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RENAISSANCE- 14th century-17th century

SHAKESPEARE
THE ELISABETHAN AGE
a)Shakespeare lived and wrote under a remarkable period of English history. By the
time S was born, Elisabeth I was already on the throne. Her long and influential reigh
defined the era. This was an exciting period of history, with discoveries of new
continents, wars, plagues, rebellions,the revolt agaist Roman Catholic Church-the
Reformation, the foundation of the protestant churches and the publication of the first
bible in the English language.
The first public theatre was built in London when S was about 7 years old. Lyric poetry,
prose and drama were the major styles of literature that flowered during Elisabethan
age. Some more important writers in that time include: Edmund Spenser, Christopher
Marlowe and Ben Jonson. However, it is a time in which poetry of the sonnet, the
spenserian stanza and the blank verse were very popular.
The cultural movement of that period was Renaissance. During this period, ancient
Greek and Roman literature was rediscovered, translated and widely read. The writers
focused on human condition and explored the human nature which led to a philosophy
called humanism.
Shakespeare *s plays deal with common life experiences which are decribed in comedy as
well as tragedy, others reflect historical and political tensions.
b)

ROMEO AND JULIET: THE BALCONY SCENE

The story of Romeo and Juliet was
originally told by the Italian storyteller
Matteo Bandello. It is set in Verona, Italy,
and it tells the tragic love story of two
young lovers who come from rival families
: Capulets and Montagues. The families
oppose their love and , after many troubles,
they die for this. Romeo, the son of Lord
Montague, accidentally finds out about a
ball given by Lord Capulet and plans to
attend uninvited because he wants to
meet Rosaline, Juliets cousin.

He is deeply in love with her but she does not love him back. He wears a mask to disguise
his identity . In the course of the feast, he meets Juliet, Lord Capulets daughter. They fall in
love at first sight and the following day are secretly married by Friar Laurence, their
confessor, who hopes to reconcile the two families through their union. That same day Romeo
is involved in a street quarrel. His friend Mercutio is killed by Tybalt, Juliets cousin and
Romeo kills Tybalt in revenge. Mercutios and Tybalts death is the tragic turn in the play.
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As a consequence, Romeo is banished from the town by the Prince of Verona. After
spending their wedding night together , they separate and Romeo goes to Mantua on exile.
The noble Paris wants to marry Juliet and her father, who knows nothing of the secret
marriage, arranges the wedding ceremony for the next day. Juliet refuses and asks Friar
Laurence to help her escape the marriage. The friar suggests her to take a potion he will give
her, which would put her in a deathlike deep sleep. The Friar will send a letter to Romeo
informing him about the plan. Seeing no other way out, Juliet agrees. Unfortunately Romeo
does not receive Friar Laurences message in time. When he is informed of Juliets death, he
goes back to Verona, breaks into her tomb and takes a lethal poison killing himself near her
body. When Juliet wakes up from her trance, she sees Romeo dead. Grief-stricken , she takes
Romeos dagger and kills herself. Eventually the two families are reconciled.
Romeo And Juliet is considered the first of Shakespeares tragedies. In a tragedy
the hero is very often a man but here we also have a heroine, Juliet. This always
happens when the main subject of the tragedy is love. The name of the protagonist
almost always appears in the titles, e.g. Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet,
Anthony and Cleopatra. The play, that starts like a comedy( Act 1 shows potentially
comical elements), contains many tragic elements Shakespeare will later perfect in his
great tragedies : tragic plot, the theme of the operation of fate, the use of the dramatic
irony and the finalCatharsis.
The tragic plot of Romeo and Juliet develops through the following stages:
INTRODUCTION: Romeo meets Juliet at a party in her house; DEVELOPMENT:
Romeo hears Juliet confessing her love for him; CLIMAX: They are married by Friar
Laurence; CRISIS: Romeo kills Tybalt, Juliets cousin; DECLINE: Julia drinks a poison
that causes apparent death; CATASTROPHE: Juliet kills herself.
The role of Fate in Romeo and Juliet is introduced to the audience by the
prologue:
Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life,
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents strife.
As we can see, they are depicted as a pair of star-crossed lovers. In the whole play
the hostile fate works through many unfortunate events:
Romeo accidentally meets Juliet and kills Tybalt; Friar Laurences message accidentally
does not reach him; its fate that makes Juliet awake shortly after Romeos suicide.
Romeo and Juliet are not like the heroes of the Golden Tragedies. They do not have
tragic flaws that lead to their downfall. There is no villain and there are no
supernatural events that determine their tragedy. There is only a series of unlucky
events.

