamphlets gave theoretical foundation to the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the monarchy. During the Renaissance poetry had been the most popular form of literature. During the Revolution prose became very popular because it was easier to write on social and political problems in prose.
John Donne (1572-1631) was one of the most famous churchmen of his time and wrote poems from 1590 onwards, but his poems were not published until 1633, shortly after his death at the age of 39. Donne is known as a leader of metaphysical poets. /Metaphysics- the part of the study of philosophy that is concerned with trying to understand and describe the nature of reality, metaphysical used to describe a complicated arrangement of words and ideas/.The name “metaphysical” is now applied to a group of 17-century poets who, whether of directly influenced by Donne, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry – Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley and in religious poetry – Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Traherne.
John Milton (1608-1674). Paradise Lost was written after the Restoration, but the powerful voice of the poet declared that the spirit of the Revolution was not broken, that it still lived in the hearts of the people. Being a Puritan, Milton wanted to portray God as an almightily embodiment of Justice, and Satan as the villain, but Satan becomes the hero of this great work.
Paradise Lost is the major epic poem in English. It was first printed in 1667 and planned in 10 books, but written in 12. Milton had thought about using the English myth of King Arthur for his great epic poem, but finally decided to use the more general myth of Creation, with the figures of God and Satan, Adam and Eve, and the Fall of Mankind as his subject. His aim, he said was:
To assert Eternal Providence
And Justify the ways of God to Men.
This is a very ambitious aim, and the poem has always caused controversy as many readers and critics see Satan as the hero. The poem can be read as a religious text, supporting Christian ideals, or it can be read as the last great Renaissance text, stressing the freedom of choice of Adam and Eve as they choose the path of human knowledge and leave the Garden of Eden, Paradise. Adam and Eve are allowed by God to live in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, as long as they do not eat the apple that grows on the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil. Satan, who has been driven from the Garden of Eden by the guardian angels, returns at night in the form of a serpent.
Adam decides to eat the fruit for love of Eve. As a punishment, God banishes Adam and Eve to the newly created world, where they have to face a life of toil and woe. The angel Michael drives them out of Paradise, waving his fiery sword. Form a hiss Michael shows Adam a vision of the tyranny and lawlessness which are to befall mankind. At the end of the poem, they follow the path towards the unknown future of all humanity:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide,
they, hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Neither Adam nor Eve is blamed for the Fall, when Eve eats the Forbidden fruit of the tree of Knowledge and Adam loses the state of innocence. Satan, God and man are equally responsible. Milton’s sympathies lie with Adam and Eve, and this shows his faith in man. His Adam and Eve are full of energy they love each other and are ready to meet whatever the earth has in store for them.
Paradise Regained, a shorter poem deals with Christ’s temptation in the desert, his resistance to Satan’s temptation balancing Eve’s yielding to that same temptation in Paradise Lost and its appeal is essentially Christian. It is a smaller poem in technique and vision as well as length. On 1672, four years after the publication of Paradise Lost, appeared Milton’s third volume of verse. It consisted of Paradise Regained, a supplement to Paradise Lost, and of Samson Agonistes, a drama in the Greek manner, it is a journey in a new field of poetry, shows Milton’s genius at its subtlest and maturest.
Список литературы.
Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002
Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Поэма Мильтона «Потерянный рай»
http://publicliterature.org/books/paradise_lost/xaa.php
www.gutenberg.org; http://www.gumer.info/authors.php
Тема 5. The Eighteenth Century Literature. The Reign of Neoclassicism. The development of realistic novel of Enlightenment.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. The main ideas of Enlightenment. Realism of Enlightenment. Two tendencies in writing. The New Hero. The main periods of Enlightenment. Classicism of A. Pope, realistic novels of Enlightenment, the development of journalism. Daniel Defoe as a founder of English realistic novel. The importance of Robinson Crusoe by D. Defoe in English and the World Literature. Jonathan Swift as the greatest of English satirists.
