Handout Rom. I 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Why a canon? Textuality and the interpreting act. Elements of Romantic poetics. Defining Romanticism.

New elements in the Pre-Romantic Period. Romanticism vs. Classicism. Paratactic list of features of Romantic Poetics. Recent influential studies on Romanticism. Romantic reconciliations.

1. old writings and habit of venerating them happen not primarily because they are witnesses to a merely historical state of affairs, but because the state of affairs has consuming relevance to later times. (F.Kermode, An Appetite for Poetry. Essays in Literary Interpretation, 1989.) 2.1. Period ENCODING DECODING Period Paradigm Author Syntagm DISCOURSE narrator - narratee Story Reader Hyper Signification

Genre Genre 2.2. Writing as textuality undoes logocentricism through its rhetoriocal and troping figures. Logocentrism= a form of rationalism that presupposes a presence behind L. and text; (a presence such as an idea, an intention, a truth, a meaning or a reference for which L. acts as a subsurvient and convenient vehicle of expression.) Jacques Derrida - a free floating formalist (Nuttall) indeterminacy of textual meaning; death of the author concept of diffrance: difference+deferring Interpretation will endlessly repeat the interpretative act, never able to reach that final explanation and understanding of the text, being a continual play of diffrance. 3. the poet; creative power; nature of poetry. 4. Romantic thought = an initially compensatory reaction to historically new social ills of a society which was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument of production.(R. Williams) Romantic art = a remedy for the ills of thought, a cure drawn from consciousness itself for the disintegrative effects of self-consciousness.(G. Hartman) 8. M.H. Abrams,The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition , OUP, 1953 H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; Poetry and Repression,1976 Paul DeMan, The Rhetoric of Temporality, 1969; The Resistance to Theory,1986; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1986 Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valery, 1954; Romanticism and Anti-Self-Consciousness,1993. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society:1780-1950, 1958, ch. The Romantic Artist. Hegel, Phenomenology, 1807(sublation; thesis; antithesis; synthesis; symbol) 9. Harter Fogle: Beauty vs. Truth; the unusual in the usual vs. the usual in the unusual.

Handout Rom. II 1. 2. 3. 4. Romantic: etymology 19th century: cultural milieu The Romantic Periods birth certificate W. Wordsworth (1770 1850): a writer with a philosophy, a clearly defined set of convictions that he presents in his poetry. 4.1 W. Ws influence in literature 4.2 W. Ws philosophical vision: the egotistical sublime(J. Keats) 4.3 W. Ws Pantheism 4.4 Themes in Lyrical Ballads 4.5 Design in Lyrical Ballads 5. Text analysis: Expostulation and Reply; A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal 1. Romantic
romantic, mod. 1. [Referring to love and adventure] --Syn. adventurous, novel, daring, charming, enchanting, idyllic, lyric, poetic, fanciful, chivalrous, courtly, knightly. 2. [Referring to languages descending from Latin; often capital ] --Syn. romanic, romance, Mediterranean, Italic, Latinic, Provencal, Catalan, Ladin or Rhaeto-Romanic or Romansh, Ladino or Judezmo, Andalusian, Aragonese, Castilian. 3. [Referring to the Romantic Movement; often capital] --Syn. Rousseauistic, Byronic, Wordsworthian, Sturm und Drang (German).

2. Reaction against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke, Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790). Reactions for: Peter Priestly, Letters to Burke (1790); Thomas Peine, Rights of Man (1791); Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man(1791), Vindication of the Rights of Woman(1791); William Cobbet, Weekly Political Register; W.Godwin, Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness,(1793). 3. 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads foreworded by the Preface: the Manifesto of the Romantic Movement; Lyrical Ballads inaugurates Modern Poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self. 4.1 use of common language; detecting the Spirit of Beauty and Goodness in Nature 4.2 Egotistical Sublime (J. Keats) egotistical<strong autobiographical element; sublime<permanent indeterminence of his vision of Nature<human nature esp. simple solitary people. 4.3 Nature, both in her sublime and her most lowly states radiates a power that meets and inter-operates with a corresponding spirit from the observing man which is given various names: soul or simply power; the leap of the heart at a rainbow. 4.4 Everyday tragedies in society; sufferings of old age; basic relationships; tales; children perceiving nature; poet as social missionary; poet as preacher 4.5 S.T. Coleridge would deal with supernatural things insisting upon the dramatic truth of such emotions that would transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth. W. Wordsworth would give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and would excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the minds attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. 4.6 A slumber did my spirit seal; No motion has she now, no force; I had no human fears; She neither hears nor sees; She seemed a thing that could not feel Rolled round in earths diurnal course, The touch of earthly years. With rocks, and stones, and trees. (1800)

