THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE: Old English (Anglo - Saxon) Period Middle English Period The Renaissance Elizabethan Age Jacobean Age Caroline Age Commonwealth Period 450 1066 1066 1500 1500 1660 1558 1603 1603 1625 1625 1649 1649 1660 1660 1785 Caedmon, Cynewulf Chaucer

Shakespeare Jonson Donne

The Neoclassical Period

The Restoration 1660 1700 The Augustan Age (Age of Reason)1700 1745 The Age of Sensibility 1745 1785

Pope, Dryden Austen Keats, Shelley,

The Romantic Period Byron The Victorian Period The Pre Raphaelites Aestheticism and Decadence The Edwardian Period The Georgian Period The Modern Period Postmodernism

1785 1830 1832 1901 1848 1860 1880 1901 1901 1914 1910 1936 1914 1945

Rosatti Wilde

OLD ENGLISH PERIOD (5th 11th Century)

Period from the invasion of the Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons and Jutes) to the conquest of England in 1066 by the Normans, led by William the Conqueror Up to the 7th century, all the poetry was passed on orally, by the wandering singers gleemen and scops, who performed songs from unknown authors Legend of King Arthur and the Knights some believe that he was a real person, a chieftain; he was a romantic figure and had historical bases Monmouth used the character of King Arthur for the first time in his Historia Regnum Britannie; Norman writer Wace added the knights in the 12th century (to settle the dispute between knights) After being converted to Christianity in the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxons started to develop written literature Monasteries were the centres of culture the monks wrote down poetry in Latin, the standard language of international scholarship Churchmen such as Alcuin, Aldhelm and Venerable Bede wrote in Latin (about a variety of subjects remembered by the Ecclesiastical history of the Anglos which records the history of the Anglos) Caedmon and Cynewolf wrote religious poetry, on biblical themes, lives of saints, sermons and paraphrases of the Bible England was divided into 3 kingdoms: Northumbria Wessex Mercia, and there was no common language that covered the whole England

Northumbrian dialect was dominant, but after the Danes invaded England, Wessex, under the reign of Alfred the Great, took over and united all the kingdoms of South England Alfred the Great supported literacy and culture he translated many works himself from Latin to West-Saxon (the southern dialect), among which the Ecclesiastical history of the Anglos; and wanted to introduce mother tongue in schools, instead of Latin He founded colleges Oxford and Cambridge (11th and 12th century), which improved education, since teachers were imported from Europe He also instituted the Anglo Saxon Chronicle (9th 12th century), which was kept by the monks, who wrote down the important happenings of the century in England English language of the time was heavily inflected (many different forms of words) and had a small vocabulary (which was for the most part Germanic) Works written in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon: Epic poem Beowulf (8th century) Lyric laments The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor which reflected real life conditions of the pagans, although written by Christian writers

Literature of the time can be divided into heathen (pagan) and religious (whose style reminds of heathen poetry) Literary forms of heathen poetry: Charms = magic heathen prayers to natural forces, in verse Riddles = description of animals, used to portray Anglo-Saxon society Lyrical elegies = sad poems about death; any serious meditative poem (The Wanderer, The Seafarer) ~ ELEGY = in Greek and Roman poetry any poem written in special elegiac meter; in English poetry the term is applied to any meditative poem (e.g. Donnes Elegies are love poems); in modern critical usage it is a formal poem lamenting death of a particular person Heroic epics = long narrative poems on a serious subject, often related to elevated style (Beowulf) Poems of war (Battle of Malden, Battle of Brumanburgh) Literary style: Writers invented new words gave special names to common things Vocabulary gradually expanded: e.g. knight = a dark helmet Words beginning the line had to rhyme (lines beginning with the same sound, not letter) head rhyme seemed natural Melancholy, darkness, mystic atmosphere Characteristics: Heavily inflected language Very small vocabulary Each line consisted of 2 half-lines separated by strong phrasal pause caesura and joined by alliteration (repetition of consonants) Example: The blazing brightness of her beauties beam Spenser When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon remembrance of things past I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought And with old woes new wail my dear times waste Shakespeare Each half-line consisted of 2 feet; each line had 4 stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed; no rhyme

Christian poetry: Christian poetry flourished in Northumbria Caedmon and Cynewulf (the first author who signed his name) wrote in Latin, about the creation of the world, the origin of mankind, the story of genesis used runic letters This poetry was made in monasteries - it was religious and didactical, but generally sad and melancholic The authors were in touch with Christian Europe and often with ancient Greece and Rome Poems had literary verse, but style reminds of heathen poetry (alliteration) Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan

~ EPIC = long narrative poem / heroic poem on a serious subject, written in a formal and elevated style, centred on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, nation or human race (Miltons Paradise lost) Two kinds of epic: Traditional (primary) epics written versions of originally oral poems (legends) about a tribal or national hero, developed in a warlike age (Odyssey, Iliad, Beowulf, Chanson de Roland) Literary (secondary) epics composed by individual poet in deliberate imitation of the traditional form (Virgil Aeneid, Milton Paradise lost, Dante Divine comedy, Keats Hyperion) Aristotle ranked epic second next to tragedy, but in renaissance it was the highest form Epic has to have a hero who is of great national importance; love story, supernatural characters; the setting is vast (worldwide or universe); the action involves superhuman deeds (in battle), supernatural elements (caused by the will of gods), gods and power (~ in neoclassical age these elements were called agents and machinery) Bourgeois epic = all novels that reflect the social reality on a broad scale Beowulf (8th century) the longest epic in Anglo-Saxon language, consisting of 2 parts; more than 3000 lines long, written in vernacular language -> product of advanced pagan civilization Grendel, imaginary character, (half-man, half-monster) attacks the land of Danish king Hrothgar (real character); Beowulf comes from Sweden to help and kills Grendel and his mother who comes to revenge her son The author is unknown, the story is based on folklore and myth, deriving from a Scandinavian legend the aim was to portray the way of life at the time, defects and vices and therefore has some criticism in it; also depicting nature and climate Grendel represents winter and death; Beowulf represents the new era, the time of transition to agriculture and rise of nobility Harsh language, alliteration, head rhyme (words beginning with the same sound time and tide) Expansion of vocabulary: the sea = the swans; way = the whales road Melancholic, mystic atmosphere When Alfred the Great united the kingdoms and the southern dialect became dominant, prose started to be written Wulfstan (Archbishop of York) and Aelfric were the monks who wrote it Aelfrics style was the best; he used alliteration to join sentences

MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (11th 16th Century)

3 periods: Until 1250 English was used by lower classes; written literature was mainly religious because the Church wanted to teach the right way of living When upper classes started to use English, literature was written to instruct, but also to amuse 1350 1450 - English became the language of the court and common people; vernacular language (middle English) came into general literary use and this was the age of secular literature (as opposed to former religious lit.) The latter was the greatest period of middle English the period of great individual authors: Chaucer, Langland, Wycliffe, the Pearl poets The Norman conquest imposed a French speaking ruling on England, so Norman French developed as the language of the upper classes, while the AngloSaxon developed as the language of the lower classes French had a great influence on the English literature and culture Normans absorbed the culture of the Roman Empire, they were literate and Christianised English won over Norman French by the end of 14th century because it was the language of majority the language had less inflections, was enriched by the vocabulary from the French, but didnt completely lose touch with tradition There were many dialects the dominant one was East Midland (modern English derives from it); the court and nobility used French, but writers used the dialect of their own region; Latin was the language of science and church and philosophical debates Later, the dialect of London became dominant Literary terms: ~ VERSIFICATION = the act of writing verse; how to compose elements (accents, rhythm, meter, rhyme, stanza, form, diction) ~ METER = the recurrence (repetition) of a regular rhythmic unit in a poetic line; patterns of accented and unaccented syllables; it is determined mainly by the relations of stronger and weaker stresses in a syllable IAMBIC (unstressed - stressed): recall, away / TROCHAIC / : older, accent ANAPESTIC / : interrupt DACTYLIC / : openly SPONDAIC // : heartbreak ~ RHETORICAL ACCENT = the emphasis we give the word (for special purposes) ~ METRICAL ACCENT = determined by the pattern of accents set up earlier in the line or passage ~ WRENCHED ACCENT = deliberate change of stress (for special purposes), forces the alliteration on the normal word accent ~ FOOT = basic metrical unit, the combination of stressed and unstressed

syllables which constitutes the recurrent rhythmic unit of a line ~ METRICAL FOOT = the smallest unit of verse, consisting of an accented syllable and one or more unstressed syllables ~ VERSE = a metric line named according to the number of feet composing it (monometer, diameter, tetrameter) ~ FEMININE ENDING = the last syllable in the line is unstressed ~ MASCULINE ENDING = the last syllable is stressed ~ END-STOPPED LINE = the natural pause in reading which comes at the end of a phrase coincides with the end of the line ~ RUN-ON LINE (ENJAMBEMENT) = the phrase carries on over the end of the line ~ COUPLET = a pair of rhymed lines, equal in length; iambic tetrameter and heroic couplet (-> introduced by Chaucer rhymed iambic pentameter) Literary forms: LYRICS still anonymous, susceptible to French language o Cuckoo song, Alysolin o G. Moumoths Historia Regnum Britannie was translated into Latin by Wace CHANSONS DE GESTE short heroic epics, but also romances because they show idealized characters and imaginative elaboration ROMANCES stories about kings, knights and love; first written as poems (like epics ~ tales in verse), later also as prose; o Introduced a heroine for the 1st time; love was a major interest; o Supernatural elements in epics, will of gods causes them, in romances they are mysteriously affected by magic, spells o Escapist literature, imaginative (while epics deals with actual historical characters more realistic) o Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 17th century o Arthurs death by Malory DEBATES contest in words between two or more speakers SKIT mild satire FABLIAU short comic tale in verse that dealt with middle classes in a realistic and satirical manner; medieval form established in the 12th century FABLE (APOLOGUE) contest in verse between two or more speakers written in octosyllabic couplet; exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behaviour o Most common is the beast fable (Chaucers The Nuns Priest Tale) o The owl and the nightingale representing 2 ways of life: owl ~ monastic, nightingale ~ secular ALLEGORY abstract ideas are represented as concrete persons and actions; personification of abstract entities (virtues, vices, states of mind, modes of life, types of character) Also: a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, represent general concepts, moral qualities or other abstractions 2 types: a) historical and political allegory characters and actions represent historical personages and events (John Dryden: Absalom and

Achitophel -> King David ~ Charles II; Absalom ~ his son, Duke of Monmouth; the biblical plot ~ a political crisis in contemporary England) b) the allegory of ideas literal characters represent abstract concepts and the plot exemplifies a doctrine or thesis (John Milton: Paradise lost -> the encounter of Satan with his daughter Sin as well as Death who is represented allegorically as the son born of their incestuous relationship) Forms: allegorical drama, romance, prose narrative, lyrical poem The Pearl Poems: The Pearl holiday in August, the author falls asleep in the field where his daughter Pearl died and gets a vision of his daughter Margaret who is now grown up and dressed like a queen in heaven; she shows him Jerusalem in heaven and wants him to come, but he cannot cross the river because he isnt dead Sir Gawain and the Green Knight about king Arthur and his knights; a knight in green challenges one of kings knights; Sir Gawain defeats him, but the Green Knight picks up his head and challenges Sir Gawain to meet him again in one years time BALLAD an anonymous orally transmitted song, which tells a story; many of them were sung FOLK (POPULAR) BALLADS narrative species of folk songs which originate among illiterate people; author is unknown, and since it is transmitted orally, each singer modifies it, so it exists in many versions Typically, it is dramatic, condensed (reduced) and impersonal the narrator begins with the climatic episode and tells the story by means of action and dialogue, without expressing personal attitudes BALLAD STANZA quatrain in alternate 4 and 3-stress iambic lines, only second and fourth lines rhyme (e.g. Sir Patrick Spens) Sir Patrick Spens: o About a Scottish king who goes to Netherlands on a mission o First stanza exemplifies conventional abrupt opening; thirdperson narration o Elements of humour and irony Chevy Chase: o Scottish ballad from the 15th century o About the fight between 2 neighbouring families, Percy and Douglas -> fight between the English and the Scots Barbara Ellen: o About a young lady who killed her lover by her wickedness and unkindness he was lying in bed, dying, and all she said: I think youre dying o Meant to be sung The cycle of Robin Hood: o About the adventures of Robin Hood Piers Plowman: o Written by William Langland in the end of the 14th century o Allegorical epic a dream allegory the first criticism of the society 7

o A didactical work in 3 parts: Do well, Do better, Do best 3 degrees of Christian life o The longest alliterative (4 accents) poem of social protest Langland was a priest who wanted to revive the society, because it was Christian only in name o Portrait of the common man of the time, the picture of all classes; criticism of the Church for being rich and corrupt o In his vision he sees a field of all kinds of people with different characters o Piers Plowman represents the common man who tells people that the only way to find the truth is to work hard and live honest John Wycliffe was a social and religious performer, a realist, like Langland He also criticized Church and wanted to reform the society He encouraged the translation of the Bible to English so the poor could read it Geoffrey Chaucer: Son of a wine merchant, but married into a rich aristocratic family Studied French and Latin, but wrote in English dialect (East Midland) so he had to invent new words he created the English language (new words, new lexis) and established literary tradition Had a strong sense of humour used to ridicule the society Observations of life as it really is; real life figures, realistic, common men -> a catalogue of personalities Wanted to find flaws in characters and to portray the gullibility of the society Skill, humour, passion, love for humanity 3 periods of creativity: 1. French translations from Roman de la rose, allegorical poems, ABC (a prayer to Mary in a form of alphabet) 2. Italian Boccaccios influence, The house of fame, Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fawles, The Legend of Good Women o In Troilus and Criseyde he uses RHYME ROYAL (~ 7 lines stanza; A b a b b c c rhyme; later used by King Dames) 3. English leaves allegorical visions, writes about his contemporaries Canterbury tales: Collection of tales, more than 1700 lines long The prologue variety of characters, different casts, men and women 32 pilgrims on their journey to the grave of the former archbishop of Canterbury each has to tell 2 stories Harry Bailey their host - Chaucer himself (so that he could interfere and comment, but isnt directly involved) leaves it on the reader to understand the tale The pilgrims knights, priests, common people describes their faults, as well as good sides, but doesnt judge the characters The wife of Bath -> a woman ahead of her time, she controls the marriage; she had 5 husbands opposite to the patriarchal society of the time, when marriages were arrangements and women were lower than men The Pardoners Tale -> illustration of culture, faith and self-definition; 8

Pardoner represents the tradition of the faith (~ broken and twisted) and the respect for the Church (~ corrupted); he wants to earn something for himself and thats why he entered the Church, he sells forgiveness he is devious, twisted and ironic The Knights Tale -> describes the knight as feminine The Nuns Priest Tale -> a beast fable written in rhymed iambic pentameter (heroic couplet); cock, hen and the fox embody human virtues, vices, prudence and faults -> romance is present: cock Chaucer makes fun of his crowing (bragging) because its the only thing the cock knows to do ironic approach to this animal, rhetorical debate

RENAISSANCE (14th 17th Century)

Began in Italy in the 14th century and continued in Italy and other countries of western Europe, through the 15th and 16th century It came to England in the 16th century and had its flowering in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age Discovery of world, discovery of man; era of individualism, thought, art It can be observed on various levels: o Philosophical thought is liberated from the dogma o Religious reformation, rebellion against the authority of the Church o Practical discoveries (printing press, America, Copernican system) Reformation ~ 16th century religious movement; establishment of Protestantism had a great influence on English culture Thomas More: Utopia written in Latin, describing the perfect society on an imaginary island; o 1st part: an explorer comes to an island and criticizes laws, nationalists, ambitions o 2nd part: no private possessions, no materialism, no unemployment, wars or pain -> idealistic world John Colet founded St. Pauls School, where teaching was in Latin and Greek Erasmus Dutch humanist philosopher who revised English grammar for St. Pauls school Humanists wanted to reconcile classical legacy of Europe with Christian religion William Caxton first used printing press 3 periods of English renaissance: o Early Tudors (1485 - 1558) The period of Henry VII and Henry VIII Drama is the most appealing style, performed on stage, so that even the illiterate could follow it Acting was very popular, though sometimes forbidden but actors were under protection of some patronage o Shakespeares England Elizabethan period (1558 - 1603): Rapid development in commerce, maritime power and national feeling