Тезисы лекций. The history of England in the second half of the 17th c. and during all of the 18th.c. was marked by British colonial expansion and the struggle for the leading role in commerce. The most active sections of the population at the time were the commercial classes that are the middle classes. They hated prejudice and lived by common sense; it was a sound – thinking and rational age. The writers and philosophers of this age, reflecting the ideology of the middle class, protested against the survivals of feudalism, in which they saw the main evils of the time. They could not yet see the contradictions that were to arise within the capitalist system. Man, they thought, was perfect by nature and vice, bad qualities of human nature were due to ignorance only; so they started a public movement for enlightening the people. The enlighteners wanted to bring knowledge that is ‘light’ to the people. To their understanding this would do away with all the evils of society, and social harmony would be achieved. This movement was called the Enlightenment. Since the enlighteners believed in the power of reason, the period was also called the Age of Reason. Appeal was normally sought to what was variously called Reason, Natural things of Common sense. The characteristic features of Enlightenment all over Europe were much the same:
Notwithstanding these common features there was a difference between the ideas expressed by the English enlighteners and those expressed by the French. The French E. was more progressive than the English: the French enlighteners were political leaders and set forth sharp political problems which prepared the French people for the coming revolution; whereas the English Enlightenment had no revolutionary aims in view; the English Bourgeois Revolution was over long before the Enlightenment spread in England, hence its restricted character.
English literature of the period may be characterized by the following features:
The literature of the age of the Enlightenment may be divided into 3 periods. The first period lasted from the “Glorious Revolution” (1688-1689) till the end of the seventeen thirties. It is characterized by classicism in poetry. The greatest follower of the classical style was Alexander Pope. Alongside with this high style there appeared new prose literature, the essays of Steele and Addison and the first realistic novels written by Defoe and Swift. Most of the writers of this time wrote political pamphlets, but the best came from the pens of Defoe and Swift. The second Period of the Enlightenment was the most mature period. It embraces the forties and the fifties of the 18th c. The development of the realistic social novel was represented by Richardson, Fielding and Smollet. The third Period refers to the 60-80-s of the century. It is marked by the appearance of a new trend: Sentimentalism, typified by the works of Goldsmith and Sterne. This period also saw the rise of the realistic drama and the revival of poetry.
In the works of Enlighteners there were 2 tendencies: the tendency to philosophic generalization of reality and the tendency to domestic description of everyday life. These tendencies went along connecting the will to wide scale description of reality and interest to detailed representation of human motives and behavior. The both tendencies were subordinated to one task of studying and real description of life. The inherent features of Enlightenment realism were criticism of existing order, the accusation of imperfection and unreasonableness of life, satirical approach. All these factors underlined mismatching of Enlightener’s ideals and life order. The goal of Enlightenment was to assert its positive program of improving human nature and circumstances of existing life.
The important meaning in Enlightenment was creation the image of new hero who accumulated the all positive characteristics of that age, faith in great potentiality of human being, its historical optimism. The hero was not artificial but natural who acts with his common sense and reasonability according to his capabilities given by nature. The images of positive hero were too schematic and straight-lined to ideal. They embodied duality, two plans.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was a journalist and that fact itself draws him to our own time. The development of the newspaper and the periodical is an interesting literary sideline of the 17th.c. Defoe is, in many ways, the father of the modern periodical, purveying opinion more than news, and The Review, which he founded in 1704, is the progenitor of a long line of ‘well-informed’ magazines. Defoe did not see himself primarily as a literary artist: he had things to say to the public, and he said them as clearly as he could without troubling to polish and revise. There are no stylistic tricks in his writings, no airs and graces, but there is the flavor of colloquial speech, a ‘no-nonsense’, down –to- earth simplicity. He was – like Swift – capable of irony, however and his Shortest Way with the Dissenters states gravely that those who do not belong to the Church of England should be hanged. This pamphlet was taken seriously by many, but when the authorities discovered they had been having their legs pulled, they put Defoe into prison.