Handout Rom. III 1. S.T. Coleridge (1772-1834) s views of poetry and nature. 2. S.T. Coleridges philosophy. 3. Poetry as spiritual and intellectual quest. 4. Symbol formation and symbolic functioning. 4.1 Symbolization vs. verbalization. 4.2 Human consciousness, poetry and religion. 5. Coleridges technique. 6. Unifying theme in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel. 7. Text analyses: Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 1. Myth-maker< expressing his ideas as SYMBOLS. 2. Coleridges antirationalism derives from German idealist philosophers (e.g. Kants The Critique of Pure Reason). The term, Philosophy defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlation of being.(Biographia Literaria, ch. 9); intelligence is capable only of lifeless and sightless notion; reason is a source of actual truth, the soul beholds, it does not hypothesize. Organic / mechanical knowledge; symbol / allegory; reason / understanding; imagination / fancy exemplified on Shakespeares work. 3. The illogical order of symbolist art coincides with the order of learning and insight. Form is factitious Being, and Thinking is the process, Imagination the Laboratory, in which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence. A Philosopher, i.e. a nominal Philosopher without Imagination, is a Coiner- Vanity, the Froth of the molten Mass is his Stuff- and Verbiage the Stamp& Impression. (Notebooks, vol.2 no 2444) 4. Every living principle is actuated by an idea; and every idea is living, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as Bacon has sublimely observed) containth an endless power of semination.'(The Statemans Manual (1817),Lay Sermons) a Symbol is characterized by the translucence of the External through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The others are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter Alas! for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures. 4.1 symbolization=the imaginative containment of a living idea. Verbalization=the manipulation of fixed counters( The Friend) 4.2 It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness that we should be brought to this negative state, & that should pass into Custom - but likewise necessary that at times we should awake & step forward - this is effected by Poetry & Religion.(Notebooks, vol.3 no 3632) 5. Coleridge inspired himself from Lisle Bowles(1762-1850) s technique in the Sonnets >viz. the technique of exploring an arrested moment of emotion by fixing it spacially in a particularized landscape; illiterate eye showing a cultivation of auditory powers. What I call this auditory imagination is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far bellow the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, the current and the new and surprising the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.(T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry, p.111)

Handout Rom. IV 1. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) and his tradition. 2. G.G. Byrons own poetics. 3. Byron and the interpreting act. 4. The lure of biography. 5. Byronism and the Byronic hero. 6. Byrons metafictional strategy. 6.1 Colloquial and narrative technique. 6.2 Inter- and extratextuality. 7. Text analysis: Don Juan 1. If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues, Milton appealed to the avenger, Time; If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime, He deigned not to belie his soul in songs, Nor turn his very talent to a crime; He did not loathe the sire to laud the son, But closed the tyrant-hater he begun. (Don Juan, Dedication, St.10) You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know, At being disappointed in your wish To supersede all warblers here below, And be the only blackbird in the dish;( Don Juan, Dedication, St.3) 2. Byron claims with remarkable clarity that the basis of poetry lies not in individual words, as Eliot implies, but in the relationships they mutually establish. 3. Byron stresses not the mystery residing in the object but the doubt caused by our own fallible mental activities. Byron declared about Don Juan, I have no plan I had no plan but I had or have materials; and indeed the manner in which it is written is just as important as the story as he observed, I mean it for a poetical Tristam Shandy. 4. Byron travels to escape his own ennui: To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. Hours of Idleness (1808)Beppo, Mazeppa, Cain, Sardonapalus (1816) 5. The Byronic hero = a moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer. = a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, incapable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection. (Macaulay) Byronism = the attitude of Titanic cosmic self-assertion; Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, dedicates a chapter to G.G. Byron. I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - I am such a strange mlange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me. ( Letter to a friend of his Lady Blessington)

There are but two sentiments to which I am constant a strong love of liberty and a detestation of CANT. 6. Byron is considered the inventor of a species of discursive narrative poetry, loose enough to contain an intermittent ironic commentary on contemporary life and manners as well as himself. 6.1 Ottava Rima stanza, (a b a b a b c c ) < Italian Renaissance Luigi Pulgi, Francesco Berni - > a metre whose potential for narrative style of mock-heroic impudence is magnificently exploited. 6.2 Inter- and extratextuality with Byron, functions comically to foreground the process whereby literary art creates its illusions through language and so becomes self-referential creating those myriad of slippages and maladjustments of that social network [that] create the gaps in which his irony and satire operate.(P.J. Manning)

Handout Rom. V 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) s specific poetics. 1.1 Form; subject-matter; tone; imagery. 2. P.B. Shelleys creed. 3. P.B. Shelleys works. 4. P.B. Shelleys views on the social part of the poet and poetry. 5. P.B. Shelleys symbolism 6. Text analysis:Epipsychidion 1.1 The pure lyric = a short poem, celebrating nothing but the poets own soul with few or no attendant circumstances. Shelley idealizes, universalizes the human nature.e.g. Prometheus, Alastor, The Revolt of Islam. Terza Rima < interlocking tercets a b a b cb c d c> e.g. The Triumph of Life The feeling of a scene rather than the individual elements that constitute it. 2. Shelley inspired himself from Godwins views: evil is not inherent in the system of creation but an accident that might be expelled. 3. Queen Mab; Alastor; The Revolt of Islam; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais; The Witch of Atlas; The Triumph of Life (unfinished); shorter poems. 4. The Necessity of Atheism (1811); A Defence of Poetry (1821). 5. W.B. Yeats says that Shelleys symbolism has an air of rootless fantasy because it has never lived in the mind of a people.

