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Literary forms such as the novel
or lyric poem, or genres, such as the horror-story, have a history. In one
sense, they appear because they have not been thought of before, but they
also appear, or become popular for other cultural reasons, such as the
absence or emergence of literacy. In studying the history of literature (or
any kind of art), you are challenged to consider
- what constitutes a given
form,
- how it has developed, and
- whether it has a future.
The novels of the late Catherine
Cookson may have much in common with those of Charlotte Brontë, but is it
worth mimicking in the late 20th century, what was ground-breaking in the
1840s? While Brontë examines what is contemporary for her, Miss Cookson
invents an imagined past which may be of interest to the cultural historian
in studying the present sources of her nostalgia, but not to the student of
the period in which her novels are set. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
is a long work of prose fiction, but critics do not necessarily describe it
as a novel. Why might this be? Knowing works in their historical context
does not give easy answers, but may shed more or less light on our darkness
in considering such questions.
Old English, Middle English and Chaucer
Old
English
English, as we know it, descends
from the language spoken by the north Germanic tribes who settled in
England from the 5th century A.D. onwards. They had no writing (except
runes, used as charms) until they learned the Latin alphabet from Roman
missionaries. The earliest written works in Old English (as their language
is now known to scholars) were probably composed orally at first, and may
have been passed on from speaker to speaker before being written. We know
the names of some of the later writers (Cædmon, Ælfric and King Alfred) but
most writing is anonymous. Old English literature is mostly chronicle and
poetry - lyric, descriptive but chiefly narrative or epic. By the time
literacy becomes widespread, Old English is effectively a foreign and dead
language. And its forms do not significantly affect subsequent developments
in English literature. (With the scholarly exception of the 19th century
poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who finds in Old English verse the model for
his metrical system of "sprung rhythm".)
Middle
English and Chaucer
From 1066 onwards, the language
is known to scholars as Middle English. Ideas and themes from French and
Celtic literature appear in English writing at about this time, but the
first great name in English literature is that of Geoffrey Chaucer
(?1343-1400). Chaucer introduces the iambic pentameter line, the rhyming
couplet and other rhymes used in Italian poetry (a language in which rhyming
is arguably much easier than in English, thanks to the frequency of
terminal vowels). Some of Chaucer's work is prose and some is lyric poetry,
but his greatest work is mostly narrative poetry, which we find in Troilus
and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales. Other notable mediaeval
works are the anonymous Pearl and Gawain and the Green Knight
(probably by the same author) and William Langlands' Piers Plowman.
Modern lyric poetry in English
begins in the early 16th century with the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt
(1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Wyatt, who is
greatly influenced by the Italian, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) introduces
the sonnet and a range of short lyrics to English, while Surrey (as he is
known) develops unrhymed pentameters (or blank verse) thus inventing the
verse form which will be of great use to contemporary dramatists. A
flowering of lyric poetry in the reign of Elizabeth comes with such writers
as Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), Sir Walter
Ralegh (1552-1618), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and William Shakespeare
(1564-1616). The major works of the time are Spenser's Faerie Queene,
Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare's sonnets.
The first great English
dramatist is Marlowe. Before the 16th century English drama meant the amateur
performances of Bible stories by craft guilds on public holidays. Marlowe's
plays (Tamburlaine; Dr. Faustus; Edward II and The Jew of Malta) use
the five act structure and the medium of blank verse, which Shakespeare
finds so productive. Shakespeare develops and virtually exhausts this form,
his Jacobean successors producing work which is rarely performed today,
though some pieces have literary merit, notably The Duchess of Malfi
and The White Devil by John Webster (1580-1625) and The
Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626). The excessive and
gratuitous violence of Jacobean plays leads to the clamour for closing down
the theatres, which is enacted by parliament after the Civil war.
The greatest of Elizabethan
lyric poets is John Donne (1572-1631), whose short love poems are
characterized by wit and irony, as he seeks to wrest meaning from
experience. The preoccupation with the big questions of love, death and
religious faith marks out Donne and his successors who are often called metaphysical
poets. (This name, coined by Dr. Samuel Johnson in an essay of 1779, was
revived and popularized by T.S. Eliot, in an essay of 1921. It can be
unhelpful to modern students who are unfamiliar with this adjective, and
who are led to think that these poets belonged to some kind of school or
group - which is not the case.) After his wife's death, Donne underwent a
serious religious conversion, and wrote much fine devotional verse. The
best known of the other metaphysicals are George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew
Marvell (1621-1678) and Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).