The most interesting of Defoe’s ‘documentary’ works is the journal of the Plague Year (one gets the impression that Defoe was actually present in London during that disastrous time, seriously taking notes, but a glance at his dates will show that this was impossible). But his memory is revered still primarily for his novels, written late in life: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana and others. The intention of these works is that the reader should regard them as true, not as fictions, and so Defoe deliberately avoids all art, all fine writing, so that the reader should concentrate only on a series of plausible events, thinking.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) son of the English lawyer Jonathan Swift the elder, was born in Dublin, Ireland, on November 30, 1667. He grew up there in the care of his uncle before attending Trinity College at the age of fourteen, where he stayed for seven years, graduating in 1688. In that year, he became the secretary of Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party. In 1694, he took religious orders in the Church of Ireland and then spent a year as a country parson. He then spent further time in the service of Temple before returning to Ireland to become the chaplain of the earl of Berkeley. Meanwhile, he had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption surrounding him, working on A Tale of a Tub, which supports the position of the Anglican Church against its critics on the left and the right, and The Battle of the Books, which argues for the supremacy of the classics against modern thought and literature. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in favor of the Whig party. In 1709 he went to London to campaign for the Irish church but was unsuccessful. After some conflicts with the Whig party, mostly because of Swift’s strong allegiance to the church, he became a member of the more conservative Tory party in 1710.
Gulliver's Travels was a controversial work when it was first published in 1726. In fact, it was not until almost ten years after its first printing that the book appeared with the entire text that Swift had originally intended it to have. Ever since, editors have excised many of the passages, particularly the more caustic ones dealing with bodily functions. Even without those passages, however, Gulliver's Travels serves as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and critical, constantly attacking British and European society through its descriptions of imaginary countries.
Список литературы. Drabble M., Stringer J. Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature.
Carter R., MacRae J., The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland.
Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Роман «Робинзон Крузо»:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe
Джонатан Свифт «Путешествия Гулливера»:
http://publicliterature.org/books/gullivers_travels/xaa.php
Тема 6. The Eighteenth century Novels. The emergence of Sensibility. The age of Johnson.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson) 1745-1785. The novels of the Age of Sensibility. The significance of Henry Fielding’s creative activity in the development of English novel. The period of late Enlightenment (60-80s of XVIII c). The origin of sentimentalism, its main conceptions and representatives. The main themes of sentimental poetry (J.Thomson, Edward Young, Thomas Grey). Laurence Sterne as a writer of human feelings and emotions.
Тезисы лекций. This age stresses the dominant position of Samuel Johnson (1709-84) and his literary and intellectual circle, which included Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Edward Godwin. These authors on the whole represented a culmination of the literary and critical modes of neoclassicism and the worldview of the Enlightenment. The more recent name, Age of Sensibility, puts its stress on the emergence, in other writers of the 40s and later, of new cultural attitudes, theories of literature and types of poetry; we find in the period, for example, a growing sympathy of the Middle ages, a vogue of cultural primitivism (is the preference for what is conceived to be ‘nature and the natural over art and the artificial in any area of human culture and values; the innate - instincts and passions over the dictates of reason and prudential forethought), an awakening interest in ballads and other folk literature, a turn from neoclassic “correctness” and its emphasis on judgment and restraint to an emphasis on instinct and felling, the development of a literature of sensibility and above all the exaltation by some critics of ‘original genius’ and a ‘bardic ‘poetry of the sublime and visionary imagination. This was the period of the great novelists, some realistic and satiric, and some ‘sentimental: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Stern.
This type of literature was fostered by the moral philosophy that had developed as a reaction against 17 century stoicism which emphasized reason and the unemotional will as the sole motives to virtue and even more importantly as a reaction against claims that a human being is innately selfish and that the mainsprings of human behavior are self-interest and the drive for power and status. In opposition to such views, many sermons, philosophical writings and popular tracts and essays proclaimed the ‘benevolence - wishing other persons well – is an innate human sentiment and motive and that central elements in moral experience are the feelings of sympathy and ‘sensibility – that is a responsiveness to another person’s distresses and joys. “Sensibility” also connoted an intense emotional responsiveness to beauty and sublimity whether in nature or in art and such responsiveness was often represented as an index to a person’s gentility – that is, to one’s upper-class status.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754), the greatest representative of bourgeois realism in the 18th century, was a descendant of an ancient, aristocratic family. His characters are all-round living beings of flesh and blood, a combination of contradictions of good and bad. The virtues he appreciates greatest are courage, frankness and generosity. The most detestable vices for him are selfishness and hypocrisy. He can forgive frivolity and light-mindedness, but he has no pity for actions which arise from calculating or conventional motives. All this found its expression in his masterpiece “ Tom Jones ”. The novel consists of 18 books, each beginning with an introductory chapter where the author discourses with the reader, in a free and easy manner, on certain moral and psychological themes. The plot of the novel is very complicated; its construction is carefully worked out, every detail being significant. Depicting England of the 18th century Fielding touches upon all spheres of life. We are shown the courts of law, the prison, the church, and the homes of people of all classes, inns and highways, even the theatre. Many people of different social ranks and professions are introduced.
