Titularizare Toata Literaturaa

DAVID COPPERFIELD
by Charles Dickens
a) Introduction:
- a novel which originally appeared in serial form;
- many elements follow events in his own life;
- the most autobiographical of all of his novels, it is Dickens favorite child;
- a story of growing up, of maturation, takes the protagonist from early childhood to early middle age;
- a story of the development of a writer, but its also a portrait of Victorian England at mid-century;
- a novel of social protest
b) Style:
- its told almost entirely from the point of view of the first person narrator, David Copperfield himself;
- its considered a Bildungsroman;
- it has one major theme throughout, the disciplining of the heros emotional and moral life-we learn to go against the
first mistaken impulse of the undisciplined heart;
- the characters and events are used as comparisons and contrasts for each other in terms of wisdom and discipline;
- the major characters get some measure of what they deserve and few narrative threads are left hanging;
- the serialization affected his audiences reading experience;
- the beginning and ending of chapters become narrative stress points, crucial in emphasizing the novels thematic
messages;
- chapter titles mark important stages in Davids life and the construction was affected by artistic issues and finances
- a Bildungsroman it presents itself as an autobiography with the mature David Copperfield writing his life story
beginning with what he has been told about his birth;
- the structure involves a movement from nave innocence and total inexperience through a series of mishaps and
apprenticeships toward a more mature state of experienced knowledge about the world and self-confidence;
- the mature narrator shares the adult readers worldly view of the novels characters;
- the narrator sympathetically portrays the world from the childs point of view
c) Themes:
1) Class consciousness:
- characters represent different classes and illustrate the wide gulf between the classes in Victorian England;
- Dickens has mixed feelings about class consciousness but he portrays the family with an honesty and
goodness of nature that is lacking in many upper-class characters;
- his attitude illustrates the progressive yet cautious attitude that was emerging in the more liberal circles of
Victorian England: an effort to narrow the gap between the classes, but not to close it entirely;
2) Criticism of social institutions:
- the novel attacks social institutions Dickens viewed as unjust and cruel: school system, prison system;
- he exposes inequities but offers no solutions
d) Historical context:
- the beginnings of social change:
- British society was divided at the end of the eighteenth century roughly into three classes: the aristocracy,
the gentry and the yeoman class;
- as people in the lower middle classes became more prosperous, they began to emulate their social betters;
- David Copperfield both reinforces and challenges the periods attitudes toward women;
- most female characters operate within the confines of the middle class;
- Dickens was one of the first to chronicle in his fiction the monotonous, harsh and sordid life of this group of
people
e) Criticism:
- he is considered one of the great Victorian novelists;
- Tolstoy regarded Dickens as the best of all English novelists and considered Copperfield to be his finest work;
- it was Freuds favorite novel
ROBINSON CRUSOE
by Daniel Defoe
a) Introduction:
- a popular adventure narrative;
- it is regarded the first novel in English;
- its a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical
island near Venezuela;
- Defoes initial inspiration for Crusoe is usually thought to be a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk;
- the character of Robinson Crusoe is recognized as a literary and cultural icon, like Don Quixote, Don Juan and Faust;
- despite its simple narrative style and the absence of the supposedly indispensable love motive, the book is considered
one of the most widely published books in history
b) Style:
- its a fictional autobiography written from a first-person point of view written by an old man looking back on his life;
- it includes material from an incomplete diary;
- it can be viewed as a spiritual or religious fable;
- it has similarities to the four different types of spiritual fable: Crusoe keeps a diary, the guide or advice
tradition(aimed at particular audiences-seamen, farmers, young people, women) to point out the danger of human
existence, especially their own, the tale of Providence(God is believed to be a being who intervenes in the affairs of
people) and the pilgrim allegory(a young man leaves his home and consequently isolates himself from God);
- Defoes use of realism or verisimilitude is perhaps the most singular aspect of the work, he popularize modern
realism;
- the realistic elements include the lists, time scale, repetition, diary and Crusoes ordinary nature;
- Defoe presents Crusoes life chronologically the details of his life and activities mark the passage of time;
- many critics view Robinson Crusoe as an allegory for Defoes life
c) Themes:
1) Fear:
- Crusoe must overcome his fear in order to survive his long ordeal on the desert island;
- he masters his fear when he faces the ultimate challenge the devil
2) Human condition:
- the novel is a meditation on the human condition and an argument for challenging traditional notions about
the condition;
- his original sin is his rejection of a conventional life
3) Money:
- money is an important theme, Crusoe details how much money he has, what he does with it and what he
gains by his actions
4) Industrialization:
- it is defined here as a process whereby humans channel the forces of nature into the production and
manufacture of goods for their economic consumption;
- this industrialization is Crusoes occupation according to his cultural background and his religion
5) Religious:
- according to J.P. Hunter, Robinson is not a hero, but an everyman, he is filled with religious aspects;
- Defoe was himself a Puritan moralist writing books on how to be a good Puritan Christian;
- the Biblical story of Jonah is alluded to in the first part of novel. Like Jonah, Crusoe neglects his duty and
is punished at sea;
- Crusoe often feels himself guided by a divinely ordained fate
- novelist James Joyce eloquently noted that the true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe;
- Crusoe attempts to replicate his own society on the island;
- the term Robinson Crusoe is virtually synonymous with the word castaway and is often used as a
metaphor for being or doing something alone;
- in 1719 England was a more tolerant and stable country, the wages of workers were high and
unemployment low;
- before the colonialist can begin to work, security precautions must be taken;
- Defoe hoped to persuade the English people to engage in the good work;
- Defoes novel encourages England to emulate the Puritans in their success;
- he believed that Englishmen were destined to succeed at colonialism;
- Robinson Crusoe is a religious instruction manual, cautioning the people of England against capital
speculation or abandonment of their Puritan work ethic
e) Criticism:
- Robinson Crusoe did not revolutionize the book industry in London, but it was a great commercial success;
- critical reaction to Robinson Crusoe is generally negative or patronizing;
- Theophilus Cibber praises Defoe for his moral conduct and invincible integrity;
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau recommended Robinson Crusoe because it should be given to children for it teaches them
self-sufficiency;
- Sir Walter Scott praised the work for its realism;
- Karl Marx deemed the work as capitalist propaganda
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
by Jane Austen
a) Introduction:
- the most famous of Jane Austens novel;
- one of the first romantic comedies in the history of the novel;
- initially called First Impressions, but never published under that title
b) Style:
- it was written during the middle of the Romantic period in western literature;
- its itself rather uncharacteristic of other fictional works of the period;
- Austens works are models of restraint;
- she concentrates on family life in small English towns, she emphasizes a balance between reason and emotion;
- instead of suicide and unrequited love, she offers elopement and marriage;
- irony is the chief literary device Austen uses to comment on the small, enclosed world of the English gentry;
- her irony takes different forms for different characters
c) Themes:
1) Pride:
- the two major themes are summed up in the title;
- the first aspect can be traced in the actions and statements of all of the works major and many of its minor
characters;
- in some characters, Austen depicts pride overtly or treads pride less directly;
- for Darcy and Elizabeth, pride can be more than a simple negative quality;
- pride serves several different functions in the novel;
- there are characters who neglect to honor their pride when they should protect it
2) Prejudice:
- its directly linked to Elizabeth Bennets character;
- there are two sorts of people: the simple ones and the intricate ones;
- Elizabeth is prepared to divide the entire world into one of these categories-an extreme example of
prejudice in the pre-judging sense of term
3) Change and transformation:
- Darcy begins his process of transformation with Elizabeths rejection of his suit;
- the characters mature and come to a better understanding of each other by the novels end through a slow
and painful growth process
- Jane Austens major novels were all composed within a short period of about twenty years;
- those 20 years mark a period in history when England was at the height of its power;
- England stood as the bulwark against French revolutionary extremism and against Napoleonic imperialism;
- this coincides with the great English military victories over Napoleon and the French: the Battle of the Nile,
the Battle of Waterloo
- a large wealthy class and an even larger middle class; these are the people that Austen depicts in Pride and
Prejudice, the landed gentry who have earned their property;
- they have few of the manners and graces of the aristocracy;
- Austens works are very little impacted by the French Revolution and revolutionary rhetoric;
- contemporary English society is a preoccupation of this novel;
- fashion of the time was influenced by French styles, styles were influenced by the costumes of the Roman
Republic
e) Criticism:
- those people that criticized the novel complained that the author of the book(who was unknown at the time) depicted
socially and morally unrefined people;
- two reviews were published anonymously in the British Critic and the Critical Review;
- both reviewers praised the novels readability;
- Southam says that the novel offended their sense of the rightness of the world;
- the critical history was just as varied as the evolution of the novel itself;
- most respected critical opinion was strongly biased against novels and novelists;
- criticism of Austens works as a whole was delayed until after her death;
- twentieth century critics began to overturn the Victorian concept of Austen as an amateur artist uncommitted to
creating great literature;
- Austen criticism has exploded since 1939;
- Austen dramatizes the delicate and precarious nature of a society based on an ecology of manners;
- feminists have criticized Austens portrayal of women as being too passive. None of the women ever take active
control of their lives, they must wait until men act;
- men must take care of women;
- Austen doesnt know how to write male characters well, much of the dialog in the novel is given to women;
- some critics have suggested that Austen herself was not familiar enough with men to write believable male characters;
- Austens writings had great influence on a number of writers throughout the century: Dickens, Thackeray, George
Eliot
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by Charles Dickens
a) Introduction:
- its written in a semiautobiographical style;
-its the story of the orphan Pip, tracing his life from his early days of childhood until adulthood;
- the story is drawn on Dickens experiences of life and people;
- the action takes place from Christmas Eve, when the protagonist is about seven years old;
- its second-to-last complete novel
b) Style:
- point of view: the first-person narrator is an adult Pip who tells the story in his own voice and from his own memory;
- the voice can so intimately recall the many small details of a little boys fear and misery, as well as the voices and
dialects of others;
- Pip uses adult vocabulary and concepts in these reflections;
- the story unfolds chronologically from Pips earliest memories to his most recent experiences, Pips development is
most believable for modern readers;
- bildungsroman: Pip must work out his problems and sort out reality from his childhood dreams by trial and error and
learning from his mistakes;
- first comes his education, demonstrating that becoming a gentleman means more than having material wealth;
- the most important lessons come from his analysis of real people and events in his society;
- Pip finds honor in his own name, he finds that the requirements of maturity are taking responsibility for ones actions
and this is what Pip must do by the end of the novel;
- he has been ashamed of his country life and friends;
- the true nobility is in his homecoming which is similar to the biblical prodigal sons return;
- comic relief: Pip is always glad to slip away to Wemmicks miniature castle, complete with a tiny moat and cannon
where all good things see possible again in this stronghold against the evil of the outer world;
- the fragility of the situation makes Wemmicks house seem all the moral magical;
- setting: the distinctions between the city, the town and the country are the most apparent shifts in Pips story;
- all of them harbor dangerous elements and carry the forces of good; the difference is that the marsh folk are more
obvious in their desires;
- of the three, the city is least likely to recognize individuality
c) Themes:
1) Alienation and loneliness:
- an analysis of the fate of the outsider;
- at least four known orphans have suffered loneliness, but each character reacts differently;
- Pip is quite lucky to have two good friends who love him for himself and can forget about his social status;
- Pip is the one character who works his way out of alienation and loneliness into a socially active life that is
enriched by love shared with friends
2) Identity: search for self:

- as a child, Pip is small for his age and quite weak, physically and temperamentally;
- he finally takes charge of his future and enjoys the love of his family and friends, realizing that they are his
most precious wealth;
- having been first a pauper, then a man of being true to ones convictions, as Pip learns;
- Pip himself must realize that he broke Joes heart when he left the forge and again when he stayed out of
contact for eleven years;
- he hurts Biddy by telling here that he could never love her, even though he returns intending to ask her to
marry him after he has lost all of his money;
- Pips final lesson was that power is not related to happiness and that one can only be a victim by permitting
it;
- the pleasure of power as victimizer is short-lived and unsatisfying
3) Guilt and innocence:
- Pip finds that guilt and innocence are much more complex than he first thought;
- he must first deal with own conscience outside of the English courts;
- the guilty are punished by a power higher than any kings;
- everyone who acts unjustly in the novel is made to either suffer and repent or to die without
forgiveness
- industrialization: nineteenth century England had flourishing cities and emerging industries, machines made
it possible for those with money to invest to earn great profits, especially with an abundance of poor people;
- the new money caused new needs;
- a middle class gradually emerged where before there had been only the aristocrats who were born wealthy
and the lower classes;
- in many ways, Pip represents the kind of middle class gentleman that was quite common during this time
e) Criticism:
- Victorian era audiences were more likely to have appreciated the melodramatic scenes and the revised;
- modern critics have little but praise for Dickens brilliant development of timeless themes: fear and fun, loneliness