The audiences attention is captured through dramatic tension. While Juliet does not know
that Romeo is there listening to what she is saying, the audience is aware of Romeos
presence. Romeo may be discovered by Juliets relatives .
The presence of danger increases the tension. To add suspense, Shakespeare also
uses the dramatic irony : the audience knows something that the protagonists on stage do
not know and it is kept in suspense, uncertain about what is going to happen. Another tragic
element is the final Catharsis that involves the audience. Tragedy must be able to arouse pity
and fear in the audience which eventually feels sympathy for the protagonist . The audience
understands that Romeo is a victim of fate and feels pity for him because his misfortunes are
greater than he deserves.
THE BALCONY SCENE

O that she knew she were!

She speaks, yet she says nothing; what of
that?
Her eye discourses, I will answer it.
I am too bold: tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

But soft, what light trough yonder window

breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than
she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love! (10)

Scene II. Capulets Garden.(Juliet appears

above at a window)

But soft, what light trough yonder window breaks?

It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.
It is my lady, O, it is my love! (10)
O that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing; what of that?
Her eye discourses, I will answer it.
I am too bold: tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp. Her eyes in heaven (20)
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand
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O that I were a glove upon that hand,

That I might touch that cheek!
Juliet.
Ay me!
Romeo.
She speaks.
O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art
As glorious to this night, being oer my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven (30)
Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-puffing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.
Juliet.
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And Ill no longer be a Capulet.
Romeo.
[Aside.] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?
Juliet.
Tis but thy name that is my enemy: (40)
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
Whats Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name.
Whats in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo calld,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee, (50)
Take all myself.
Romeo.
I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and Ill be new baptisd;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
Juliet.
What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,
So stumblest on my counsel?
Romeo.
By a name
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I know not how to tell thee who I am:

My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee. (60)
Had I it written, I would tear the word.
Juliet.
My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words
Of thy tongues uttering, yet I know the sound.
Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?
Romeo.
Neither, fair saint, if either thee dislike.
Juliet.
How camst thou hither, tell me, and wherefore?
The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,
And the place death, considering who thou art,
If any of my kinsmen find thee here.
Romeo.
With loves light wings did I oerperch these walls, (70)
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt:
Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.
Juliet.
If they do see thee, they will murder thee.
Romeo.
Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye
Than twenty of their swords. Look thou but sweet
And I am proof against their enmity.
Juliet.
I would not for the world they saw thee here.
Romeo.
I have nights cloak to hide me from their eyes,
And, but thou love me, let them find me here; (80)
My life were better ended by their hate
Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love.
Juliet.
By whose direction foundst thou out this place?
Romeo.
By love, that first did prompt me to enquire.
He lent me counsel, and I lent him eyes.
I am no pilot, yet, wert thou as far
As that vast shore washd with the furthest sea,
I should adventure for such merchandise.
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Juliet.
Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek (90)
For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.
Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny
What I have spoke. But farewell compliment.
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say Ay,
And I will take thy word. Yet, if thou swearst,
Thou mayst prove false. At lovers perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs. O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully:
Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won,
Ill frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay, (100)
So thou wilt woo: but else, not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond;
And therefore thou mayst think my haviour light:
But trust me, gentleman, Ill prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.
I should have been more strange, I must confess,
But that thou overheardst, ere I was ware,
My true-love passion: therefore pardon me;
And not impute this yielding to light love
Which the dark night hath so discovered. (110)
Romeo.
Lady, by yonder blessed moon I vow,
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops
Juliet.
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
Romeo.
What shall I swear by?
Juliet.
Do not swear at all.
Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And Ill believe thee. (120)
Romeo.
If my hearts dear love
Juliet.
Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
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Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