The optimism felt in literature during the first half of the 18th c. gave way to a certain depression as years went by. Towards the middle of the century a new literary trend, that of Sentimentalism, appeared. The first representative of the sentimental school in English literature was Samuel Richardson (1689 –1761). He was asked by a publisher to write a series of letters which should serve as models for the correspondence and behavior of people in the lower walks of like. He did so, and to add interest, he write them as the connected letters of a young serving-girl to her parents, telling the story of her temptation by her master, a certain MR.B, of her resistance and of her final triumph in marrying him. The book appeared in 1740 and was so popular that R. wrote a sequel, which described Pamela’s experience as wife in a sphere much above that of her birth, her lessons in behavior suitable to that estate, and her plans for the education of her children The moral and social purposes of the book are therefore successfully blended, though it must be admitted that Pamela’s morality is of a rather calculating type. The success of Pamela or Virtue Rewarde (1740) encouraged the author to produce a second work of fiction, Clarissa, (1748) with appeared in 8 volumes. This is the story of a young lady, Clarissa Harlowe, who is at the outset the unwilling object of the attentions of a certain Lovelace. Like Pamela, Clarisse is told by means of letters – epistolary form which pass between the different characters. Obviously, this method is in its nature dramatic, that is to say, the reader holds communication directly with the characters. In other ways it is clear that Richardson thought of the novel as an elaborated drama.
His novels are works in which the inner world of the characters is shown. Richardson glorifies middle – class virtues as opposed to the immorality of the aristocracy. He makes his readers sympathize with his heroes. These novels were very much admired in the 18 and 19th centuries.
Tobias Smollett (1721 –1771) was another Scotsman, who was the major comic novelist of the second half of the 18.c. His novel, such as Roderick Random (1748) is entertaining adventure in which the heroes go traveling all over Europe. They are angry young men, who react against bad treatment and the ills of society with strong language and often violent behavior. This is social observation, but it has a more comic tone than the satire of Swift and generation earlier. Many readers found Smollett’s novels and their themes too strong. His final novel Humphy Clinker (1771) is an epistolary novel which describes how disunited the UK was nearly 70 years after the union of parliaments in 1707. Above all, Smollett uses rich and original language to suit his characters, and he brings a new tone of comic freedom to the novel after Fielding.
The most unusual novel of the time was Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) by Laurence Sterne. This is a long comic story which plays with time, plot and character and even with the shape and design of the page. Traditionally, a plot had a beginning, middle and an end, in that order. Sterne was the first to change this order. He wanted to show how foolish it is to force everything into the traditional plot. Sterne was the first writer to use what came to be known as the stream of consciousness technique, following the thoughts of characters as they come into their heads. In this he was influenced by the essay concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, and his theories about time, sensations and the relation of one idea to another. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is an account of travels through France and Italy. And here tears are shed freely –especially over animals, Sterne being perhaps the first of the English ‘poor-dumb-beast’ sentimentalists. It was through the copious shedding of tears of pity and sympathy, in writers like Sterne, that the humanitarianism which is now said to be a great characteristic of the English was able to develop.
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story". The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. It originated in England in the second half of the 18th century and had much success during the English romantic period with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. A later well known novel in this genre, dating from the Victorian era, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The name Gothic refers to the (pseudo)-medieval buildings in which many of these stories take place. This extreme form of romanticism was very popular in England and Germany. The English gothic novel also led to new novel types such as the German Schauerroman and the French roman noir.
The Term Gothic Applied for:
1. The Gothic novel was also considered as Gothic romance.
2. The term Gothic is also employed to designate narrative poetry or prose of which the major elements are horror, violence, and the supernatural.
3. The selection of the locale was usually a haunted castle with dungeons, underground passages, ghost-haunted rooms, and secret stairways that produced great amount of awe, wonder and fear.