and luck, classis and social justice, humiliation and honor;
- some critics point out that the original ending is better because it is more realistic since Pip must earn the selfknowledge;
- Victorian audiences eagerly followed the story of Pip assuming that the protagonists love and patience would win out
in the end;
- in the Victorian era, reading fiction was an extremely favorite pastime, the fact that Victorian novels were published in
installments had a great effect on the characteristics and style of those novels including fantastic and extremely
complex plots;
- many publishers and readers felt that autobiographical stories were more appropriate for publication;
- the main action of the novel involves Pips expectations to improve his lot in life and the three stages of his
transformation from a poor boy living in a small town into a gentleman successful in the world of Victorian commerce;
- Pip becomes a snob and more and more embarrassed by his past, by his home by his loyal and true friends;
- through the stages of his personal and psychological development, Pip experiences a change of heart and learns the
value of a true friend;
- some critics have found an unusual opportunity for understanding the place of women in Victorian culture and their
role in Victorian fiction by studying the women in this novel
ALICES ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
by Lewis Carroll
a) Introduction:
- a work of literary nonsense, a classic example of the genre and of English literature in general;
- the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantastic realm populated by peculiar and
anthropomorphic creatures;
- its filled with allusion to Dodgsons friends and enemies and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected
to memorize;
- the tale plays with logic in ways that have made the story of lasting popularity with adults as well as children, it is
considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense and its narrative course and
structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre;
- the term Wonderland from the title has entered the language and refers to a marvelous imaginary place, or else a
real-world place that one perceives to have dream like qualities;
- a funhouse mirror version of a childs journey through the adult world, specifically the world of upper-class Victorian
England
b) Style:
- parody: it was originally told to entertain a little girl, a parody which adopts the style of the serious literary work and
applies it to an inappropriate subject for humorous effect; most of the songs and poems are parodies of well-known
Victorian poems. Carrolls parodies have outlived the originals they mock is the fact that they are excellent humorous
verses in their own right, they emphasize the underlying senselessness of Wonderland and highlight Alices own sense
of displacement
- narrator: there is another voices besides those of Alice and the characters she encounters; the third person narrator of
the story maintains a point of view that is very different from that of the heroine, the narrator steps in to explain Alices
thoughts to the reader
- point of view: the narrator has an impartial voice, the point of view is very strongly connected with Alice, events are
related as they happen to her and are explained as they affect her
- language: the inhabitants twist the meaning of words; Carroll plays with language by including many puns and other
forms of word play, the power of language is also evident in the way Alice continually offends the inhabitants of
Wonderland, often quite unintentionally
c) Themes:
1) Identity:
- it has been one of the most analyzed books of all time;
- the physical sign of her loss of identity is the changes in size that take place when she eats or drinks;
- for Alice, the question of identity is a vital one
2) Coming of age:
- the question of why Alice is so confused about her identity has to do with her developing sense of the
difference between childhood and adulthood;
- she is surrounded by adult figures and figures of authority: the Duchess, the Queen, the King;
- even the animals she encounters treat her as a Victorian adult might treat a small child;
- it is a very affirming book for children, it offers them a path by which they can find their own way into the
power of adulthood
3) Absurdity:
- everything about Wonderland is absurd by Alices standards, Alice tries to understand the twisted
Wonderland logic;
- none of the rules she has been taught seem to work here;
- the inhabitants meet her politeness with rudeness and respond to her questions with answers that make no
sense
- the Victorian age in England: the book has become timeless classic, it nonetheless clearly reflects its
Victorian origins in its language, its class-consciousness and its attitude toward children, the Victorian age
named for the long rule of Britains Queen Victoria, spanned the years 1837 to 1901;
- the early Victorian era marked the emergence of a large middle-class society for the first time in the history
of the Western world family values: polite society avoided mentioning sex, sexual passions, bodily
functions, body parts, many middle-class Englishmen and women seeking to find morally uplifting and
mentally stimulating thoughts in their reading and other entertainments;
- Victorian views of childhood: many upper-middle0class Victorians had a double view of childhood,
childhood was regarded as the happiest period of a persons life, a simple and uncomplicated time; some
Victorians also neglected their children; the emphasis on manners and good breeding is reflected in Alices
adventures, Alices own experiences suggest that Carroll felt that childrens feelings and emotions were fully
as complex as any adult emotions;
- The early development of childrens literature: most early Victorian fairy-stories and other works for
children were intended to promote what contemporaries believed was good and moral behavior on the
part of children, most of the verses and poems Carroll included in the story are parodies of popular Victorian
songs and ballads, twisted so that their didactic points are lost in the pleasure of wordplay
e) Criticism:
- critics have viewed it as a work of philosophy, as a criticism of the Church of England, as full of psychological
symbolism, and as an expression of the drug culture of the 1960s;
- it is one of the most widely interpreted pieces of literature ever produced, Victorians praised Carrolls wordplay and
brilliant use of language;
- critics after his death found psychological clues to Carrolls own subconscious in the books curious dream-structure
and the strange and often hostile creatures of Wonderland, they continue to find new readings and new meanings in
Carrolls stories for children, they mentioned his parodies, his use of language and his literary style;
- the critics analyzed the stories from many points of view: political, philosophical, metaphysical, psychoanalytic, often
evaluating the tales as products of Dodgsons neuroses and as reactions to Victorian culture;
- critics conclude that Carroll was a closet pedophile, they are able to agree about the meaning of the Alice books, they
conclude that the stories are primarily games, stories invented by a man who loved young children and who loved to
invent his own word-games and mind-puzzles, they think that his story is the work of a lonely and brilliant man who
found consolation in the company of children and tried to repay some of the debt he felt.
TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES
by Thomas Hardy
a) Introduction:
- it was considered quite scandalous and fortune, it was one of Hardys last;
- a milkmaid is seduced by one man, married and rejected by another and eventually murders the first one;
- the novel is considered a great classic of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared in
part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardys day;
- its praised as a courageous call for righting many of the ills Hardy found in Victorian society and as a link between
the late Victorian literature of the end of the nineteenth century and that of the modern era;
- it tells the story of a girl who is seduced and has a child who dies; when she meets another man she wants to marry,
she is unable to tell him about her past until after their wedding, her husband abandons her and Tess is driven by
despair into the arms of her former seducer; when her husband returns, Tess kills the man she is living with
b) Style:
- narrator: Hardy uses a third-person narrator with an omniscient point of view to offer his philosophical insights on
the action; at several spots in the novel, Hardys narrator loses his omniscient ability and comments on the story
through the eyes of a storyteller of local history;
- setting: it takes place in Wessex, an invented territory based on the Dorset countryside where Hardy was born and
which fascinated him his entire life; time of year is also important in the novel as Hardy uses the changing of the
seasons over the period of about five years as representative of the changing fortunes of his heroine;
- symbolism: several characters have symbolic names as well, Angel and Tess are symbolically associated with Adam
and Eve of the Bible
c) Themes:
1) Fate and chance:
- the characters appear to be under the control of a force greater than they
2) Culture Clash:
- during Tesss time, the industrialization of the cities was diminishing the quality of life of the inhabitants of
rural areas, the contrast between what is rural(and therefore good) and what is urban(and therefore bad)
3) Knowledge and ignorance:
- knowledge causes conflict between those who see the truth of a situation and those who are ignorant, Tess
and Angel feel isolated from their parents
4) Natural law:
- Hardys contrast between false knowledge and knowledge that allows insight into the needs and desires of
others is also seen in his insistence on a natural law that exists independent of humanity
5) God and religion:
- the arbitrary law of society that Hardy criticizes is a product of organized religion, his religious characters
are pious hypocrites except for Angels father who appears to have a good heart
6) Sex:
- Victorian society preferred to avoid talking about sex;
- in this novel, sex is often associated with nature, it is presented as a natural part of life
- Darwin and social darwinism: the last fifty years of the nineteenth century saw innovations in science and
technology that changed society to a greater degree than ever before; the theory of evolution popularized by
naturalist Charles Darwin was that humans were descended from apes changed accepted views of religion
and society, it shocked the Victorians to think that their ancestors were animals; a complementary theory
called Social Darwinism was formulated, the existence of lower classes could be explained by their inferior
intelligence and initiative in comparison to that of the upper classes
- Women in Victorian society: Hardy considers both the rights of man and with equal sympathy, the rights
of women; women of the Victorian era were idealized as the helpmate of man, the keeper of the home and the
weaker sex; heroines in popular fiction were expected to be frail and virtuous, the Victorian era was a time of
national pride and belief in British superiority; the term Victorian has come to refer to any person or group
with a narrow, uncompromising sense of right and wrong, women were discriminated against by the moral
code and by the legal code of the day
e) Criticism:
- some critics believe the novel would have been better if Hardy could have remained silent and let actions of the
characters tell the story;
- the critics admitted that even with a poor story, good technique could have saved the novel;
- Andrew Lang found the characters to be far from plausible, the story beyond belief and Hardys use of
psychological terminology unskillful;
- Albert Guerard said that Hardy the novelist is a major transitional figure between the popular moralists and popular
entertainer of Victorian fiction and the serious, visionary, often symbolizing novelists of today
THE SCARLETT LETTER
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
a) Introduction:
- a romance: a woman taken in adultery, she must wear the letter A on her chest for all to see, yet she surrounds it with
beautiful stitching, so that it advertises not only her shame but also her skill as a seamstress; she refuses to name her
lover, she keeps her word not to reveal the identity of her husband now calling himself Roger Chillingworth and raises
her daughter, Pearl, on her own, living at the edge of town, near the wild forest and the open sea; the book is about
labeling, about the Puritan and later the American desire to eliminate ambiguity, to get the meanings right;
- its his magnum opus
b) Style:
- narrator: one of the most obvious problems is determining the identity of the narrator;
- symbolism: its rich with symbols, its largely regarded as the first symbolic novel in America; a symbol is like a
metaphor, something that stands for or represents something else; the term symbol is used to describe a substitution
with more power or profound meaning;
- setting: the entire novel takes place in and around the small colonial town of Boston, Massachusetts; what lies outside
the town is a black forest, strongly symbolic of moral absence and evil;
- ambiguity: the meaning or truth will be profoundly difficult to uncover
c) Themes:
1) Individual and society:
- the novel describes the psychological anguish of two principle characters, their mutual sin of adultery in a
strict Puritan society, the author represents the stern and threatening force of Puritan society, he symbolizes
the force of the Puritans civil and religious authority in this prison-door; the action of the novel maintains
the conflict of the individual with society
- stability, change and transformation
3) Ambiguity:
- truth and deception imply a firm moral order; ambiguity implies the incapacity to know anything for certain,
is much closer to what the novel describes
4) Guilt and innocence sin:
- its a novel about sin and guilt, its an allegory, involving significant episodes and issues from American
history;
- sin and knowledge are linked in the Judeo-Christian tradition; the Puritan elders insist on seeing earthly
experience as merely an obstacle on the path to heaven, they view sin as a threat to the community that
should be punished and suppressed
- the Transcendentalist movement: colonial seventeenth-century New England; the novel is considered a
historical romance written in the midst of the American literary movement called transcendentalist
- Abolitionism and revolution: lower and middle classes against established power and authority
- the Puritan Colonies: the novel was written in the mid-nineteenth century
e) Criticism:
- Evert Duyckinck called the tale a psychological romance, a study of character in which the human heart is
anatomized, carefully;
- Henry James considered it not as a work of entertainment but one of serious art, he declared that the novel was the
finest piece of imaginative writing, he considered an almost ridiculous level of symbolic effect;
- most modern critics have wrangled with this novel unresolved tensions, carpenters find the narrative generally
characterized by a confusion between romantic immorality and transcendental idealism;
- Baym suggests that its arguably the most important work of fiction ever written in America
LEAVES OF GRASS
by Walt Whitman
a) Introduction:
- poetry collection, a major work, original masterpiece that introduced Whitmans own poetic form, the lyric epic;
- both its form and content departed markedly from poetic conventions of the day, he wrote entirely in free verse and
combined the traditional historical subject matter of epic poetry with the personal, subjective focus of lyric poetry;
- its delight in and praise of the senses during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral;
- the poetry exalted the body and the material world, influenced by the transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot of
Romanticism
b) Style:
- it praises nature and the individual humans role in it;
- Whitman does not diminish the role of the mind or the spirit;
- he elevates the human form and the human mind
- Whitman's major concern was to explore, discuss, and celebrate his own self, his individuality and his personality.