Great period of English literature, especially in drama o Early Stuarts and Commonwealth (1603 - 1660) First drama in English tragedy Gorboduc, written by Norton and Sackville; it has no artistic value The topic murders in royalty, very violent play (subject taken from legendary chronicles of Britain) Theatres in colleges, courts The Globe, The Fortune, The Swan, The Rose had no roof (~ pit for those who couldnt afford a seat in a gallery) There were no female actors so boys from the choir played womens roles and were under the lords protection First copies of the plays were given to actors so they could improvise Tragedies were still influenced by Seneca (the unity of time, place and plot) in English plays actors only talked about the horror, while in Italian, the violence was shown on stage Comedies were written by Udall - Ralph Roister Doister and Gurton - Needle Thomas Kyd The Spanish Tragedy a revenge tragedy, deals with the victory of Spain over Portugal; a tragedy of love and war Some believe that he wrote the original Hamlet Revenge tragedies: o 3 conventional devices taken from Seneca: ghost, the theme of revenge for the murder of a relative, liberal use of declamation and soliloquies o Heros quest for revenge o Scenes of insanity are present; scenes of graveyards and mutilation o Play within a play Literary terms: ~ BLANK VERSE = unrhymed iambic pentameter, 5 feet and 10 syllables; closest to natural English intonation ~ INTERLUDES = transition between medieval period and renaissance; short comical one-act pieces in otherwise serious play ~ FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE = usage of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect; standard meaning ~ literal vs. figurative = Figures of thought (tropes) - radical change in meaning -> metaphor, hyperbole, irony = Figures of speech (rhetorical figures) distinction from the standard is achieved through the syntactical order or pattern of words -> rhetorical question, chiasmus, zeugma ~ IMAGERY = objects and qualities of sense perception referred to by description, allusion, similes or metaphors; it includes visual, auditory, tactile, thermal, olfactory, gustatory and kinaesthetic qualities = it applies directly to our senses and suggests the 10

mental picture we get = Tennyson: In Memoriam: Unloved, that beach will gather brown, And many rose carnation feed With summer spice in the humming air ~ METAPHOR = a word or expression which in literal usage denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different thing, without asserting comparison = e.g. my love is a red rose (Burns) ~ SIMILE = a comparison between two distinctly different things, indicated by linking words like or as = e.g. my love is like a red rose = e.g.and ice came floating by as green as emerald (Coleridge) ~ CONCEIT = unusual comparison; a figure of speech which establishes a striking parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or situations = e.g. if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head (Shakespeare in My mistress eyes) ~ HYPERBOLE = figure of speech; bold overstatement, extravagant exaggeration, used either for serious or comic effect = e.g. the hapless Soldiers sigh runs in blood down Palace walls William Blakes London ~ IRONY = the meaning implied differs sharply from the meaning expressed = e.g. ~ IMAGES = mental pictures suggested by different literary techniques; visual, auditory, olfactory = TIED IMAGE meaning and value are the same for all readers = FREE IMAGE not so fixed by the context; has various meanings for different people = LITERAL IMAGE the words call up a sensory representation of a literal object or sensation e.g. it is a beauteous evening, calm and free = FIGURATIVE IMAGE involves a turn on the literal meaning of words, depends on the author and each reader gets a different picture in his head e.g. the holy time is quiet as a nun ~ SYNECDOCHE = a part of something is used to signify the

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whole = e.g. ten hands ~ 10 workmen ~ PERSONIFICATION = an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it had human attributes or feelings = e.g. some sad drops wept (Miltons Paradise lost) ~ SYNESTHESIA = description of one kind of sensation in terms of another (colour is attributed to sounds, odour to colours etc.) = e.g. Tasting of Flora and the country green Dance and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth Keats (Ode to a Nightingale poet calls for a draught of wine) = e.g. A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue Rimbauds sonnet on the colour of vowel sounds; or also Baudelaires sonnet Correspondences ~ ZEUGMA = use of a verb with 2 subjects or objects or of an adjective with 2 nouns although appropriate to only one of them = e.g. to wage war and peace ~ CHIASMUS = reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases = e.g. he went to the country, to the town went she ~ ASSONANCE = repetition of vowel sounds in stressed syllables = e.g. Thou still unravished BRIDE of QUIETNESS thou foster CHILD of SILENCE and slow TIME ~ ODE = a long lyric poem, serious in subject and treatment, elevated in style, elaborated in its structure; = Ode to a Nightingale (Keats), Ode to the West Wind (Shelley), Intimations (Wordsworth) ~ SONNET = a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of 14 iambic pentameter lines and a particular rhyme scheme: Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet abba abba cde cde used by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Milton, and Wordsworth English (Shakespearean) abab cdcd efef gg Spenserian sonnet abab bcbc cdcd ee In the first part the problem, in the second part or couplet the solution, the conclusion Topics: love, beauty of loved ones, sufferings of the rejected lovers, intensely personal even about love for a man (Shakespeare) Petrarcas sonnets idealized, perfect portraits; Shakespeares sonnets mocks at these (My mistress eyes) ~ WIT = often applied in criticism, combined with metaphysical paradox; today it is applied to brief expressions intentionally 12

combined to produce a shock of comic surprise ~ HUMOUR = originally, physiological term for the fluids of human body (blood, choler, yellow bile, phlegm) the temperament was determined by the combination of these fluids wit is always intentionally comic, humour may be unintentional; humour applies to what is laughable in persons appearance and actions and what he says Christopher Marlowe predecessor of Shakespeares Introduced blank verse as a form of dramatic expression Author of the tragedies: Doctor Faustus, Queen of Cartage, The few of Malta Sir Thomas Wyatt They flee from me Theme love, the poet is in prison and remembers his past loves (they) He used to be popular, but now all his women left him because they wanted a change and he couldnt give them that She is special, the one he remembers the most also seeking change; he is talking about her lack of loyalty in love He blames himself for his unhappiness he couldnt provide the change they wanted He compares his women to half - domestic pets gentle, tame and meek. To take bread at my hand Written under the influence of Italian sonnets tone is sad, melancholic (remembrance), comparisons, irony (I so kindly am served the disloyal relationship) Written in iambic pentameter They flee from me, that sometime did me seek Poetry in effective way evokes vivid experience conveys emotions, suggests ideas through imagery, tone, literary figures, meter Robert Browning Meeting at night Written later, not in renaissance Theme love, presents a specific situation in which the poet goes to meet his lover, although the word love isnt mentioned He travels across the sea, land and cant wait to meet her The poet conveys experience through images grey sea, long black land, yellow half-moon, startled little waves (visual); warm seascented beach (olfactory); tap at the pane, quick sharp scratch, voice less loud (auditory) William Shakespeare wrote sonnets, addressed to a certain male friend and a Dark Lady He printed his books in folio (2 leaves, 4 pages) and quarto (4 leaves, 8 pages) William Shakespeare That time of year English type of sonnet 3 quatrains + 1 couplet Theme getting old, youth is passing The writer thinks that the person hes speaking to will love him even more, now that they must part In the beginning he mentions yellow leaveswhich shake against 13

the cold metaphor -> autumn of life, getting old The twilight of such day black night metaphor ->he is dying Glowing of such fire metaphor -> compares himself to glowing ambers of dying fire In the couplet conclusion: hes going to die and he wants the person hes speaking to to love him more because hes leaving William Shakespeare My mistress eyes Mocking at sweet Italian sonnets mentions false compare Using conceits if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head when she walks, treads on the ground Talking about how horrible his mistress is, unusual images, very weird, she seems to be ugly etc., but he loves her I think my love is rare William Shakespeare When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought Sorrow, painful memories of the friends he lost Typical sonnet: love, sorrow, feelings, suffer, joy, hate, friendship He thinks that he wasted his time, thinks of his lost friends and his lost love He will always feel sorrow, but friendship is here to stay forever

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale The poet is sad, sitting in an orchard and he sees the nightingale The poet wants to escape from the reality he lives in and to see the forest with the nightingale One way of following her is getting drunk, but he doesnt want that He wants to follow her through poetry because when we feel deep pleasure, we want to see how it is to be immortal Mentally, hes in the woods with the nightingale and hes overwhelmed He doesnt want to die, but later he has some thoughts of death when the nightingale sings again, he would almost want to die Usage of synesthesia to suggest the sweet smell of the flowers Fairy land forlorn midway between the world we want and the world we live in The poet confesses his frustration, his hunger for life, although he had a thought of death He wonders whether the world around him is real, or is the song he heard real Expression of his emotions Sir Philip Sidney Poet, critic posthumously published poems Wrote about 150 sonnets and a sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella Essay The defence of Poesy written in prose; defends poetry because it was said to be worthless and useless Poetry is important in every time. Older than philosophy, teaches morals its task is to teach and delight He accepts Aristotles theory that poetry is imitation of nature it

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makes nature more beautiful than it actually is He wrote a prose romance Arcadia written in sanazzaro, a collection of pastoral dialogues (eclogues) Arcadia the name of the mountain district in Peloponnese where Pan reigned Edmund Spenser Poet, one of his aims was to rid English language of unnecessary establishments and make it simple He wanted to show that English is fit for poetic writing The Shepherds Calendar poem for every month of the year; written in different meters; 10 of them are eclogues; consists also of complaints by Colin Clait (the author himself) Mother Hubbards Tale satirical poem in which he attacks Elizabethan court Amoretti sonnet sequence, finishes with the famous hymn (love poem) Faerie Queen speaks of human virtues in the form of allegory; gives each virtue a special knight or protector Gloreana is the faerie queen the glory that comes from possessing a virtue -> you are rich if you have virtues Addressed to 3 Elizabeths (mother, future wife, queen) patriotic, describes every social class Spenserian stanza consists of 9 lines 8 iambic pentameters and an iambic hexameter with a rhyme scheme: abab bcbc c -> later used by Keats and Shelley Ben Jonson The first real poet laureate of England Sought inspiration in contemporary life of London Wanted to portray all traits of people (negative ones) in a satirical way The Alchemist 2 rogues pretend to have discovered a formula to turn matter into gold Volpone the fox pretends to be on a death bed -> people are greedy He writes in blank verse; obeys the 3 unities Based his Comedy of Manners on 4 body fluids it deals with relations and intrigues between ladies and gentlemen living in a quiet and sophisticated society; evokes laughter at the violation of social conventions and decorum

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METAPHYSICAL POETRY (17th century) Metaphysics a branch of philosophy, trying to understand and describe the nature of reality Metaphysical poets were different, untraditional, eccentrics, inconsistent, complicated considered to be the forerunners of modern poetry Motto: Carpe Diem! Secular poetry: John Donne, Marvell, Cowley, Cleveland Religious poetry: Herbert, Vaughn, Crashaw Poems are cynical, witty, full of logic, irony, intelligence, knowledge, unusual images, modelled on actual speech and organized in a form of argument ahead of their time Poets use conceits, strange descriptions of women, abstruse (~hard to understand) arguments and hidden meanings because they dont want to be understood as easily as Petrarca or Spenser These poets often used their knowledge of philosophy and astronomy and often described physical love; they opposed idealized human nature and beauty John Donne is the main representative -> A Valediction of Weeping o The Flea, Batter my Heart, Three Personed God o A Lecture Upon the Shadow ironical, cynical, realistic o Songs and Sonnets collection of 52 love poems Literary terms: ~ PARADOX = apparent contradiction that is in a sense true and valid; 16

carries a shock value and is in contrast with common experience = e.g. The child is the father of a man Wordsworth ~ OXYMORON = combines direct contraries (e.g. living dead) ~ SATIRE =aims to make the subject ridiculous; more serious than comedy, laughter is used as a weapon HORATIAN SATIRE milder, weaker, tries to evoke laughter at the foibles of man; shows the defects of the characters and ridicules their pride about them JUVENALIAN SATIRE evokes contempt and moral indignation at the vices and corruption of men Jacobean, Caroline and Commonwealth age After Elizabeth died, James Stuart came to throne - > Jacobean age, and then puritan life was led Puritans rejected pleasures (enjoyment, art, literature) and were devoted to work Charles I. came to throne in 1625 -> Caroline age In 1642, there was a civil war, between the Parliament (round heads, Cromwell) and the king (cavaliers) it finished in 1649 when Parliament took power and England was ruled by Parliament and their leader Cromwell for 11 years -> Commonwealth period There was a religious, political and economical split: Tories (cavaliers) and Wigs (roundheads) Puritans closed down theatres for moral and religious reasons drama almost diminished John Milton Well-read, educated (attended Cambridge), spoke 7 languages he was familiar with Latin, French and Italian He was puritan, but very passionate in his poems He was blind when he grew old His work is influenced by Donne, but he breaks the tradition 3 periods: 1) Poetry before civil war: he was an accomplished poet at the age of 17 Elegy on the Death of the Fair Infant for his sister, after their father died Ode on the Morning of Christs Nativity describes victory of Christ over false gods Lycidas elegy about his friend Edward King who drowned and died; less about his feelings, more the description of the political situation and criticism of Church, in a way (blind mouth people who have high positions in Church) 2) Prose and poetry of the Commonwealth period: he returned from Italy because of the civil war He wrote prose works, pamphlets economical and political (Freedom of press and free speech) Prose pamphlets on various themes marriage and divorce

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(he wasnt happily married); education (wanted to introduce scientific subjects) 3) Poems of Restoration: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained new approach to Biblical theme -> portrays Adam and Eve as if there is hope for them Paradise Lost religious epic, written in blank verse; medieval conception of Heaven and Hell He breaks the tradition hope for the future

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THE NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD (1660 1785)

Age of prosperity, progress and stability Middle class developed and became predominant; it became a force that dictated the general taste in everything and in literature also Ideological concept of literature writings which embodied the tastes of certain class Now everything is literature philosophical debates, letters etc. It is the age of reason, scientific age everything comes from the head and emotions have no importance Strong feelings lead to wars and anarchy, therefore poetry should not be passionate because emotions represent chaos Form is more important than the content everything had to be in order Towns are centres of culture so topics are: town themes, sophisticated themes, intellectual topics, politics, moral classes, good manners Revival of theatres considerable technical changes -> roofed theatres, dropping curtain, movable scenery, galleries; there was a proscenium ~ a part of the stage in front of the curtain, which stretched into audience Plays were for upper classes, and the most popular form was the comedy of manners (Molieres influence) plot is based on an exaggerated feature of a character John Dryden The father of the modern criticism, most famous for his criticism on the literary art Beginning of the literary theory Literature has to give the picture of truth and imitate nature; it has to satisfy the reason and obey rules Iambic pentameter suggested disorder because it was unrhymed everything should rhyme Essay on dramatic poesy; Aurengzebe tragedy written in heroic couplet Augustian age Age of prosperity, empire was growing balance between the king and the Parliament Social conventions are more important than the individual ones, reason is more important than emotions, form is more important than content Writers didnt want to experiment they rather repeated what they already knew - same phrases all over again (petrification of language) They used heroic couplet, same rhythm, same phrases (e.g. women = nymphs) Dissociation of sensibility strict reason, no emotions Deism belief in existence of a divine being, but without acceptance of revelation or religious dogma (miracles etc.) Man is basically good (deep down) and needs no external laws to tell him what is good and whats not -> laws and religion became unnecessary Gothic novel 19

o The result of suppressing emotions emotions are here exaggerated o Fiction, emotions, mysterious and supernatural elements o Stories are set in the medieval period, in gloomy castles, dungeons, subterranean passages, sliding panels o Focus is on the suffering imposed on an innocent heroine by a lustful villain o Ghosts, mysterious disappearances, supernatural occurrences (which turn out to have natural explanations) o The purpose is to evoke horror o Exploration of the irrational and perverse impulses and the terrors that lie beneath the surface of a civilized mind o First Gothic novelist Horace Walpole The Castle of Otranto o The term Gothic extended to a type of fiction which develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror and represents melodramatically violent o William Beckford: Vathek medieval and oriental setting; erotic and sadistic subject o Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, Charles Dickens: Bleak house (chapters 11, 16 and 47) and Great Expectations (Miss Havisham episodes) o Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey made fun of the decorous instances of Gothic vogue Alexander Pope A classical poet; in a way, he sums up the 18th century Called Singer of the Universe Preaches correctness in writing, polishes his phrases and wants to reach perfection He was also a critic: Ode to Solitude, Essay on Man he advocates deism The Rape of the Lock a mock-heroic epic (mocks the epic by treating a trivial subject in an elevated style); someone cut off a girls lock of hair and she began to moan He was a master of rhetorical figures Dr. Samuel Johnson A critic on the metaphysical poetry they made their strange comparisons on purpose, not spontaneous Famous as the author of the first English dictionary Satires: London, Vanity of Human Virtues, Idler, Rambler

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ROMANTICISM (1785 1830)

Began in the year of the French Revolution (1789) or alternatively in 1798 when Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge were published Characteristics: o Interest in history, medieval times are important o Exploration of the unknown, mysticism o Oriental settings are interesting o Interest in nature, beauty of the rural life o Inspiration in primitive societies, legends, folk ballads o Individualism, creativity, personality o Pain, spleen, strong emotions, passion, solitude o Prose became an artistic form o Development of the historical novel Ivanhoe by W. Scott o Fight against the social norms (they were against marriage, for example) o Wanted to be free of any kind of limitation o Protagonists are not representatives of the society anymore they are nonconformists, outcasts o Poems of meditation concerned with human experience and problems, although often stimulated by a natural phenomenon Elizabethan way of language language of poetry is the language of ordinary people Wordsworth rejected poetic diction his writing is simple English is studied at universities 2 generations of authors: o William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Robert Burns o Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, John Keats William Wordsworth Good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings The immediate act of composition must be spontaneous and free of rules Nature the theme of his Daffodiles Robert Burns A Red, Red Rose Subject: love Using simile comparison with linking words such, like, as My love is like a red, red rose William Blake The Sick Rose Theme illicit love affair Using very strange images: rose ~ the invisible worm; bed of crimson joy; dark secret love Rose = feminine beauty, love, women personification Worm = death/ secret lover Crimson joy = intense pleasure, passionate love-making Dark secret love = concealed love affair