Long narrative poems on heroic
subjects mark the best work of classical Greek (Homer's Iliad and Odyssey)
and Roman (Virgil's Æneid) poetry. John Milton (1608-1674) who was
Cromwell's secretary, set out to write a great biblical epic, unsure
whether to write in Latin or English, but settling for the latter in Paradise
Lost. John Dryden (1631-1700) also wrote epic poetry, on classical and
biblical subjects. Though Dryden's work is little read today it leads to a
comic parody of the epic form, or mock-heroic. The best poetry of the mid
18th century is the comic writing of Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Pope is
the best-regarded comic writer and satirist of English poetry. Among his
many masterpieces, one of the more accessible is The Rape of the Lock
(seekers of sensation should note that "rape" here has its
archaic sense of "removal by force"; the "lock" is a
curl of the heroine's hair). Serious poetry of the period is well
represented by the neo-classical Thomas Gray (1716-1771) whose Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard virtually perfects the elegant style
favoured at the time.
On the death of Oliver Cromwell
(in 1658) plays were no longer prohibited. A new kind of comic drama,
dealing with issues of sexual politics among the wealthy and the bourgeois,
arose. This is Restoration Comedy, and the style developed well beyond the
restoration period into the mid 18th century almost. The total number of
plays performed is vast, and many lack real merit, but the best drama uses
the restoration conventions for a serious examination of contemporary
morality. A play which exemplifies this well is The Country Wife by William
Wycherley (1640-1716).
Prose fiction and the novel
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745),
wrote satires in verse and prose. He is best-known for the extended prose
work Gulliver's Travels, in which a fantastic account of a series of
travels is the vehicle for satirizing familiar English institutions, such
as religion, politics and law. Another writer who uses prose fiction, this
time much more naturalistic, to explore other questions of politics or economics
is Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll
Flanders.
The first English novel is
generally accepted to be Pamela (1740), by Samuel Richardson
(1689-1761): this novel takes the form of a series of letters; Pamela, a
virtuous housemaid resists the advances of her rich employer, who
eventually marries her. Richardson's work was almost at once satirized by Henry
Fielding (1707-1754) in Joseph Andrews (Joseph is depicted as the
brother of Richardson's Pamela Andrews) and Tom Jones.
After Fielding, the novel is
dominated by the two great figures of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Jane
Austen (1775-1817), who typify, respectively, the new regional, historical
romanticism and the established, urbane classical views.
Novels depicting extreme
behaviour, madness or cruelty, often in historically remote or exotic
settings are called Gothic. They are ridiculed by Austen in Northanger
Abbey but include one undisputed masterpiece, Frankenstein, by Mary
Shelley (1797-1851).
The
rise of Romanticism
A movement in philosophy but
especially in literature, romanticism is the revolt of the senses or
passions against the intellect and of the individual against the consensus.
Its first stirrings may be seen in the work of William Blake (1757-1827),
and in continental writers such as the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and the German playwrights Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The publication, in 1798, by the
poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834) of a volume entitled Lyrical Ballads is a significant
event in English literary history, though the poems were poorly received
and few books sold. The elegant latinisms of Gray are dropped in favour of
a kind of English closer to that spoken by real people (supposedly).
Actually, the attempts to render the speech of ordinary people are not
wholly convincing. Robert Burns (1759 1796) writes lyric verse in the
dialect of lowland Scots (a variety of English). After Shakespeare, Burns
is perhaps the most often quoted of writers in English: we sing his Auld
Lang Syne every New Year's Eve.
Later
Romanticism
The work of the later romantics John
Keats (1795-1821) and his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822; husband
of Mary Shelley) is marked by an attempt to make language beautiful, and by
an interest in remote history and exotic places. George Gordon, Lord Byron
(1788-1824) uses romantic themes, sometimes comically, to explain
contemporary events. Romanticism begins as a revolt against established
views, but eventually becomes the established outlook. Wordsworth becomes a
kind of national monument, while the Victorians make what was at first
revolutionary seem familiar, domestic and sentimental.
The major poets of the Victorian
era are Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) and Robert Browning (1812-1889).