Second, he wanted to eulogize democracy and the American nation with its achievements and potential. Third, he
wanted to give poetical expression to his thoughts on life's great, enduring mysteries birth, death, rebirth or
resurrection, and reincarnation.
c) Themes:
1) The self:
- the complete self is both physical and spiritual. The self is man's individual identity, his distinct quality and
being, which is different from the selves of other men, although it can identify with them. The self is a
portion of the one Divine Soul. Whitman's critics have sometimes confused the concept of self with egotism,
but this is not valid.
2) The body and the soul:
- he thought that we could comprehend the soul only through the medium of the body. To Whitman, all matter
is as divine as the soul; since the body is as sacred and as spiritual as the soul, when he sings of the body or
its performances, he is singing a spiritual chant.
3) Nature:
- nature is divine and an emblem of God. The universe is not dead matter, but full of life and meaning. He
loves the earth, the flora and fauna of the earth, the moon and stars, the sea, and all other elements of nature.
He believes that man is nature's child and that man and nature must never be disjoined.
- when Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, the United States was entering a period of great internal
political conflict that would culminate 40 years later with the Civil War. During the first half of the
Nineteenth Century, the young nation was growing and expanding its territorial holdings as daring easterners
and newly arrived immigrants headed west across the Mississippi River to explore and settle the western
frontier. In his poetry, Whitman describes these settlers as intrepid Americans who were inspired by a
determined pioneering spirit, a need for raw materials
e) Criticism:
- critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested that Whitman was guilty of that horrible sin not to be mentioned among
Christians, he calls it a mass of stupid filth and categorized its author as a filthy free lover;
- Oliver Stevens wrote that Leaves of Grass constituted obscene literature;
- critic William Michael Rossetti considered it a classic along the lines of the works of William Shakespeare
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
by Mark Twain
a) Introduction:
- one of the greatest American novels ever written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person
by the eponymous Huck Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer;
- colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River, it has been popular with young readers since its
publication;
- it does not have the definite article The as a part of its proper title and writer Sara Baker has hypothesized that this
absence represents the fundamentally uncompleted nature of Hucks adventures;
- the greatest literary achievement America has yet produced;
- inspired by many of the authors own experiences, the book tells of two runaways- a white boy and a black man- and
their journey down the mighty Mississippi River
b) Style:
- the first person point of view: Huck describes the story in his natural, everyday voice, and he addresses his readers
directly during his storytelling with a friendly, trusting attitude. Taking that into consideration along with Hucks age,
education level, and social background Twains choice of a colloquial style makes perfect sense.
- the grammar isnt perfect, and clearly Twain writes the way Huck Finn talks (hence all the apostrophes subbing for
unpronounced letters). Its also important to note that Hucks voice as well as the era and the location in which the
novel is set is why the n-word pops up so often. Throughout its publication, Huckleberry Finn has been banned
numerous times because of the inclusion of that word.
- besides nailing Hucks education level, social background, and personality, Twain succeeded in telling the story
convincingly through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old, theres quite a bit of dramatic irony throughout the novel
c) Themes:
1) Freedom:
- he feels more like himself in the backwoods, Huck is clearly running from a civilization that attempts to
control him
2) Conscience:
- Hucks main struggle in the book is with his conscience, he turns his back forever on societys ethics, Huck
is in moral conflict with the received values of the society he lives in and he is unable to consciously refute
those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jims friendship
and human worth
3) Race and racism:
- no clear-cut stance on race and racism emerges, he reveals his prejudice towards black people
4) Narrator:
- it was a breakthrough in American literature for its presentation of Huck Finn, an adolescent boy who tells
the story in his own language, the novel employs the childs perspective and the vernacular a language
specific to a region or group of people
5) Setting:
- it takes place when slavery was at its height in America, the novel addresses in a roundabout way the
prejudices of southern whites that had laid the foundation for slavery and were still omnipresent in the
Reconstruction South of Twains time; the physical setting of the novel, most specifically the river and the
raft, has also drawn the attention of critics
6) Burlesque:
- burlesques, or parodies of evelated or serious forms of literature, were popular as far back as Shakespeare,
the author used the technique to critique the aristocratic pretensions of the King and Duke and the romantic
fantasies of Tom Sawyer
7) Realism and regionalism:
- Twain was a major contributor to the interconnected Realist and Regionalism movements; realism refers to
the insistence on authentic details in descriptions of setting and the demand for plausible motivations in
characters behaviors; writers of the Regionalist movement also adhered to the principles, Regionalist
techniques are exemplified in the novel by the specific and richly detailed setting and the novels insistence
on dialect
- Slavery: the issue of slavery threatened to divide the nation as early as the Constitutional Convention of
1787
- Reconstruction: the novel takes place before the Civil War, it was written in the wake of Reconstruction, the
period directly after the Civil War
- Minstrel shows: Twain used its humorous effects to challenge the racial stereotype on which it was based,
minstrel shows featured white men in black face and outrageous costumes, the men played music, danced and
acted burlesque skits, but the central feature of the show was the exaggerated imitation of black speech and
mannerism which produced a stereotype of blacks as docile, happy and ignorant
e) Criticism:
- Hemingway declared that all modern American literature comes from Huck Finn;
- respected scholars have claimed the book as the core text of an American literary canon, the debate over the books
racial messages has more recently become the center of debate amongst literary scholars as well;
- Twain reveals his racism and for many critics, his conscious intentions about racial messages are not the issue, he uses
a great deal of irony in general
10
MOBY DICK
by Herman Melville
a) Introduction:
- an encyclopedic work in which the first person voice of the narrator, Ishmael, fractures into multiple voices, it is the
most discussed work in American literary history, it probes many themes that remain salient in our time: religious,
philosophical, environmental and sexual;
- the story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaling ship Pequod commanded
by Captain Ahab;
- Melville employs stylized language, symbolism and metaphor to explore a number of complex themes which he
believes are universal; the concepts of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of gods are all examined
as Ishmael speculates upon his personal beliefs and his place in the universe;
- it is considered one of the greatest novels in the English language
b) Style:
- point of view: the narrative voice in this novel is to be more obviously fictional
- symbolism: the passages providing reference information on whales and whaling, which sometimes seem clumsily
inserted into the narrative
- structure: he introduces very short chapters, some barely a page in length, and puts words into the mouths of his
characters as if they are performing on the Elizabethan stage; it remains a difficult book to complete on first encounter
- epic style: verbal palette these include his fondness for verbal nouns such as regardings, intercedings which
give passages of the novel the magisterial tone of an ancient classic text
c) Themes:
1) Individual and nature:
- the voyage of the Pequod is no straightforward, commercially inspired whaling voyage, Melville explores
the attributes of natural forces
2) God and religion:
- the conflict between the individual and nature brings into play the theme of religion and Gods role in the
natural world
3) Good and Evil, Female and Masculine:
- Ahab picks his fight with evil on its own terms, striking back aggressively; the good things in the book(the
loyalty of members of the crew such as young Pip, Ahabs domestic memories of his wife and child) remain
peripheral and ineffective; the sky and air, home for the birds is described as feminine while the sea is
masculine, a deep dungeon for murderous brutes; contrasted with the sea is the land, seen as green and mild,
a tranquil heaven
4) Choices and consequences:
- Ahab is both a hero and a villain, his monomania or obsession chains him to a fate worse than that which
might have prevailed had he not so stubbornly pursued his goal, Ahab is finally seen as both defined and
consumed by fate
5) Appearance and reality:
- ongoing consideration of the meaning of appearances
6) Symbolism:
- all of the members of the crew have biblical-sounding, the narrator is deliberately casting his tale in an epic
and allegorical mode; the book contains multiple implicit and explicit allusions to the story of Jonah, the
name Ishmael appears in the Bible as that of the first son of Abraham in the Old Testament and the name has
come to symbolize orphans, exiles and social outcasts; the symbolism of the whale is not clear: many things
include nature, providence and fate; in popular culture, Moby Dick is often depicted as being an albino whale
and it appears to be unusually intelligent
- America in the Mid-Nineteenth century: America was in a tumultuous period, establishing its national and
international identity at the time Moby Dick was being written; it is about pursuit and capture, about
following a dream; the book is not about its time, but about ours
- Self-reliance: transcendentalism was becoming the predominant philosophical and religious viewpoint
- the American whaling industry: Moby Dick was written at a time when the American whaling industry,
propelled by home demand, was at its peak, the United States owned three quarters of the worlds whaling
ships
e) Criticism:
- the criticism of recent decades has been inclined to explore the idiosyncratic structure of Moby Dick in terms of
potential, rather than weaknesses and deficiencies and to treat the whale as the novels central character;
- Robert Lee interpreted the book in anatomical terms, searching for layers of meaning under the skin, Eric Mottram is
one of several critics who have discussed the novels erotic and sexual connotations in Freudian terms;
- H. Auden and Camille Paglia have written about the sexual symbolism in the novel;
- many critics praised it for its unique style, interesting characters and poetic language, the style of his tale is in places
disfigured by mad English and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly and obscurely managed
11
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

by Henry James
a) Introduction:
- one of the greatest novels in modern literature; its heroine, Isabel Archer, is widely considered one of Jamess most
powerful characters;
- all the storys events and all the other characters exist only to serve the purpose of revealing Isabel to the reader;
- it is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who affronts her destiny and finds it
overwhelming; she inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming
by two American expatriates;
- it is set mostly in Europe, notably England and Italy;
- this novel reflects Jamess continuing interest in the differences between the New World and the Old, often to the
detriment of the former, it also treats in a profound way the themes of personal freedom, responsibility, betrayal and
sexuality;
- James was influenced by George Eliot who was a pioneer in minimizing the authors role in the story
b) Style:
- psychological realism: James is considered the foremost author of psychological realism, a subcategory of American
realism; the realist period in American literature followed Romanticism, a movement that produced stories of idealized
love and that elevated emotion above reason; the harsh realities of the Civil War suddenly made Romanticism
irrelevant; the year of the war end, 1865, marks the end of the Romantic period and the beginning of American
realism; its the story of Isabels mind and how it shapes her destiny and her character and for this and other masterful
tales of human psychology, James is considered the father of psychological realism
- point of view: modern readers are unlikely to take special notice of point of view in this book; the point of view that
James uses is common today, it was an innovation in Jamess time; in addition to telling the story, the author narrator
often inserted asides directly addressing the reader, commenting on the characters actions this gives fiction an
artificial quality; the author is always visible as an intermediary between the characters and the reader; this technique
of storytelling was not suitable to realism; James wanted readers to observe his characters directly and to interpret
characterss actions themselves; this book does have a third-person narrator, the narrator is not James and does not
intrude into the story
c) Themes:
1) American versus European character:
- Americans tend to be nave, energetic, practical, sincere, direct and spontaneous and they value the
individual above society; conversely, Europeans are sophisticated, lethargic, formal, insincere, obtuse and
scheming and they value society above the individual
2) Social and emotional maturation:
- Isabels social and emotional development is thrown into high relief by Jamess contrast of American and
European natures; James uses one theme, the contrasts between Americans and Europeans
3) Freedom versus responsibility:
- Isabels sexual fears and diffidence; she is eventually shown as capable of deep arousal; the plot became an