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VICTORIAN AGE (1832 1901)

Time of rapid economic and social changes, which made England the industrial power Atmosphere of national pride and optimism about the future times and progress Turbulence, social stresses and anxiety about the ability to cope with the social and political problems of the age Industrialization played a great role produced wealth for the expanding middle class, but led rural England to massive poverty The term Victorianism is often used to imply narrow-mindedness, sexual correctitude and ignorance, social respectability Doubts about the religious dogma led to strict biblical fundamentalism Women started to fight for their right and equal status women question Subdivided into 3 periods o Early Victorianism (until 1848) o Middle Victorianism Pre-Raphalites (1848 - 1860) o Late Victorianism Aestheticism and Decadence (1860 - 1901) Literature reflected the social, economic, religious and intellectual problems and issues of the time Novel is the dominant form they were published in monthly issues, to keep the interest of the readers Critics of the time: Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold rebellion against Victorian doctrines (materialism, utilitarianism, insularity, narrow-mindedness) and wanted classical harmony Childhood is the dominant theme Poets: Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mathew Arnold Essayists: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Mathew Arnold, Walter Peter Novelists: Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, William M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler Charles Dickens Very good in portraying characters Novels are marked by the sense of injustice Everything depends on the individual, problems cannot be solved by laws He had a feeling for the rhythm of speech of the poor and uneducated The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, The Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Great Expectations W.M. Thackeray

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Wrote about upper classes, in a completely unromantic way Vanity Fair, Book of Snobs, The Newcomers, Virginians

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Literary movements: o PRE-RAPHAELITES = a group of critics organized a brotherhood in 1848, wanting to replace the existing style of painting with the one of Raphael truthful, simple and with the spirit of devotion A painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris o AESTHETICISM = a European phenomenon that started in France in the end of the 19th century a work of art is a supreme value among human products and has no use or moral aim outside its own being Developed by Charles Baudelaire, who was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe; later taken up by Flaubert, Mallarme, Verlaine o LART POUR LART = Immanuel Kant proposed the supreme value of beauty in his Critique of Judgement; Walter Peter introduced these views into Victorian England love of art for its own sake Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson o DECADENCE = started in 1860s, exploration of strange sensations, experiments with drugs and different modes of sexual experience Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons Representative work: The Picture of Dorian Gray

EDWARDIAN AGE
The period between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the World War I Poets: Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling Dramatists: Henry Arthur Jones, John Galsworthy, George Bernard Shaw Playwrights: Lady Gregory, Yeats, Synge Prose: Hardy, Galsworthy, Kipling, Henry James

GEORGIAN AGE
The period of the reign of George V (1941 - 1956) Georgian poets gathered their works into an anthology Georgian Poetry Poetry is rural in theme, delicate in manner, traditional in form Poets: Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Ralph Hodgson, W.H. Davies, John Maefield

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MODERN PERIOD
The literature written since the beginning of the World War I Development of science caused the shift of values Darwins theory of evolution shattered the beliefs in God Education becomes more and more important Influence of Sigmund Freud Period marked by experiments in form, subject and style Major achievements in all the genres Literary groups are formed Writers are in search for a myth conscience ordering and explanation of subconscious human drives -> they wanted to find the basic psychological pattern of human experience Yeats and Eliot Domination of anti-heroic characters Predominant use of irony, paradox and ambiguity Poets are the explorers of experience, using language to build up patterns of meaning No more omniscient author in novels, 1st person narrator is dominant In poetry interior monologue introduced by T.S. Eliot; irregular rhythm Avantgarde = writers ahead of their time, alienated from the established order; the aim is to shock and to challenge the norms Poets: Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas Novelists: Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Doris Lessing Dramatists: G.B. Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter Critics: T.S. Eliot, Richards, Woolf

LITERARY THEORIES: NEW CRITICISM = proper concern of literary criticism is the detailed consideration of the work itself, and not the external circumstances or historical position of the author o Started in 1941 with the publication of John Crowe Ransoms The New Criticism and was dominant in America in the 1960s o Characteristic close reading, detailed analysis of the complex interrelation and ambiguities o Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William K. Wimsatt RUSSIAN FORMALISM = proposes opposition between the poetical and practical use of language o Originated in Moscow and Petrograd in 1920s o The main feature of poetical language is literariness, and of practical to convey messages o Boris Eichenbaum, Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson 25

LITERARY MOVEMENTS: IMAGISM = abandoning conventional poetic materials and versification; freedom to choose any subject matter and create personal rhythms, usage of common speech o In England and America 1912 1917, as a revolt against the poetry of the time o Poems written in free verse, representing writers impressions of a visual objects or scene o Usage of metaphors, influence of Haiku poems o Hilda Doolittle, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos, John Fletcher

SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT = exploiting an order of private symbols in poetry o Developed in the end of 19th century in France Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Paul Valery o French authors had a great influence on: Arthur Symons, Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens EXPRESSIONISM = revolt against the artistic tradition of realism, in subject, matter and style; expression of a personal vision of life and society, describing an individual alone and afraid in a technological and industrial urban society o In Germany, 1910 1925 o Utopian views of future, symbolic images o Drama theatre of absurd -> anonymous human types instead of individualized characters, episodic renderings o Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch o Nietzsche, Strindberg, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett

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NOVEL
A novel is an extended prose fiction narrative, broadly realistic--concerning the everyday events of ordinary people--and concerned with character. "People in significant action" is one way of describing it. - "An extended, fictional prose narrative about realistic characters and events." It is a representation of life, experience, and learning. Action, discovery, and description are important elements, but the most important tends to be one or more characters--how they grow, learn, find--or don't grow, learn, or find. - Influences on the development: journalism, biographies, letters - The real predecessor is picaresque novel which originated from the Spanish La Vida de Lazarillo de Torres, de Sus Adventuras y Adversidades Types of novel: Adventure novel. A novel where exciting events are more important than character development and sometimes theme. Examples:

Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Autobiographical novel. A novel based on the author's life experience. Many novelists include in their books people and events from their own lives because remembrance is easier than creation from scratch. Examples:

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Bildungsroman. Educational novel; the subject is the development of protagonist's mind and character from his childhood to maturity, portraying their spiritual crisis. Examples:

Charles Dickens, The Great Expectations

Dystopian novel. An anti-utopian novel where, instead of a paradise, everything has gone wrong in the attempt to create a perfect society. See utopian novel. Examples:

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Epistolary novel. A novel consisting of letters written by a character or several characters. The form allows for the use of multiple points of view toward the story and the ability to dispense with an omniscient narrator. Examples:

Samuel Richardson, Pamela Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Fanny Burney, Evelina

Fantasy novel. Any novel that is disengaged from reality. Often such novels are set in nonexistent worlds, such as under the earth, in a fairyland, on the moon, etc. The

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characters are often something other than human or include nonhuman characters. Example:

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Gothic novel. A novel in which supernatural horrors and an atmosphere of unknown terror pervades the action. The setting is often a dark, mysterious castle, where ghosts and sinister humans roam menacingly. Horace Walpole invented the genre with his Castle of Otranto. Gothic elements include these:

Ancient prophecy, especially mysterious, obscure, or hard to understand. Mystery and suspense High emotion, sentimentalism, but also pronounced anger, surprise, and especially terror Supernatural events (e.g. a giant, a sighing portrait, ghosts or their apparent presence, a skeleton) Omens, portents, dream visions Fainting, frightened, screaming women Women threatened by powerful, impetuous males Setting in a castle, especially with secret passages The metonymy of gloom and horror (wind, rain, doors grating on rusty hinges, howls in the distance, distant sighs, footsteps approaching, lights in abandoned rooms, gusts of wind blowing out lights or blowing suddenly, characters trapped in rooms or imprisoned) The vocabulary of the gothic (use of words indicating fear, mystery, etc.: apparition, devil, ghost, haunted, terror, fright)

Examples:

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto William Beckford, Vathek Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Historical novel. A novel where fictional characters take part in actual historical events and interact with real people from the past. Examples:

Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott, Waverly James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans Charles Dickens, The Tale of Two Cities

Involuted novel. Postmodernist, multicultural, anti-novel. Includes esoteric data (e.g. Detailed information about chess strategies or butterflies) Examples:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Mystery novel. A novel whose driving characteristic is the element of suspense or mystery. Strange, unexplained events, vague threats or terrors, unknown forces or antagonists, all may appear in a mystery novel. Gothic novels and detective novels are often also mystery novels.

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Novella. A prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. There is no standard definition of length, but since rules of thumb are sometimes handy, we might say that the short story ends at about 20,000 words, while the novel begins at about 50,000. Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. Examples:

Henry James, Daisy Miller Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Henry James, Turn of the Screw Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Novel of incidents. A novel focusing on and describing what the character will do next and how the plot will come out. Examples:

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Novel of character. A novel focusing on protagonist's motives of what he does and how he, as a person will come out. Examples:

Samuel Richardson, Pamela

Novel of manners. A novel focusing on and describing in detail the social customs and habits of a particular social group. Usually these conventions function as shaping or even stifling controls over the behavior of the characters. Examples:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Picaresque novel. An episodic, often autobiographical novel about a rogue or picaro (a person of low social status) wandering around and living off his wits. The wandering hero provides the author with the opportunity to connect widely different pieces of plot, since the hero can wander into any situation. Picaresque novels tend to be satiric and filled with petty detail. Examples:

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild

Pulp fiction. Novels written for the mass market, intended to be "a good read,"--often exciting, titillating, thrilling. Historically they have been very popular but critically sneered at as being of sub-literary quality. The earliest ones were the dime novels of the nineteenth century, printed on newsprint (hence "pulp" fiction) and sold for ten cents. Westerns, stories of adventure, even the Horatio Alger novels, all were forms of pulp fiction. Regional novel. A novel faithful to a particular geographic region and its people, including behaviour, customs, speech, and history. Examples:

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native

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Social novel. A novel focusing on and describing in detail the social events and the conditions of a certain era. Examples:

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Utopian novel. A novel that presents an ideal society where the problems of poverty, greed, crime, and so forth have been eliminated. Examples:

Thomas More, Utopia Samuel Butler, Erewhon

Western. A novel set in the western United States featuring the experiences of cowboys and frontiersmen. Many are little more than adventure novels or even pulp fiction, but some have literary value. Examples:

Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident Owen Wister, The Virginian

Authors point of view: Who the narrator within the story is (the author, a character from the story) Omniscient narrator. All-knowing narrator; he reads the minds of the characters in the story; he is at several places at once and has access to private thoughts and feelings. Examples:

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones George Eliot

Intruding author. Some authors serve the reader as guides in their fictional world; he comments, gives opinions about characters; we are aware of his presence (as if he came from the outside into the story to comment) 3rd person objective. The author chooses one character whom he follows through the action and restricts the reader from the range of character. What characters think and feel it seems from the outside. Examples:

Henry James, The Ambassadors

1st person autobiographical. The person itself talks about his experiences in a confessional tone. Autobiographical material is shaped by creative imagination of the author. The persona (I in the text) is the narrator and may have much in common with the author (author in disguise) or be a freely created imaginary identity. 1st person observer. A limited point of view, characteristic for modern authors. We are aware of the reflector the person inside or outside the story through whose eyes and ears we register the events. We see the story through the perspective of a chosen interpreter. Examples:

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

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1st person protagonist. The main character tells us his/her story in the 1st person. This perspective places us in the center of the action. Examples:

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Nave narrator. The narrator seems to know and understand less than the reader himself. Examples:

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Interior monologue. The author goes deeper in the interior life of the characters. Stream of consciousness, sequence of thoughts and feelings not logical, no grammatical order. Examples:

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway James Joyce

Unintrusive narrator. He is objective, impersonal and shows the action without his comments or judgments; he doesnt go into motives and feelings. Examples:

Ernest Hemingway

Characters: People that carry on the action in the novel Flat characters. Simple characters can be described in one sentence (type characters) occur in detective story. Stock characters. Special kind of a flat characters => stereotypical figure who has occurred so many times in fiction that his nature is immediately known (stingy person Scrooge; beautiful international spy). Round characters. Complex and fully realized individuals. Static character. Doesnt change at all; same at the beginning and in the end of the story. Dynamic character. Changes in the story, undergoes permanent changes in personality (Mr Darcy in Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice). Setting: The location and period in which the action takes place Plot: Succession of events; system of actions represented in the novel Artistic unity there must be nothing that is irrelevant and doesnt contribute to the story In a highly unified novel there is a succession of events each element grows out of the preceding and leads logically to the development of the action Plot manipulation the author gives a sudden turn to a story, unjustified by the situation

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Deus ex machina author cannot find the right solution so things resolve themselves; something happens unexpectedly and solves the situation Suspense: What will happen next, how will it turn out carries the element of surprise

Structure: Organization or overall design or form of a literal work Critics often disagree over structure Symbols: Something that on the surface is its literal self but which also has another meaning or even several meanings. A symbol may be said to embody an idea. There are two general types of symbols: universal symbols that embody universally recognizable meanings wherever used, such as light to symbolize knowledge, a skull to symbolize death, etc. and constructed symbols that are given symbolic meaning by the way an author uses them in a literary work, as the white whale becomes a symbol of evil in Moby Dick. a sword may be a sword and also symbolize justice, garden ~ fertility, nature Name symbolism Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of a Lot 49

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INTRODUCTION
The novel is only one of many possible prose narrative forms. It shares with other narratives, like the epic and the romance, two basic characteristics: a story and a storyteller. The epic tells a traditional story and is an amalgam of myth, history, and fiction. Its heroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and women. The romance also tells stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes adventure and often involves a quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy. The events seem to project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors of the human mind and are, therefore, analogous to the materials of dream, myth, and ritual. Although this is true of some novels as well, what distinguishes the novel from the romance is its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest, as Northrop Frye said, is "human character as it manifests itself in society." Development of the Novel The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which suggests its closeness to the medieval romance. The English name is derived from the Italian novella, meaning "a little new thing." Romances and novelle, short tales in prose, were predecessors of the novel, as were picaresque narratives. Picaro is Spanish for "rogue," and the typical picaresque story is of the escapades of a rascal who lives by his wits. The development of the realistic novel owes much to such works, which were written to deflate romantic or idealized fictional forms. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15), the story of an engaging madman who tries to live by the ideals of chivalric romance, explores the role of illusion and reality in life and was the single most important progenitor of the modern novel. The novel broke from those narrative predecessors that used timeless stories to mirror unchanging moral truths. It was a product of an intellectual milieu shaped by the great seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes and Locke, who insisted upon the importance of individual experience. They believed that reality could be discovered by the individual through the senses. Thus, the novel emphasized specific, observed details. It individualized its characters by locating them precisely in time and space. And its subjects reflected the popular eighteenth-century concern with the social structures of everyday life. The novel is often said to have emerged with the appearance of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722). Both are picaresque stories, in that each is a sequence of episodes held together largely because they happen to one person. But the central character in both novels is so convincing and set in so solid and specific a world that Defoe is often credited with being the first writer of "realistic" fiction. The first "novel of character" or psychological novel is Samuel Richardson's Pamela (174041), an epistolary novel (or novel in which the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters). It is a work characterized by the careful plotting of emotional states. Even more significant in this vein is Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa (1747-48). Defoe and Richardson were the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. They established the novel's claim as an authentic account of the actual experience of individuals. Since the eighteenth century, and particularly since the Victorian period, the novel, replacing poetry and drama, has become the most popular of literary forms--perhaps because it most closely represents the lives of the majority of people. The novel became 33

increasingly popular as its social scope expanded to include characters and stories about the middle and working classes. Because of its readership, which included a large percentage of women and servants, the novel became the form which most addressed the domestic and social concerns of these groups. Experimentation: The Developing Role of the Narrator As it evolved, the novel expanded in terms of its form. Writers began to experiment with different modes of presentation. Central to experimentation was the role of the narrator. In a given novel, who talks to the reader? From whose point of view is the story told? Is the narrator identifiable with the author? Is the narrator a character in the story or another character who simply observes the actions of others in the story? Is the narrator reliable--can you believe him or her? Or is he or she unreliable, unable to convey the story without distortion? How does the device of the narrator "frame" the story? How does the reader determine what the truth is about the events reported? Nineteenth-century novelists like Thackeray and Dickens often told their stories through an omniscient narrator, who is aware of all the events and the motivations of all the characters of the novel. Through this technique the writer can reveal the thoughts of any character without explaining how this information is obtained. Henry James, who began writing in the last third of the nineteenth century, used the technique of point-ofview narration so completely that the minds of his characters became the real basis of interest of the novel. In such works, our knowledge of events and characters is itself limited by the limitations of this character or central consciousness. Since Henry James' time, many writers have experimented with shifting the focus of the novel further inward to examine human consciousness. Writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner used a method of narration known as stream of consciousness, which attempts to reproduce the flow of consciousness. Perceptions, thoughts, judgments, feelings, associations, and memories are presented just as they occur, without being shaped into grammatical sentences or logical sequences. In streamof-consciousness narration, all narrators are to some degree unreliable, which reflects the twentieth century's preoccupation with the relativity and the subjective nature of experience, of knowledge, and of truth. Proliferation of Types The novel continues in its popularity to this day. It has moved away from a primarily realistic focus and has evolved into the expansive form that incorporates all other fictional modes. Today, for example, there are many types of novels. There is the allegorical novel, which uses character, place, and event to represent abstract ideas and to demonstrate some thesis. The science fiction novel relies on scientific or pseudoscientific machinery to create a future society which parallels our own. The historical novel is set in the past and takes its characters and events from history. The social novel is concerned with the influence of societal institutions and of economic and social conditions on characters and events. These three types, the science fiction, social, and historical novel, tend to be didactic, to instruct readers in the necessity for changing their morality, their lives, and the institutions of society. The regional novel presents the influence of a particular locale on character and events. The detective novel is a combination of the picaresque and psychological novel in that it reveals both events and their motivation. And there are many others.