Ere one can say It lightens. Sweet, good night!
This bud of love, by summers ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Good night, good night! as sweet repose and rest
Come to thy heart as that within my breast! (130)
Romeo.
O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?
Juliet.
What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?
Romeo.
The exchange of thy loves faithful vow for mine.
Juliet.
I gave thee mine before thou didst request it:
And yet I would it were to give again.
Romeo.
Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?
Juliet.
But to be frank, and give it thee again.
And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee, (140)
The more I have, for both are infinite.
Nurse calls within
The above passage is taken from the so-called The Balcony Scene. Romeo is outside
Juliets garden when she appears at the balcony. She does not know that he is there and
speaks aloud revealing to the audience her love for him. Romeo is unsure about waiting in
the shadow listening to her or making her realize he is there: Shall I hear more, or shall I
speak at this? .When he speaks, Juliet recognises him by his voice: my ears have not yet
drunk a hundred words of thy tongues uttering, yet I know the sound: Art thou not Romeo,
and a Montague? . Romeo is very much struck by Juliets beauty and exalts it through a
series of metaphors: he compares her to the fair sun (he had done the same with Rosaline
when, speaking of her in act 1 sc. 2 describes her so beautiful that The all-seeing sun / neer
saw her match since first the world begun) and contrasts her with the the envious moon who
is already sick and pale with grief that thou her maid art far more fair than she . According
to the classical mythology, the Goddess Moon and her maids, the Vestals, were devoted to
chastity. Romeo invites Juliet not to be her maid , not to wear her vestal livery. Juliets
eyes are brilliant as if two stars have changed places with them: Two of the fairest stars in
all the heaven .do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her
eyes were there, they in her head?.
They would beam their light on the sky making the night so bright that birds would
sing and think it were not night and would enhance the brightness of her cheeks that
would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp. When he comes out into the open he
declares his love, too: I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and Ill be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo . From Romeos and Juliets speeches, we may realize that
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they have a tremendous crush on each other. They are like teenagers of all times when they
first fall in love. Their love is not a pure, chaste and platonic love but there is passion, too.
Romeo invites Juliet to cast her vestal livery off. He would like to be a glove upon that
hand (Juliets one), That I might touch that cheek! At the end of her speech Juliet invites
Romeo to take all myself that is both soul and body.
The passage reveals the characters of the two adolescents. Romeo is like all
teenagers,bold, passionate, impulsive and quite irresponsible .Someone points out that he
is also reckless in his attitude towards love transferring quickly his love from Rosaline to
Juliet. I dont think so. He is only infatuated of Rosaline but he truly loves Juliet. Romeo
has followed Juliet after their meeting at the masque ball and hides in her garden, a
dangerous place that as Juliet says, may be death, considering who thou art, If any of my
kinsmen find thee here .. If they do see thee, they will murder thee . He is not afraid of
the danger of being in the Capulets garden. He is very cheeky : For stony limits cannot
hold love out, And what love can do, that dares love attempt. Therefore thy kinsmen are no
stop to me. Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye than twenty of their swords! Look
thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity.. . let them find me here. My life were
better ended by their hate than death prorogued, wanting of thy love . Romeo would run all
risks to take possession of her: were thou as far as that vast shore washd with the farthest
sea I would adventure for such merchandise .
Juliet is the more rational of the two. She is conscious of their situation and fearful
of the danger they are running; she knows that their belonging to two rival families is a
serious obstacle to their love. Romeo is a Montague and she a Capulet, then she is well aware
that their families will oppose their love: O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And Ill no
longer be a Capulet. Tis but thy name that is my enemy . She has adeeper
understanding of things even if she is a naive girl, too, when she thinks that giving up their
names, they can overcome their problem. She says that names are not important, they do not
affect the object for which they are used: Whats Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor
arm, nor face Whats in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would
smell as sweet . Juliet is sincere, spontaneous, simple andinnocent and she openly
declares her love. She does not want to play the conventional game of the cunning girl who
pretends to be shy to be courted on. She does not want to flirt with Romeo and to appear as a
light girl: do not impute this yielding to light love . She knows that Romeo has heard her
declare her love when he was hidden by the dark night: .. if thou thinkest I am too quickly
won, Ill frown and say thee nay so that thou wilt woo In truth, fair Montague, I am too
fond ..But trust me, gentleman,Ill prove more true than those that have more cunning to be
strange (shy). ..I must confess my true love passion . They exchange wow of eternal
love and faithfulness to each other. Romeo wows by the moon and Juliet replies that he
mustnt because the moon is inconstant and she fears that his wow might be inconstant, too.
She knows that formal declarations of love are often insincere and love may be short and
superficial. She is aware that their love is too quick and unprepared too rush, too
unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning and she fears it ..doth cease to be ere one can
say It lightens and asks him not to swear at all Romeo insists: He wants the satisfaction of
the exchange of thy loves faithful wow for mine . He fears that Juliet may withdraw it.