Handout Rom. VI 1. Characteristics of John Keats (1795-1821) s poetics. 1.1 The poet as central concept. 2. J. Keatss thinking system. 3. The Bower principle vs. The Buildung principle. 4. A chronology of J. Keatss work. 4.1 Imagination and Growth in the Great Odes 5. Keatss conception of a general and gregarious advance of intellect in cultural history. 6. Keats and the poetic principle of self-development. 7. The allegorical function of self. 8. Keatss principle of vale of soul-making. 9. Keatss sense of the fellowship with essence. 10. Text analysis: Ode to Psyche. 1. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of Hearts affections and the truth of imagination.(Letter to Bailey) I can never feel certain of any Truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.( Letter to George) M. Arnold said that No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness. Appeal to the senses; empathy; negative capability; cultural background; Greek mythology and Middle Ages. 1.1 The Poet endowed with Negative capability < Platos theory of the Daimon. 2. Due to his analogous thinking, Keatss poetry is allusive, programme-free, not naming things but suggesting them. Keatss mythopoetics is directed towards the achievement of the two eternal concepts: Beauty and Truth. Morris Dickstein introduces two interesting concepts characterizing Keatss work: The Bower principle = the embodiment of a nave rather than a decadent state of Oneness with nature. The Buildung principle = its objective is coexistence with its own self-formation and not quite the principle of the quest. = it is connected with a poetics of transcendence (e.g. Endymion) or a poetics of historicity ( e.g. the Two Hyperions).

3.

4.

Endymion (1818); La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Ballad (1819); The Fall of Hyperion (1819); The Odes: Ode to Psyche; Ode to A Nightingale; Ode on A Grecian Urn; Ode On Melancholy; Ode On Indolence; To Autumn (1819); Lamia; Hyperion; Isabella; The Eve of St. Agnes (1820); 4.1 Leading theme: the theme of transience and permanence. 5. The Mansion of Many Apartments is a metaphor which represents the life of the mind. (Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818) The Chamber of Maiden Thought is at the heart of the minds mansion, and all doors open from it. From its original infant or thoughtless Chamber, the soul is imperceptibly impelled to the next chamber by innate forces beyond its control, by forces which have strangely awakened, on the lines of Coleridges recognition that at times we should awake and step forward.

6. 7.

I have asked myself so often why I should be a Poet more than other Men seeing how great a thing it is. (Letter to Hunt) The selfs function is to sense and watch the internal manifestations of the Genius of Poetry the thinking principle, motivated by the eternal Being, the Principle of Beauty- and the Memory of Great Men. (Notebooks) They are very shallow people who take everything literal A Mans life of any worth is a continual allegory _ and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life a life like the scriptures, figurative. (Shakespeares Criticism) Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.

8.

Difficulties nerve the Spirit of a Man they, make our Prime Objects a Refuge as well as a Passion. (The Friend) the principle of Vale of Soul- Making. A poet can seldom have justice done to his imagination it can scarcely be conceived how Milton might here aid the magnitude of his conceptions as a bat in a large gothic vault. (marginal note to Paradise Lost in The Students Manual, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, 1972) Keats internalized the model for expanding the mind, taken from Milton, in his own process of metabolizing emotional obstacles by etherealizing, alchemizing or digesting, (frequent metaphors of his ), such that they become developmental aids in the Vale of Soul- making, nerving the spirit.

9.

The idea of Beauty is the quarry and the food which produces in the poet essential verse.(in Keatss sense of a fellowship with essence).

Keats always regarded a sense of beauty as the first step in recognizing the richness of any potential mind-forming experience; and by beauty, Keats included a range of complex sensations such as pain, ugliness, blindness, etc. I have the same idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essntial Beauty. According to Keats the imagining-into faculty is secondary to (or consequent on) the being-imagined-into faculty which (in Coleridge' s terms) reflects the mystery of being.

Handout Rom. VII 1. Romantic Essayists and their Vision on the Epoch vs Victorian Prose Writers and their Vision on their Own Epoch. 1.1 Representatives, Means of Expression, Degrees of Commitment. 1.2 Divergent Views on the Individual / Democracy Dichotomy. 2. Religion vs. Science in the 19th Century Context. 2.1Reactions to the Religious Impasse. 3. Safety Valves as a Result of Individual Alienation. 4. 20th Century Reactions to the Victorian Age. 5. Characteristics of Victorian Literature. 6. Prose as Instrument of Persuasion and Argumentation. 7. Victorian Poetry vs. Romantic Poetry. 8. Victorian Theories of the Poet. 1. Reformers (Politics + Religion) Conservatives Uncommitted Ch. Lamb (1775-1834) personal essays e.g. Essays of Elia

L. Hunt (1784-1859) W. Hazlitt(1778-1830) Periodicals practical critic l (the ephemeral of (liberty, equality) everyday life) impressionist criticism e.g. Autobiography e.g. The Pleasure of Hating

Th. Love Peacock (1785-1866) Surviver of the great 18th c. tradition of satire e.g. The Four Ages of Poetry Th. De Quincey (1785-1859) impressionist criticism e.g. Syle; Rhetoric nightmarish side of human consciousness e.g. Confessions of an English Opium Eater 1.2 Supporters of Personal Freedom: J. S. Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848 year of The Communist Manifesto); On the Subjection of Women (1869) about which The Queen had to say: Lady ought to get a good whipping. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different then let them remain each in their position. In Mills view the distinction between 18th c. and 19th c. thinking is : For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace rational fundations. The Cult of the Great Man as supported by Th. Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. The Ages Protest against Machinery: Th. Carlyle: To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable SteamEngine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. J. Ruskin: The ugliness of urban life made people steal out to the fields and the mountains.

