Period Study Literary History Literatures in English Introduction

Period Study Literary History Literatures in English Introduction to Literature Lecture 9

Literature in Context Period Study, Literary History Literatures in English, Postcolonial Studies Literary Translation and Cultural Memory are interrelated notions or approaches to the study of literature. They are attempts at a scientific approach to literature, they propose related ways of a systematic study of literature and its phenomena.

Literature in Context University curricula: based on literary kinds based on literary periods based on individual authors based on literary theories based on social context

Literary Periods Dominant Qualities Defining literary periods: based on dominant qualities. Dominant qualities colour most elements of intellectual life in a given culture at a certain time – also influence art, music, architecture, landscape gardening, philosophy, politics, etc. • a few broad tendencies in common at a high level of abstraction • with individual, temporal, local variations • subordinate currents exist as well as dominant ones • declining and emergent energies e. g. New Historicism takes this line of study

How to examine a literary period: how is it framed by a set of significant events The Renaissance in England, for example: • • the first visit of Erasmus (1499), Caxton's printing press at Westminster (1476), the discovery of America (1492), the court of the young Henry VIII (on the throne: 1491 -1547), • the Protestant Reformation, • Copernicus's new astronomy (1543), • the reign of Elizabeth I (1558 -1603)

How to examine a literary period: priorities in its views • features certain priorities in its views concerning the world and art • e. g. , in Classicism: balance, form, proportion, propriety (good taste, good manners correctness, otherwise known as decorum), dignity, simplicity, objectivity, rationality, restraint, responsibility (rather than self-expression), unity (rather than diversity)

How to examine a literary period: views of humans, favourite genres • promotes a certain view of humankind e. g. , in Romanticism: the celebration of the individual • uses specific genres (rather than others) e. g. , in 19 th c. Realism: the novel with its details, its particularisation of the lives of ordinary people

How to examine a literary period: favourite subjects, favourite forms • favours certain subjects for art e. g. , in Modernism: inner individual perception (impressionistic presentation, stream of consciousness technique, such as in James Joyce’s Ulysses) • shows characteristic formal elements (including the example above) e. g. , in Postmodernism: Narcissistic narrative: intruding into one's own fiction to ponder upon its powers A literary trend may not correspond exactly to a cultural period, e. g. Postmodernism and the Post-Modern Period.

Literary period: horizontal or vertical study The study of High Modernism James Joyce: Ulysses, T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land Both published in 1922 in literature in England in the historical context of the UK in the artistic or social or political context of continental Europe in the life of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot

Ulysses – in the context of Irish literature (Dublin, 16 June, 1904) European Modernism Ancient Greek literature Homer’s Odyssy The Waste Land – in the context of English Literature European Modernism Post-First World War Literary allusions such as the Legend of the Holy Grail Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval, le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail) 12 th century, French Wolfram von Escgenbach: Parzival, 12 th– 13 th century, German Thomas Malory: Le Morte d’Arthur, 15 th century, English

James Joyce (1882– 1941)

T. S. Eliot (1888– 1965)

The history of literature: a series of literary periods connections may be established among texts (see “Leda and the Swan”) allusion, intertextuality: interdependence of texts through genre, conventions vs traditional notions of influence: study of direct sources

How is literature read, or judged? Yet another way of looking at literature: how it was read, by whom, how it was judged • readership, horizon(s) of expectations (Hans Robert Jauss) • How do you judge a piece of literature? Do you have to? Should you? Can you avoid doing so? How do you select a work or period to be studied? Can evaluation change reading? Can evaluation prevent reading? • How are literary canons formed? • Literary canon – selection, exclusion, promotion

Chris Baldwick: Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. OUP, 2001 canon, a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of holy scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonica. L Verb: canonize. See also corpus, oeuvre.

J. A. Cuddon: The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Penguin, 1992 canon A body of writings stablished as authentic. The term usually refers to biblical writings accepted as authorized – as opposed to the Apocrypba (q. v. ). The term can also apply to an author's works which are accepted as genuine. For example: the Shakespeare Canon.