uncompromising story of the free-spirited Isabel losing her freedom and getting ground in the very mill of
the conventional
- Isabel, especially, is a product of Enlightenment ideas; the Enlightenment was a philosophical, political and
literary movement; Isabel and the other American characters are products of this movement whose lives show
how completely these ideas were adopted in the United States;
- the French revolution followed the American war of independence and represented the victory of
Enlightenment ideas in France;
- England was still very much a society based on wealth, class, tradition and the supremacy of society over
the individual
e) Criticism:
- the book was widely reviewed and most reviews were positive, some critics complained that there was nothing
realistic about James s stories in which everyone was wealthy and refined;
- James never pretended to write about all elements of human society, he wrote about the wealthy because it was the
wealthy and their problems that he was familiar with and interested in;
- the book shows James in the fullness of his powers, the sheer beauty, grace and assurance of the writing, almost
startling in the opening description of Gardencourt
12
HEART OF DARKNESS
by Joseph Conrad
a) Introduction:
- novella, the story is partly based on Conrads personal experiences as the captain of a riverboat on the Congo River
and was immediately interpreted as an indictment of the colonial rule of the Belgian government in the Congo; the
story is characterized by a narrative embedded in a narrative;
- the frame narrator relates a story told him by the sailor Charlie Marlow; Marlow relates his experiences as the
captain of a steamboat sent down the Congo River in the employ of an unnamed ivory company, ti retrieve Kurtz, a
company manager whose methods had become unsound;
- the central symbolism represents the darkness at the heart of mens soul the descent into an evil that lurks in the
hearts of all men; in this sense it is a psychological journey into the unconscious;
- the journey represents a descent into the darkness or evil of imperialism the greed for ivory and other resources
that characterized the exploitation of African people;
- this highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative
b) Style:
- narration: narrative technique is an important element of Conrads literary style; this story is structured as an
embedded narrative, this means that the central story, narrated by the fictional character Charlie Marlow is
embedded in a frame narrative whereby the frame narrator introduces Marlows character and presents the central
story as a direct quotation from Marlow; the narrator uses the metaphor of a nut indicating that for Marlow the
meaning of the story lies more in the shell(the narration) than in the nut(the central story); the bulk of the novel is
told in the form of a story recited by the character Marlow to a group of listeners and the conclusion is presented in the
form of a letter from Marlow; within Marlows narration, other characters also tell their own stories in nested dialogue;
events in the novel are described from several view points and often out of chronological order; the reader is left to
form an impression of Jims interior psychological state from these multiple external points of view but mere facts are
inadequate to explain the human condition
- setting: it takes place in England, as a group of men relax on a private yacht; the central story narrated by Marlow
takes place on the Congo River, in an area of Africa then colonized by the Belgian King Leopold II; the setting is
significant because the tale is based in part on Conrads own personal experiences as the captain of a riverboat in the
1890s
- imagery: light and darkness: contrast between the light white Europeans in Africa and the dark native Africans;
the light is suggestive of European civilization while the darkness refers to the culture of the African people which
Europeans perceived as primitive and savage; the light also represents the realm of that which is known and
understandable to the Europeans(their own culture and native land) as opposed to the unknown(darkness) mysterious
land, peoples and cultures of the African continent
c) Themes:
1) Civilization and the primitive:
- the symbolism that represents this theme is the opposition of light versus darkness; the imagery of light is
associated with Western culture, civilization, knowledge and the conscious mind and the imagery of darkness
is associated with Third World cultures, the primitive or savage; Conrads story is a critique of the racist
colonial mentality of the Europeans in Africa
2) Capitalist exploitation:
- Conrads story is critical of the methods of the white European Company; he also satirizes the values of
efficiency practiced by the Company as both irrational and inhumane
3) Race and racism:
- Conrads story is racist, it is clear that the issue of race and racism in the European colonies is a central
theme of the story
4) Lies:
- Marlows narrative includes an underlying theme regarding lies and lying; there is a taint of death, a flavor
of mortality in lies
- Apocalypse now: the 1978 film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola
- the Congo: the story is based on Conrads experiences as the captain of a steamboat in the Congo River, the
novel is largely autobiographical, it has sophisticated structure
e) Criticism:
- this is considered to be Conrads masterpiece;
- the reviewers interpreted the story in terms of Christian religious iconography;
- more recent critical debate on this story has focused on the issue of whether the story is actually a critique of racism
or if the story is based on a fundamentally racist perspective; they say that this story projects the image of Africa as the
other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization
13
LORD JIM
by Joseph Conrad
a) Introduction:
- a very difficult book for readers to understand, the most obvious technique that Conrad used was a shifting form of
narration in which the reader hears a tale first from one narrator then another and finally from several disparate
accounts;
- the story concerns a young man named Jim who undertakes the training to become a naval officer but his certificate is
revoked when he deserts his ship during a crisis leaving eight hundred Moslem pilgrims to what he thinks is a certain
death; Jim continually runs from this past, eventually to Patusan, a remote island in the Far East; here Jim starts fresh,
earning the respect of the natives who call him Lord Jim and attribute his many successes to supernatural powers
b) Style:
- narration: the reader is introduced to the title character
- Bildungsroman: it is a good example of a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story in which a young protagonist must
face painful challenges on his or her road to adulthood; bildungsromans are educational novels that show how other
young people have weathered the necessary initiation into adult society with its mature values
- modernism: Lord Jim is regarded by many as one of the best examples of literary modernism, a type of narrative
writing that distinguished itself from most other late-nineteenth-century novels; Conrad employs more than one
narrator, he keeps the reader in suspense by manipulating time in confusing ways; Conrad uses this technique of
delaying crucial background information many times in the novel; using complex narrative techniques like multiple
narrators and chronological ambiguity is a hallmark of the modern novel
c) Themes:
1) Betrayal:
- the idea of betrayal and the consequences that result from it
2) Heroism:
- Jim becomes a superior being in the eyes of the natives, and he finally achieves the heroism that he craves
3) Beliefs:
- what the characters believe is extremely important to understanding them
- Conrad wrote his novel at the dawn of the twentieth century, when the world was rapidly changing in many
ways; one of the biggest changes was the massive and widespread colonization of islands and other remote
lands by European countries and by the United States in many cases to establish trade or military posts
e) Criticism:
- Ross Murfin notes that the book was generally well received;
- reviewers throughout the twentieth century had various reactions to the work which was in retrospect identified as a
modernist creation for its tendency to break the narrative conventions of the day;
- Albert Guerard notes the ambiguity of the novel but talks about the psycho-moral implications which have no easy
solution;
- the novel has no one meaning and that it is based on a paradox that invites us to admire commitment to an ideal that
can never be justified
ULYSSES
by James Joyce
a) Introduction:
- one of the most important works of modernist literature;
- stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring and experimental prose-full of puns, parodies and allusions;
rich characterizations and broad humor;
- Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day; the title
alludes to the hero of Homers Odyssey and there are many parallels both implicit and explicit between the two works;
- the book has been the subject of much controversy and scrutiny since its publication ranging from early obscenity
trials to protracted textual Joyce Wars
b) Style:
- this poem is written in iambic pentameter which means that the rhythm is in segments of one unstressed syllable
followed by one stressed syllable;
- pentameter means that there are five of these segments five feet on each line;
- iambic meter is the most common metric pattern used in English poetry because it resembles the natural rise and fall
of the way we ordinarily speak the language; it has a constant rhythm and the lines have the same number of syllables;
14
- its form is called blank verse;

- it is used enjambment the running over of a sentence or thought from one line to the next without any punctuation at
the end of the line; this technique gives the reader the impression that the speakers thoughts are not prepared for
presentation
c) Themes:
1) Culture clash:
- the irony of holding the honored position of ruler of a nation but being completely unimpressed, the
population is so different in temperament than the ruler; Ulysses is aware of his own limits while he has
power to give his people commands, he cannot change them; he knows himself: he is a man of war, not of
politics, he is a man who understands how to make ships follow the currents, his personality is the exact
opposite of a good peacetime leader
2) Growth and development:
- he does not seem to believe that he can develop into a good king for Ithaca but instead considers himself to
be stuck forever with the personality he currently has; he feels that he could be a great king but does not feel
motivated to work toward it; he also shows how his nature has been changed throughout his life
3) Politics:
- the leaders are held accountable for their actions by the voting public; Ulysses travels should make him an
effective politician, because he has been exposed to different sorts of governments and councils that could
give him theories to apply in ruling; but he does not have the patience to transform his experience into
practice, he only hungers for more experience
4) Religious:
- Leopold Bloom is identified by other characters as a Jew, his religious identity is more complicated, he
would not be considered Jewish under Jewish law because the religion is conveyed matrilineally, he
converted to Catholicism in order to marry Molly Bloom
- Ulysses is a product of the Romantic Period when it was already established as an artistic movement;
- there seems to be no reason the Romantic and Victorian periods cannot be seen to exist during the same
period;
- the Romantic period came about when the development of democracy and the growth of cities forced artists
and philosophers to focus attention on the individual and to question the suffering that they might; it was a
time of optimism, of advancing the belief that society can be perfect;
- it was a time of humanism, a time when the arts came to be looked to; genius and creativity were valued;
- Ulysses has some elements of the coming Victorian attitude that eventually settled on the country but the
poems influences are strictly Romantic; the early part of Romanticism called the Age of Romantic Triumph
or the Classical Romantic Period was an especially vibrant time in literature
e) Criticism:
- the poem is generally well-regarded by critics;
- novelist George Eliot compared Ulysses to Homers ancient work;
- difficulty in interpreting the poems ultimate message has kept critics arguing for years;
- the poem is a dramatic monologue in which the entire poem is narrated by a single speaker;
- according to Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most
accurate edition published
CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA
by George Bernard Show
a) Introduction:
- a play written in 1898;
- Political comedy at its best, Caesar and Cleopatra takes on the themes of imperialism and leadership as only George
Bernard Shaw can. Set amidst the Roman conquest of Egypt, the play pits the mature statesmanship of Julius Caesar
against the nave ambition of Cleopatra. It imagines Caesar's first meeting with Cleopatra and their subsequent plotting
as Caesar attempts to subdue Egypt and Cleopatra tries to eliminate her brother and rival claimant for the throne.
Assassination and intrigue, romance and betrayal, all are dealt with in Shaw's inimitable comic style. Caesar and
Cleopatra represents a mature Shaw, who revolutionized the British theatre by combining exceptionally entertaining
comedy with incisive and relevant themes.
b) Themes:
- Shaw wanted to prove that it wasnt love but politics that drew Cleopatra to Julius Caesar, he saw the
Roman occupation of ancient Egypt as similar to the British occupation;
- Caesar understands the importance of good government;
15
- another theme is Shaws belief that people have not been morally improved by civilization and technology;
- another theme is the value of clemency: Caesar remarks that he will not stoop to vengeance when
confronted with Septimus, the murderer of Pompey
c) Historical context:
- Shaws philosophy has often been compared to that of Nietzsche; their shared admiration for men of action
shows itself in Shaws description of Caesars struggle with Pompey
d) Criticism:
- there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country
road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased
command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it
is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive
command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the
racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.