The love story of Juliet and Romeo belongs to all times. Nowadays we can find
similar situations because there are many parents who oppose their childrens love and
many opposing groups that regard each other as enemies. Parents or groups should not
interfere in their sons love affairs. They are entitled to express their opinion and suggest
them how to behave, but it is the young mens right to choose freely their Shakespeare
is not original in the choice of his plots, which are all derived from various ancient and
contemporary sources: historical works (Holinsheds Chronicles of England, Scotland and
Ireland), Roman history, classical works (Plutarchs andPlautuss writings), the Italian
works of Matteo Bandello and others and material taken from many Elizabethan
playwrights. In the Renaissance the idea of originality as we have nowadays, did not exist.
There was no copyright and it was possible to copy other writers without any legal
consequence. Writers were praised not for saying something new but for saying it well or in
a new way. Of course Shakespeare did not copy; his originality was in his ability to handle
the original source and make it assume a new meaning and value. He penetrated the
depths of the human soul and represented impartially all aspect of life and attitudes of
men. He created a great variety of characters. They include persons of all types: Kings,
Queens, ordinary people, heroes and so on. Shakespeare loved music and he also wrote
several songs which appear in some of his plays.
b) The Great Tragedies have got
some common characteristics. They all
have a hero who is assailed by forces,
good or evil, the full nature of which he
doesnt know until its too late. Like the
heroes of the greatest Greek tragedies,
Shakespearian heroes are driven to
their downfall by the loss of something
they believed in. The hero, who may be
as wicked asRichard III or as innocent
as Romeo, is also brought to his ruin by
the operation of the Fate.