The Victorian Web http: //www. victorianweb. org/gender/canon/litcan. html George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University THE LITERARY CANON The American Heritage Dictionary has eleven separate definitions of the term canon, the most relevant of which is "an authoritative list, as of the works of an author" and "a basis for judgment; standard; criterion. " Canon is also defined as "the books of the Bible officially recognized by the Church, " and the idea of a literary canon also implies some such official status. To enter the canon, or more properly, to be entered into the canon is to gain certain obvious privileges. The gatekeepers of the fortress of high culture include influential critics, museum directors and their boards of trustees, and far more lowly scholars and teachers.

Indeed, a chief enforcer of the canon appears in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high culture that in the Victorian period took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of major college anthologies in America. To appear in the Norton or Oxford anthology is to have achieved, not exactly greatness but what is more important, certainly – status and accessibility to a reading public. And that is why, of course, it matters that so few women writers have managed to gain entrance to such anthologies.

§ Literary history and literary canon § establishing a body of writings to be accepted as representative of a culture, a period, a movement, an author § canonization, canon formation by critics, writers, readers, politicians § an act of authorization § canon as a construction manipulative, arbitrary shaping the public taste advancing authors, promoting ideas § canon and counter-canon

Literary history is the history of canonization, de-canonization, re-canonization Some examples John Donne (1573– 1631) versus Ben Jonson (1573– 1637) William Blake (1757– 1827) versus Thomas Chatterton (1752– 1771) and James Macpherson (1736? – 1796) G. M. Hopkins (1844 – 1889) versus Robert Bridges (1844– 1930)

Thirties poets, the ’Auden Group’ W. H. Auden (1907– 1973) Stephen Spender (1909– 1995) Louis Mac. Neice (1907– 1963) Cecil Day Lewis (1904– 1972) The re-canonization of Louis Mac. Neice as the father-figure of the Ulster poets of the 1960 s (Derek Mahon, Michael Longley)

17 th Century ’Metaphysical’ Poetry Grierson, Herbert J. C. , ed. : Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Oxford: Clarendon, 1921 Eliot, T. S. : The Metaphysical Poets. TLS, 20 October 1921 “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” Samuel Johnson (1709– 1784), ‘Abraham Cowley’, in: Lives of the Poets, 1779– 1781 This is precisely the quality 20 th century critics and poets appreciated in their poetry.

John Donne (1572– 1631)

Conceit An extended metaphor (conceit, concetto) establishes a principal subject (comparison) and subsidiary subjects (comparisons). Used extensively by English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century.

A VALEDICTION OF WEEPING Let me pour forth My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here, For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, And by this mintage they are something worth, For thus they be Pregnant of thee; Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more, When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore, So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.

On a round ball A workman, that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All; So doth each tear Which thee doth wear, A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven, dissolvèd so.

Terrestrial globe by Gerard Mercator, 1551

O more than Moon, Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea, what it may do too soon; Let not the wind Example find To do me more harm than it purposeth; Since thou and I sigh one another's breath, Whoe'er sighs most, is cruellest, and hastes the other's death. Published 1633

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to aery thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit, Yet, when the other far doth roam, It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home. Such wilt thou be to me, who must, Like th' other foot, obliquely run ; Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.