SCIENCE (Darwin) LOSS OF FAITH DOUBT / BELIEF Utilitarianism Philosophical Conservatives (J. Bentham/Malthus/J. Mill) EDUCATION Agnosticism T.H. Huxley(1825-1895) controversialist On the Physical Basis of Life Th. Carlyle (1795-1881) Sartor Resartus The Everlasting No The Everlasting Yea (vital spark)

RELIGION FAITH Tractarianism

J.H.Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) Oxford Movement Apologia Pro Vita Sua

John Stuard Mill (1806-1873) On Liberty from Of Individuality What Is Poetry? (INDIVIDUAL more important than the State or Church.)

Th. Macaulay (1800-1859) History of England the Accession of James II (Great debater of progress)

J. Ruskin (1819-1900) : If only the Geologists would let Modern Painters me alone, I could do very well, The Stones of Venice but those dreadful hammers! I The Nature of Gothic hear the clink of them at the (a prophet) end of every cadence of the Bible verses. (1851) W. Morris (1834-1896) M. ARNOLD (1822-1888) News from Nowhere The Function of Criticism (ideal of a communist state) Culture and Anarchy The Beauty of Life Friendships Garland (work-pleasure) (CULTURE=a panacea) (ag. PHILISTINISM) W. Pater(1839-1894) : the legitimate contention Is, not Appreciations of one age or school of literary Aesthetic Poetry art against another, but of all Romanticism successive schools alike, (epicurian preacher, against the stupidity which is impressionistic critic) dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form. 3. Theatre: farce; pantomime; burlesque melodrama; Punch and Judy shows Journalism: 150 Comic Journals; Literature: Nonsense (Limerick; Jabberwocky) 4. for: G. Steiner: Victorian Period: the Great Summer of Human Civilization against: Georgian reaction: Victorian=Prudery; V. Woolf: dampness, rain; 9. Th. Carlyles poet as hero; Sinfields the poet of the margins; J.S. Mills and Lewess the secular poet of the margins= the poet divorced from the politics, one whose duty is

to aesthetics, pleasure, beauty and not prophecy, instruction and devotion. (e.g. Tennyson) Handout Vic. VIII 1. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) as exponent of the secular poet of the margins. 2. Alfred Tennysons poetry between solipsism and social involvement. 2.1Alfred Tennysons self renewing techniques. 3. Signposts in His Evolution. 3.1In Memoriam A.H.H.(1850): theme, form, imagery. 4. Arthur Tennysons Conception of Language. 5. Text Analysis: In Memoriam, Section 54 1. Vex not the poets mind With thy shallow wit: Vex not thou the poets mind; For thou canst not fathom it. Clear and bright it should be ever, Flowing like a crystal river; Bright as light, and clear as wind. (The Poets Mind, 1830 ) 2. A. Tennyson confesses in a commentary to Tears, Idle Tears (1847): it is the distance that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate today in which I move. Stopford Brooke (Victorian critic, 1894) reconsidered Ts relation to modern life: Ts age was vividly with him as he wrote of patriotism; the proper conception of freedom; the sad condition of the poor; the position of women in the onward movement of the world; the role of commerce and science in that movement; the future of the race; the noble elements of English character, their long descent and the sacred reverence we owed to them. 3. The Lady of Shalott; The Lotos-Eaters; The Epic [Morte dArthur]; Ulysses; The Princess, A Medley; Idylls of the King (The Coming of ArthurThe Passing of Arthur). 3.1 In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850) literary sources: Horaces Odes; pastoral elegy; lovesonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare; Dantes Vita Nuova and Divina Commediae. 4. (a) The empiricist perspective on language <Locke: sensations are the source of all knowledge and a word is merely a sound that is arbitrarily attached to a sensation. (b) The idealist perspective, deriving from Kant, current among the Apostles (the Germano-Coleridgean, Cambridge Society in the 1820s) T.S. Eliot: A great poet because of abundance, variety and complete competence. The saddest of the English poets. Terry Eagleton: Tennyson marks the last point in English life at which poetry was still a public genre. Yet even here the cracks are beginning to show: In Memoriam rehearses the set themes of Victorian Society, but it is really an assemblage of lyrical fragments in which private experience is now running too deep for public articulation. ( in T. L. S. /Oct.1992) Penelope Fitzgerald: He was a superb metrist, who scarcely needed to care for the opinions of Indolent Reviewers, but did care, and he was someone who could hear the authentic voice of the English language,i.e. the sound of the language talking to itself. At times Tennyson seems to me to be listening, rather as Pavarotti does, in apparent amazement simply to the beauty of the sounds that he is inexplicably able, as a great professional, to produce. (in T. L. S. /Oct. 1992, A Hundred Years After)