Both are prolific and varied, and their work defies easy classification.
Tennyson makes extensive use of classical myth and Arthurian legend, and
has been praised for the beautiful and musical qualities of his writing.
Browning's chief interest is in
people; he uses blank verse in writing dramatic monologues in which the
speaker achieves a kind of self-portraiture: his subjects are both
historical individuals (Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto) and
representative types or caricatures (Mr. Sludge the Medium).
Other Victorian poets of note
include Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina
Rossetti (1830-1894). Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is notable for his
use of what he calls "sprung rhythm"; as in Old English verse
syllables are not counted, but there is a pattern of stresses. Hopkins'
work was not well-known until very long after his death.
The
rise of the popular novel
In the 19th century, adult
literacy increases markedly: attempts to provide education by the state,
and self-help schemes are partly the cause and partly the result of the
popularity of the novel. Publication in instalments means that works are
affordable for people of modest means. The change in the reading public is
reflected in a change in the subjects of novels: the high bourgeois world
of Austen gives way to an interest in characters of humble origins. The
great novelists write works which in some ways transcend their own period,
but which in detail very much explore the preoccupations of their time.
Dickens
and the Brontës
Certainly the greatest English
novelist of the 19th century, and possibly of all time, is Charles Dickens
(1812-1870). The complexity of his best work, the variety of tone, the use
of irony and caricature create surface problems for the modern reader, who
may not readily persist in reading. But Great Expectations, Bleak House,
Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit are works with which every
student should be acquainted.
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) and
her sisters Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849) are understandably
linked together, but their work differs greatly. Charlotte is notable for
several good novels, among which her masterpiece is Jane Eyre, in
which we see the heroine, after much adversity, achieve happiness on her
own terms. Emily Brontë's Wüthering Heights is a strange work, which
enjoys almost cult status. Its concerns are more romantic, less
contemporary than those of Jane Eyre - but its themes of obsessive
love and self-destructive passion have proved popular with the 20th century
reader.
The
beginnings of American literature
The early 19th century sees the
emergence of American literature, with the stories of Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849), the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), Herman Melville
(1819-91), and Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835-1910), and the
poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-92) and Emily Dickinson (1830-86). Notable
works include Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby
Dick, Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
Later
Victorian novelists
After the middle of the century,
the novel, as a form, becomes firmly-established: sensational or
melodramatic "popular" writing is represented by Mrs. Henry Wood's
East Lynne (1861), but the best novelists achieved serious critical
acclaim while reaching a wide public, notable authors being Anthony
Trollope (1815-82), Wilkie Collins (1824-89), William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811-63), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans; 1819-80) and Thomas Hardy
(1840-1928). Among the best novels are Collins's The Moonstone,
Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede
and Middlemarch, and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, The
Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
Early
20th century poets
W.B. (William Butler) Yeats
(1865-1939) is one of two figures who dominate modern poetry, the other
being T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888-1965). Yeats was Irish; Eliot was
born in the USA but settled in England, and took UK citizenship in 1927.
Yeats uses conventional lyric forms, but explores the connection between
modern themes and classical and romantic ideas. Eliot uses elements of
conventional forms, within an unconventionally structured whole in his
greatest works. Where Yeats is prolific as a poet, Eliot's reputation
largely rests on two long and complex works: The Waste Land (1922)
and Four Quartets (1943).
The work of these two has
overshadowed the work of the best late Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian
poets, some of whom came to prominence during the First World War. Among
these are Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), A.E. Housman
(1859-1936), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Siegfried
Sassoon (1886-1967), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Isaac Rosenberg
(1890-1918). The most celebrated modern American poet, is Robert Frost
(1874-1963), who befriended Edward Thomas before the war of 1914-1918.
Early
modern writers
The late Victorian and early
modern periods are spanned by two novelists of foreign birth: the American Henry
James (1843-1916) and the Pole Joseph Conrad (Josef Korzeniowski;
1857-1924). James relates character to issues of culture and ethics, but
his style can be opaque; Conrad's narratives may resemble adventure stories
in incident and setting, but his real concern is with issues of character
and morality. The best of their work would include James's The Portrait
of a Lady and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The
Secret Agent.
Other notable writers of the
early part of the century include George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), H.G.