The genre was nothing but a phase of the literary movement of romanticism in English literature. It was also the precursor of the modern mystery novel.
The Major writers of the Gothic Romance:
It was Horace Walpole who inaugurated the Gothic romance. He wrote The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764). Other major writers were Clara Reeve, who wrote The Champion of Virtue (1777); Ann Radcliffe, who wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Charles Robert Maturin, who wrote The Fatal Revenge (1807); and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who wrote Frankenstein (1818).
Список литературы. Carter R., MacRae J., The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland.
Oxford Illustrated Guide to English Literature.
Stapleton M. The Cambridge Guide to English Literature.
Интернет ресурсы. Http://englishlit.about.com/arts/englishlit
www.spartacus.schoonet.co.uk/drama.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Http://www.factspider.com/neo-romanticism
Тема 7. The beginning of the Romanic movement. The Nineteenth century Romanticism.
Проблемные вопросы лекции. Historical background of Romantic Period. The main historical and philosophical preconditions for continuation and origin of two main literary movements of 19th c. - romanticism and realism. The reflection in Romanticism the process of alienation of individuality from society. The attitude of Romanticists to modern English society. The process of re-creation of reality with the help of poetic imagination and fantasy in English Romanticism. The role of Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey) in the formation of English Romanticism. The preface of W. Wordsworth to “Lyrical Ballads” as the manifest of English Romanticism. The ideas and role of Revolutionary Romanticists (Byron, Shelly) in the development of English Romanticism. The main contradictions in the creative works of Revolutionary Romanticists. Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels.
Тезисы лекций. It is dated as beginning in 1785 or alternatively in 1789 (the outbreak of the French Revolution), or in 1798 (the publication of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads) – and as ending either in 1830 or else 1832, the year in which Sir Walter Scott died and the passage of the Reform Bill signaled the political preoccupations of the Victorian era. The term is often applied also to literary movements in European countries and America. Romantic characteristics are usually said to have been manifested first in Germany and England in the 1790s, and not to have become prominent in France and America until two or three decades after that time. Major English writers of the period, in addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge, were the poets William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Walter Savage Landor; the prose writers Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, the novelists Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley. The span between 1786 and the close of the 18 c. was that of the Gothic romances by William Beckford, Matthew Gregory Lewis, William Godwin and Anne Radcliffe. Romanticism, which was the leading literary movement in England for more than half a century, was caused by great social and economic changes.
The Industrial revolution, which had begun in the middle of the 18th c., was no sudden change from home manufacturing to large-scale factory production. Enclosing common land had begun as early as the 16th c., but it was only in the second half of the 18th c., that the process became rapid and spread all over Britain. The peasants, completely deprived of their lands, were forced to go to work in factories. Mines and factories had changed the face of the country. Where flowing rivers and green meadows lay, towns sprang up, because water-power was the best available force to drive the new machines. But mechanization did not improve the life of the common people. It only meant a new form of slavery. Now the economic and social ills were clearly seen by the people: the diseases of industrial towns, the misery of child labor, the crowds of underpaid workers and the tyranny of the factory bell that had turned human beings into parts of a machine and made them desperate at the loss of personal freedom. The suffering of the new class, the proletariat, led to the first strikes, and workers took to destroying machines. This was a movement directed against industrial slavery. Workers, who called themselves Luddites after a certain Ned Ludd who in a fit of fury broke two textile frames, naively believed that machines were the chief cause of their sufferings. These actions led to severe repression by the authorities.
The Great French Revolution was accepted as progressive by many in Britain, but when it involved all sections of the French population, it gave a shock to the ruling classes. Under the influence of the Revolution the Irish peasants plotted a rebellion against English landlordism. It broke out in 1798 but was cruelly drowned in blood. The British government took the lead in the counter-revolutionary wars against France. Now the belief of progressive-minded people in the ideal nature of the bourgeois system fell to pieces. As a result, a new humanist movement that of Romanticism, sprang up towards the close of the 18th.c.