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The Fate works through the faults or errors of the hero, through the evil embodied in
a villain, a character who lives near him (Cassius, Iago) or through
the supernatural(ghosts, witches).In nearly all the tragedies the destruction of the hero
involves the death of the innocent who lives next to him. The hero has fatal tragic flaws
which explain the calamities by which he is overwhelmed. When the play ends, there is
always his redemption even if he has been so wicked as Richard III or Macbeth. The
spectators feel pity on him because Shakespeare is able to make them realize that he was not
completely bad and that he has been brought to his downfall by the operation of the Fate.
Other common characteristics are the theme of the Shattered Harmony and
theuse of prose and verse. There is always harmony at the beginning of the play; then the
harmony is shattered by a character, the hero, who brings chaos, and by the forces of evil.
But Good in the end always wins and another character, usually a minor one, defeats the
hero and restores harmony.As far as the use of verse and prose, characters belonging to
aristocracy speak in verse while common people speak in prose. When a character from the
aristocracy speaks in prose, it is because he is out of mind (for instance Hamlet and Ophelia).
In Julius Caesar instead, Brutus and Anthony in their speeches respectively speak in prose
and in verse for a different reason: Brutus addresses to peoples rationality and Anthony to
peoples feelings.
Shakespeares world is male dominated but women are as important as men. In some
plays the action is equally divided between man and women, for example in Romeo and
Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. The psychology of the female characters of these
plays, together with other female characters (Ophelia, Desdemona), has been openly
investigated. They are stronger, more decided and less hesitant than their respective lovers and
they are ready to risk everything for their love.
Besides being a dramatist, Shakespeare was also a great poet. He wrote some long
mythological poems (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece) and a collection of
154Sonnets. They show his knowledge of classical themes and mythology. Venus and
Adonisand The Rape of Lucrece are dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, one of his patrons,
who helped him when the theatres were closed because of the plague which raged all over
Europe in the years 1592- 1594.It is probably because of the plague that Shakespeare and
other playwrights start to write poetry. The Sonnets can be conventionally divided intotwo
groups: from sonnet 1 to sonnet 126 and from sonnet 127 to 154. The first group is addressed
to a lovely boy, a fair youth a Mr W.H. while the second group is dedicated to a dark
Lady.In the first group there is also another character, a rival poet, probably a poet
(George Chapman?) who depended on the patronage of Shakespeares patrons.
Critics have tried to discover who the fair Youth and the Dark Lady were. They
found no definite answers. Many of them think that the Fair Youth, was the above
mentioned Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, or William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
who were Shakespeares friends and patrons. The Dark Lady is a mysterious married
woman, probably Shakespeares mistress. The poet describes their troubled and painful
relationship in which they are both unfaithful to each other. The woman bestows her attention
also on one of Shakespeares friends and he feels doubly betrayed by his woman and by his
friend. The Sonnets have got many themes: unselfish love and mutual infidelity, friendship,

old age, the decay of all earthly things, the destructive force of time and the immortality of
art.
Shakespeares sonnets do not follow the Petrarchan sonnets of an octave and a sestet
(or two quatrains and two tercets) but the standard English structure of three quatrains and a
final rhymed couplet. The final couplet is used either to summarize the theme dealt with in
the quatrains or to reinforce it. They also differ from the other cycles of sonnets of the time
(Astrophel and Stella, Amoretti) because they do not tell the poets love story for a woman.

.ENLIGHTENMENT NEOCLASSICAL PERIOD- the 18th century

Jonathan Swift- Gullivers travels

Nscut: 30 noiembrie 1667, Dublin, Irlanda

Decedat: 19 octombrie 1745, Dublin, Irlanda
Key Facts about Gulliver's Travels

Full Title: Gullivers Travels, or, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World.
In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several
Ships

When Written: 1720-1725

Where Written: Dublin, Ireland

When Published: 1726

Literary Period: Augustan

Genre: Satire

Setting: England and the imaginary nations of Lilliput, Blefuscu, Brobdingnag,

Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms

Climax: Gullivers decision to reject humankind and try his best to become a
Houyhnhnm

Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for Gulliver's Travels

By Gulliver, About Gulliver. Although contemporary editions of Gullivers Travels have

Jonathan Swifts name printed as author on the cover, Swift published the first edition under
the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver.
Instant Classic. Gullivers Travels was an immediate success upon its first publication in
1726. Since then, it has never been out of print.