PYGMALION
by George Bernard Show
a) Introduction:
- a comedy about a phonetics expert who as a kind of social experiment, attempts to make a lady out of an uneducated
Cockney flower-girl;
- it did provoke controversy upon its original production; somewhat ironically, the cause was an issue of language;
- it tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he
can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak
with an upper class accent and training her in etiquette;
- the Pygmalion myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaws influences,
W.S. Gilbert who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea
b) Style:
- plotting with a purpose: it has a tightly-constructed plot, rising conflict and other qualities of the well-made play, a
popular form at the time; Shaw was greatly influenced by Henrik Ibsen who he claimed as a forerunner to his theatre of
discussion or ideas
- intellect and entertainment: Shaw broke both with the predominant intellectual principle of his day, that of art for
arts sake; he was for a theater which preached to its audience on social issues; Shaw succeeded because he
nevertheless understood what made a play theatrical, wrote scintillating dialogue and always created rich, complex
characters in the center of a philosophically complex drama
- romance: in calling Pygmalion a romance, Shaw was referencing a well-established literary form to which Pygmalion
does not fully conform; there is a romantic element between Liza and Higgins; romances have been distinguished from
more realistic forms by their exotic, exaggerated narratives and their idealized characters and themes; its a romance
because of the almost magical transformations which occur in the play and the idealized qualities to which the
characters aspire
c) Themes:
1) Appearances and reality:
- Pygmalion examines this theme primarily through the character of Liza and the issue of personal identity;
social roles in the Victorian era were viewed as natural and largely fixed
2) Beauty:
- Shaw interrogates beauty as a subjective value, ones perception of beauty in another person is shown to be
a highly complex matter, dependent on a large number of factors
- the transformation of Liza is central to the plot and theme; the truly important transformation Liza goes
through is the learning of independence and a sense of inner self-worth that allows her to leave Higgins
4) Identity:
- Shaw investigates conflicts between differing perceptions of identity and depicts the end result of Higgins
experiment as a crisis of identity for Liza, Lizas transformation is glorious but painful
5) Language and meaning:
- it points to a much wider range of varieties of spoken English; Shaw believed characteristics of social
identity such as ones refinement of speech were completely subjective ones; Shaw himself hated poor speech and the
varieties of dialect and vocabulary could present obstructions to conveying meaning
6) Sex roles:
- sex and gender have a great deal to do with the dynamics between Liza and Higgins, including the sexual
tension between them
16
7) Ubermensch(superman):
- Shaws belief in the Life Force and the possibility of human evolution on an individual or social level led
him to believe also in the possibility of the Superman
8) Wealth and poverty:
- class consciousness; Shaws play examines both the realities of class and its subjective markers; the
linguistic signals of social identity are simultaneously an issue of class
- World War I: the year of Pygmalions London premiere marked tremendous changes in British society
- Colonialism and the British Empire: in 1914 Great Britain was very much still a colonial power; the war
was itself simultaneously accelerated the development of nationalism and autonomy in the provinces;
Victorian values revolved around social high-mindedness(a Christian sense of charity and service)
- Industrialization: Pygmalion suggests the subjectivity of class identity and the rapid deterioration of many
pre-industrial social structures
- The rise of women and the working classes: the political power of the working class increased greatly,
through massive increases in trade union membership
e) Criticism:
- the critic expressed a curiosity about what the foundation idea of Pygmalion might be; there are plenty of ideas, but
none is predominant;
- many critics found the language of the play shocking;
- Eric Bentley found a play of singularly elegant structure a good play by perfectly orthodox standards needing no
theory to defend it;
- a popular debate developed as to whether there should have been a romantic ending between Higgins and Liza
MRS. DALLOWAY
by Virginia Woolf
a) Introduction:
- the action of the novel takes place during a single day in June 1923 in London;
- tunneling technique referring to the way her characters remember their pasts;
- the book is composed of movements from one character to another;
- the book has been called a flaneur novel which means it depicts people walking about a city;
- the books major competing themes are isolation and community or the possibilities and limits of communicativeness;
- a number of issues are feminism and madness displayed by the characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren
Smith
b) Style:
- narration and point of view: it shows the secure meshing of a third person narrators point of view with a first person,
characters point of view such that it is not possible to separate or distinguish the two; the author invented an elegant
and efficient way of moving between and representing multiple characters speech and thought; the clumsiness of
excessive dialogue or of switching between sequences of different characters thoughts presented in the first person is
avoided; related terms in literary criticism are reported thought and speech, free indirect discourse and stream-ofconsciousness
- time: Mrs. Dalloway is striking for the way that its events occur within a single day; the novel multiplies time by
presenting the thoughts of myriad characters, each of whom remember and experience time, the past and the present, in
different ways; in this novel, chronological time is only one sense of time as the characters bring the past into the
present
- character double: Septimus Warren Smith can be seen as Clarissas double in the novel; as a character double, he is a
character whose attributes and story fill out the character and story of Clarissa
c) Themes:
1) Consciousness:
- the novel is a relatively new literary form; the novel did not arise as a unique genre until the late eighteenth
century; Woolfs style represents a culmination of this connection between the novel and the individual; what
comes with being an individual is a sense of separateness and uniqueness, a sense of being apart; the novel is
a literary form of the individual, literary historians argue because novelists present and explore characters
who have significant interior lives
2) Social change:
- some critics believe that Mrs. Dalloway is an apolitical and an asocial novel about individual internal life as
opposed to social life; others insist that the political and social scene of Britain is changing significantly
17
- the New Modern Era: mercantilism and industrialism created a powerful new class; the cultural, political
and economic might of this new class, the bourgeoisie or middle-class, soon overtook that of the aristocratic
classes that had controlled nations and empires before; Mrs. Dalloway registers this sense of the end of an
era; England of this time had become radically modern in its move to a fuller social democracy, the political
system that still characterizes most modern nations today, including the United States
- WWI: WWI bears comparison with the Vietnam War
e) Criticism:
- it is a work of literature that can be classified as narrative fiction; it tells a story or a narrative that is fictional or madeup, but it is a novel without a plot; this essay examines what this means and why the author might have chosen to
eschew this typical narrative convention;
- considered equal to the likes of Shakespeare, James Joyce and Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf is indisputably one of
the English languages greatest literary voices;
- major topics in the criticism on Mrs. Dalloway are the significance of the opposition of Richard, parliamentarian and
politician and the seemingly apolitical, spoilt Clarissa, giver of parties and lover of beauty;
- many feminist critics suggest that this opposition of political styles is a gender issue;
- another topic in the criticism is an examination of Septimus and Clarissa as problems in psychology and mental health
THE GREAT GATSBY
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
a) Introduction:
- the novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the Jazz Age; he idolized the riches and glamour of the
age, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and lack of morality that went with it;
- it is a concentrated meditation on the American dream understood as the faith that anyone, even of the most humble
origins, can attain wealth and social standing in the United States through talent and individual initiative;
- it derives from Fitzgeralds having provided readers with an opportunity to simultaneously see through the pretenders
illusion and identify deeply with his aspirations and even love him for having made the effort;
- he viewed as the callousness and moral irresponsibility of the affluent American society of the 1920s; America at this
time experienced a cultural and lifestyle revolution
b) Style:
- point of view: it is told from the point of view of Nick Carraway, one of the main characters; the technique is similar
to that used by British novelist Joseph Conrad, one of Fitzgeralds literary influences and shows how Nick feels about
the characters
- setting: the setting is a crucial part; west and east are two opposing poles of values: one is pure and idealistic and the
other is corrupt and materialistic
- satire: the author wrote in the form of a satire, a criticism of societys foibles through humor; the elements of satire in
the book include the depiction of the nouveau riche(newly rich), the sense of vulgarity of the people, the parties
intended to draw Daisy over the grotesque quality of the name Great Gatsby in the title
c) Themes:
1) Culture clash:
- those in the Midwest were fair, relatively innocent, unsophisticated while those who lived in the East for
some time were unfair, corrupt and materialistic; the author romanticizes the Midwest; the materialism of the
East creates the tragedy of destruction, dishonesty and fear
2) American dream:
- Gatsby represents the American dream of self-made wealth and happiness, the spirit of youth and
resourcefulness and the ability to make something of ones self despite ones origins
3) Appearances and realy:
- since there is no real love between Gatsby and Daisy, there is no real truth to Gatsbys vision; hand in hand
with this idea is the appearances and reality theme; Gatsby is a lonely man
4) Moral corruption:
- the wealthy class is morally corrupt and the objective correlative is the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg; there are no
spiritual values in a place where money reigns; the traditional ideas of God and Religion are dead here and
the American dream is direly corrupted; this is no place for Nick who is honest
- the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: Jordan Baker is an athletic, independent woman who maintains a
hardened, amoral view of life; her character represents the new breed of woman in America with a sense of
power during this time
18
- New York city and the urban corruption: prohibition fostered a large underworld industry in many big cities,
including Chicago and New York
- the Black Sox Fix of 1919: Gatsby tells Nick that Wolfsheim was the man who fixed the World series back
in 1919
- the Cover Artwork: the Art Deco piece that he produced for the novel shows the outlined eyes of a woman
looking out of a midnight blue sky above the carnival lights of Coney Island in Manhattan
e) Criticism:
- Fitzgerald was generally praised for The Great Gatsby; it is usually considered to be his finest accomplishment and
the one most analyzed by literary critics;
- Lionel Trilling said that he did not fully realize his powers but his quality was a great one and on one occasion it was
as finely crystallized in art;
- William Rose Benet said that the book revealed matured craftsmanship;
- Ernest Hemingway praised the writer;
- critics found similarities between Fitzgerald and English poet John Keats and novelist Joseph Conrad;
- Gatsby was compared to Eliots poem The waste land;
- Gatsby has ironically been likened to Christ and Nick Carraway, the storyteller to Nicodemus in a Christian
interpretation of the novel;
- sociological, historical and biographical approaches to teaching literature have predominated in past decades
MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA
by Eugene ONeill
a) Introduction:
- it is considered his most ambitious work; he adapts the Greek myth Oresteia to nineteenth century New England;
- his play features themes of fate, revenge, hubris, adultery and honor; it is structured as a trilogy;
- as an updated Greek tragedy, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love and revenge and even a group of
townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus;
- the play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective; it is extraordinarily lengthy for a drama;
b) Style:
- chorus: traditionally in Greek tragedies, the chorus consists of masked actors who dance and chant; the groups of
local people whose conversations and actions open the plays serve as the chorus
- expressionism: it is a style of art that expresses internal experiences and psychological truth; such art does not present
a realistic image of world but instead tries to create in the viewer a powerful true experience of a particular emotion,
feeling or state of mind
- naturalism: it is a nineteenth century theory that developed in the wake of Darwins theory of evolution; naturalistic
drama presents a vision of human life as akin to that of animal nature; naturalistic elements include the ways the
characters personal histories and environments determine their actions and motivations
- realism: realistic drama avoids melodramatic acting, stagy effects and dramatic conventions
- setting: the setting refers to the place in which the plays actions take place; settings often have a symbolic value:
Greek temple, so the setting reminds us that the play itself offers a retelling of a cycle of Greek tragedies
c) Themes:
1) Revenge:
- revenge serves as a primary motivation for the plays actions; the Mannon family is a complex web of
revenge scenarios
2) Paradise:
- Paradise is an obsession for many of the plays characters; the island paradise offers erotic possibilities and
freedom from materialism and becomes a symbol of all that New England society is not
3) Incest:
- incest and incestuous desire lie behind most of the relationship
4) Sin and guilt:
- his work illustrates his fascination with sin, guilt, punishment and redemption; the sins include murder,
adultery, suicide and premarital sex
- his came of age during Americas Progressive Era; interested in politics and political philosophy;
- his symbolic use of the post-Civil War setting reveals his understanding of American history and ideology,
raising parallels between an earlier war fought for firm ideological beliefs and WWI which was fought in
large measure over colonial issues; he also compares New Englands nineteenth century Puritan heritage with
contemporary America
19
e) Criticism:
- Brooks Atkinson praised the playas Mr. ONeills masterpiece;
- according to George Jensen, he was an experimenter in technique who attempted ambitious projects;
- Barrett Clark criticized it for a lack of emotion;
- some critics characterize ONeills work as sensational, exploiting sex and violence without offering substantial
motivation or explanation;
- more than one critic believed the play would have benefited from cutting and compression and that the play reflects