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Aesthetic distance: degree of emotional involvement in a work of art. The most obvious example of aesthetic distance (also referred to simply as distance) occurs with paintings. Some paintings require us to stand back to see the design of the whole painting; standing close, we see the technique of the painting, say the brush strokes, but not the whole. Other paintings require us to stand close to see the whole; their design and any figures become less clear as we move back from the painting. Similarly, fiction, drama, and poetry involve the reader emotionally to different degrees. Emotional distance, or the lack of it, can be seen with children watching a TV program or a movie; it becomes real for them. Writers like Faulkner and the Bronte sisters pull the reader into their work; the reader identifies closely with the characters and is fully involved with the happenings. Hemingway, on the other hand, maintains a greater distance from the reader. Alliteration: the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of a word, such as the repetition of b sounds in Keats's "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" ("Ode to a Nightingale") or Coleridge's "Five miles meandering in a mazy motion ("Kubla Khan"). A common use for alliteration is emphasis. It occurs in everyday speech in such phrases as "tittle-tattle," "bag and baggage," "bed and board," "primrose path," and "through thick and thin" and in sayings like "look before you leap." Some literary critics call the repetition of any sounds alliteration. However, there are specialized terms for other sound-repetitions. Consonance repeats consonants, but not the vowels, as in horror-hearer. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, pleaseniece-ski-tree. See rhyme. An allusion: a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase. The writer assumes well recognize the reference. For instance, most of us would know the difference between a mechanic's being as reliable as George Washington or as reliable as Benedict Arnold. Allusions that are commonplace for readers in one era may require footnotes for readers in a later time. Ambiguity: (1) a statement which has two or more possible meanings; (2) a statement whose meaning is unclear. Depending on the circumstances, ambiguity can be negative, leading to confusion or even disaster (the ambiguous wording of a general's note led to the deadly charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War). On the other hand, writers often use it to achieve special effects, for instance, to reflect the complexity of an issue or to indicate the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of determining truth. The title of the country song "Heaven's Just a Sin Away" is deliberately ambiguous; at a religious level, it means that committing a sin keeps us out of heaven, but at a physical level, it means that committing a sin (sex) will bring heaven (pleasure). Many of Hamlet's statements to the King, to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, and to other characters are deliberately ambiguous, to hide his real purpose from them. Ballad: a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these. Two characteristics of the ballad are incremental repetition and the ballad stanza. Incremental repetition repeats one or more lines with small but significant variations that advance the action. The ballad stanza is four lines; commonly, the first and third lines contain four feet or accents, the second and fourth lines contain three feet. Ballads often open abruptly, present brief descriptions, and use concise dialogue. The folk ballad is usually anonymous and the presentation impersonal. The literary

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ballad deliberately imitates the form and spirit of a folk ballad. The Romantic poets were attracted to this form, as Longfellow with "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Coleridge with the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which is longer and more elaborate than the folk balad) and Keats with "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (which more closely resembles the folk ballad). Characterization: the way an author presents characters. In direct presentation, a character is described by the author, the narrator or the other characters. In indirect presentation, a character's traits are revealed by action and speech. Characters can be discussed in a number of ways.

The protagonist is the main character, who is not necessarily a hero or a heroine. The antagonist is the opponent; the antagonist may be society, nature, a person, or an aspect of the protagonist. The antihero, a recent type, lacks or seems to lack heroic traits. A persona is a fictional character. Sometimes the term means the mask or alterego of the author; it is often used for first person works and lyric poems, to distinguish the writer of the work from the character in the work. Characters may be classified as round (three-dimensional, fully developed) or as flat (having only a few traits or only enough traits to fulfill their function in the work); as developing (dynamic) characters or as static characters. A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major character; in Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, whose fathers have been killed, are foils for Hamlet.

Convention: (1) a rule or practice based upon general consent and upheld by society at large; (2) an arbitrary rule or practice recognized as valid in any particular art or discipline, such as literature or art (NED). For example, when we read a comic book, we accept that a light bulb appearing above the head of a comic book character means the character suddenly got an idea.

Literary convention: a practice or device which is accepted as a necessary, useful, or given feature of a genre, e.g., the proscenium stage (the "picture-frame" stage of most theaters), a soliloquy, the epithet or boast in the epic (which those of you who took Core Studies 1 will be familiar with). Stock character: character types of a genre, e.g., the heroine disguised as a man in Elizabethan drama, the confidant, the hardboiled detective, the tightlipped sheriff, the girl next door, the evil hunters in a Tarzan movie, ethnic or racial stereotypes, the cruel stepmother and Prince Charming in fairy tales. Stock situation: frequently recurring sequence of action in a genre, e.g., rags-toriches, boy-meets-girl, the eternal triangle, the innocent proves himself or herself. Stock response: a habitual or automatic response based on the reader's beliefs or feelings, rather than on the work itself. A moralistic person might be shocked by any sexual scene and condemn a book or movie as dirty; a sentimentalist is automatically moved by any love story, regardless of the quality of the writing or the acting; someone requiring excitement may enjoy any violent story or movie, regardless of how mindless, unmotivated or brutal the violence is.

Fiction: prose narrative based on imagination, usually the novel or the short story. Genre: a literary species or form, e.g., tragedy, epic, comedy, novel, essay, biography, lyric poem. Click here for a fuller discussion of genres.

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Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, what is said and what is done, what is expected or intended and what happens, what is meant or said and what others understand. Sometimes irony is classified into types: in situational irony, expectations aroused by a situation are reversed; in cosmic irony or the irony of fate, misfortune is the result of fate, chance, or God; in dramatic irony. the audience knows more than the characters in the play, so that words and action have additional meaning for the audience; Socratic irony is named after Socrates' teaching method, whereby he assumes ignorance and openness to opposing points of view which turn out to be (he shows them to be) foolish. Click here for examples of irony. Irony is often confused with sarcasm and satire: Sarcasm is one kind of irony; it is praise which is really an insult; sarcasm generally involves malice, the desire to put someone down, e.g., "This is my brilliant son, who failed out of college." Satire is the exposure of the vices or follies of an individual, a group, an institution, an idea, a society, etc., usually with a view to correcting it. Satirists frequently use irony.

Language can be classified in a number of ways.

Denotation: the literal meaning of a word; there are no emotions, values, or images associated with denotative meaning. Scientific and mathematical language carries few, if any emotional or connotative meanings. Connotation: the emotions, values, or images associated with a word. The intensity of emotions or the power of the values and images associated with a word varies. Words connected with religion, politics, and sex tend to have the strongest feelings and images associated with them. For most people, the word mother calls up very strong positive feelings and associations--loving, self-sacrificing, always there for you, understanding; the denotative meaning, on the other hand, is simply "a female animal who has borne one or more children." Of course connotative meanings do not necessarily reflect reality; for instance, if someone said, "His mother is not very motherly," you would immediately understand the difference between motherly (connotation) and mother (denotation). Abstract language refers to things that are intangible, that is, which are perceived not through the senses but by the mind, such as truth, God, education, vice, transportation, poetry, war, love. Concrete language identifies things perceived through the senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste), such as soft, stench, red, loud, or bitter. Literal language means exactly what it says; a rose is the physical flower. Figurative language changes the literal meaning, to make a meaning fresh or clearer, to express complexity, to capture a physical or sensory effect, or to extend meaning. Figurative language is also called figures of speech. The most common figures of speech are these: o A simile: a comparison of two dissimilar things using "like" or "as", e.g., "my love is like a red, red rose" (Robert Burns). o A metaphor: a comparison of two dissimilar things which does not use "like" or "as," e.g., "my love is a red, red rose" (Lilia Melani).

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Personification: treating abstractions or inanimate objects as human, that is, giving them human attributes, powers, or feelings, e.g., "nature wept" or "the wind whispered many truths to me." o hyperbole: exaggeration, often extravagant; it may be used for serious or for comic effect. o Apostrophe: a direct address to a person, thing, or abstraction, such as "O Western Wind," or "Ah, Sorrow, you consume us." Apostrophes are generally capitalized. o Onomatopoeia: a word whose sounds seem to duplicate the sounds they describe--hiss, buzz, bang, murmur, meow, growl. o Oxymoron: a statement with two parts which seem contradictory; examples: sad joy, a wise fool, the sound of silence, or Hamlet's saying, "I must be cruel only to be kind" Elevated language or elevated style: formal, dignitifed language; it often uses more elaborate figures of speech. Elevated language is used to give dignity to a hero (note the speeches of heros like Achilles or Agamemnon in the Iliad), to express the superiority of God and religious matters generally (as in prayers or in the King James version of the Bible), to indicate the importance of certain events (the ritual language of the traditional marriage ceremony), etc. It can also be used to reveal a self-important or a pretentious character, for humor and/or for satire.
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Lyric Poetry: a short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue, and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece, the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre. Click here for a discussion of Reading Lyric Poetry. Meter: a rhythm of accented and unaccented syllables which are organized into patterns, called feet. In English poetry, the most common meters are these:

Iambic: a foot consisting of an unaccented and accented syllable. Shakespeare often uses iambic, for example the beginning of Hamlet's speech (the accented syllables are italicized), "To be or not to be. Listen for the accents in this line from Marlowe, "Come live with me and be my love." English seems to fall naturally into iambic patterns, for it is the most common meter in English. Trochaic: a foot consisting of an accented and unaccented syllable. Longfellow's Hiawatha uses this meter, which can quickly become singsong (the accented syllable is italicized):

"By the shores of GitcheGumee By the shining Big-Sea-water." The three witches' speech in Macbeth uses it: "Double, double, toil and trouble."

Anapestic: a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables and an accented syllable. These lines from Shelley's Cloud are anapestic: "Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb I arise and unbuild it again."

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Dactylic: a foot consisting of an accented syllable and two unaccented syllables, as in these words: swimingly, mannikin, openly. Spondee: a foot consisting of two accented syllables, as in the word heartbreak. In English, this foot is used occasionally, for variety or emphasis. Pyrrhic: a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables, generally used to vary the rhythm.

A line is named for the number of feet it contains: monometer: one foot, dimeter: two feet, trimeter: three feet, tetrameter: four feet, pentameter: five feet, hexameter: six feet, heptameter: seven feet. The most common metrical lines in English are tetrameter (four feet) and pentameter (five feet). Shakespeare frequently uses unrhymed iambic pentameter in his plays; the technical name for this line is blank verse. In this course, I will not be asking you to identify meters and metrical lines, but I would like you to have some awareness of their existence. Modern English poetry is metrical, i.e., it relies on accented and unaccented syllables. Not all poetry does; Anglo-Saxon poetry relied on a system of alliteration. Skillful poets rarely use one meter throughout a poem but use these meters in combinations; however, a poem generally has one dominant meter. Ode: usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern. There are various kinds of odes, which we don't have to worry about in an introductory course like this. The ode often praises people, the arts of music and poetry, natural scenes, or abstract concepts. The Romantic poets used the ode to explore both personal or general problems; they often started with a meditation on something in nature, as did Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale" or Shelley in Ode to the West Wind". Click here for a fuller discussion of the ode. Paradox: a statement whose two parts seem contradictory yet make sense with more thought. Christ used paradox in his teaching: "They have ears but hear not." Or in ordinary conversation, we might use a paradox, "Deep down he's really very shallow." Paradox attracts the reader's or the listener's attention and gives emphasis. Point of view: the perspective from which the story is told.

The most obvious point of view is probably first person or "I." The omniscient narrator knows everything, may reveal the motivations, thoughts and feelings of the characters, and gives the reader information. With a limited omniscient narrator, the material is presented from the point of view of a character, in third person. The objective point of view presents the action and the characters' speech, without comment or emotion. The reader has to interpret them and uncover their meaning.

A narrator may be trustworthy or untrustworthy, involved or uninvolved. Click here for an illustration of these points of view in the story of Sleeping Beauty. Rhyme:the repetition of similar sounds. In poetry, the most common kind of rhyme is end rhyme, which occurs at the end of two or more lines. Internal rhyme occurs in the middle of a line, as in these lines from Coleridge, "In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud" or "Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white" ("The Ancient Mariner"). There are many kinds of end rhyme:

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True rhyme is what most people think of as rhyme; the sounds are nearly identical--notion, motion, potion, for example. Weak rhyme, also called slant, oblique, approximate, or half rhyme, refers to words with similar but not identical sounds, e.g., notion-nation, bear-bore, earare. Emily Dickinson frequently uses partial rhymes. Eye rhyme occurs when words look alike but don't sound alike--e.g., bear-ear.

Sonnet: a lyric poem consisting of fourteen lines. In English, generally the two basic kinds of sonnets are the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnet. The Italian/Petrarchan sonnet is named after Petrarch, an Italian Renaissance poet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains (four lines each) and a concluding couplet (two lines). The Petrarchan sonnet tends to divide the thought into two parts; the Shakespearean, into four. Structure: framework of a work of literature; the organization or over-all design of a work. The structure of a play may fall into logical divisions and also a mechanical division of acts and scenes. Groups of stories may be set in a larger structure or frame, like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, or The Arabian Tales. Style: manner of expression; how a speaker or writer says what he says. Notice the difference in style of the opening paragraphs of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. A Farewell to Arms You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Symbol: in general terms, anything that stands for something else. Obvious examples are flags, which symbolize a nation; the cross is a symbol for Christianity; Uncle Sam a symbol for the United States. In literature, a symbol is expected to have significance. Keats starts his ode with a real nightingale, but quickly it becomes a symbol, standing for a life of pure, unmixed joy; then before the end of the poem it becomes only a bird again. Tone: the writer's attitude toward the material and/or readers. Tone may be playful, formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic, outraged, baffled, tender, serene, depressed, etc.