Isobel Armstrong: He is a baffling poet because the writing often seems to long for a simplicity which is betrayed by the complexity of its language. Handout Vic. IX 1. Robert Browning(1812-1889)s method in poetry vs. Alfred Tennysons method. 2. Robert Browning as a forerunner of 20th century poetry. 2.1 The Dramatic Monologue as norm. 2.1.1 Definition; advantages. 3. Vitality: the most outstanding principle of Brownings poetry. 4. Aspects Separating Browning from the Victorian Age. 5. Robert Browning: the humanist, historicist and dialectician. 6. Text Analysis: My Last Duchess 1. Browning wrote in McAleer, Dearest Isa: 328 about A. Tennysons Pelleas and Ettare (1869): Here is an Idyll about a knight being untrue to his friend and yielding to the temptation of that friends mistress after having engaged to assist him in his suit. I should judge the conflict in the knights soul the proper subject to describe: Tennyson thinks he should describe the castle, and the effect of the moon on its towers, and anything but the soul. My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul; little else is worth study.(Sordello) His poems are described always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imagery persons, not mine.( Preface of 1868) 2. The American poet Richard Howard (1969) dedicated a volume of monologues to B.: to the great poet of otherness, who said, as I should like to say, Ill tell my state as thought were none of mine. 2.1 Randall Jarrell remarked: the dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or another the norm. (Poetry and the Age, 1953) 2.2 D.M. = A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience. = One instance of the monologue besides monodrama, soliloquy, solo address. (1) A way of lying while seeming to tell the truth or vice versa.(2) each speaker of D.M. provides a mask for the poet.(3) the triad reader / speaker / poet is brought together as the Readers work through the words of the speaker toward the meaning of the poet. 3. I.e. Life is presented as a challenge to be met with positive effort, even if the contest seems desperate and pointless; through (1) character, action, explicit statement; (2) language, versification and poetic texture. 4. In point of characters and style. Andrea del Sarto; Fra Lippo Lippi; Sordello; The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxeds Church; Paracelsus; Caliban Upon Satabos; Men and Women. 5. R. Browning is a skeptical man whose ultimate concern is man preference for the conflict in his characters; forerunner of the stream of consciousness technique; God is revealed to Man through Love: the infinite becomes the finite through Christ. Brownings Language has an emotional basis: the more emotional it becomes, the greater the chance to contain approximations of truth personal, existential truth. Brownings imagination was historical and therefore novelistic: e.g. The Ring and the Book; he dealt more with Facts than Fancies. General theme: Order Vs Disorder

General mood: an optimistic confidence in the enormous prospects of human happiness, capable to overcome human suffering. Diction is denotative to the extreme. Handout Vic. X 1. Gerard Manley Hopkinss (1844-1889) poetry: a means towards a deeper knowledge. 1.1 Significant Data for His Career as an Outstanding Searcher in the Science of Poetic Language. 1.2 Poetry between Verbal Sound and Meaning. Definition. 1.3 Hopkinss Concept of Identity. 2. His Theory of Poetry and Language. 2.1 Inscape. Instress. Running Instress. 2.2 Language and the taste of Himself. 2.3 Vocabulary: A Personal Thesaurus. 2.4 Symbols Used by Hopkins. 3. Recurrent Themes in Early Verse. 4. Hopkins, Aesthetics and Religion. 4.1 The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875) 5. Innovatory Techniques. Deviant Language. 6. Hopkins as Critic. 7. Sonnets. Terrible Sonnets. 1. Every true poetmust be original, and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. (Hopkins) 1.2 Hopkins defined poetry: speech formed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. 1.3 I consider my self being, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being. 2.1 Inscape Instress the outward signs by which a creatures inner identity could be grasped. the emotional force with which inscape impressed itself on his consciousness. Power of the eye to communicate with the noneye. Power of the man to reveal his inscape to the inscape of the objects. Power of the object to reveal its own inscape. Secures the unity of the world. Natural urge towards its own proper function, inherent in everything. Running Instress the modification of one INSTRESS by relics of a previous one in the mind of the observer. 2.2 Language should be appropriate both to the inscape and his own self-being.

2.3 His thesaurus was gathered from all sources: workday and literary, local and cosmopolitan. 2.4 Fire and Light; the beauty of the sacrifice; regret before the fact of decay and mortality. 3 Religious content: A Vision of Mermaids; Heaven-Haven; The Habit of Perfection. 4 Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty; Hopkins wrote in his Journal (1866-1875): All the world is full of inscape; and he caught inscapes everywhere: in leaves, flowers, trees, bird-song, bird-flight, horses and distant sheep; in waves, waterfalls, clouds, sunsets and stars. I do think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. The world might be seen as the INSCAPE of GOD. Duns Scotuss Scriptum Oxonieuse Super Sententies: the theory of thisness.