his recurring concerns about the unsuccessful struggle of an individual to escape a tragic fate and the dark nature of
human existence
ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
by William Faulkner
a) Introduction:
- a southern Gothic novel; it is a story about three families of the American South taking place before, during and after
the Civil War with the focus of the story on the life of Thomas Sutpen;
- the title itself is an allusion to a wayward son fighting the empire his father built; the history of Thomas Sutpen
mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture; Sutpens failures necessarily reflect the weaknesses of an
idealistic South; Sutpen proves unwilling to honor his marriage to a black woman, setting in motion his own
destruction;
- any and all narratives, any and all reconstructions of the past remain irretrievable and therefore imaginative;
- the story concerns Thomas Sutpen, a poor man who finds wealth and then marries into a respectable family; his
ambition and extreme need for control bring about his ruin and the ruin of his family; Sutpens story is told by several
narrators allowing the reader to observe variations in the saga as it is recounted by different speakers;
- he readily condemns many aspects of its history and heritage in this story; he reveals the unsavory side of southern
morals and ethics, including slavery; the novel explores the relationship between modern humanity and the past
examining how past events affect modern decisions and to what extent modern people are responsible for the past
b) Style:
- narrative structure: the story becomes part of an oral tradition among the residents of Jefferson and people living
beyond Jefferson; long sentences, flashbacks, multiple points-of-view describing the same events; the narrative
structure is so unusual; there are four characters narrating the story and a fifth omniscient narrator also occasionally
speaks to the reader; Faulkner switches from narrator to narrator without always signifying the change; of the four
characters who narrate the story, none of them is completely reliable; by using various storytellers expressing their
interpretations of the facts, it alludes to the historical cultural zeitgeist of the old South where the past is always present
and constantly in states of revision by the people who tell and retell the story over time which give the story a strong
magical-realist element
- regionalism: it is a regional in scope although its themes extend well beyond the South; there are no dialects, the novel
portrays the manners, habits and lore of the South
- literary devices: a variety of literary techniques notably several significant instances of irony; he creates a mythic
atmosphere for Sutpens saga; the reiteration of the story is reminiscent of the legends and folktales kept alive; biblical
and classical allusion story of Absalom, a son of David who rebelled against his father
c) Themes:
1) The American South:
- Faulkner openly criticizes the ethical and moral practices of the American South; the novel contains
references to the Civil War and the destruction of the South in the wars aftermath
2) Truth:
- each version of the story is different because it is told through the memories and perceptions of each
narrator; there are limits to how fully people can know the truth about the past; truth seems to be in the eye of
the beholder; Faulkner demonstrates the limited capacity people have to known the truth of past events
3) The past:
- Faulkner expresses his belief that people should be aware of the past and learn what they can from it but
they should not allow it to shape their lives; each narrator has a different relationship with the past; characters
within the story are also affected by their pasts
- The Civil War Aftermath: almost one third of the southern men who went to fight in the Civil War died and
many suffered serious injuries; the South was in financial ruin at the end of the war
- Southern social life: in the South, gender roles were specific and were taught at an early age; social structure
and habits in the South were rooted in chivalry and hierarchy; the ideology of the North was based on ethics
and conscience; during the Civil War, women are given an opportunity to be more independent; women were
expected to do more work in their homes; southern women symbolized the virtue and goodness of the South
- Naturalistic and symbolistic period in American literature: it extended between 1900 and 1930; a
movement toward unflinching realism in literature
20
e) Criticism:
- scholars have come to universally commend Faulkner as a genius who was able to fuse content and form perfectly in
this novel;
- the structural complexity of the novel presents a unique set of challenges to the reader although critics regard time
spent unraveling the novel well spent;
- scholars consider the regional elements of the novel to be realistic and vibrant;
- Faulkners novel is not simply about the South and critics readily praise the authors ability to portray universal
themes and experiences in the southern context he knew so well; some critics have marveled at Faulkners ability to
portray such profound and universal ideas given his isolated regional backgrounds;
- many critics admire the way Faulkners seamlessly wove his various themes together into a cohesive whole and made
them relevant to modern life; Rosa is considered to be a typical southern woman who is quiet and easily dismissed
THE WASTE LAND
by Thomas Sterns Eliot
a) Introduction:
- a poem that seemed to incorporate many unrelated, little-known references to history, religion, mythology and other
disciplines; he even wrote parts of the poem in foreign languages, such as Hindu;
- its a revolutionary, highly influential 434-line modernist poem; its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and
unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant
range of cultures and literatures
b) Style:
- modernism: its the broad term used to describe post World War I literature that employs techniques; a rebellion
against traditional literature; Eliots poem was like a catalog of modernist poetic techniques, including free verse, odd
stanza lengths, snatches of dialogue, quotations from other works, phrases from other languages, indistinct transitions,
conflicting ideologies such as Christianity and paganism, frank discussion and depictions of sexuality;
- music hall: Eliot enjoyed the music hall; it follows the pattern of the musical fugue in which many voices enter
throughout the piece restarting the themes
c) Themes:
1) Disillusionment:
- the current state of affairs in modern society, especially the post World War I Europe in which he lived
2) Restoration:
- restoration or rebirth is the opposite of disillusionment; the idea of restoration is not explored in detail until
the final section with the introduction of Christ
- World War I: it was widely acknowledged as reflecting the disillusionment in Europe following Worl War I;
- The Lost Generation: Lost Generation, most critics today associate this term with a group of American
writers who translated their disillusionment into a social protest and in the process produced some of the
greatest works of twentieth century literature
e) Criticism:
- the poem has inspired both passion and hatred; it was taken by some critics as a tasteless joke, by others as a
masterpiece expressing the disillusionment of a generation;
- Eliot viewed the poem as a catharsis;
- Aiken says that the poem is one of the most moving and original poems of our time;
- the aspects of the poem that make it modern also have led to the greatest amount of confusion and conflict among
critics;
- Eliot was rebelling against the tendency to glorify the past; he wanted to demonstrate that the past was gritty and real;
- some critics consider Eliot one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century;
- many see the poem as a reflection of Eliots disillusionment with the moral decay of post World War I Europe
LORD OF THE FLIES
by William Golding
a) Introduction:
- the book seemed to appeal to adolescents natural skepticism about the allegedly humane values of adult society;
- its an allegorical novel; it discusses how culture created by man fails using as an example a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results;
21
- The Lord of the Flies contains twelve titled chapters. The plot is simple and rarely splits into more than one plot lines,
although it does sometimes. Occasionally, the story separates from the general group and follows one child. For
example, the story followed the first of Jacks hunts into the jungle, and also Simons wanderings to be alone. One of
the techniques he uses in organizing plot is foreshadow. Through the use and manipulation of many symbols, he gives
the reader and idea of what is to come foreshadowing future events.
b) Style:
- point of view: the author uses the omniscient point of view which enables him to stand outside and above the story
itself; the strongest emotion he personally feels about the story is grief
- symbolism: a symbol can be defined as a person, place or thing that represents something more than its literal
meaning; the noises of the surf, the crackling fire, the boulders rolling down hills and trees exploding from the fires
heat are often compared to the boom of cannons and drum rolls; the whole story is intended to repeat and symbolize the
atomic war which preceded it
- setting: Golding has created his own Coral Island- an allusion or literary reference to a book of that name by R.M.
Ballantyne; the Coral Island is a classic boys romantic adventure story in which everyone has a great time and nobody
dies or ends up unhappy
c) Themes:
1) Good and evil:
- during their abandonment on the island, Ralph, Piggy, Simon and many of the other boys show elements of
good in their characters; all of these characters ultimately fall victim to the forces of evil as represented by
the cruelties of the hunters especially Jack and Roger; Piggy loses his glasses and thus the power to make
fire; this power is a powerful tool for good
2) Appearances and reality:
- Golding is at pains to stress the complexity of human life; the sun which should represent life and the power
of reason can also be blinding
3) Reason and emotions:
- because of Golding;s great interest in Greek and Roman mythology, this theme is sometimes summarized
by critics as the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian aspects of life; this refers to the Greek
gods Apollo, the god of reason and Dionysus, the god of wine and emotion; most characters in the story show
elements of both reason and emotion
4) Morals and morality:
- Golding sets a group of children who should supposedly be closest to a state of innocence, alone on an
island without supervision
- Golding and Worl War II: the devastation of England by the German air force; the climate of the postwar
years
- The geography of a Tropical Island: the weather is usually very hot and humid and there is no breeze once
one enters the jungle
- The political climate of the 1950s: the rise of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the western
powers after the end of World War II signaled a new phase in world geopolitics; an atomic war on the scale
that Lord of flies suggested did not seem out of the realm of possibility during the early 1950s
e) Criticism:
- the author has written a typical rigged thesis novel whose characters never come alive as real boys;
- Martin Green said the novel is not importantly original in thought or feeling;
- James Baker has claimed that the popularity of the book peaked by the end of the 1960s because of that decades
nave view of humanity and rejection of original sin;
- there is remarkable disagreement about the books influences, genre, significant characters and theme, not to mention
the general philosophy of the author
ROMEO AND JULIET
by William Shakespeare
a) Introduction:
- it is greatest love story; the play opens with a scene of conflict between two feuding families and ends with their
reconciliation;
- the juxtaposition of light and dark, the injection of comic moments and the beauty of the language of love further
b) Style:
- Light and dark polarity motif: a visual motif is the contrast of light and dark but in a sensory way, rather than in the
sense of good and evil
22
- Shakespearean tragedy: Elizabethans used a twist of fate as the single causative factor for the tragic ending;
Shakespeare devised more complicated causes stemming from character traits and motives; difference between the
Greek and Shakespearean tragedies is the use of irony; Shakespeare allows the audience to discover the irony for
themselves
- Use of a chorus: acts 1 and 2 only are introduced by the chorus, a lone actor who serves as a narrator for the play; the
speech of the chorus is written in the form of a sonnet with an ending couplet; Shakespeare deviates from the Greek
model
- Blank verse: the normal form of speech is blank or unrhymed verse; each unrhymed line has five stresses;
Shakespeare subtly varied the stresses as well as rhythms, pauses and tones in order to convey different moods and
even the personal peculiarities of a character
- Rhymed verse: rhymed verse in five-stress lines, usually in couplets; after a passage of blank verse or prose, rhymed
verse could also have the effect of stiffening the dialogue and heightening the emotion; when Romeo and Juliet first
meet, their dialogue becomes a sonnet thus emphasizing the rise of their emotions; Shakespeare cleverly used rhymed
verse for another effect that of contrast by having one character talk in blank verse while another uses rhymed verse
c) Themes:
1) The power and passion of love and hate:
- the love story is only a vehicle for the resolution of the story about hate; the power of hate is illustrated in
the first scene by the exhibition of enmity between servants of the two families; the power of love is seen in
the determination of Romeo and Juliet to defy their families and be together; her love is strong enough to risk
everything, Romeos love is strong enough to risk the Princes punishment to get to Juliets tomb; the whole
play is a clash of passionate love and passionate hate each strong enough to cause tragedy
2) The individual versus society:
- the young couple is pitted against social and public institutions that are barriers to their relationship; in
Juliets society, the father, as head of the household, has absolute power and they have to keep that secret
from family and friends
3) The problem of time:
- the chronology of the play is a rush of time; Romeo and Juliet are married the day after they meet; Romeo
kills Juliets cousin the same day and is banished from Verona only a day after the prince has first announced
his intention to severely punish anyone caught fighting because of the Capulet/Montague feud
4) Fate and forebodings:
- Elizabethans expected a tragedy to rest upon a twist of fate; there are certainly numerous references to fate
in the play; all the accidents of timing in the play seem to be fate working against the young lovers for the
Elizabethan audience did not see these incidents as coincidences but rather as the hand of fate directing the
action
- The Renaissance: a period that begins in the fourteenth century and extends into the seventeenth century;
the term renaissance means rebirth and refers to the revival of an interest in the classical cultures of Greece
and Rome; there are many social, political and intellectual transformations that comprised the Renaissance;
many details in the play connect it to Italian Literature with which Shakespeare was familiar; during the
sixteenth century, ancient Greek and Roman literature was rediscovered, translated and then widely read; the
classical writers focused on the human condition; they explored human nature and asserted some valuable
insights about what causes human suffering and what works to establish social order; the play shows that
passion can be disruptive, dangerous and destructive and yet ironically it also expresses love and grief;
through the loss of these two young lovers, the feuding families find reconciliation and order in the
community is reestablished