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Theme: (1) the abstract concept explored in a literary work; (2) frequently recurring ideas, such as enjoy-life while-you-can; (3) repetition of a meaningful element in a work, such as references to sight, vision, and blindness in Oedipus Rex. Sometimes the theme is also called the motif. Themes in Hamlet include the nature of filial duty and the dilemma of the idealist in a non-ideal situation. A theme in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is the difficulty of correlating the ideal and the real. Tragedy: broadly defined, a literary and particularly a dramatic presentation of serious actions in which the chief character has a disastrous fate. There are many different kinds and theories of tragedy, starting with the Greeks and Aristotles definition in The Poetics, "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself...with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions." In the Middle Ages, tragedy merely depicted a decline from happiness to misery because of some flaw or error of judgment. Click here for a fuller discussion of tragedy and the tragic vision. Greek Theory of Tragedy: Aristotle's Poetics The classic discussion of Greek tragedy is Aristotle's Poetics. He defines tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also as having magnitude, complete in itself." He continues, "Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of artistic expression." The writer presents "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to interpret its catharsis of such emotions" (by catharsis, Aristotle means a purging or sweeping away of the pity and fear aroused by the tragic action). The basic difference Aristotle draws between tragedy and other genres, such as comedy and the epic, is the "tragic pleasure of pity and fear" the audience feel watching a tragedy. In order for the tragic hero to arouse these feelings in the audience, he cannot be either all good or all evil but must be someone the audience can identify with; however, if he is superior in some way(s), the tragic pleasure is intensified. His disastrous end results from a mistaken action, which in turn arises from a tragic flaw or from a tragic error in judgment. Often the tragic flaw is hubris, an excessive pride that causes the hero to ignore a divine warning or to break a moral law. It has been suggested that because the tragic hero's suffering is greater than his offence, the audience feels pity; because the audience members perceive that they could behave similarly, they feel pity. Click here for excerpts from Aristotle's Poetics. Medieval Tragedy and The Wheel of Fortune The medieval tragedy is a prose or poetic narrative, not a drama. Tragedy was perceived as a reversal of fortune, a fall from a high position. This view of tragedy derives from the Medieval concept of fortune, which was personified as Dame Fortune, a blindfolded woman who turned a wheel at whim; men were stationed at various places on the wheel--the top of the wheel represented the best fortune, being under the wheel the worst fortune. However, the wheel could turn suddenly and the man on top could suddenly be under the wheel, without warning. Elizabethan and Shakespearean Tragedy

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A distinctly English form of tragedy begins with the Elizabethans. The translation of Seneca and the reading of Aristotle's Poetics were major influences. Many critics and playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, insisted on observing the classical unities of action, time and place (the action should be one whole and take place in one day and in one place). However, it was romantic tragedy, which Shakespeare wrote in Richard II, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, which prevailed. Romantic tragedy disregarded the unities (as in the use of subplots), mixed tragedy and comedy, and emphasized action, spectacle, and--increasingly--sensation. Shakespeare violated the three unities in these ways and also in mixing poetry and prose and using the device of a play-within-a-play, as in Hamlet. The Elizabethans and their Jacobean successors acted on stage the violence that the Greek dramatists reported. The Elizabethan and later the Jacobean playwright had a diverse audience to please, ranging from Queen Elizabeth and King James I and their courtiers to the lowest classes. Christopher Marlowe's tragedies showed the resources of the English language with his magnificent blank verse, as in the Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, and the powerful effects that could be achieved by focusing on a towering protagonist, as in Tamburlaine. In Elizabethan tragedy, the individual leads to violence and conflict. A distinctly nonAristotelian form of tragedy developed during this period was the tragicomedy. In a tragicomedy, the action and subject matter seem to require a tragic ending, but it is avoided by a reversal which leads to a happy ending; sometimes the tragicomedy alternates serious and comic actions throughout the play. Because it blends tragedy and comedy, the tragicomedy is sometimes referred to as a "mixed" kind. The Problem Play or Drama of Ideas The problem play or play of ideas usually has a tragic ending. The driving force behind the play is the exploration of some social problem, like alcoholism or prostitution; the characters are used as examples of the general problem. Frequently the playwright views the problem and its solution in a way that defies or rejects the conventional view; not surprisingly, some problem plays have aroused anger and controversy in audiences and critics. Henrik Ibsen, who helped to revive tragedy from its artistic decline in the nineteenth century, wrote problem plays. A Doll's House, for example, shows the exploitation and denigration of middle class women by society and in marriage. The tragedy frequently springs from the individual's conflict with the laws, values, traditions, and representatives of society. Genre is a French term derived from the Latin genus, generis, meaning "type," "sort," or "kind." It designates the literary form or type into which works are classified according to what they have in common, either in their formal structures or in their treatment of subject matter, or both. The study of genres may be of value in three ways. On the simplest level, grouping works offers us an orderly way to talk about an otherwise bewildering number of literary texts. More importantly, if we recognize the genre of a text, we may also have a better idea of its intended overall structure and/or subject. Finally, a genre approach can deepen our sense of the value of any single text, by allowing us to view it comparatively, alongside many other texts of its type. Classification By Types While the number of genres and their subdivisions has proliferated since

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classical times, the division of the literary domain into three major genres (by Plato, Aristotle, and, later, Horace), is still useful. These are lyric, drama, and epic, and they are distinguished by "manner of imitation," that is, by how the characters and the action are presented. The chart briefly summarizes the main differences in the way action and characters are presented in the lyric, drama, and the epic. Lyric: The poet writes the poem as his or her own experience; often the poet uses first person ("I"); however, this speaker is not necessarily the poet but may be a fictional character or persona. Drama: The characters are obviously separate from the writer; in fact, they generally seem to have lives of their own and their speech reflects their individual personalities. The writer is present, of course, in stage directions (which the audience isn't aware of during a performance), and occasionally a character acts as a mouthpiece for the writer. Epic: This long narrative is primarily written in third person. However, the epic poet makes his presence known, sometimes by speaking in first person, as when the muses are appealed to for inspiration (the invocation) or by reporting the direct speech of the characters.

The lyric includes all the shorter forms of poetry, e.g., song, ode, ballad, elegy, sonnet. Up to the nineteenth century, the short lyric poem was considered the least important of the genres, but with the Romantic movement the prestige of the lyric increased considerably. The relative brevity of the lyric leads to an emphasis upon tight formal construction and concentrated unity. Typically, the subject matter is expressive, whether of personal emotions, such as love or grief, or of public emotions, such as patriotism or reverence or celebration. Drama presents the actions and words of characters on a stage. The conventional formal arrangement into acts and scenes derives ultimately from the practice in Greek drama of alternating scenes of dialogue with choral sections. From classical example also comes the standard subdivision into tragedy and comedy. Historically, many of the specific conventions of these two types have changed. We refer, for instance, to Greek tragedy, or to medieval tragedy, or to Shakespearean tragedy. This does not deny interrelationships between them; rather, it emphasizes the equal importance of their distinctive features. One thing that Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy share is the "Tragic Vision." It is helpful, in discussing plays, to have some familiarity with some basic conventions of drama. Every play typically involves the direct presentation of actions and words by characters on a stage. Although the structural principles are quite fluid, dramatic form often tends to move from exposition or presentation of the dramatic situation, through complication, setting of the direction of the dramatic conflict, to a climax or turning point (connected to Aristotle's peripeteia or "change of fortune"), and then through further action, resolving the various complications, to the denouement or conclusion of the play. This conventional movement in drama is not an absolute, but a tendency we observe, and variations are frequent. ("Exposition" of character motivation,

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for example, need not be limited to the first act.) It is useful to understand this conventional structure of drama so that we can better appreciate departures from it, as well as apply it more specifically to tragedies, and to comedies. The epic, in the classical formulation of the three genres, referred exclusively to the "poetic epic." It was of course in verse, rather lengthy (24 books in Homer, 12 books in Virgil), and tended to be episodic. It dealt in elevated language with heroic figures (human heroes and deities) whose exploits affected whole civilizations or even, by implication, the whole of mankind. Its lengthiness was properly a response to the magnitude of the subject material. Today, we classify epics with other forms of the "mixed kind." That is, we see the classical epic as but one of the generic subdivisions of the epic or fiction. This broader classification can include many kinds of narratives, in prose as well as in verse. Thus the "mixed kind" now includes the novel, the folktale, the fable, the fairy tale, even the short story and novella, as well as the romance, which can be in either prose or verse. Of these, the novel and the romance tend to continue the epic tradition of length (we speak of the "sweep" of a sizeable novel). It should be noted that the three-part division of lyric, drama, and epic or fiction, while useful and relatively comprehensive, does not provide a place for all of the known literary genres. Some obvious omissions are the essay, the pastoral, biography and autobiography, and satire. How Literary Critics Have Used Genres Critics have employed the genre approach to literature in a number of ways. From the Renaissance through most of the eighteenth century, for example, they often attempted to judge a text according to what they thought of as the fixed "laws of kind," insisting upon purity, that is, fidelity to type. Thus the placement of comic episodes in otherwise predominantly serious works was frowned upon, and hybrid forms like tragicomedy were dismissed. There was also a tendency to rank the genres in a hierarchy, usually with epic or tragedy at the top, and shorter forms, such as the epigram and the subdivisions of the lyric, at the bottom. Modern critics have a different view of genres, and are likely to point out how, in actual practice, writers play against as well as with generic traditions and how specific conventions are imitated or defied, modified or renovated. Literary Genres: Conclusion All of the arts consist of genres. To name some of the outstanding types: in painting, there are the landscape, the still life, the portrait; in music there are the sonata, the symphony, the song; in film we have the domestic comedy, the horror/thriller, the Western. If students think of the forms with which they are most familiar (perhaps the film genres), they will understand that for sophisticated appreciation, they need always to be acquainted with the specific conventions of the type. The study of genres essentially is the study of conventions. And in literature as in the other arts, an acquaintance with generic

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conventions is critical to enriching our responses to particular texts. It is true that since we are reading "landmarks," there will always be something marvellously unique about each great work studied. But in each case there will also be a set of expectations connected to its type, to its generic tradition, as well as to the Zeitgeist (the "spirit of the time") in which the work was written. Introduction to Romanticism Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world. Historical Considerations It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England, the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe. The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major precepts have survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period. Imagination The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate "shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to

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constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested), we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"), imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols. Nature "Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic language. For example, throughout "Song of Myself," Whitman makes a practice of presenting commonplace items in nature--"ants," "heap'd stones," and "poke-weed"--as containing divine elements, and he refers to the "grass" as a natural "hieroglyphic," "the handkerchief of the Lord." While particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation. Symbolism and Myth Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another. Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of

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valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life (that is, for its mimetic qualities) was reversed. In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet. Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind (the development of self) as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Chateaubriand's Rene (1801), as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe Harold (1818), are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type. Contrasts With Neoclassicism Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they selfconsciously asserted their differences from the previous age (the literary "ancient regime"), and declared their freedom from the mechanical "rules." Certain special features of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behaviour were more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I am different."-this view was challenged.

Individualism: The Romantic Hero The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama. In another way, of course, Romanticism created its own literary types. The hero-artist has already been mentioned; there were also heaven-storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab, outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne, and there was Faust, who wins salvation in Goethe's great drama for the very reasons--his characteristic striving for the unattainable beyond the morally permitted and his insatiable thirst for activity-that earlier had been viewed as the components of his tragic sin. (It was in fact Shelley's opinion that Satan, in his noble defiance, was the real hero of Milton's Paradise Lost.) 47

In style, the Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint, maximum suggestiveness over the neoclassical ideal of clarity, free experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum, and they promoted the conception of the artist as "inspired" creator over that of the artist as "maker" or technical master. Although in both Germany and England there was continued interest in the ancient classics, for the most part the Romantics allied themselves with the very periods of literature that the neoclassicists had dismissed, the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom Voltaire had called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in the powers of faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favour of the idea that each person (and humankind collectively) must create the system by which to live. The Everyday and the Exotic The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local colour" (through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested by the above examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18thcentury cult of the noble savage had promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used "the language of common men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults). Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favour, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of "objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in paradoxical combinations. In the Lyrical Ballads, for example, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to divide their labours according to two subject areas, the natural and the supernatural: Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar, while Coleridge would try to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real, both aiming to dislodge vision from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the beautiful soul in an ugly body, as characterized in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is another variant of the paradoxical combination. <> The Romantic Artist in Society In another way too, the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness--as one would

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expect in a period of revolution, one that reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror. ("Nothing succeeds like excess," wrote Oscar Wilde, who, as a partial inheritor of Romantic tendencies, seemed to enjoy shocking the bourgeois, both in his literary and life styles.) Thus the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often uncomprehending audience began to widen. Some artists may have experienced ambivalence about this situation--it was earlier pointed out how Emily Dickinson seemed to regret that her "letters" to the world would go unanswered. Yet a significant Romantic theme became the contrast between artist and middle-class "Philistine." Unfortunately, in many ways, this distance between artist and public remains with us today. Spread of the Romantic Spirit Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic Movement affected not just literature, but all of the arts--from music (consider the rise of Romantic opera) to painting, from sculpture to architecture. Its reach was also geographically significant, spreading as it did eastward to Russia, and westward to America. For example, in America, the great landscape painters, particularly those of the "Hudson River School," and the Utopian social colonies that thrived in the 19th century, are manifestations of the Romantic spirit on this side of the Atlantic. Recent Developments Some critics have believed that the two identifiable movements that followed Romanticism--Symbolism and Realism--were separate developments of the opposites which Romanticism itself had managed, at its best, to unify and to reconcile. Whether or not this is so, it is clear that Romanticism transformed Western culture in many ways that survive into our own times. It is only very recently that any really significant turning away from Romantic paradigms has begun to take place, and even that turning away has taken place in a dramatic, typically Romantic way. Today a number of literary theorists have called into question two major Romantic perceptions: that the literary text is a separate, individuated, living "organism"; and that the artist is a fiercely independent genius who creates original works of art. In current theory, the separate, "living" work has been dissolved into a sea of "intertextuality," derived from and part of a network or "archive" of other texts--the many different kinds of discourse that are part of any culture. In this view, too, the independently sovereign artist has been demoted from a heroic, consciously creative agent, to a collective "voice," more controlled than controlling, the intersection of other voices, other texts, ultimately dependent upon possibilities dictated by language systems, conventions, and institutionalised power structures. It is an irony of history, however, that the explosive appearance on the scene of these subversive ideas, delivered in what seemed to the establishment to be radical manifestoes, and 49

written by linguistically powerful individuals, has revolutionary spirit and events of Romanticism itself. The Romantic Poets and the Ode

recapitulated

the

In most required literature courses, students will read at least one novel and some examples of lyric poetry, often drawn from the Romantic period, which raised the lyric to unprecedented prominence. Although there are many different species of lyric, most of them apply and/or renovate some set of conventions, whether derived from classical models or from the lyric types generated in earlier periods of European and English poetry. Selected for examination here is the ode, because British Romantic poets perfected a special form of it--"the personal ode of description and passionate meditation," as M. H. Abrams described it--sometimes called the "Romantic meditative ode." Origin and Development of the Ode Traditionally, the ode is lengthy (as lyrics go), serious in subject matter, elevated in its diction and style, and often elaborate in its stanzaic structure. There were two classical prototypes, one Greek, the other Roman. The first was established by Pindar, a Greek poet, who modelled his odes on the choral songs of Greek drama. They were encomiums, i.e., written to give public praise, usually to athletes who had been successful in the Olympic games. Pindar patterned his complex stanzas in a triad: the strophe and antistrophe had the same metrical form; the epode had another. What is called in English the regular or Pindaric ode imitates this pattern; the most famous example is Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy." As the ode developed in England, poets modified the Pindaric form to suit their own purposes and also turned to Roman models. In 1656, Abraham Cowley introduced the "irregular ode," which imitated the Pindaric style and retained the serious subject matter, but opted for greater freedom. It abandoned the recurrent strophic triad and instead permitted each stanza to be individually shaped, resulting in stanzas of varying line lengths, number of lines, and rhyme scheme. This "irregular" stanzaic structure, which created different patterns to accord with changes of mood or subject, became a common English tradition. Poets also turned to an ode form modeled after the Roman poet, Horace. The Horatian ode employed uniform stanzas, each with the same metrical pattern, and tended generally to be more personal, more meditative, and more restrained. Keats' "Ode to Autumn" and Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty" are Horatian odes. The Romantic meditative ode was developed from these varying traditions. It tended to combine the stanzaic complexity of the irregular ode with the personal meditation of the Horatian ode, usually dropping the emotional restraint of the Horatian tradition. However, the typical structure of the new form can best be described, not by traditional stanzaic patterns, but by its development of subject matter. There are usually three elements:

the description of a particularized outer natural scene; an extended meditation, which the scene stimulates, and which may be focused on a private problem or a universal situation or both;

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the occurrence of an insight or vision, a resolution or decision, which signals a return to the scene originally described, but with a new perspective created by the intervening meditation.

Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," are examples, and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," while Horatian in its uniform stanzaic form, reproduces the architectural format of the meditative soliloquy, or, it may be, intimate colloquy with a silent auditor.

Tragedy: An Overview Tragedy usually focuses on figures of stature whose fall implicates others--a family, an entire group, or even a whole society--and typically the tragic protagonist becomes isolated from his or her society (Phedre's "outcast and fugitive from all" would suit Lear and Hamlet as well). In tragedy, life goes on; in comedy, life goes onward and upward. In the tragic vision, the possibility of a happy ending is unrealised, although it is sometimes suggested, as when Lear is briefly reconciled to Cordelia. When tragedy pauses to look at comedy, it views such a happy ending as an aborted or by-passed possibility. At best, it acknowledges "what might have been" as an ironic way of magnifying "tragic waste." Tragedy tends to exclude comedy. In the tragic vision, something or someone dies or lapses into a winter of discontent. The "Tragic Vision" In tragedy, there seems to be a mix of seven interrelated elements that help to establish what we may call the "Tragic Vision":

The conclusion is catastrophic. The catastrophic conclusion will seem inevitable. It occurs, ultimately, because of the human limitations of the protagonist. The protagonist suffers terribly. The protagonist's suffering often seems disproportionate to his or her culpability. Yet the suffering is usually redemptive, bringing out the noblest of human capacities for learning. The suffering is also redemptive in bringing out the capacity for accepting moral responsibility.