a) Jonathan Swift was an Irish author, satirist, essayist and political pamphleteer,
famous for works like : A modest proposal, Drapiers letters, A tale of a tub, The
Battle of the Books and Gullivers Travels.
When Swift was writing Gullivers travels, England was undergoing a lot of
political shuffling: George I was an unpopular king who had gained his throne with the
help of the Whig party. The Whig party ministers then used their power against the
Tories and Swift, a Tory himself, resented their action. The period was greatly affected
by The Glorious Revolution and The Restoration-people came back to monarchy.
The novel .....was written during the Enlightenment era, a period of scientific
awakening.It was believed that the knowledge and science could improve the human
condition.
The 18th century has been called the Neoclassical Age or the Augustan age. This century
saw the development of the novel from many causes: expansion on the reading public,
growth of a new middle class, different position of women, economic reasons. The novel
was labelled as realistic novel: the characters were real people wiyh ordinary names;
they were described intheir daily routines; the settings were real geographical places,
and the contents were taken from real stories.In fact many candidates for the first novel
in English date from this period, of which Daniel Defoes 1719 Robinson Crusoe is
probably the best known. Subgenres of the novel during the 18th century were the
epistolary novel, the sentimental novels, histories, the gothic novel and the libertine
novel. The prose style became clear , graceful and polished.
Jonathan Swift wrote during the first period of the ENLIGHTENMENT alongside with
Alexander Pope in poetry and Defoe/ Swift, in novel.
SAU( In the early eighteenth century, Britains political atmosphere underwent a dramatic
shift. While Queen Anne sat on the throne from 1665 to 1714, the Tory party was in favor and
dominated politics with their conservative agenda of minimized parliamentary power and
increased royal authority. Yet when King George I took power in 1714, the dynamics shifted
and the liberal Whig party, the conservative Tory partys opponents, gained traction in English
politics, pushing Tories out of prominence. One of these Tories was Jonathan Swift and parts
of Gullivers Travels (especially Gullivers adventures in Lilliput) satirize the Whigs and
Tories struggles against each other.)
Gullivers Travels satirizes the form of the travel narrative, a popular literary genre that
started with Richard Hakluyts Voyages in 1589 and experienced immense popularity in

eighteenth-century England through best-selling diaries and first-person accounts by explorers

such as Captain James Cook. At the time, people were eager to hear about cultures and
people in the faraway lands where explorers were claiming colonies for England. Many
accounts were largely truthful, but even those that were generally honest were not
immune to elaboration. In Gullivers Travels, Swift satirizes embellishing travel writers
as well as gullible English readers eager for outrageous tales about other countries.
b) Gullivers travels is not really a childrens book, but it has been seen as a
childrens story right from the start: little people, big people, talking horses.The book,
which made fun of the political scene and certain proeminent people in England, was
published anonymously.It is an anticipation of the modern fantasy novel and can be
read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoes optimism account og human capability.
The novel shows Swifts bad opinion on people. He is very intolerarant with people in
general and once he wrote to his dear friend AlexanderPope: I hate and detest that animal
called man. He maintains that man is not a reasonable animal but an animal endowed with
reason, which he is not always able to use in the right way.
Gulliver, as a first person narrator, is not completely reliable though he is very precise in
datailing his travels, sometimes he doesnt see the forest from the tree.Swift deliberately
made Gulliver naive and sometimes arrogant for two reasons: it makes the reader
skeptical about the ideas presented in the book and it allows the reader to have a good
laugh at Gullivers expense when he doesnt realise the absurdity of his limited
viewpoint.In other words, this technique of the unreliable narrator assures a humorous
and satirical effect.
Gullivers travels adopts the ancient device of an imagery voyage, with Gulliver
travelling to four remote nations of the world, enabling Swift to approach mankind from
a fresh point of view. The philosophical basis of the whole novel is the contast between
rationlity and animality.
Structurally, Gulivers travels is devided into four parts with two introductory letters at
the beggining of the book.Indeed, his travels possess a perfect symmetry.
Part I follows Gullivers journey to Liliput where he meets a race of tiny people and he is a
giant among them. In this first book, Swift attacks the English Government and the
hypocrises of the party system. Catholic Church is ironically attacked, too. This part is
considered to be an allegory because many of the things Gulliver experieced can be linked to
actual historical events of Swifts time. For instance , the religious/political controversy
between the big Enders and Little Enders correspond to actual conflict between Protestants
and Catholics.
Part II to Brobdingnag and his giants, here he attacks the judicial and the political
system in Britain aiming at stressing the hypocrisy and corruption practised in the
Institutions.
In part III Gulliver visits several islands and countries of Laputa. Where he meets
the projectors, who work on new scientific odd plants. They are presented in a decadent way:
badly dressed, very dirty and even beggars. Animality is seen in the scientists while rationality