- Elizabethan and Jacobean literature: Shakespeare was fortunate to write in a time when the arts were
supported by patrons and his English contemporaries included Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher
Marlowe, Robert Southwell, Thomas Campion, all important writers, critics and celebrities; there are
numerous and diverse distinguishing characteristics of Elizabethan literature
e) Criticism:
- Ben Jonson was held in higher regard as a playwright; he considered Shakespeare a talented but undisciplined writer;
- Dryden admires Jonson but loves Shakespeare;
- critics into the eighteenth century continued this view that Shakespeare had more natural ability than educated
refinement; they discussed his artistic faults rather than his merits;
- Samuel Johnson found Romeo and Juliet to be one of Shakespeares most pleasing dramas and found the plot varied,
believable and touching; he also thought Shakespeare correct to mix tragedy and comedy because real life is a mixture;
Johnson felt that Shakespeares work lacked sufficient moral emphasis;
- August von Schlegel found Romeo and Juliet to be nearly perfect artistically;
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge suspected that Shakespeares irregularities were actually evidence of psychological and
philosophical genius
23
HAMLET
a) Introduction:
- a tragedy, set in Denmark recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius who was murdered
Hamlets father and then taken the throne and married Gertrude, Hamlets mother; the play explores themes of
treachery, revenge, incest and moral corruption;
- its the longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in the English literature; it provides a
storyline capable of seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others
b) Style:
- Dramatic structure: Shakespeare reverses the advice of Aristotle so that it is through the soliloquies not the action that
the audience learns Hamlets motives and thoughts; the play is full of seeming discontinuities and irregularities of
action
- Language: Hamlets statement that his dark clothes are the other sign of his inner grief demonstrates strong rhetorical
skill; much of the plays language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse; Hamlet is the most skilled of all at rhetoric; he
uses highly developed metaphors, stichomythia and in nine memorable words deploys both anaphora and asyndeton; he
relies heavily on puns to express his true thoughts while simultaneously concealing them; an unusual rhetorical device,
hendiadys appears in several places in the play; Hamlet interrupts himself, vocalizing either disgust or agreement with
himself and embellishing his own words; he has difficulty expressing himself directly and instead blunts the thrust of
his thought with wordplay
c) Themes:
1) Religious:
- Ophelia depicts her mysterious death by drowning; the play is alternately Catholic(or piously medieval) and
Protestant(or consciously modern); the Ghost describes himself as being in purgatory and as dying without
last rites
2) Philosophical:
- philosophical ideas in Hamlet are similar to those of the French writer Michel de Montaigne; Hamlet is
often perceived as a philosophical character, expounding ideas that are now described as relativist,
existentialist and skeptical; the clearest example of existentialism is found in the to be or not to be speech
where Hamlet uses being to allude to both life and action and not being to death and inaction; scholars
agree that Hamlet reflects the contemporary skepticism that prevailed in Renaissance humanism
3) Political:
- in the early 17th century political satire was discouraged and playwrights were punished for offensive
works
4) Psychoanalytic:
- Freud suggested that an unconscious oedipal conflict caused Hamlets hesitations; Freud concludes that
Hamlet has an Oedipal desire for his mother and the subsequent guilt preventing him from murdering
Claudius who has done what he unconsciously wanted to do
5) Feminist:
- Ophelia is distracted by grief; feminist critics have explored her descent into madness; the essence of
Hamlet is the central characters changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful
to Old Hamlet; she can be honest and fair; it is virtually impossible to link these two traits since fairness is an
outward trait; she is surrounded by powerful men; her father, brother and Hamlet: all three disappear-Laertes leaves,
Hamlet abandons her and Polonius dies; without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia is driven
into madness
- Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language;
- Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influences of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives and
divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the plays composition, simplifications of the
story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters and narratives featuring
performances of the play
e) Criticism:
- scholars have debated for centuries about Hamlets hesitation in killing his uncle; some see it as a plot device to
prolong the action and others see it as a result of pressure exerted by the complex philosophical and ethical issues;
- Restoration critics saw Hamlet as primitive and disapproved of its lack of unity and decorum; critics and performers
begin to view Hamlet as confusing and inconsistent; Romantic critics valued Hamlet for its internal, individual conflict
reflecting the strong contemporary emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in general; they started to focus
on Hamlets delay as a character trait rather than a plot device
24
MACBETH
a) Introduction:
- a tragedy about regicide and its aftermath; it is Shakespeares shortest tragedy and his sources for the tragedy are the
accounts of Kings Macbeth, Duff, Duncan
b) Themes:
1) As a tragedy of moral order:
- the play depicts Scotland as a land shaken by inversions of the natural order; he may have intended a
reference to the great chain of being; an elaborate compliment to Jamess belief in the divine right of kings;
Macbeths generally accepted indebtedness to medieval tragedy is often seen as particularly significant in the
plays treatment of moral order; Glynne Wickham connects the play through the Porter, to a mystery play on
the harrowing of hell; Howard Felperin argues that the play has a more complex attitude toward orthodox
Christian tragedy than is often admitted; the theme of androgyny is often seen as a special aspect of the
theme of disorder; critic Janet Adelman has connected the plays treatment of gender roles to its larger theme
of inverted natural order
2) As a poetic tragedy:
- critics in the early twentieth century reacted against what they saw as an excessive dependence on the study
of character in criticism of the play
3) Witchcraft and evil:
- in the play, the Three Witches represents the darkness, chaos and conflict while their role is as agents and
witnesses; their presence communicates treason and impending doom; during Shakespeares day, witches
were seen as worse than rebels; they were not only political traitors but spiritual traitors as well
4) Superstition and the Scottish play:
- an alternative explanation for the superstition is that struggling theatres or companies would often put on
this popular blockbuster in an effort to save their flagging fortunes; another explanation for this superstition
is that theatre companies may have used Macbeth as a back-up play if they were to lose an actor and were not
able to perform the production originally planned for the performance
5) Feminist:
- Ophelia is distracted by grief; feminist critics have explored her descent into madness; the essence of
Hamlet is the central characters changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful
to Old Hamlet; she can be honest and fair; it is virtually impossible to link these two traits since fairness is an
outward trait; she is surrounded by powerful men; her father, brother and Hamlet: all three disappear-Laertes leaves,
Hamlet abandons her and Polonius dies; without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia is driven
into madness
- there are no performances known with certainty in Shakespeare's era. Because of its Scottish theme, the play is
sometimes said to have been written for, and perhaps debuted for, King James; however, no external evidence supports
this hypothesis. The play's brevity and certain aspects of its staging (for instance, the large proportion of night-time
scenes and the unusually large number of off-stage sounds) have been taken as suggesting that the text now extant was
revised for production indoors;
- in the Restoration, Sir William Davenant produced a spectacular operatic adaption of Macbeth and special effects
like flyings for the witches;
- Samuel Pepys called Davenants Macbeth one of the best plays for a stage and variety of dancing and music that ever
he saw
d) Criticism:
- Robert Bridges perceived a paradox: a character able to express such convincing horror before Duncans murder
would likely be incapable of committing the crime;
- John Dover Wilson hypothesized that Shakespeares original text had an extra scene or scenes in which husband and
wife discussed their plans; the evil actions motivated by his ambition seem to trap him in a cycle of increasing evil
A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM
a) Introduction:
- a romantic comedy; it portrays the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of amateur actors, their
interactions with the Duke and Duchess of Athens, Theseus and Hippolyta and with fairies who inhabit a moonlit
forest;
- some features of the plot and characters can be traced to elements of earlier mythologically-based literature
25
b) Themes:
1) Love:
- writer David Bevington finds in the play what he refers to as the dark side of love; he writes that the fairies
make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titanias eyes, forcing her to fall
in love with Bottom as an ass; in the forest, both couples are met by problems and assume that a partner is
dead at some point; the play is a comedy yet it harbors serious ideas
2) Loss of individual identity:
- Maurice Hunt writes of the blurring of the identities of fantasy and reality in the play; Shakespeare prepares
the readers mind to accept the fantastic reality of the fairy world and its magical happenings
3) Ambiguous sexuality:
- Douglas Green explores possible interpretations of alternative sexuality that he finds within the text of the
play in juxtaposition to the proscribed social mores of the culture at the time the play was written; Green
writes that the sodomitical elements, homoeroticism, lesbianism and even compulsory
heterosexuality in the story must be considered in the context of the culture of early modern England as a
commentary on the aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order
4) Feminist:
- male dominance is one thematic element; females enjoy more power and freedom than they actually
possess; marriage is seen as the ultimate social achievement for women while men can go on to do many
other great things and gain societal recognition; a connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn; there is
an absence of patriarchal control
- during the years of the Puritan Interregnum when the theatres were closed, the comic subplot of Bottom and his
compatriots was performed as a droll; drolls were comical playlets often adapted from the subplots of Shakespearean
and other plays that could be attached to the acts of acrobats and jugglers and other allowed performances, thus
circumventing the ban against drama
d) Criticism:
- Wolfgang Clemens, in the first excerpt, provides a general introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream, identifying
and analyzing the play's historical background, language, themes, dramatic structure, characterization, and literary
significance. In the second excerpt, Jack Vaughn characterizes the comedy as an eminently poetic work, discussing
Shakespeare's language, with particular attention to eye imagery, such as the blindness of love.
- Describing A Midsummer Night's Dream as similar to a fertility rite, Shirley Garner discusses the sexual,
psychological, and social implications of Shakespeare's comedy. More than a simple celebration of erotic love, the play,
Garner maintains, reflects certain attitudes characteristic of male-dominated societies. In the second selection, Jan Kott
asserts that A Midsummer Night's Dream is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays.
- George A. Bonnard's principal thesis is that the worlds, fantastic and mundane, represented in the play, exist apart
from each other, never meeting at any given point. In the second excerpt, Allardyce Nicoll asserts that the play clearly
reflects the poet's serious preoccupation with dreams and reality. In the final excerpt, David Richman discusses
Shakespeare's effective introduction of wonder into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Language, the critic explains, is
instrumental in creating wonderment, and the characters from the supernatural world identify themselves by their
peculiar rhetorical devices and speech mannerisms.
- The immense expanses created by Shakespeare's extraordinary poetic imagination, Mark Van Doren asserts in this
selection, are vast enough to house the fairy realms and the world of ordinary reality, including all the peculiar
manifestations of either place
THE SONNETS
a) Introduction:
- is a collection of poems in sonnet form that deal with love, beauty, politics and mortality;
- the first 17 sonnets are written to a young man urging him to marry and have children(these are called the procreation
sonnets); sonnets 18-126 are addressed to a young man expressing the poets love for him; sonnets 127-152 are written
to the poets mistress expressing his love for her; the final two sonnets, 153-154 are allegorical;
- the sonnets are each constructed from three four-line stanzas(called quatrains) and a final couplet composed in iambic
pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg;
- the Fair Youth is an unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126; the poet writes of the young man in romantic and
loving language;
- sonnets 127-152 are addressed to a woman commonly known as the Dark Lady because her hair is said to be black
and her skin dun;
- the Sonnets were published under conditions that have become unclear to history
26
b) Themes:
1) Parody:
- pastiche or parody of the three centuries-long tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets; they create a more
complex and potentially troubling depiction of human love; Shakespeare speaks on human evils that do not
have to do with love, he comments on political events, he makes fun of love, he parodies beauty, he plays
with gender roles, he speaks openly about sex and even introduces witty pornography
2) Legacy:
- Shakespeares sonnets can also be seen as a prototype or even the beginning of a new kind of modern love
poetry; the sonnets rose steadily in reputation during the nineteenth century; there is no major written
language into which the sonnets have not been translated including Latin, Turkish, Japanese, Esperanto and
even Klingon
- Allowing that the issue of whether Shakespeare is the narrator of the sonnets or even referring to facets of his life
through the narrator aside, we know that it was during the Romantic Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries that critics first became preoccupied with an autobiographical "I." Thus, the Romantic poet William
Wordsworth expressed the predominate view of the Sonnets during his life-time, that here "Shakespeare unlocked his
heart." It was in 1780 that Edmund Malone published the first edition of the Sonnets complete with notes in which he
encouraged his readers to approach these poems as self-representations. The eighteenth century was a period in which
diaries, journals, and letters were highly popular literary forms, readers being interested in texts reflecting the lives of
their authors. This focus spilled over into Shakespeare scholarship, and the working presumption was that the narrator
and the author of the sonnets shared an identity.