4.1 You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of 75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work (letter to Dixon, 1878) Sprung Rhythm =the purely accentual verse which he extensively explained in Preface to Poems. 5 Sprung Rhythm; Upbeat (Slack); Downbeat (Ictus); Alliteration; Inscape; Instress. Ellipses; inversions; substitutions; omission; odd affixation; dialecticism; paradigmatic shifts; syntactic ambiguities; homophones; word order. 5. The ability to hold a special awareness of his own self, inscaping the world. The inscape of speech reveals the inscape of the artists person. Seriousness - the touchstone of highest art - being in earnest with your subject-reality Beauty has an ethical contingency: a necessary condition to the fullness of the Holiness beauty + good The Handsome Heart = the beauty of the character 6. Binsey Poplars; Spring; The Starlight Night; The Windhover; Pied Beauty; Carrion Comfort; As Kingfishers Catch Fire.

Handout Vic. XI 1. Romance Vs Novel. Romance Vs Realism 1.1 Characteristics of Romances 1.2 Victorian Definitions of the Novel 1.3 Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction 1.4 Realism as Perfect Agreement between Form and Message 2. Characteristics of the Victorian Novel 3. Victorian Novelists as Historians of the Two Englands 4. Functions of the Novel in the Victorian Age 5. Common Victorian Themes 6. Original Audience 7. Famous Representatives 8. Comic Verse, Parody, Nonsense 8.1 Punchs (1841) jokes: a national industry 8.2 Representatives of the Genre 1.2 A Romance originally meant anything in prose or in verse written in any of the Romance languages; a
Novel meant a new tale, a tale of fresh interest now, when we speak of a Romance, we generally mean a fictitious narrative, in prose or verse, the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents; and, when we speak of a Novel we generally mean a fictitious narrative differing from the Romance, inasmuch as the incidents are accommodated to the ordinary train of events and the modern state of society. (D.Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction, 1859). A good novel should be both [sensational and realistic], and both in the highest degree. (A. Trollope. Autobiography, 1883) Between realism and idealism, there is no natural conflict. This completes that. (G. Meredith, 1862)

1.4 Jan Watt states that the first use of the term REALISM occurred in 1835 as an aesthetic description to denote the vrit humaine of Rembrandt opposed to the idalit potique of neoclassical painting; it was later consecrated as a specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 of Ralism, a journal edited by Duranty.(Jan Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1970). The novels realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it. (J Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1970) R.Wellek defines the realism of this period as truth of observation and a depiction of commonplace events, characters and settings. 2. Walter Allen in The English Novel, 1954, remarks that: This sense of identity with their times is of cardinal importance in any consideration of the early Victorian novelists. It was a source alike of their strengths and of their weaknesses, and it distinguishes them both from their successors and from their great European contemporaries. The English saw themselves as preachers sometimes as preachers and always as reformers, always as public entertainers. Their conception of themselves was modest, their conscious aim nothing much more than Wilkie Collinss Makeem laugh, makeem cry, makeem wait. (W.Allen, The English Novel)

7. romance + novelistic devices Gothic Novel W. Scott S. Richardson Th.Hardy (1840Novelistic devices Prevail Picaresque Novel Jane Austen

the 1840s the 1850s The Bronts Charlotte (1816Emily (1818-1848) Ann (1820-1849) Ch.Dickens(18121928)

the 1860s the 1870s 1855)

1870)

the 1880s the 1920s

E.Gaskell(1810-1865)

G.Eliot (1818-1880) W.Thackeray(1811G. Meredith (18281863)

1909) H.James (1843-1916)

In F.R.Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948): H.James J.Conrad J.Austen G.Eliot D.H.Lawrence G.Meredith

8. J.S.Mill said that: Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. 8.1 Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. (Jabberwocky in L. Carroll, Alice through the Looking-Glass) Algernon Charles Swinburne, Seven against Sense, 1880 One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see not, is: Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly this. What, and wherefore, and whence? For under is over and under: If thunder could be without lightning, lighting could be without thunder. Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt: We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe without? Why, and whither, and how? For barley and rye are not clover: Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is under and over. Two and two may be four: but four and four are not eight: Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same thing as fate. Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what he feels: God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair of heels. Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which: The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch More is the whole than a part: but half is more than the whole: Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the body the soul? One and two are not one: but one and nothing is two: Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true. Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common as cocks: Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox. Parallels all things are: yet many of these are askew:

You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you. Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream from the rock: Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the cock. God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see: Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

