Literature

Restoration of monarchy after turbulent times --> conservative, revolution as biggest threat

(peak in Augustan Age:)

from the HEAD, not the HEART - art as a craft - rational thinking & brain

--> objectivity

admiration of order, regularity and control: strictness (poesis from greek "to make" after all!)

about society

imitating Horace, Vergil,Ovid

"dulcis et utilis"

Age of Sensibility = last decades of Neo-Classicism (leading up to Romanticism):

emphasis on emotional consciousness

sensibility = openness to "tender feelings" & response to the beautiful, compassion

novels focus on romantic love & misfortune

summary of oral (songs, folktales etc.) and written (Bible, travel accounts, romance etc.) "storytelling"

OED:

- fictitious prose narrative/tale of considerable length

- characters and actions representative of real life (past or present)

- portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity

shows: basically no rules!

novel was new --> no models (like sonnets or epics) thus no rules = diverse forms

Picaresque Novel

picaro = rogue

- realistic style

- episodic structure

- satirical tone

--> themes: hypocrisy, weakness of society vs. all worthy)

- lacks psychological complexity

picaresque journey = from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility

Epistolary Novel

- entirely consisting of letters & addressed to a trustee

- subject-matter = love, wooing, complications

- detailed representation of emotions

- underscores gender hierarchies (provider > virtuous)

Historical Context: American Declaration of Independence & French Revolution

values: equality, liberty, fraternité & pursuit of happiness

Romanticism as a renewal, even revolution, of (because of) Neo-Classicism:

the individual = an infinite reservoir of possibilities (not fixed, limited and constant)

man intrinsically good, spoiled by bad circumstances VS. man naturally limited, shaped & disciplined by order & tradition

from HEART, not HEAD

- imagination

- visionary originality

- emotions & subjectivity

- individualism & personal expression

Romanticists about Romanticism:

Lord Byron:

- poetry is lava, overflow preventing earthquake

- parallel to childbirth, poem = offspring (vs. craft in Neo-Classicism)

William Wordsworth: romantic manifesto (potential to revolutionise)

- poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings - origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity

- the feeling developed gives importance to the action and situation, not other way round

- poet is man amongst equals - yet prophet (more lively sensibility, enthusiasm & tenderness - greater knowledge of human nature, more comprehensive soul) --> The Lonely Tower by Samuel Palmer: lonely, wise, separated by abyss

Ode to the West Wind (Percy Bysshe Shelley):

wind from west (USA & France) brings awakening, revolution of structures (hello politics)

wind is destroyer, as well as preserver (ambivalent)

poet wants to become wind himself (--> poet is central)

William Wordsworth:

The Solitary Reaper:

poet listening to some scottish lass singing in Scottish - nvm whether he understands Scottish! Emotions & feelings are still developing, which is only thing that matters (not event itself)

--> recollecting emotions in tranquillity, then writing about memories of emotions

- simple language

- about simple people

I Wandered lonely as a Cloud:

memory > event, recollecting memories afterwards (lying on couch), then writing about it

everything is matter (soul is irrelevant)

(socio-political changes in Victorian Age: national railway network, increase of national wealth, capitalistic middle-class)

positive from lat. ponere ("put down" - so to touch, to prove)

belief in sense perception

knowledge based on observation

darwin, natural science

DARK & POWERFUL

socio-economic changes:

- industrial revolution

- massive increase in population

- rapid urbanisation

- gap btw N & S (north = heavily industrialised, south rural, deteriorated)

socio-political changes:

- development of railway network

- increase of national wealth

- capitalistic middle-class

Thomas Carlyle's Epithet: Mechanical Age, Age of Machinery

- whole, undivided might forwards

- adapting means to ends

- nothing is done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

- little is left for men, but mind machines and feed furnaces

- everything is operated to give mechanical regularity to all the habit and action of men

women:

The Angel in the House

--> orig. 18th cen. ideal of perfect wife, devoted to family, domestic duties; sexually ignorant before marriage, full of family affection afterwards

The Fallen Woman

--> origin: Eve - prostitute, moral monster, beyond redemption; reality of poverty

frequently child protagonist --> evoking pity

North and South (Elisabeth Gaskell):