The Catastrophic Conclusion In tragedy, unlike comedy, the denouement tends to be catastrophic; it is perceived as the concluding phase of a downward movement. In comedy, the change of fortune is upward; the happy ending prevails (more desirable than true, says Northrop Frye in the Anatomy of Criticism), as obstacles are dispelled and the hero and/or heroine are happily

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incorporated into society or form the nucleus of a new and better society. In tragedy, there is the unhappy ending--the hero's or heroine's fall from fortune and consequent isolation from society, often ending in death. The Sense of Inevitability To the audience of a tragedy, the catastrophe will seem, finally, to be inevitable. Although tragedy can not simply be identified with uncontrollable disasters, such as an incurable disease or an earthquake, still there is the feeling that the protagonist is inevitably caught by operating forces which are beyond his control (sometimes like destiny, visible only in their effects). Whether grounded in fate or nemesis, accident or chance, or in a causal sequence set going through some action or decision initiated by the tragic protagonist himself or herself, the operating forces assume the function of a distant and impersonal power. Human Limitation, Suffering, and Disproportion Ultimately, perhaps, all the instances that we find in tragedy of powerlessness, of undeniable human limitations, derive from the tragic perception of human existence itself, which seems, at least in part, to be terrifyingly vulnerable, precarious, and problematic. And it is precisely because of these human limitations that suffering also becomes basic to the tragic vision. Tragedy typically presents situations that emphasize vulnerability, situations in which both physical and spiritual security and comforts are undermined, and in which the characters are pressed to the utmost limits-overwhelming odds, impossible choices, demonic forces within or without (or both). Against the tragic protagonist are the powers that be, whether human or divine, governed by fate or chance, fortune or accident, necessity or circumstance, or any combination of these. The more elevated, the more apparently secure and privileged the character's initial situation, the greater is our sense of the fall, of the radical change of fortune undergone, and the greater our sense of his or her suffering. Tragedy testifies to suffering as an enduring, often inexplicable force in human life. In the suffering of the protagonists, there is frequently, something disproportionate. Even to the extent that there is some human cause, the eventual consequences may seem too severe. In Lear's case, we may or may not agree that he is "more sinned against than sinning," but Cordelia certainly is. This inequity is particularly profound for some of those who surround the protagonists, those who seem to bear (at worst) minor guilt, the so-called "tragic victims." The Learning Process and Acceptance of Moral Responsibility Despite the inevitable catastrophe, the human limitation, the disproportionate suffering, the tragic vision also implies that suffering can call forth human potentialities, can clarify human capacities, and that often there is a learning process that the direct experience of suffering engenders--Lear and Phedre are transformed by it. Gloucester may think that we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys--"they kill us for their sport"-but such a conception of brutal slaughter is alien to the tragic vision. Indeed, tragedy provides a complex view of human heroism, a riddle mixed of glory and jest, nobility and irony. The madness that is wiser than sanity, the blind who see more truly than the physically sighted, are recurring metaphors for the paradox of tragedy, which shows us

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human situations of pitiful and fearful proportions, but also of extraordinary achievement. For tragedy presents not only human weakness and precarious security and liability to suffering, but also its nobility and greatness. Tragedies do not occur to puppets. While the "tragic victim" is one of the recurring character types of tragedy (Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona, Andromaque, Hippolytus, and even, perhaps, Richard II and Phedre), tragic protagonists more frequently have an active role, one which exposes not only their errors of judgment, their flaws, their own conscious or unwitting contribution to the tragic situation, but which also suggests their enormous potentialities to endure or survive or transcend suffering, to learn what "naked wretches" feel, and to attain a complex view of moral responsibility. The terrifying difficulty of accepting moral responsibility is an issue in Hamlet as well as in Sophocles' Antigone or Oedipus Tyrannus. It is an issue in all tragedy, even when the moral status of the protagonist(s) is not admirable. Whatever Aristotle's hamartia is, it is not necessarily moral culpability, although it may be, as the case of Macbeth illustrates. Tragic vision insists upon man's responsibility for his actions. This is the essential element of the vision that permits us to deny access to its precincts to puppets, who, by definition, have neither free will nor ultimate responsibility for their existence. Tragedy acknowledges the occasional disproportion between human acts and their consequences, but imposes or accepts responsibility nevertheless. In this way, pain and fear are spiritualised as suffering, and, as Richard Sewall suggests in The Vision of Tragedy, the conflict of man and his "destiny" is elevated to ultimate magnitude. One of the conventions discerned and analysed by Aristotle was that the change of fortune, peripety or reversal, experienced by the tragic hero, should be accompanied by anagnorisis or cognitio, "discovery" or "recognition." The conditions and the degree of this discovery vary considerably. It may even be relatively absent from the protagonists's awareness, as we have noted. But it is almost always central to the audience's responses. In the school of suffering we are all students, witnessing, like Lear, essential, "unaccomodated" man, and we become caught up in an extended discovery, not only of human limitation, but also of human potentiality. In grouping texts according to "type," the concept of genre is applied to all literary works, past, present, or future. Thus seeing a single work in its generic context becomes inseparable from seeing it as part of literary history. The concept of literary period also implies a grouping through time. But a work, rather than being "placed" within the entire sweep of literary history, is "placed" within a much more restricted time frame. The period concept provides another system of classification, ordering literary and cultural data chronologically, within certain discrete time periods. It assumes every age has its characteristic special features, which are reflected in its representative artifacts or creations. (Indeed, among these characteristic features may be its typical choice of genres.) The kind of coherence displayed is not accidental, for literary works participate in the culture of their times. The Period Concept Basically, the period concept suggests two things: (1) that literary works can be grouped according to what they share with each other within a given time span, and (2) that this grouping can be differentiated from other such chronological groupings. Literary periods share, in Rene Wellek's phrase, "systems of norms," which include such things as conventions, styles, themes, and philosophies.

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Cautions and Qualifications When we read, most of us like to have at least some information about historical periods because it seems to give us immediate and satisfying entry into a literary work. It often seems to explain a number of things about a poem, play, or novel. Yet before we look more specifically at how study of a period can help us, we ought to raise certain kinds of questions that are important for literary study or, for that matter, for any study which purports to search for truth. Scholarly method and scholarly care often mean observing, questioning, and noting necessary qualifications to any general theory. We may ask, for example, how are the "characteristic features" of a given period determined? The facts suggest that very often the majority of writers in a period will continue to use the norms of the previous period. We should note, then, that it is usually a special minority, the greatest and most significant artists, who shape and reflect the defining character of a literary period. It also becomes clear that at least three qualifications to the period concept are necessary. First, the features that differentiate periods are always relative: works written in one time period often display continuities with works of other periods as well as differences among themselves. Second, the beginning, the flowering, and the end of each literary period can be defined, but cannot be fixed precisely; in addition, such terminal dates may vary from one country to another. Third, no individual work can ever embody all that is associated with a given period. Another thing we might try to avoid as we read in, or about a period, is what may be called the "evolutionary fallacy." This involves the claim that a particular period represents an "advance" of some sort or that something "higher" has "evolved" out of earlier, more "primitive" forms. The more one studies literature, the more one recognizes that the paradigm of cumulative progress is untenable, that one period cannot be said to be "better" than another. What we do see is that works of differing styles (which reflect their time periods) often go through cycles of enthusiastic reception, then disfavor, and then perhaps revival of interest. Finally, the attentive student may note that even the labeling of literary periods and movements does not always appear to be consistent. This has come about because the traditional names derive from a variety of sources. "Humanism" came from the history of ideas, and the "Renaissance" from art historians; "Restoration" came from political history, and "The Eighteenth Century" is strictly chronological; "Neoclassic" and "Romantic" came from literary theory, while both "Elizabethan" and "Victorian" came from the names of reigning monarchs. Usefulness of the Concept Despite these cautions and qualifications, the study of literary periods and movements can be helpful in three ways. At the least, for student or for scholar, there is always some teasing contemporary allusion that can only be cleared up by study of the age. More significantly, such study may help one avoid the potential danger of misreading a work through ignorance of its historical context. Finally, and most importantly, great works of art do indeed seem clearer and more interesting in proportion to the reader's possession of certain broad kinds of information about the age in which they were produced--whether it be about the age's religious orientation or its cosmology, about its attitude toward "love," toward the classics or its own place in history, toward the state, the individual, or society. The reader's experience of literature will necessarily be enriched by knowledge of the prevailing attitudes toward education,

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money, arranged marriages, duty, ethics; by its attitudes toward human nature, including the importance attached to various human faculties (spirit, reason, feeling, imagination). And especially important to the student of literature is the age's representative attitudes toward art and the methods of its creation. Period Descriptors The literary periods and movements following the classical period are usually labeled as follows:

medieval (from the fall of Rome through the fourteenth or fifteenth century); Renaissance (from its earliest beginnings in Italy in the fourteenth century through the sixteenth century elsewhere in Europe, with a shift in some countries to "Baroque" in its last phase); the neoclassical (starting in the mid-seventeenth century, with its subsequent eighteenth-century development as the "Age of Enlightenment"); the Romantic period (beginning in the last decades of the eighteenth century and continuing at least through the middle of the nineteenth); the Realist movement and its late nineteenth century extension into "naturalism"; and finally, the modern period, which has been given many names, all of them, so far, provisional.

Each of these major periods and movements is international in scope and designates the system of norms that dominated Western culture at a particular time of the historical process. Historians of English literature employ period labels which emphasize, in some cases, local variations of these international periods. For example, "Elizabethan" designates a period that corresponds to the late Renaissance. "Victorian" designates the literature of the mid-nineteenth through the turn of the twentieth century in England and its spheres of influence. Nevertheless, the multiple labelings, while derived from varied sources, are ultimately compatible. Most required literature courses present a sampling of "landmarks," representing different genres and selected from different literary periods. There are of course elective courses in literature which study both genre and period in greater detail, by examining more specifically works of a given "type" or period, or by reading the works of a single author.

Medieval View of Love: General :The Chain of Being and Caritas At the start of one of the most influential philosophical works in the Middle Ages, Boethius's On the Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524 A.D.), the poet seems abandoned by God, situated at the bottom of the wheel of fortune. Once a highly placed counselor to Emperor Theodoric, Boethius had been suddenly toppled from his position, accused of treason, and thrown into prison. His consolation, written in prison before his execution, consists of learning to ignore the vagaries of fortune ("look unmoved on fortune good or bad," he is advised) and learning instead to keep his sight on the source of all Goodness

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and Love, that is, on God ("to see Thee is our end, / Who art our source and maker, lord and path and goal"). It was this force, called God, or love in its spiritual sense, which governed the movements of the planets, the tides, the changes of seasons, the treaties between nations, and the human bonds of fealty, marriage, and friendship. Boethius sums up the notion: And all this chain of things In earth and sea and sky One ruler holds in hand: If Love relaxed the reins All things that now keep peace Would wage continual war The fabric to destroy Which unity has formed With motions beautiful. . . . O happy race of men If Love who rules the sky Could rule your hearts as well! (Trans. V. E. Watts, Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, II) The medieval world was therefore part of a multifaceted and hierarchical universe in which all elements were bound together in a "great chain of being." The force which bound all these elements together was love, also called caritas or charity, what St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) called the whole motion of the soul towards God for His sake and towards one's self and one's fellow man for the sake of God. All of scripture, indeed all of Christian doctrine, taught the essential importance of charity in this spiritualized sense. Caritas Versus Amor Distinguished from the spiritualized sense of love as caritas, was the more worldly sense of love which was referred to as amor. The men and women of the Middle Ages, like people everywhere from the beginning of recorded history, were caught up by love in its many earthly forms and variations. Amor signified the love of things of this world-money, power, possessions, other men and women--things which, however attractive and compelling, were by their own natures fragile and short-lived. Despite these drawbacks, money and possessions were ardently pursued during the Middle Ages, and so, of course, was romantic love. When the pursuit of human love expressed itself in literature, it often appeared in the form we now call courtly love, a term coined in the late nineteenth century to describe a loose set of literary conventions associated almost exclusively with the aristocracy and their imitators. Courtly Love Courtly love as a literary phenomenon reflects one of the most far-reaching revolutions in social sensibility in Western culture--the dramatic change in attitude towards women that began in the late eleventh century, spread throughout western and northern Europe during the twelfth century, and lingered through the Renaissance and on into the modern world where traces can still be found. In its essential nature, courtly

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love, or fin' amors, as the Provencal poets called it, was the expression of the knightly worship of a refining ideal embodied in the person of the beloved. Only a truly noble nature could generate and nurture such a love; only a woman of magnanimity of spirit was a worthy object. The act of loving was in itself ennobling and refining, the means to the fullest expression of what was potentially fine and elevated in human nature. More often than not, such a love expressed itself in terms that were feudal and religious. Thus, just as a vassal was expected to honor and serve his lord, so a lover was expected to serve his lady, to obey her commands, and to gratify her merest whims. Absolute obedience and unswerving loyalty were critical. To incur the displeasure of one's lady was to be cast into the void, beyond all light, warmth, and possibility of life. And just as the feudal lord stood above and beyond his vassal, so the lady occupied a more celestial sphere than that of her lover. Customarily she seemed remote and haughty, imperious and difficult to please. She expected to be served and wooed, minutely and at great length. If gratified by the ardors of her lover-servant, she might at length grant him her special notice; in exceptional circumstances, she might even grant him that last, longed-for favor. Physical consummation of love, however, was not obligatory. What was important was the prolonged and exalting experience of being in love. It was usually one of the assumptions of courtly love that the lady in question was married, thus establishing the triangular pattern of lover-lady-jealous husband. This meant that the affair was at least potentially adulterous, and had to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy and danger. The absolute discretion of the lover was therefore indispensable if the honor of the lady were to be preserved. Though the convention did not stipulate adultery as a sine qua non, it is nevertheless true that the two great patterns of courtly love in the Middle Ages--Tristan and Isolt and Lancelot and Guenevere--both involved women who deceived their husbands. Implications of Courtly Love What practical effect did the convention of courtly love have on the situation of women in the Middle Ages? Very little, if we are to believe social historians, who point out that there is no evidence to show that the legal and economic position of women was materially enhanced in any way that can be attributed to the influence of fin' amors. In a broader cultural context, however, it is possible to discern two long range effects of courtly love on western civilization. For one thing, it provided Europe with a refined and elevated language with which to describe the phenomenology of love. For another, it was a significant factor in the augmented social role of women. Life sometimes has a way of imitating art, and there is little doubt that the aristocratic men and women of the Middle Ages began to act out in their own loves the pattern of courtly behavior they read about in the fictional romances and love lyrics of the period. The social effect was to accord women preeminence in the great, central, human activity of courtship and marriage. Thus women became more than just beloved objects--haughty, demanding, mysterious; they became, in a very real sense, what they have remained ever since, the chief arbiters of the game of love and the impresarios of refined passion. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in the work of Dante and other poets of the fourteenth century, the distinction between amor and caritas became blurred. Chaucer's Prioress ironically wears a brooch on which is inscribed, "Amor Vincit Omnia" ("Love Conquers All"). The secular imagery of courtly love was used in religious poems in praise of the Virgin Mary. The lover with "a gentle heart," as in a poem by Guido Guinizelli, could be led through a vision of feminine beauty to a vision of heavenly grace.

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One of Dante's greatest achievements was to turn his beloved, seen primarily in physical, worldly, courtly love terms in his early work, La Vita Nuova, into the abstract, spiritualized, religious figure of Beatrice in The Divine Comedy. General Characteristics of the Renaissance "Renaissance" literally means "rebirth." It refers especially to the rebirth of learning that began in Italy in the fourteenth century, spread to the north, including England, by the sixteenth century, and ended in the north in the midseventeenth century (earlier in Italy). During this period, there was an enormous renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity. Yet the Renaissance was more than a "rebirth." It was also an age of new discoveries, both geographical (exploration of the New World) and intellectual. Both kinds of discovery resulted in changes of tremendous import for Western civilization. In science, for example, Copernicus (1473-1543) attempted to prove that the sun rather than the earth was at the center of the planetary system, thus radically altering the cosmic world view that had dominated antiquity and the Middle Ages. In religion, Martin Luther (1483-1546) challenged and ultimately caused the division of one of the major institutions that had united Europe throughout the Middle Ages--the Church. In fact, Renaissance thinkers often thought of themselves as ushering in the modern age, as distinct from the ancient and medieval eras. Study of the Renaissance might well center on five interrelated issues. First, although Renaissance thinkers often tried to associate themselves with classical antiquity and to dissociate themselves from the Middle Ages, important continuities with their recent past, such as belief in the Great Chain of Being, were still much in evidence. Second, during this period, certain significant political changes were taking place. Third, some of the noblest ideals of the period were best expressed by the movement known as Humanism. Fourth, and connected to Humanist ideals, was the literary doctrine of "imitation," important for its ideas about how literary works should be created. Finally, what later probably became an even more far-reaching influence, both on literary creation and on modern life in general, was the religious movement known as the Reformation. Renaissance thinkers strongly associated themselves with the values of classical antiquity, particularly as expressed in the newly rediscovered classics of literature, history, and moral philosophy. Conversely, they tended to dissociate themselves from works written in the Middle Ages, a historical period they looked upon rather negatively. According to them, the Middle Ages were set in the "middle" of two much more valuable historical periods, antiquity and their own. Nevertheless, as modern scholars have noted, extremely important continuities with the previous age still existed. The Great Chain of Being Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended. ("Hierarchical" refers to an order based on a series of higher and lower, strictly ranked gradations.) An object's "place" depended on the relative proportion of 58