is seen in man. In this book we can see how Enlightenment thinkers value rationality,
science, discoveries and new ideas over traditional, practical ways of doing things.
In the last book he is in the land of the Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses that can talk. They
are perfectly rational and virtuous. They have man like slaves, the Yahoo, who are bestial,
irrational and vicious.Swift subscribed to the pre-Enlightenment idea that man is by
nature sinful, having fallen from perfection in the Garden of Eden. In this part, the
author suggests that we can never return to the state of perfection, because it is human
condition to sin, we can at least rise above out Yahoo-ness.
Swift find a near utopia in the land of Brobdingnag. Here society is imperfect and the people
are wise and humane. While the Houyhnhmn society does not have lying and deceit, greed or
lust, ambition or opinion, it also doesnt have love as we know it.
Gullivers tone is naive during the first three voyages but in the fourth , it turns cynical
and bitter. When he comes home after his rescue, he cannot accept the human race any
longer.At the end of the novel, the reader can see that Gulliver has turned into a
misanthrope.
Above all, Gullivers Travels is a novel about perspective. While the story is abundant with
potential morals, the strongest and most consistent message is a lesson in relativism:
ones point of view is contingent upon ones own physical and social circumstances and
looking at peoples circumstances explains a lot about their respective viewpoints.
Gulliver explicitly lectures the reader on relativism, explaining how Englands ideas of
beauty, goodness, and fairness are radically different from notions of those qualities
possessed by the beings he visits in other lands. Until novels end, Gulliver is able to see
merit in his own countrys perspective as well as in the perspectives of other nations, a fairmindedness which he acquires from immersing himself in different cultures and adopting
their opposite points of view.
The novel ultimately suggests that ones perspective on reality is even more powerful
than reality itself.

Daniel Defoe- Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Foe
16591660
London, England
Died

24 April 1731 (aged 70-72)

London, England

Occupation

Writer, journalist, merchant

Genre

Adventure

Key Facts about Robinson Crusoe

Full Title: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York,
Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on
the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been
cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An
Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates.

When Written: Shortly before 1719

Where Written: England

When Published: 1719

Literary Period: Robinson Crusoe is often regarded as one of the foundational

novels of literary realism.

Genre: Novel, adventure story.

Setting: England, Morocco, Brazil, an uninhabited island in the Caribbean, Portugal,

Spain, and France, in the mid-to-late 17th century.

Climax: Robinson rescues the English captain, helps him recapture his ship, and
finally leaves his island.

Antagonist: Robinson mostly struggles against the forces of nature (from storms to
earthquakes to wild wolves), which can themselves be regarded as instruments of fate
and God's providence.