- life of factory workers, life in factories & economic injustice

- N vs. S

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens):

- expectations not = reality

- future does not hold righteous stuff, justice

- people holding your back & people being after the money (sucking up)

- Industrialisation enables uprising of poor orphan

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)

Tess of the d'Ubervilles (Thomas Hardy)

fallen women (starts relationship with rapist - beyond redemption, poor

My Last Duchess (Robert Browning):

women ought to be submissive, or - well - get killed

still: He's not in control of the painting, her cheating lives on - he tries to control (murder, painting behind curtains)

Mariana (Alfred Lord Tennyson):

about nothing happening at all!

--> locus amoeus = lovely place (perverted locus amoeus here)

not one, but a lot of small movements (sometimes only local) etc.

huge changes in history (e.g. losing of colonies in WWI)

"Europe is falling apart"

--> negative effects of industrialisation --> devastation (unlike in the Victorian Age)

fluid boundaries of the arts

literary impressionism (Holman & Harmon):

- highly personal manner of writing

- materials presented as they appear to an individual temperament at a precise moment, from particular POV

--> not as they are in reality

--> subjective reality

- momentary

- atmosphere (colours, light, sound)

modernist fiction:

- no omniscient narrator

- lack of closure

- multiple focalisations, perspectives

- lack of logical plot, non-chronological (e.g. stream of consciousness)

--> FRAGMENTATION

At the Bay (Katherine Mansfield):

literary impressionism

describing atmosphere, rather than objects (blue grass)

(E.E. Cummings):

l(e

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

compared to Modernism

atmosphere after WWII: sense of disillusionment

both extension and break wit Modernism (hello fragmentation^^)

--> both deal with fragmentation, however attitude is different, takes different forms:

"The modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it" (Barry, Perter)

Modernism = "Live in fragments no longer. Only connect" (Foster, E.M.)

world perceived as breaking apart

- fragments as source of despair - must be remedied

- nostalgia for loss of harmony

- very "whole" (e.g. cubic architecture)

Postmodernism = "Fragments are the only forms I trust" (Barthelme, Donald)

world is in flux, in motion and subject to transformation - liberation

- fragments as source of playfulness & performance

- pluralisation, openness

- traditional concepts (e.g. truth) fade, become doubted

--> perspective (e.g. several different truths, personal truths) --> Metafiction

Postmodern issues:

- Reality: question of perspective

- History: highly subjective (therefore, history written by historians insufficient)

- Metanarratives: grand narrative has lost it's credibility

absurd

the modern sense of purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value

characteristics:

- antisocial characters (bewildered, not understanding)

- plot is not logical, circular (incapability of communication)

- grotesque

philosophical notion that human condition is absurd --> human must construct meaning in life himself

- absurd often in double meaning:

- grotesquely comic

- feeling of total alienation (again double: in universe & from oneself)

Existentialism

existence precedes essence (Sartre)

a number of dramatist in the 50ies whose work evoke the absurd by abandoning logical form, character and dialogue together with realistic illusion

a play that combines elements of tragedy and comedy, either by providing a happy ending to a potentially tragic story or by some more complex blending of serious and light moods

in dramatic criticism term has become attached to the theatre of the absurd

Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett):

absurd theatre

minimal setting of a country road (live, change), a tree (live) and it's evening (death? also change)

nothing happens, nobody comes or goes

only certainty: awareness of waiting, everything is unclear

--> purposelessness of life

--> sense of total estrangement

--> failure of communication

Lost in the Funhouse (John Barth):

self-aware, metafictional

Colonialism is age of binarism & othering (other as an essential requirement for definitions)

--> breaking binary oppositions, hybridity instead of othering

English as a pluricentric language

Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys):

Jane Eyre from different perspective (crazy woman in attic)

The Danger of a Single Story (Ngozi Aidiche)

Jasmine (Bharati Mukherjee):

Hybridity & concepts of identity

fractured (i.e. post-colonial as well as postmodern)

creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonialisation

can be linguistic, cultural, political, racial etc.