"spirit" and "matter" it contained--the less "spirit" and the more "matter," the lower down it stood. At the bottom, for example, stood various types of inanimate objects, such as metals, stones, and the four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Higher up were various members of the vegetative class, like trees and flowers. Then came animals; then humans; and then angels. At the very top was God. Then within each of these large groups, there were other hierarchies. For example, among metals, gold was the noblest and stood highest; lead had less "spirit" and more matter and so stood lower. (Alchemy was based on the belief that lead could be changed to gold through an infusion of "spirit.") The various species of plants, animals, humans, and angels were similarly ranked from low to high within their respective segments. Finally, it was believed that between the segments themselves, there was continuity (shellfish were lowest among animals and shaded into the vegetative class, for example, because without locomotion, they most resembled plants). Besides universal orderliness, there was universal interdependence. This was implicit in the doctrine of "correspondences," which held that different segments of the chain reflected other segments. For example, Renaissance thinkers viewed a human being as a microcosm (literally, a "little world") that reflected the structure of the world as a whole, the macrocosm; just as the world was composed of four "elements" (earth, water, air, fire), so too was the human body composed of four substances called "humours," with characteristics corresponding to the four elements. (Illness occurred when there was an imbalance or "disorder" among the humours, that is, when they did not exist in proper proportion to each other.) "Correspondences" existed everywhere, on many levels. Thus the hierarchical organization of the mental faculties was also thought of as reflecting the hierarchical order within the family, the state, and the forces of nature. When things were properly ordered, reason ruled the emotions, just as a king ruled his subjects, the parent ruled the child, and the sun governed the planets. But when disorder was present in one realm, it was correspondingly reflected in other realms. For example, in Shakespeare's King Lear, the simultaneous disorder in family relationships and in the state (child ruling parent, subject ruling king) is reflected in the disorder of Lear's mind (the loss of reason) as well as in the disorder of nature (the raging storm). Lear even equates his loss of reason to "a tempest in my mind." Though Renaissance writers seemed to be quite on the side of "order," the theme of "disorder" is much in evidence, suggesting that the age may have been experiencing some growing discomfort with traditional hierarchies. According to the chain of being concept, all existing things have their precise place and function in the universe, and to depart from one's proper place was to betray one's nature. Human beings, for example, were pictured as placed between the beasts and the angels. To act against human nature by not allowing reason to rule the emotions--was to descend to the level of the beasts. In the other direction, to attempt to go above one's proper place, as Eve did when she was tempted by Satan, was to court disaster. Yet Renaissance writers at times showed ambivalence towards such a rigidly organized universe. For example, the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in a work entitled On the Dignity of Man, exalted human beings as capable of rising to the level of the angels through philosophical contemplation. Also, some Renaissance writers were fascinated by the thought of going beyond boundaries set by the chain of being. A major example was the title character of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor

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Faustus. Simultaneously displaying the grand spirit of human aspiration and the more questionable hunger for superhuman powers, Faustus seems in the play to be both exalted and punished. Marlowe's drama, in fact, has often been seen as the embodiment of Renaissance ambiguity in this regard, suggesting both its fear of and its fascination with pushing beyond human limitations. Political Implications of the Chain of Being The fear of "disorder" was not merely philosophical--it had significant political ramifications. The proscription against trying to rise beyond one's place was of course useful to political rulers, for it helped to reinforce their authority. The implication was that civil rebellion caused the chain to be broken, and according to the doctrine of correspondences, this would have dire consequences in other realms. It was a sin against God, at least wherever rulers claimed to rule by "Divine Right." (And in England, the King was also the head of the Anglican Church.) In Shakespeare, it was suggested that the sin was of cosmic proportions: civil disorders were often accompanied by meteoric disturbances in the heavens. (Before Halley's theory about periodic orbits, comets, as well as meteors, were thought to be disorderly heavenly bodies.) The need for strong political rule was in fact very significant, for the Renaissance had brought an end for the most part to feudalism, the medieval form of political organization. The major political accomplishment of the Renaissance, perhaps, was the establishment of effective central government, not only in the north but in the south as well. Northern Europe saw the rise of national monarchies headed by kings, especially in England and France. Italy saw the rise of the territorial city-state often headed by wealthy oligarchic families. Not only did the chain of being concept provide a rationale for the authority of such rulers; it also suggested that there was ideal behavior that was appropriate to their place in the order of things. It is no wonder then that much of Renaissance literature is concerned with the ideals of kingship, with the character and behavior of rulers, as in Machiavelli's Prince or Shakespeare's Henry V. Other ideals and values that were represented in the literature were even more significant. It was the intellectual movement known as Humanism that may have expressed most fully the values of the Renaissance and made a lasting contribution to our own culture. Humanism A common oversimplification of Humanism suggests that it gave renewed emphasis to life in this world instead of to the otherworldly, spiritual life associated with the Middle Ages. Oversimplified as it is, there is nevertheless truth to the idea that Renaissance Humanists placed great emphasis upon the dignity of man and upon the expanded possibilities of human life in this world. For the most part, it regarded human beings as social creatures who could create meaningful lives only in association with other social beings. In the terms used in the Renaissance itself, Humanism represented a shift from the "contemplative life" to the "active life." In the Middle Ages, great value had often been attached to the life of contemplation and religious devotion, away from the world (though this ideal applied to only a small number of people). In the Renaissance, the highest cultural values were usually 60

associated with active involvement in public life, in moral, political, and military action, and in service to the state. Of course, the traditional religious values coexisted with the new secular values; in fact, some of the most important Humanists, like Erasmus, were Churchmen. Also, individual achievement, breadth of knowledge, and personal aspiration (as personified by Doctor Faustus) were valued. The concept of the "Renaissance Man" refers to an individual who, in addition to participating actively in the affairs of public life, possesses knowledge of and skill in many subject areas. (Such figures included Leonardo Da Vinci and John Milton, as well as Francis Bacon, who had declared, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province.") Nevertheless, individual aspiration was not the major concern of Renaissance Humanists, who focused rather on teaching people how to participate in and rule a society (though only the nobility and some members of the middle class were included in this ideal). Overall, in consciously attempting to revive the thought and culture of classical antiquity, perhaps the most important value the Humanists extracted from their studies of classical literature, history, and moral philosophy was the social nature of humanity. "Imitation" Another concept derived from the classical past (though it was present in the Middle Ages too), was the literary doctrine of "imitation." Of the two senses in which the term had traditionally been used, the theoretical emphasis of Renaissance literary critics was less on the "imitation" that meant "mirroring life" and more on the "imitation" that meant "following predecessors." In contrast to our own emphasis on "originality," the goal was not to create something entirely new. To a great extent, contemporary critics believed that the great literary works expressing definitive moral values had already been written in classical antiquity. Theoretically, then, it was the task of the writer to translate for present readers the moral vision of the past, and they were to do this by "imitating" great works, adapting them to a Christian perspective and milieu. (Writers of the Middle Ages also practiced "imitation" in this sense, but did not have as many classical models to work from.) Of course Renaissance literary critics made it clear that such "imitation" was to be neither mechanical nor complete: writers were to capture the spirit of the originals, mastering the best models, learning from them, then using them for their own purposes. Nevertheless, despite the fact that there were a great many comments by critics about "imitation" in this sense, it was not the predominant practice of many of the greatest writers. For them, the faithful depiction of human behavior--what Shakespeare called holding the mirror up to nature--was paramount, and therefore "imitation" in the mimetic sense was more often the common practice. The doctrine of "imitation" of ancient authors did have one very important effect: since it recommended not only the imitation of specific classical writers, but also the imitation of classical genres, there was a revival of significant literary forms. Among the most popular that were derived from antiquity were epic and satire. Even more important were the dramatic genres of comedy and tragedy. In fact, Europe at this time experienced a golden age of theater, led by great dramatists such as Shakespeare.

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The Protestant Reformation Finally, as it developed during the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation was a movement that had profound implications, not only for the modern world in general, but specifically for literary history. Just as Renaissance Humanists rejected medieval learning, the Reformation seemed to reject the medieval form of Christianity. (It should be noted, however, that both Catholics and Protestants were Humanists, though often with different emphases.) In the early sixteenth century, the German monk Martin Luther reacted against Church corruption, the sort depicted, for example, by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. Many Catholics like Erasmus wanted to reform the Church from within. However, Luther's disagreements with Church policy ultimately led him to challenge some of the most fundamental doctrines of the Church, which in turn led him and his followers to break away from the Catholic Church in protest; hence they were known as Protestants. The Reformation had significant political ramifications, for it split Europe into Protestant and Catholic countries which often went to war with each other during this period. Protestantism broke up the institution that had for so long unified all Europe under the Pope (though there were also national struggles with the Papacy that had little to do with Protestantism). Among the most important tenets of Protestantism was the rejection of the Pope as spiritual leader. A closely related Protestant doctrine was the rejection of the authority of the Church and its priests to mediate between human beings and God. Protestants believed that the Church as an institution could not grant salvation; only through a direct personal relationship with God--achieved by reading the Bible--could the believer be granted such. Many scholars argue that this emphasis on a personal, individual connection with God spawned the modern emphasis on individualism in those cultures affected by Protestantism. On the other hand, some Protestants also believed that after the Fall of Adam in Eden, human nature was totally corrupted as far as human spiritual capabilities were concerned. (Early Protestantism's emphasis on human depravity distinguishes it sharply from Renaissance Humanism.) Humans therefore are incapable of contributing to their salvation, for instance through good deeds; it could only be achieved through faith in God's grace. Overall, there is a good deal of ambivalence regarding many of the Protestant positions, and in fact the disagreement among the many Christian sects may be precisely what distinguishes Renaissance from Medieval religion. Literary Ramifications Among the literary ramifications of the Reformation, two stand out. First, the Protestant rejection of the authority of Church representatives resulted in placing that authority entirely on the Bible, at least in theory. Consequently, Protestants stressed the need for all believers to read the Bible for themselves. To help make that possible, they were active in translating the Bible into the vernacular languages so that all laymen could read it. This practice was opposed by the Catholic Church, which insisted on preserving the Bible in Latin. At the same time, Protestants also stressed the need to understand the Bible in its original languages (Hebrew and Greek) so that it could be properly 62

translated. In their interest in such learning, particularly of ancient languages, Protestants were similar to Humanists. This emphasis on the Bible had a significant impact on literature because the Bible became a renewed source of literary inspiration, both in literary form and subject matter; it also became a rich source of symbols. The other way the Reformation impacted on literature was perhaps more subtle, and the effects did not appear till much later in literary history. Certainly the emphasis on inner feeling found later in the Romantic Movement received at least some of its inspiration and reinforcement from the religious thrust of the Protestant Reformation. When student readers approach Renaissance literary works, they may experience certain concepts (the doctrine of "correspondences," for instance), as a bit strange. Yet they are also likely to sense some very modern things in the works written in this remarkable age. And among its many wonders, they will also be experiencing the revival of great drama, as it underwent a "rebirth" in the Renaissance, embodied most fully in the works of our greatest English writer, William Shakespeare. English Theater in the Mid-Sixteenth Century When its greatest playwright was born, in 1564, the English theater hardly existed at all as an organized commercial or artistic institution. Troupes of actors roamed the countryside, performing in courtyards or in the great halls of noble houses; little better than vagrants in the eyes of the law, they lived precariously by presenting crude native tragedies, bawdy interludes, or adaptations of the classics, in exchange for a meal, a bed, or a few coins. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, the stage was one of London's thriving industries, supporting at least three successful repertory companies of which one--the Lord Chamberlain's Men--boasted the services of William Shakespeare as a resident actor, playwright, and shareholder. Shakespeare's Stage The Chamberlain's Men (who changed their name to the King's Men after James I took the throne in 1603), performed most of their plays on the multi-leveled spaces of the Globe Theater. Many of us are familiar with a different kind of theater altogether; the "modern" stage consists of a single flat playing surface separated from the audience by a proscenium arch, artificially lighted, furnished with sets and props and peopled by actors whose costumes, gestures and speech suggest a world that corresponds closely with our own. Shakespeare's stage also held, as Hamlet put it, a mirror up to nature, but it did not do so by the same means, and its reflection tended to be less realistically detailed. Perhaps the greatest difference is that what contemporary plays often accomplish through sets, props and costumes, Shakespeare gave his audiences almost entirely through language. We know that we are in the Forest of Arden, for example, or on the battlements of a Danish castle, or on the seacoast of Bohemia, because the characters tell us so, not because we can see or hear for ourselves that we are; there are no trees or battlements or roaring surf but only a bare stage jutting out among the spectators, flanked by galleries and balconies and backed by an inner recess into which the action might move. Visual spectacle, though not unimportant, was secondary to dialogue; we speak of going to "see" a play where audiences up to the nineteenth century spoke of "hearing" one. 63

Shakespeare's Language We must not think of Shakespeare's stage as impoverished because it lacked the technical resources of our own, for the richness of his dramatic speech more than compensates us. Shakespeare did not invent those unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter known as blank verse, but he perfected it; he shaped the stiff, stilted, and oratorical meter that he inherited into a rhetorical instrument that could range from the most colloquial and realistic dialogue to discourse of an almost operatic grandeur and eloquence. And perfectly complementing and counterpointing Shakespeare's verse was his prose, a vehicle capable of distinguishing the commoners from the noble characters, the subplots from the main plot, the comic from the tragic. Shakespeare's Genres The distinction between tragedy and comedy, still useful in our age, was particularly important in Shakespeare's time. Elizabethan tragedy was the still familiar tale of a great man or woman brought low through hubris or fate (though some of Shakespeare's tragic heroes--Romeo, say, or Timon, or Macbeth--do not easily accomodate Aristotle's definition of the type). Shakespearean comedy, like much of our own, was descended from the Roman "New Comedy" of Plautus and Terence (an influence seen most clearly in The Comedy of Errors), crossbred with fairy tale and Italian romance and sometimes undercut by bitingly ironic satire. Tragedies and comedies are two of the genres into which the First Folio of Shakespeare divides the plays; the third category is Histories, comprising plays that chronicled the lives of English Kings, but these plays themselves often tended toward the tragic (Richard II or Richard III, for instance) or the comic (the Falstaff subplots of both parts of Henry IV and the Pistol-Fluellen encounters of Henry V). Thus almost from the start, Shakespeare's method was to mingle the heretofore antagonistic visions of comedy and tragedy in ways that still seem novel and startling. There is more to laugh at in the tragedy of Hamlet than there is in a comedy like The Merchant of Venice, and some modern critics go so far as to consider King Lear at once the pinnacle of Shakespeare's tragic achievement and a kind of divine comedy or even absurdist farce. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy assembled from comic materials (a story of young lovers struggling to overcome the obstacle of parental disapproval), and in Shakespeare's later tragedy of romantic love, Anthony and Cleopatra, there is much poignant humor at the expense of middle-aged lovers attempting with difficulty to sustain the passion usually associated with adolescence. Indeed, some of Shakespeare's comedies--Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well are the most notable-seem so far removed from the optimism usually associated with that genre that they have acquired the qualifying title of "problem comedies." Shakespeare's Multiple Perspectives In other ways besides the generic, Shakespeare's theater presents to us a mixed, even a contradictory aspect. The Aristotelian tradition demanded of serious playwrights that their plays be unified in the continuity of their action. But instead of telling us a single coherent story, Shakespeare sometimes tells us two or even three, alternating among them or even (through his favorite device of the play-within-a-play) placing one inside the other. Instead of limiting his casts to a few characters, he gives us so many that his actors are forced to "double," racing offstage as a page or messenger to reappear the next moment as an old man or a flattering courtier. The plays do not hold a single

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mirror up to nature, then, but many mirrors at once--like the characters whose function it is to parallel and reflect each other, and so comment upon each other; thus, in King Lear, we are given not a single father mistreated by his children but two, and in Hamlet, not one son of a slain father but three. Multiple perspectives, actions, and characters looked at from different and even contradictory points of view, abound in the plays, which themselves, by setting the subjective beside the objective and the real beside the illusory, become instruments for investigating the nature of reality itself. How NOT to Read Shakespeare The above may make Shakespeare sound like a philosopher or a scientist, and many people have thought of him in this way: as a writer whose most valuable contributions are to the history of ideas, to psychology, to theology, to sociology. But this is a way to misread Shakespeare and to ignore what he did best; it has even been the basis for those now largely discredited claims that not Shakespeare but some better-educated or more aristocratic writer must have written his plays. Shakespeare is not so much a "thinker" as a writer capable of bringing thoughts to life. Every one of his plays, like those of his contemporaries, is an adaptation of some story, history, or other play; many of the "ideas" for which Shakespeare is now given credit are part of the intellectual commonplace of his age. We should not read or attend his plays to find out how people lived in Elizabethan London, or what true love is, or whether God exists, though such matters are debated in them. The nineteenth century, in particular, tended to regard the plays as slices of life and to remove characters from their dramatic context to argue their motives, speculate upon their childhoods, or predict their futures. But they are not real people who live in our world; each of the plays is its own world in miniature: the happy-go-lucky farcical world of The Comedy of Errors or The Taming of the Shrew, the romantic, fairy-tale world of Cymbeline and The Tempest, the darkly ironic world of Troilus and Cressida and the tragic world of Lear or Othello are all places different from each other and from our own. The thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare are not moral sermons, not handbooks of etiquette, not philosophical treatises, not documentaries of English life in the Renaissance. They are exercises in dramatic imagination, demonstrations of mimetic magic, celebrations of the power of illusion over reality; and, if we come to them in the right spirit, they will move and entertain us as the works of few other writers can hope to do. Introduction to Neoclassicism After the Renaissance--a period of exploration and expansiveness--came a reaction in the direction of order and restraint. Generally speaking, this reaction developed in France in the mid-seventeenth century and in England thirty years later; and it dominated European literature until the last part of the eighteenth century. The New Restraint Writers turned from inventing new words to regularizing vocabulary and grammar. Complex, boldly metaphorical language, such as Shakespeare used in his major tragedies, is clarified and simplified--using fewer and more conventional figures of speech. Mystery and obscurity are considered symptoms of incompetence rather than signs of grandeur. The ideal style is lucid, polished, and precisely appropriate to the genre of a work and the social position of its characters. Tragedy and high comedy, for