Romanticism was a movement against the progress of bourgeois civilization, which had driven whole sections of the population to poverty and enslaved their personal freedom. It was an effort to do away with the injustice that comes into being within the capitalist formation of society, that is to say, the exploitation of man by man. But no one as yet knew what to be done to achieve equality and freedom. New themes for writing arose: no longer were writers attracted to the domestic epic which had been the chief subject of the novel. Protesting against the bourgeois system that crushed human individuality to insignificance, they longed to depict strong individuals, endowed with grand, tempestuous and even demonic passions. The romanticists made emotion, and not reason, the chief force of their works. This emotion found its expression chiefly in poetry. The problem of what was to become of man stirred the hearts of all men of letters.
Some poets were, seized with panic and an irresistible desire to get away from the present. They wished to call back ‘the good old days’, the time long before the mines and factories came, when people worked on ‘England’s green and pleasant land”. These pets are called the Passive Romanticists. They spoke for the English farmers and Scottish peasants who were ruined by the Industrial Revolution. They idealized the patriarchal way of life during the Middle ages, a period that seemed to them harmonious and peaceful. Their motto was “close to nature and from Nature to God”, because they believed that religion put man at peace with the world. The poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey belonged to this group. They were also called the Lake Poets after the Lake District attracted the poets because industry had not yet invaded this part of the country.
Another group of poets distinguished themselves for the revolutionary spirit which they brought into poetry. The Revolutionary Romanticists tried to look ahead and see the future. They spoke up for the new working class and believed in their right to active struggle for liberty. They kept an eye on all political events and sympathized with the national liberation movement in all oppressed countries. The poets believed that the peoples of the world would gain freedom, and imagined that the states of the future would be somewhat like the republics of ancient Greece and Rome. Nevertheless, great pessimism is felt in the works of all these poets, because they did not understand that the struggle for freedom was led at that time by the class of the bourgeoisie and therefore could not give freedom to the workers. The outstanding Revolutionary Romanticists were George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), the first great writer of historical novels, was born in Edinburgh. His father was an Edinburgh lawyer who descended from the fighting and riding clan of Buccluch. He was the first of his clan to live in a city and practice a profession. He had a large family. Walter, the future writer, was the ninth of his twelve children. When not yet two years old, the boy fell ill with a disease that left him lame for life. His parents thought country air would be good for him, so they sent him to his grandparents’ farm, called Sandy Knowe, a place where there were hills and crags and a ruined tower. Walter soon became a strong boy. In spite of his lameness he climbed the steep hills and rode his pony at a gallop. Walter’s grandparents told him thrilling tales of adventures on the Scottish border and stories of the crumbling abbeys and old castles. He learned to love the solemn history of Scotland and liked to recite Scottish ballads and poems. When he grew older and went to school, he became very fond of reading: one of his favorite books was a collection of ballads, called Reliques of Ancient English Poetry edited by Bishop Percy. At the age of 15 Scott had a chance to meet Robert Burns. At the suggestion of his father, Scott became a lawyer and practiced for fourteen years. Like many writers belonging to the Romantic trend, Scott, too felt that all the good days were gone. He wished to record all the historical facts he knew before they were forgotten. And thus pay tribute to the past. Scott’s first published work was a translation of Goethe’s historical play. The folk ballads Walter Scott had collected were the first poetic work he published. It was called “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” and consisted of three volumes; the first two were issued in 1802 and the third one in 1803. Soon after, his own romantic poems attracted the attention of the reading public, the best were ‘the lay of the last minstre’1805, marmion1808 and the lady of the lake 1810. These poems reproduce old legends and combine them with historical material. They were written with great poetic skill and accompanied by such beautiful descriptions that he poet became very famous. But when Byron’s wonderful poems appeared, Scott to quote his own words, “left the field of poetry to his rival ‘who by that time was already a friend of his. He took to writing novels. It was not only a new beginning; it marked a new period in Scott’s creative work. He declined the honor of poet-laureate in 1813 because he understood that writing official verses and odes on the birthdays of members of the royal family would interfere with his creative work.
Список литературы. Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Академия», 2007
Аникин Г.В., Михальская Н.П. История английской литературы. М., «Высшая Школа», 1985
Alexander M. A History of English Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000
Thornley G.C., Roberts G. An outline of English Literature, Longman, 2002
Интернет ресурсы. www.spartacus.schoonet.co.uk/drama.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Http://www.factspider.com/neo-romanticism
on line e-texts - www.gutenberg.org
http://www.gumer.info/authors.php
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