Handout Vic. XII 1. Charles Dickenss (1812-1870) work: a melting pot of 18th century fictional devices 1.1 The Dickens of Coach Journeys 1.2 Dickens: The Great StageManager Novelist 1.2.1Elements of Macro and Microstructure of his Novels 2. Dickens: One of the Greatest Stylists of 19th Century 3. Distinctive Features of the Dickensian Style 3.1 Sample Analyses 4. Dickens Defends Fantasy 1.1 Journeys are one of the most controlling metaphors in Dickenss early novels: The Pickwick Papers; Oliver Twist; Nicholas Nickleby; The Old Curiosity Shop; Barnaby Rudge; American Notes; Martin Chuzzlewit; The Chimes; A Christmas Carol. 1.2.1 Mario Prazs formula for Dickenss Novel is: melodrama + grotesque + humorous elaboration of characters 2. When confronted with a Dickens text the reader is forced to make some readjustment of understanding while reading. The readers unsettled experience becomes a principal means of recognizing meanings and effects associated with a text. 3. Grandiloquence was the besetting linguistic vice of Dickenss era, and it is clear from many burlesque treatments of it in his novels (notably in the language of Mr.Micawber), that Dickens himself regarded it as a vice. The occurrence of this device in Dickenss own narrative is a sign of non-seriousness, a linguistic game-playing which is a prose counterpart of the mock-heroic style in poetry. 3.1 Among the good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadnt robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in at an acute angle of the table-cloth, with the table in my chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak( I didnt want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No; I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldnt leave me alone. (Ch. Dickens, Great Expectations, Chapter 4) 4. It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is truth. The exact truth must be there; but the merit of art in the narration is the manner of stating the truth. As to which thing in literature, it always seems to me that there is a world to be done. And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal & catalogue-like to make the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do in that way I have an idea (really founded on the love of what I profess) that the very holding of popular literature through a kind of popular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment. (Ch. Dickens, Letter to John Foster, 1859 in J. Foster, The Life of Ch. Dickens (1874) vol.III)

Handout Vic. XIII 1. W.M. Thackerays (1811-1863) work: a continuous portrayal of the real 1.1 Sources of Realism 1.2 The novelist on the novel 2. E. Gaskell (1810-1865) and domestic realism 2.1 Th. Carlyles concept of Environment of Circumstances 2.2 Elements of Macro and Microstructure of her Novels 3. Emily Bront (1818-1848) as best representative of That Family of Poets. 3.1 Wuthering Heights (1847) a self reflexive novel _ a book about spiritual war. 1.1 Realism in Thackeray issues out of Parody. Thackerays sense of an unheroic 19th century was based on a specifically anti-heroic reading of history which challenged Carlyles influential views on heroes, great individual men who provided the driving force of a nations history. 1.2 The Art of Novels Is to Represent Nature I think Mr.Dickens has in many things quite a divine genius so to speak & certain notes in his song are so delightful & admirable, that I should never think of trying to imitate him, only hold my tongue & admire him. I quarrel with his Art in many respects: which I dont think represents Nature duly . The Act of Novels is to represents Nature; to convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality _ in a tragedy or a poem or a lofty drama you aim at producing different emotions; the figures moving, and their words sounding, heroically: but in a drawing-room drama, a coat is a coat and a poker a poker, and must be nothing else according to my ethics, not an embroidered tunic nor a great red-hot instrument like the Pantomime weapon. (W.M.Thackeray, Letter to David Masson, 6 May 1851, Letters 1945) ...We are for the most part an abominably foolish & selfish people desperately wicked & all eager after vanities. Everybody is you see in that book [i.e . Vanity Fair] for instance if I had made Amelia a higher order of woman there would have been no vanity in Doblins falling in love with her, where as the impression at present is that he is a fool for his pains, that he has married a sweet little thing & in fact has found out his error, rather a sweet & tender & however quia multum amavit. I want to leave everybody dissatisfied & unhappy at the end of the story we ought all to be with our own & all other stories. Good God, dont see (in that maybe cracked & warped looking glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses; wickednesses, lusts, follies, shortcomings? In company let us hope with better qualities about which permit discourse. We must lift up our voices about these & howl to a congregation of fools; so much at least has been my misanthropy to task - I wish I could myself: but take the world by a certain standard (you know what I mean) & who dares talk of having any virtue at all? (W.M.Thackeray, Letter to Robert Bell, 3 September 1848, Letters 1945 in Miriam Allott, Novelists on the Novel)

2. Th. Carlyle endowed the term environment for the first time when translating Goethe with a new connotation viz. environment of circumstances: the condition under which any person or thing lives or is developed; the sum-total of influences which modify and determine the development of life or character. 2.1 R. Williams considers that there is a deliberately close but limited access to the writing that was actually being done by the class that Mrs. Gaskell was writing about, as in her close reliance on Bamford, or in the inclusion of dialect in that deliberately associating, and yet at the same time outwardly explanatory, way. ( Forms of English Fiction in 1848, 1986) R.Williams remarks that the relationship of Margaret and Thornton and their eventual marriage serve as a unification of the practical energy of the Northern manufacturer with the developed sensibility of the Southern girl which is stated explicitly by E. Gaskell in her novel. (R.W., 1986) The device of the legacy which usually solves the insoluble problems in the world of the Victorian novel is also used by E.Gaskell in North and South, which very well may come in the category of fiction of special pleading. (R.W., 1986) 3. Emily Bront justifies her belonging to that family of poets. (W.M.Thackeray) 3.1 Wuthering Heights , an I-narration novel, apparently takes the form of a diary which Mr.Lockwood writes to himself:
1801 I have just returned from a visit to my landlord the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! [Ch I]

This narration also includes long passages reporting Nellie Deans narration of the events of the story to Lockwood:
About twelve oclock, that night, was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights: a puny, seven months child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff, or know Edgar. [Ch 16]