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example, use the language of cultivated people and maintain a well-bred tone. The crude humor of the gravediggers in Hamlet or the pulling out of Gloucester's eyes in King Lear would no longer be admitted in tragedy. Structure, like tone, becomes more simple and unified. In contrast to Shakespeare's plays, those of neoclassical playwrights such as Racine and Moliere develop a single plot line and are strictly limited in time and place (often, like Moliere's The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, to a single setting and a single day's time). Influence of the Classics The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art forms of classical times, emphasizing even more than their Renaissance predecessors the classical ideals of order and rational control. Such simply constructed but perfect works as the Parthenon and Sophocles' Antigone, such achievements as the peace and order established by the Roman Empire (and celebrated in Book VI of Vergil's Aeneid), suggest what neoclassical writers saw in the classical world. Their respect for the past led them to be conservative both in art and politics. Always aware of the conventions appropriate to each genre, they modeled their works on classical masterpieces and heeded the "rules" thought to have been laid down by classical critics. In political and social affairs, too, they were guided by the wisdom of the past: traditional institutions had, at least, survived the test of time. No more than their medieval and Renaissance predecessors did neoclassical thinkers share our modern assumption that change means progress, since they believed that human nature is imperfect, human achievements are necessarily limited, and therefore human aims should be sensibly limited as well. It was better to set a moderate goal, whether in art or society, and achieve it well, than to strive for an infinite ideal and fail. Reasonable Philinte in The Misanthrope does not get angry at people's injustice, because he accepts human nature as imperfect. Neoclassical Assumptions and Their Implications Neoclassical thinkers could use the past as a guide for the present because they assumed that human nature was constant--essentially the same regardless of time and place. Art, they believed, should express this essential nature: "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature" (Samuel Johnson). An individual character was valuable for what he or she revealed of universal human nature. Of course, all great art has this sort of significance--Johnson made his statement about Shakespeare. But neoclassical artists more consciously emphasized common human characteristics over individual differences, as we see in the type-named characters of Moliere. If human nature has remained constant over the centuries, it is unlikely that any startling new discoveries will be made. Hence neoclassical artists did not strive to be original so much as to express old truths in a newly effective way. As Alexander Pope, one of their greatest poets, wrote: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." Neoclassical writers aimed to articulate general truth rather than unique vision, to communicate to others more than to express themselves. Social Themes

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Neoclassical writers saw themselves, as well as their readers and characters, above all as members of society. Social institutions might be foolish or corrupt--indeed, given the intrinsic limitations of human nature, they probably were--but the individual who rebelled against custom or asserted his superiority to humankind was, like Alceste in The Misanthrope, presented as presumptuous and absurd. While Renaissance writers were sometimes fascinated by rebels, and later Romantic artists often glorified them, neoclassical artists expected people to conform to established social norms. For individual opinion was far less likely to be true than was the consensus of society, developed over time and embodied in custom and tradition. As the rules for proper writing should be followed, so should the rules for civilized conduct in society. Neither Moliere nor Jane Austen advocate blind following of convention, yet both insist that good manners are important as a manifestation of self-control and consideration for others. The Age of Reason The classical ideals of order and moderation which inspired this period, its realistically limited aspirations, and its emphasis on the common sense of society rather than individual imagination, could all be characterized as rational. And, indeed, it is often known as the Age of Reason. Reason had traditionally been assumed to be the highest mental faculty, but in this period many thinkers considered it a sufficient guide in all areas. Both religious belief and morality were grounded on reason: revelation and grace were de-emphasized, and morality consisted of acting rightly to one's fellow beings on this earth. John Locke, the most influential philosopher of the age, analyzed logically how our minds function (1690), argued for religious toleration (1689), and maintained that government is justified not by divine right but by a "social contract" that is broken if the people's natural rights are not respected. As reason should guide human individuals and societies, it should also direct artistic creation. Neoclassical art is not meant to seem a spontaneous outpouring of emotion or imagination. Emotion appears, of course; but it is consciously controlled. A work of art should be logically organized and should advocate rational norms. The Misanthrope, for example, is focused on its theme more consistently than are any of Shakespeare's plays. Its hero and his society are judged according to their conformity or lack of conformity to Reason, and its ideal, voiced by Philinte, is the reasonable one of the golden mean. The cool rationality and control characteristic of neoclassical art fostered wit, equally evident in the regular couplets of Moliere and the balanced sentences of Austen. Sharp and brilliant wit, produced within the clearly defined ideals of neoclassical art, and focused on people in their social context, make this perhaps the world's greatest age of comedy and satire.

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:: GLOSSARY OF SOME SORT :: Allegory. A figurative work in which a surface narrative carries a secondary, symbolic or metaphorical meaning. In The Faerie Queene, for example, Red Cross Knight is a heroic knight in the literal narrative, but also a figure representing Everyman in the Christian journey. Many works contain allegories or are allegorical in part, but not many are entirely allegorical. A good example of a fully allegorical work is

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Apologue. A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to comment on the human condition. Often, the apologue highlights the irrationality of mankind. The beast fable, and the fables of Aesop are examples. Some critics have called Samuel Johnson's Rasselas an apologue rather than a novel because it is more concerned with moral philosophy than with character or plot. Examples:

George Orwell, Animal Farm Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Blank Verse. Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Caesura. A pause, metrical or rhetorical, occurring somewhere in a line of poetry. The pause may or may not be typographically indicated. Canon. In relation to literature, this term is half-seriously applied to those works generally accepted as the great ones. A battle is now being fought to change or throw out the canon for three reasons. First, the list of great books is thoroughly dominated by DWEM's (dead, white, European males), and the accusation is that women and minorities and non-Western cultural writers have been ignored. Second, there is pressure in the literary community to throw out all standards as the nihilism of the late 20th century makes itself felt in the literature departments of the universities. Scholars and professors want to choose the books they like or which reflect their own ideas, without worrying about canonicity. Third, the canon has always been determined at least in part by political considerations and personal philosophical biases. Books are much more likely to be called "great" if they reflect the philosophical ideas of the critic. Conceit. An elaborate, usually intellectually ingenious poetic comparison or image, such as an analogy or metaphor in which, say a beloved is compared to a ship, planet, etc. The comparison may be brief or extended. See Petrarchan Conceit. (Conceit is an old word for concept.) See John Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," for example: "Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, / The Intelligence that moves, devotion is."

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End-stopped. A line that has a natural pause at the end (period, comma, etc.). For example, these lines are end stopped: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips red. --Shakespeare Enjambed. The running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. For example, the first two lines here are enjambed: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. . . . --Shakespeare Epic. An extended narrative poem recounting actions, travels, adventures, and heroic episodes and written in a high style (with ennobled diction, for example). It may be written in hexameter verse, especially dactylic hexameter, and it may have twelve books or twenty four books. Characteristics of the classical epic include these:

The main character or protagonist is heroically larger than life, often the source and subject of legend or a national hero The deeds of the hero are presented without favoritism, revealing his failings as well as his virtues The action, often in battle, reveals the more-than-human strength of the heroes as they engage in acts of heroism and courage The setting covers several nations, the whole world, or even the universe The episodes, even though they may be fictional, provide an explanation for some of the circumstances or events in the history of a nation or people The gods and lesser divinities play an active role in the outcome of actions All of the various adventures form an organic whole, where each event relates in some way to the central theme

Typical in epics is a set of conventions (or epic machinery). Among them are these:

Poem begins with a statement of the theme ("Arms and the man I sing") Invocation to the muse or other deity ("Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles") Story begins in medias res (in the middle of things) Catalogs (of participants on each side, ships, sacrifices) Histories and descriptions of significant items (who made a sword or shield, how it was decorated, who owned it from generation to generation) Epic simile (a long simile where the image becomes an object of art in its own right as well as serving to clarify the subject). 69

Frequent use of epithets ("Aeneas the true"; "rosy-fingered Dawn"; "tall-masted ship") Use of patronymics (calling son by father's name): "Anchises' son" Long, formal speeches by important characters Journey to the underworld Use of the number three (attempts are made three times, etc.) Previous episodes in the story are later recounted

Examples:

Homer, Iliad Homer, Odyssey Virgil, Aeneid Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered Milton, Paradise Lost

Euphemism. The substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one, as in the use of "pass away" instead of "die." The basic psychology of euphemistic language is the desire to put something bad or embarrassing in a positive (or at least neutral light). Thus many terms referring to death, sex, crime, and excremental functions are euphemisms. Since the euphemism is often chosen to disguise something horrifying, it can be exploited by the satirist through the use of irony and exaggeration. Foot. The basic unit of meter consisting of a group of two or three syllables. Scanning or scansion is the process of determining the prevailing foot in a line of poetry, of determining the types and sequence of different feet. Types of feet: U (unstressed); / (stressed syllable) Iamb: U / Trochee: / U Anapest: U U / Dactyl: / U U Spondee: / / Pyrrhic: U U See also versification, below. Free verse. Verse that has neither regular rhyme nor regular meter. Free verse often uses cadences rather than uniform metrical feet. Heroic Couplet. Two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter. Most of Alexander Pope's verse is written in heroic couplets. In fact, it is the most favored verse form of the eighteenth century. Example: u / u / u / u / u / 'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill

u / u / u / u / u / 70

Appear in writing or in judging ill. . . . --Alexander Pope Horatian Satire. In general, a gentler, more good humored and sympathetic kind of satire, somewhat tolerant of human folly even while laughing at it. Named after the poet Horace, whose satire epitomized it. Horatian satire tends to ridicule human folly in general or by type rather than attack specific persons. Compare Juvenalian satire. Humanism. The new emphasis in the Renaissance on human culture, education and reason, sparked by a revival of interest in classical Greek and Roman literature, culture, and language. Human nature and the dignity of man were exalted and emphasis was placed on the present life as a worthy event in itself (as opposed to the medieval emphasis on the present life merely as preparation for a future life). Humours. In medieval physiology, four liquids in the human body affecting behavior. Each humour was associated with one of the four elements of nature. In a balanced personality, no humour predominated. When a humour did predominate, it caused a particular personality. Here is a chart of the humours, the corresponding elements and personality characteristics:

blood...air...hot and moist: sanguine, kind, happy, romantic phlegm...water...cold and moist: phlegmatic, sedentary, sickly, fearful yellow bile...fire...hot and dry: choleric, ill-tempered, impatient, stubborn black bile...earth...cold and dry: melancholic, gluttonous, lazy, contemplative

The Renaissance took the doctrine of humours quite seriously--it was their model of psychology--so knowing that can help us understand the characters in the literature. Falstaff, for example, has a dominance of blood, while Hamlet seems to have an excess of black bile. Juvenalian Satire. Harsher, more pointed, perhaps intolerant satire typified by the writings of Juvenal. Juvenalian satire often attacks particular people, sometimes thinly disguised as fictional characters. While laughter and ridicule are still weapons as with Horatian satire, the Juvenalian satirist also uses withering invective and a slashing attack. Swift is a Juvenalian satirist. Metaphysical Poetry. The term metaphysical was applied to a style of 17th Century poetry first by John Dryden and later by Dr. Samuel Johnson because of the highly intellectual and often abstruse imagery involved. Chief among the metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan. While their

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poetry is widely varied (the metaphysicals are not a thematic or even a structural school), there are some common characteristics:

1. Argumentative structure. The poem often engages in a debate or persuasive presentation; the poem is an intellectual exercise as well as or instead of an emotional effusion. 2. Dramatic and colloquial mode of utterance. The poem often describes a dramatic event rather than being a reverie, a thought, or contemplation. Diction is simple and usually direct; inversion is limited. The verse is occasionally rough, like speech, rather than written in perfect meter, resulting in a dominance of thought over form. 3. Acute realism. The poem often reveals a psychological analysis; images advance the argument rather than being ornamental. There is a learned style of thinking and writing; the poetry is often highly intellectual. 4. Metaphysical wit. The poem contains unexpected, even striking or shocking analogies, offering elaborate parallels between apparently dissimilar things. The analogies are drawn from widely varied fields of knowledge, not limited to traditional sources in nature or art. Analogies from science, mechanics, housekeeping, business, philosophy, astronomy, etc. are common. These "conceits" reveal a play of intellect, often resulting in puns, paradoxes, and humorous comparisons. Unlike other poetry where the metaphors usually remain in the background, here the metaphors sometimes take over the poem and control it.

Metaphysical poetry represents a revolt against the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry and especially the typical Petrarchan conceits (like rosy cheeks, eyes like stars, etc.). Meter. The rhythmic pattern produced when words are arranged so that their stressed and unstressed syllables fall into a more or less regular sequence, resulting in repeated patterns of accent (called feet). See feet and versification. Mock Epic. Treating a frivolous or minor subject seriously, especially by using the machinery and devices of the epic (invocations, descriptions of armor, battles, extended similes, etc.). The opposite of travesty. Examples:

Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock

Novella. A prose fiction longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. Thus, the novella is a fictional work of about 20,000 to 50,000 words. Examples:

Henry James, Daisy Miller Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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Parody. A satiric imitation of a work or of an author with the idea of ridiculing the author, his ideas, or work. The parodist exploits the peculiarities of an author's expression--his propensity to use too many parentheses, certain favorite words, or whatever. The parody may also be focused on, say, an improbable plot with too many convenient events. Fielding's Shamela is, in large part, a parody of Richardson's Pamela. Petrarchan Conceit. The kind of conceit (see above) used by Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch and popular in Renaissance English sonnets. Eyes like stars or the sun, hair like golden wires, lips like cherries, etc. are common examples. Oxymorons are also common, such as freezing fire, burning ice, etc. Rhyme. The similarity between syllable sounds at the end of two or more lines. Some kinds of rhyme (also spelled rime) include:

Couplet: a pair of lines rhyming consecutively. Eye rhyme: words whose spellings would lead one to think that they rhymed (slough, tough, cough, bough, though, hiccough. Or: love, move, prove. Or: daughter, laughter.) Feminine rhyme: two syllable rhyme consisting of stressed syllable followed by unstressed. Masculine rhyme: similarity between terminally stressed syllables.

Romance. An extended fictional prose narrative about improbable events involving characters that are quite different from ordinary people. Knights on a quest for a magic sword and aided by characters like fairies and trolls would be examples of things found in romance fiction. Examples:

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Sir Philip Sidney, The Arcadia

In popular use, the modern romance novel is a formulaic love story (boy meets girl, obstacles interfere, they overcome obstacles, they live happily ever after). Computer software is available for constructing these stock plots and providing stereotyped characters. Consequently, the books usually lack literary merit. Examples:

Harlequin Romance series

Sarcasm. A form of sneering criticism in which disapproval is often expressed as ironic praise. (Oddly enough, sarcastic remarks are often used between friends, perhaps as a somewhat perverse demonstration of the strength of the bond--only a good friend could say this without hurting the other's feelings, or at least without excessively damaging the relationship, since feelings are often hurt in spite of a close relationship. If you drop your lunch tray and a stranger says, "Well, that was really intelligent," that's sarcasm. If your girlfriend or boyfriend says it, that's love--I think.)

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Sonnet. A fourteen line poem, usually in iambic pentameter, with a varied rhyme scheme. The two main types of sonnet are the Petrarchan (or Italian) and the Shakespearean. The Petrarchan Sonnet is divided into two main sections, the octave (first eight lines) and the sestet (last six lines). The octave presents a problem or situation which is then resolved or commented on in the sestet. The most common rhyme scheme is A-B-B-A A-B-B-A C-D-E C-D-E, though there is flexibility in the sestet, such as C-D-C D-C-D. The Shakespearean Sonnet, (perfected though not invented by Shakespeare), contains three quatrains and a couplet, with more rhymes (because of the greater difficulty of finding rhymes in English). The most common rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B C-D-C-D E-F-E-F G-G. In Shakespeare, the couplet often undercuts the thought created in the rest of the poem. Spenserian Stanza. A nine-line stanza, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter (called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B B-C-B-C C. Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is written in Spenserian stanzas. Style. The manner of expression of a particular writer, produced by choice of words, grammatical structures, use of literary devices, and all the possible parts of language use. Some general styles might include scientific, ornate, plain, emotive. Most writers have their own particular styles. Versification. Generally, the structural form of a verse, as revealed by scansion. Identification of verse structure includes the name of the metrical type and the name designating number of feet: The most common verse in English poetry is iambic pentameter. See foot for more information.

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