Wells (1866-1946), and E.M. Forster (1879-1970). Shaw was an essay-writer,
language scholar and critic, but is best-remembered as a playwright. Of his
many plays, the best-known is Pygmalion (even better known today in
its form as the musical My Fair Lady). Wells is celebrated as a
popularizer of science, but his best novels explore serious social and
cultural themes, The History of Mr. Polly being perhaps his
masterpiece. Forster's novels include Howard's End, A Room with a View
and A Passage to India.
Joyce
and Woolf
Where these writers show
continuity with the Victorian tradition of the novel, more radically modern
writing is found in the novels of James Joyce (1882-1941), of Virginia
Woolf (1882-1941), and of D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). Where Joyce and Woolf
challenge traditional narrative methods of viewpoint and structure,
Lawrence is concerned to explore human relationships more profoundly than
his predecessors, attempting to marry the insights of the new psychology
with his own acute observation. Working-class characters are presented as
serious and dignified; their manners and speech are not objects of
ridicule.
Other notable novelists include George
Orwell (1903-50), Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Graham Greene (1904-1991) and
the 1983 Nobel prize-winner, William Golding (1911-1993).
Poetry
in the later 20th century
Between the two wars, a revival
of romanticism in poetry is associated with the work of W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
Auden (1907-73), Louis MacNeice (1907-63) and Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72).
Auden seems to be a major figure on the poetic landscape, but is almost too
contemporary to see in perspective. The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-53)
is notable for strange effects of language, alternating from extreme
simplicity to massive overstatement.
Of poets who have achieved
celebrity in the second half of the century, evaluation is even more
difficult, but writers of note include the American Robert Lowell
(1917-77), Philip Larkin (1922-1985), R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), Thom Gunn
(1929-2004), Ted Hughes (1930-1998) and the 1995 Nobel laureate Seamus
Heaney (b. 1939).
Notable writers outside mainstream movements
Any list of
"important" names is bound to be uneven and selective.
Identifying broad movements leads to the exclusion of those who do not easily
fit into schematic outlines of history. Writers not referred to above, but
highly regarded by some readers might include Laurence Sterne (1713-68),
author of Tristram Shandy, R.L. Stevenson (1850-94) writer of Kidnapped
and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900), author of The Importance of Being Earnest, and
novelists such as Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
and the Americans F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Ernest Hemingway
(1898-1961), John Steinbeck (1902-68) and J.D. Salinger (b. 1919). Two
works notable not just for their literary merit but for their articulation
of the spirit of the age are Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. The American dramatist Arthur
Miller (b. 1915) has received similar acclaim for his play Death of a
Salesman (1949). Miller is more popular in the UK than his native
country, and is familiar to many teachers and students because his work is
so often set for study in examinations.
Literature has a history, and
this connects with cultural history more widely. Prose narratives were
written in the 16th century, but the novel as we know it could not arise,
in the absence of a literate public. The popular and very contemporary
medium for narrative in the 16th century is the theatre. The earliest
novels reflect a bourgeois view of the world because this is the world of
the authors and their readers (working people are depicted, but
patronizingly, not from inside knowledge). The growth of literacy in the
Victorian era leads to enormous diversification in the subjects and
settings of the novel.
In recent times the novel has
developed different genres such as the thriller, the whodunnit, the
pot-boiler, the western and works of science-fiction, horror and the
sex-and-shopping novel. Some of these may be brief fashions (the western
seems to be dying) while others such as the detective story or
science-fiction have survived for well over a century. As the dominant form
of narrative in contemporary western popular culture, the novel may have
given way to the feature film and television drama. But it has proved surprisingly
resilient. As society alters, so the novel may reflect or define this
change; many works may be written, but few of them will fulfil this
defining rôle; those which seem to do so now, may not speak to later
generations in the same way.
The "test of time" may
be a cliché, but is a genuine measure of how a work of imagination can
transcend cultural boundaries; we should, perhaps, now speak of the
"test of time and place", as the best works cross boundaries of
both kinds. We may not "like" or "enjoy" works such as Wüthering
Heights, Heart of Darkness or The Waste Land, but they are the
perfect expression of particular ways of looking at the world; the author
has articulated a view which connects with the reader's search for meaning.
It is, of course, perfectly possible for a work of imagination to make
sense of the world or of experience (or love, or God, or death) while also
entertaining or delighting the reader or audience with the detail and
eloquence of the work, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner or Great Expectations.
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