- But by the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the tide turned against autobiographical readings of the Sonnets, and it
did so largely on moral grounds. The Sonnets make reference to a number of acts that the Victorians found offensive,
including adultery, perjury, and (possible) homosexuality, the narrator acknowledging in Sonnet #112, for example, that
his own brow is stamped with "vulgar scandal." Not only did the suggestion that Shakespeare himself was involved in
such transgressions offensive to moralistic Victorians, it was at odds with the literary historian James Boswell's
assertion that about Shakespeare that "at no time was the slightest imputation cast upon his moral character." More
broadly, the received image of Shakespeare's character was that of a gentle, benevolent man while the narrator of the
sonnets exhibits an array of ugly traits, from self-pity to envy. Nineteenth century Shakespeare critics separated the
author from the text of the Sonnets, reading them as literary exercises and philosophical discourses.
d) Criticism:
- Shakespeare's sonnets are presumably narrated by a single persona. The narrator of the sonnets has a distinctive
character and appears to partake in an ongoing story that revolves around his Platonic relationship to a "fair youth" and
is later complicated by his carnal relationship with a "dark lady." Although the pendulum has swung back and forth
over centuries of interpretation, throughout the history of Shakespeare sonnet criticism we find a deep division between
critics who presume that there is an autobiographical basis to these poems and those holding that the narrator is a
fictional device. The former are encouraged in their identification of the narrator as the poet himself by the fact that the
sonnets are the only work in which Shakespeare wrote in the first person singular. Beyond this, however, the collective
evidence that it is Shakespeare himself speaking about his own actual life in the sonnets is purely circumstantial and
internally inconsistent.
- The predominant (but not universal) opinion among modern Shakespeare scholars is that the sonnets are to be read
apart from their creator's biography. Nevertheless, the issue here has not been conclusively settled, the autobiographical
thesis is intriguing and a brief consideration of the "I" problem in the Sonnets furnishes us with insight as to how they
have been presented and read over the ages.
- William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke) and Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton) being the prime
candidates. Affirmations concerning a possible relationship between Shakespeare and one of these noblemen have been
sought from biographies and other records of these men, particularly Southampton, but the correspondences are not
clear enough or strong enough to justify equating any historical person with the young man of the Sonnets. On even
thinner bases, similar labors have been devoted to discovering the respective real identities of the "dark lady" and the
"rival poet."
- From a complementary angle, scholars have looked to the text of the Sonnets for allusions to current events of the
1590s, constructing elaborate arguments to sketch out historical parallels.
- As for Shakespeare himself, he left no autobiography, diary or personal record of his life, nor did any of his
contemporaries provide any first-hand account of it, the first comprehensive life of Shakespeare being written more
than one hundred and fifty years after his death. Anecdotes and oral traditions, deductions from historical chronicles,
and occasional traces of what may be autobiographical allusions in his plays, have helped to flesh out Shakespeare's
life, but sharp disputes persist among historians over the validity of many these details.
- Some scholars have detected poetic allusions to historical persons and events in the Sonnets.
- The strongest (but far less) direct textual evidence for identifying the narrator of the sonnets with Shakespeare is
vocational. Shakespeare was a poet, the narrator is a poet, poetry is a primary subject in more than two dozen of the
sonnets. We know further that, like all Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare produced his non-dramatic verse for private
patrons and was in competition with other talented artists for personal financial sponsorship and "affection." These
same general circumstances are described by the narrator as his own, for he depends on the "fair youth" for support and
frequently mentions vying with his rival.
27
WILLIAM BLAKE
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake
is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic
poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".
His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever
produced". Although he only once journeyed farther than a day's walk outside London during his lifetime, he produced
a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence
itself".
Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for
his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings
and poetry have been characterized as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic",for its large
appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the
ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jacob
Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg.
Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th
century scholar William Rossetti characterized Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by
predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors.".
Although Blake's attacks on conventional religion were shocking in his own day, his rejection of religiosity
was not a rejection of religion per se. His view of orthodoxy is evident in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a series of
texts written in imitation of Biblical prophecy.
Jesus, for Blake, symbolizes the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity.
Blake designed his own mythology, which appears largely in his prophetic books. Within these Blake
describes a number of characters, including 'Urizen', 'Enitharmon', 'Bromion' and 'Luvah'. This mythology seems to
have a basis in the Bible and in Greek mythology, and it accompanies his ideas about the everlasting Gospel.
Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a distinct body from the soul, and which must submit to the rule of
soul, but rather sees body as an extension of soul derived from the 'discernment' of the senses. Thus, the emphasis
orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship
between body and soul; elsewhere, he describes Satan as the 'State of Error', and as being beyond salvation.
Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologizes for injustice.
He abhorred self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and particularly with sexual repression. He saw
the concept of 'sin' as a trap to bind mens desires (the briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in
obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life:
He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind. Blake had
a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Due to his visionary religious beliefs, Blake opposed
the Newtonian view of the universe. Despite his opposition to Enlightenment principles, Blake thus arrived at a linear
aesthetic that was in many ways more similar to the neoclassical engravings of John Flaxmanthan to the works of the
Romantics, with whom he is often classified. Therefore Blake has also been viewed as an enlightenment poet and artist,
in the sense that he was in accord with that movement's rejection of received ideas, systems, authorities and traditions.
On the other hand, he was critical of what he perceived as the elevation of reason to the status of an oppressive
authority. In his criticism of reason, law and uniformity Blake has been taken to be opposed to the enlightenment, but it
has also been argued that, in a dialectical sense, he used the enlightenment spirit of rejection of external authority to
criticize narrow conceptions of the enlightenment.
Blake abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express
a notion of universal humanity. Blake retained an active interest in social and political events for all his life, often
cloaking social and political statements in mystical allegory. His views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of
rightful freedom extended to the Church. His spiritual beliefs are evidenced in Songs of Experience (1794), in which he
distinguishes between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God (Jesus
Christ in Trinitarianism), whom he saw as a positive influence.
From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The first of these visions may have occurred
as early as the age of four when, according to one anecdote, the young artist "saw God" when God "put his head to the
window", causing Blake to break into screaming. At the age of eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, Blake claimed to
have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." According to
Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home and reported this vision, and he only escaped being thrashed
by his father for telling a lie through the intervention of his mother. Though all evidence suggests that his parents were
largely supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake's early drawings and poems
decorated the walls of her chamber. On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw
angelic figures walking among them. Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often
associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual
works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's
works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual centre of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. In
28
addition, Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works,
which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels.
JOHN KEATS
John Keats was an English poet who became one of the key poets of the English Romantic movement during
the early nineteenth century. During his very short life, his work received constant critical attacks from periodicals of
the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson and Wilfred Owen has been immense.
Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats' poetry, including a series of odes that were his
masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on
his aesthetic theory of "negative capability" are among the most celebrated by any writer.
Keats was an avid student in the fields of medicine and natural history, but he then turned his attentions to the
literary works of such authors as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Keats had his poems published in the magazines of the day at the encouragement of many including James
Henry Leigh Hunt Esq. (1784-1859), editor of the Examiner and to whom Keats dedicated his first
collection Poems(1817). It includes "To My Brother George", "O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell", and "Happy is
England! I Could Be Content". Upon its appearance a series of personal attacks directed at Keats ensued in the pages
of Blackwood's Magazine. Despite the controversy surrounding his life, Keats's literary merit prevailed. That same year
Keats met Percy Bysshe Shelley who would also become a great friend. When Shelley invited the ailing Keats to stay
with him and his family in Italy, he declined. When Shelley's body was washed ashore after drowning, a volume of
Keats's poetry was found in his pocket.
Having worked on it for many months, Keats finished his epic poem comprising four books, Endymion: A
Poetic Romance--"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"--in 1818. That summer he traveled to the Lake District of
England and on to Ireland and Scotland on a walking tour with Brown. They visited the grave of Robert Burns and
reminisced upon John Milton's poetry. While he was not aware of the seriousness of it, Keats was suffering from the
initial stages of the deadly infectious disease tuberculosis. He cut his trip short and upon return to Hampstead
immediately tended to his brother Tom who was then in the last stages of the disease. After Tom's death in December of
1818, Keats lived with Brown.
Although 1819 proved to be his most prolific year of writing, Keats was also in dire financial straits. His
brother George had borrowed money he could ill-afford to part with. His earning Fanny's mother's approval to marry
depended on his earning as a writer and he started plans with his publisher John Taylor (1781-1864) for his next
volume of poems. At the beginning of 1820 Keats started to show more pronounced signs of the deadly tuberculosis
that had killed his mother and brother. After a lung hemorrhage, Keats calmly accepted his fate, and he enjoyed several
weeks of respite under Brown's watchful eye. As was common belief at the time that bleeding a patient was beneficial
to healing, Keats was bled and given opium to relieve his anxiety and pain. He was at times put on a starvation diet,
then at other times prescribed to eat meat and drink red wine to gain strength. Despite these ill-advised good-intentions,
and suffering increasing weakness and fever, Keats was able to emerge from his fugue and organize the publication of
his next volume of poetry.
EMILY ELIZABETH DICKINSON
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family
with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst
Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to
her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white
clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore
carried out by correspondence.
Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems
were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly
by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she
wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization
and punctuation.[3] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her
friends.
Dickinson was familiar not only with the Bible but also with contemporary popular literature. She was
probably influenced by Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, another gift from Newton. In direct opposition to
the immense productivity that she displayed in the early 1860s, Dickinson wrote fewer poems in 1866. Beset with
personal loss as well as loss of domestic help, it is possible that Dickinson was too overcome to keep up her previous
level of writing. Carlo died during this time after providing sixteen years of companionship; Dickinson never owned
another dog. Although the household servant of nine years had married and left the Homestead that same year, it was
29
not until 1869 that her family brought in a permanent household servant to replace the old one. [73] Emily once again
was responsible for chores, including the baking, at which she excelled.
Dickinson studied botany from the age of nine and, along with her sister, tended the garden at Homestead. During her
lifetime, she assembled a collection of pressed plants in a sixty-six page leather-bound herbarium. It contained 424
pressed flower specimens that she collected, classified, and labeled using the Linnaean system.[85] The Homestead
garden was well-known and admired locally in its time. It has not survived, and Dickinson kept no garden notebooks or
plant lists, but a clear impression can be formed from the letters and recollections of friends and family. The extensive
use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and
imagery, combine to create a body of work. She did not write in traditional iambic pentameter (a convention of
English-speaking poetry for centuries), and did not even use a five-foot line. Her line lengths vary from four syllables
or two feet to often eight syllables or four feet. Her frequent use of approximate or slant rhyme attracted attention since
her work first appeared in print. Her poems typically begin with a declaration or definition in the first line ("The fact
that Earth is Heaven"), which is followed by a metaphorical change of the original premise in the second line
("Whether Heaven is Heaven or not"). Dickinson's poems can easily be set to music because of the frequent use
of rhyme and free verse. Written for the most part in common meter or ballad-meter, they can also be set to songs that
use the same alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.[129]
Major themes: Flowers and gardens, The Master poems, Morbidity, Gospel poems, The Undiscovered
Continent. Emily Dickinson is now considered a powerful and persistent figure in American culture.[153] Although
much of the early reception concentrated on Dickinson's eccentric and secluded nature, she has become widely
acknowledged as an innovative, pre-modernist poet.
The Dickinson Homestead as it appears today. In 2003 it was made into the Emily Dickinson Museum.
Dickinson is taught in American literature and poetry classes in the United States from middle school to
college.
30

Titularizare Toata Literaturaa

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Titularizare Toata Literaturaa

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

DAVID COPPERFIELD

2) Identity: search for self:

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

- its form is called blank verse;

S-ar putea să vă placă și