Compasses. George Wither’s Emblem Book, 1635

Compasses. Jacibus Boschius’s Emblem Book, 1701

Ted Hughes DAFFODILS Remember how we picked the daffodils? Nobody else remembers, but I remember. Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy, Helping the harvest. She has forgotten. She cannot even remember you. And we sold them. It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them. [. . . ] We sold them, to wither. The crop thickened faster than we could thin it. Finally, we were overwhelmed And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

[. . . ] Every March since they have lifted again Out of the same bulbs, the same Baby-cries from the thaw, Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers In the draughty wings of the year. On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering They return to forget you stooping there Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April, Snipping their stems. But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are. Here somewhere, blades wide open, April by April Sinking deeper Through the sod-an anchor, a cross of rust. (From Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters. London: Faber and Faber, 1998)

Period Study. Literary History. "Dates and periods are necessary to the study and discussion of history, for historical phenomena are conditioned by time and are produced by the sequence of events. […] But, unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray. ” G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1942) 1970, 107

Literary Histories A few examples

Michael Alexander: A History of English Literature. Third Edition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Saintsbury, George: A Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan, (1898) 1953 The Preliminaries of English Literature • The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Poetry • Caedmon, Cynewulf, and Those about Them • Angol-Saxon Prose • The Decadense of Anglo-Saxon The Making of English Literature • The Transition • First Middle English Period (1200 -1250) • Second Middle English Period (1300 -1360) • Early Romances – Metrical • Early Romances – Alliterative

Saintsbury, cont. Chaucer and His Contemporaries 1. Chaucer’s Life and Poems 2. Langland Gower 3. Chaucer’s Prose – Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville The Fifteenth Century 1. The English Chaucerians – Lydgate to Skelton 2. The Scottish Poets – Historical, Political, and Minor 3. The Four Great Scottish Poets (The King’s Quair, Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas) 4. Later Romances in Prose and Verse 5. Minor Poetry and Ballads 6. Miscellaneous Prose

Saintsbury, cont. Elizabethan Literature to the Death of Spenser 1. Preliminaries – Drama 2. Preliminaries – Prose 3. Prelminaries – Verse 4. Spenser and His Contemporaries 5. The University Wits (Peele, Green, Marlowe, Kyd, Lodge, Nash) 6. Lyly and Hooker – The Translators, Pamphleteers and Critics Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature 1. Shakespeare 2. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in Drama 3. The Schools of Jacobean Poetry 4. Jacobean Prose – Secular 5. The Golden Age of English Pulpit - I

Saintsbury, cont. Caroline Literature 1. Blank Verse and the New Couplet 2. The Metaphysicals – The Lyric Poets – The Miscellansts, etc. 3. The Drama till the Closing of the THeatres 4. The Golden Age of the English Pulpit – II 5. Miscellanous Prose 6. Scots Poetry and Prose The Augustan Ages 1. The Age of Dryden – Poetry 2. The Age of Dryden – Drama 3. The Age of Dryden - Prose

Saintsbury, cont. 4. 5. Queen Anne Prose (Swift, Steele, Addison, etc. ) Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse Middle and Later Eighteenth-Century Literature 1. The Poets from Thomson to Crabbe 2. The Eighteenth-Century Novel 3. Johnson, Goldsmith, and the Later Essayists 4. The Graver Prose 5. Eighteenth-Century Drama 6. Miscellaneous Writers The Triumph of Romance 1. The Poets from Coleridge to Keats

Saintsbury, cont. 2. 3. 4. 5. The Novel – Scott and Miss Austen The New Essay (Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc. ) The Last Georgian Prose The Minor Poets of 1800 -1830 Victorian Literature 1. Tennyson and Browning 2. The Victorian Novel (Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, etc. ) 3. History and Criticism (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, etc. ) 4. Poetry since the Middle of the Century 5. Miscellaneous (J. S. Mill, Darwin, etc. )

Baugh, Albert C. : A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948 Book I. The Middle Ages 1. The Old English Period (to 1100) 2. The Middle English Period (1100 -1500) Book II. The Renaissance 1. The Early Tudors (1485 -1558) 2. The Reign of Elizabeth (1558 -1603) 3. The Early Stuarts and The Commonwealth (1603 -1660) Book III. The Restauration and Eighteenth Century (1660 -1789) 1. The Rise of Classicism 2. Classicism and Journalism 3. The Disintegration of Classicism Book IV. The Nineteenth Century and After