Hence the discourse structure of Nellie Deans narration as presented by G.Leech is: Addresser I (Emily Bront) Message Addresser 2 (Implied author) Message Addresser 3 Addressee 3 (Mr. Lockwood) Message Addressee 2 (Implied reader) Addressee I (Reader)

(Mr. Lockwood)

Addresser 4 (Nellie Dean)

Addressee 4 (Mr. Lockwood)

Message (Geoffrey N. Leech & Michael Short, Style in Fiction, Fig 8.3, p.2 63, 1981) Handout Vic. XIV 1. The Trajectory of a Woman Writer: George Eliot (1819 1880) 1.1 Why Mary Ann Evans was not good enough? 1.2 Her Religion: The Humanist Doctrine of Meliorism 1.3 Influences on Her Work 1.4 Arguments for Her Belonging with the Real School 1.5 Central Concepts of her Thinking 1.6 Elements of Macro and Microstructure in Her Novels 2. Thomas Hardy (1840 1928): Between Idealism and Realism 2.1 Th. Hardys World: Men in a Perpetual Flight, Pursuit, Homeless People 2.2 Influences on His Work 2.3 Central Concepts of His Thinking 2.4 Elements of Macro and Microstructure in His Novels 1.2 Meliorism (John Cross) = a belief which affirms that the world may be made better by human effort. 1.3 Like A. Comtes, G.Eliots religion of humanity grew out of historical perceptions. free will coexists with determinism(U.L.Knoepflmacher) = moral choice and the idea of a version which can be acted upon are central to her thinking. 1.4 Her aim: I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles to win your tears for real sorrows: sorrow such as may live next door to you such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel. Still there is a strong attachment to exploring the relationship between the real and the ideal. 1.5 Her novels are novels of crisis = crisis as a mode of historical explanation of this humanised apocalypse. Im not denyin the women are foolish: God Almighty made em to match the men. (Adam Bede, 1859) 1.6 Adam Bede,(1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Ramola (1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-1872), Daniel Deronda (1876). The dark secret: Tis grievous, that all amplification of travel both by sea and land, a man can never separate himself from his past history. (motto in Felix Holt) Our deeds still travel with us from afar; and what we have been makes us what we are.(motto to Ch. 70 in Middlemarch). The portrayal of imperfect souls: I wish less of our piety were spent on perfect goodness and more given to real imperfect goodness. Intrusive authorial narrator: But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas whose story we know. ( Middlemarch, Finale)

G.Eliots aim: My function is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher the rousing of nobler emotions, which mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing, of special measures. 2.Hardys idiosyncratic mode of regard justifies his idealistic conception on Art: If I were a painter, I would paint a picture of a room as viewed by a mouse from a chink under the skirting.(Florence Emily Hardy, Life of Th.Hardy) The artists disproportioning = viewing the world in varying lights or from unusual perspectives: I have been looking for God 50 years and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him. staid, worn, weak man at the railway station, whose black legs, hands, and face were longing to be out of the world, but whose brain was not because like the brain of most people, it was the last part of his body to realize a situation.(Life of Th. Hardy, 29 January entry) 2.3 Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists, 1943, identifies 3 masks for fate: (1) natural force; (2) innate weakness of character; (3) chance, destiny 2.4 Plot: D.Lodge considers Th. Hardy a cinematic novelist = one who deliberately renounces some of the freedom of representation and report afforded by the verbal medium, who imagines and presents his materials in primarily visual terms. Leon Edel observes in Novel and Camera in The Theory of the Novel, 1974, about all the great 19th century realist novelists: Novelists have sought almost from the first to become a camera. And not a static instrument but one possessing the movement through space and time which the motion-picture camera has achieved in our century. We follow Balzac, moving into his subject, from the city into the street, from the street into the house, and we tread hard on his heels as he takes us from room to room. We feel as if that massive realist had a precision of the cinema wherever we turn in the 19th century. We can see novelists cultivating the camera-eye and the cameramovement. Setting: stands in a living, cooperative relationship to the character, plot, themes. Time: analysed in relation to A.Comtes looped orbit = a forward and thus progressive cyclic movement of history. Character-drawing: D.H.Lawrence in Study of Hardy (1914) wrote of Hardys people of Wessex always bursting suddenly out of bud and taking a wild flight into flower, always shooting suddenly out of a light convention, a tight, hide-bound cabbage stage into something quite madly personal. They are struggling hard to come into being and the first and chiefest factor is the struggle into love and the struggle with love. Focalization: R. Barthes has observed that the discourse of the traditional novel alternates the personal and the impersonal very rapidly, often in the same sentence, so as to produce a proprietary consciousness which retains the mastery of what it states without participating in it. (To Write: An Intransitive Verb, The Structuralist Controversy, 1972) J.Hillis Miller refers to Hardys reliance on specified observers due to the writers unconscious wish to escape from the dangers of direct involvement in life as it is without being seen and could report on that seeing. (Hillis Miller, TH.Hardy: Distance and Desire, 1970)

Atmosphere: The New York Bookman said of Jude the Obscure (1895): It is simply one of the most objectionable books we have ever read in any language whatsoever. Pessimistic tone: The doctor examining the corpse of Little Father Time, Judes son says that the boy represents the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live. (Jude the Obscure, VI 2)