Dodsworth, Martin, ed. : The Penguin History of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1970) 1994 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. [8. 9. The Middle Ages English Poetry and Prose 1540 -1674 English Drama to 1710 Dryden to Johnson The Romantic Period The Victorians The Twentieth Century American Literature to 1900 American Literature since 1900]

Ford, Boris, ed. : The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1983) 1990 1. Medieval Literature Part One: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition Part Two: The European Inheritance 2. The Age of Shakespeare 3. From Donne to Marvell 4. From Dryden to Johnson 5. From Blake to Byron 6. From Dickens to Hardy 7. From James to Eliot 8. The Present [9. American Literature]

Penguin Pelican

Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature. 4 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, (1960) 1969 1. 2. From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century Shakespeare to Milton [Shakespeare Drama from Jonson to the Closing of the Theatres Milton Prose in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Scottish Literature to 1700] 4. The Restoration to 1800 The Romantics to the Present Day + The Present Age in British Literature 3. (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, (1958) 1969

David Daiches (1912– 2005)

Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. From the 1890 s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976 1. Poetry around the Turn of the Century 2. Poetry in Rapport with a Public 3. Popular Modernism [The New Poetry of America Imagism Poetry for Democracy Conservative and Regional Poets of America Black Poets of America: The First Phase British Poetry after the War, 1918 -1928] 4. The Beginnings of the High Modernist Mode

Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. Modernism and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987 1. The Age of High Modernism [The Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925 -1950 Eliot’s Later Career Modes of Modern Style in the United States Hart Crane The Poetry of Critical Intelligence The Period Style of the 1930 s in England W. H. Auden The English Romantic Revival] 1. 2. The Resurgence of Pound, Williams, and Stevens Postmodernism

Period Studies Innes, Christopher: Modern British Drama 1890 -1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 Proceeds by a mixture of chronological, generic, cultural and theoretical features Bradbury, Malcolm: The Modern British Novel 1878 2001. London: Penguin Books, 2001 Proceeds by chronology, each decade a characteristic quality is attributed to

Period Studies Childs, Peter: The Twentieth Century in Poetry. A Critical Survey. London and New York: Routledge, 1999 Proceeds by a mixture of chronological, generic, cultural and theoretical features.

Period Studies Bradbury, Malcolm; Mc. Farlane, James, eds. : Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890 -1930. London: Penguin Books (1976) 1991 1. The Name and nature of Modernism 2. The Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Modernism 3. A Geography of Modernism 4. Literary Movements 5. The Lyric Poetry of Modernism 6. The Modernist Novel 7. Modernist Drama

Histories of Genres Allen, Walter: The English Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1954) 1958 Grierson, Herbert J. C. ; Smith, J. C. : A Critical History of English Poetry. New Jersey: Humanities Press, London: Athlone Press (1944) 1983

Literatures in English literary texts representing other cultures – the living conscience and public depository of the cultural memories of the world, telling the story, incorporating the way of thinking, and mirroring the language of other cultures.

Some examples V. S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River (1979), narrated by an Indian Muslim in an unnamed African country after independence, observing the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider's distance. Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981), key events in the history of India. Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England. Tibor Fischer: Under the Frog (1992), the 1950 s and 1956 in Hungary.

Some more examples R. K. Narayan: The Guide (1958), a novel based in Malgudi, the fictional town in South India. The novel describes the transformation of the protagonist, Raju from a tour guide to a spiritual guide and become one of the greatest holy man of India. Derek Walcott: Omeros (1990), an epic poem set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, drawing on Homer, Virgil, and Dante, presenting themes such as colonialism, historiography, homecoming, paternity.

Derek Walcott (1930)

Salman Rushdie (1947)

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954)

Postcolonial Studies See: http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Postcolonialism Post-colonialism (postcolonial theory, post-colonial theory) is an intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialis. Postcolonialism comprises a set of theories found amongst anthropology, architecture, philosophy, film, political science, human geography, sociology, feminism, religious and theological studies, and literature.