Art Imitates Life Imitates Art. Defoe's novel was inspired by the real-life survival of
Alexander Selkirk on an abandoned island, Ms a Tierra. In 1966, to honor Defoe's
famous novel, the island was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island.
a)Robinson Crusoe's journey takes place in the context of 17th-century European
imperialism and colonialism, as different countries explored the Americas, establishing
colonies and exploiting natives. More specifically, Defoe was likely inspired or influenced
by the real-life adventures of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish man who survived
for four years stranded on an island in the south Pacific. His amazing story of survival spread
widely after he returned to Europe in 1711 (not long before Defoe published Robinson
Crusoe).
Other Books Related to Robinson Crusoe
Defoe was likely influenced by a variety of travelers' accounts. His own novel was extremely
popular and became one of the central examples of novelistic realism, exerting a powerful
influence on the tradition of the novel. It spawned many imitators (including The Swiss
Family Robinson) and Crusoe's journey is often alluded to in other works. The American
poet Elizabeth Bishop has written a well-known poem called "Crusoe in England," in which
she imagines the adventurer in old age, looking back on his life.
a) Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist, pamphleteer, most famous for his
novels Robinson Crusoe , Moll Flanders, A journal of the Plague and Roxana.
During Defoe`s life, England was politicaly driven by the monarchy and the Anglican
Church and, like his father, Defoe found the need to defend his faith and he participated
in several rebellions. Also he witnessed 2 of the greatest disasters of the century: a
outbreak of plague in 1665 and the Great fire of London 1666. This events may have
shaped his fascination with catastrophes and survival in his writing.The period was
greatly affected by The Glorious Revolution and The Restoration- people came back to
monarchy.
The novel .....was written during the Enlightenment era, a period of scientific
awakening.
It was believed that the knowledge and science could improve the human condition.

The 18th century has been called the Neoclassical Age or the Augustan age. This century
saw the development of the novel from many causes: expansion on the reading public,
growth of a new middle class, different position of women, economic reasons. The novel
was labelled as realistic novel: the characters were real people wiyh ordinary names;
they were described in their daily routines; the settings were real geographical places,
and the contents were taken from real stories.In fact many candidates for the first novel
in English date from this period, of which Daniel Defoes 1719 Robinson Crusoe is
probably the best known. Subgenres of the novel during the 18th century were the
epistolary novel, the sentimental novels, histories, the gothic novel and the libertine
novel. The prose style became clear , graceful and polished.
Daniel Defoewrote during the first period of the ENLIGHTENMENT alongside
with Alexander Pope in poetry and Jonathan Swift, in novel. Some see Defoe as the
Ernest Hemingway of his days.
b)
Epistolay, confessional and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography
of a castaway who spends 28 years on a tropical island, encountering cannibals,captives and
mutineers before ultimately being rescue.
Novelist James Joyce noted that the true symbol of the British Empire is Robinson Crusoe. In
a sense Crusoe attempts to replicate his society on the island.
The story is told in the first person singular in the form of a diary. Robinson
Crusoe is the first narrative in which the character is not a hero, but an average man.
He is both narrator and main character of the tale, leading many people to believe that it
was a real person.He occasionally describes his feelings, but only when they are
overwhelming.
Crusoes tone is mostly detached, meticolous and objective. He generally avoids
dramatic storytelling an inventorylike approach to the facts as they unfold. His style will
establish a new standard for the English novel: simple, direct and fact-based.
In this novel, according to the Enlightenment philosophy, we can find four stages of
the development of human kind: first stage-he makes living by hunting and fishing;
second stage-the agriculture appears; third stage- Friday marks the beginning of a
relationship master and servant; forth stage- the arrlival of other people on the island,
the beginning of a colony, land is distributed among the members of the colony and
private properties begins.As much as Defoe's novel is about Robinson's literal, physical
journey, it is also about his more metaphorical, spiritual journey toward Christianity
Robinson was seen as the first capitalist hero in English literature because he looked at
everything in economic terms: produced more than he needed, kept from the ship a lot of
things, expanded his power on the whole island and eventually became rich.
The novel has been variously read as an allegory for the development of civilization.
From the beginning of the novel, Robinson has an intense desire to go to sea, an urge
that stays with him even at the novel's end. Going to sea symbolizes abandoning a life of
comfort and ease in search of some greater ambition, whether profit or adventure: the
ocean is dangerous, but also holds the promise of immense profit. The sea is also
unpredictable and unknowable. As such, it can symbolize the divine forces of

providence, to which Robinson surrenders himself. In his various vessels, Robinson's

trips are somewhat determined by the capricious waves, currents, and conditions of the
sea. And when he is literally thrown into the sea during his shipwreck, his life is
completely up to the unpredictable waves that are equally capable of dashing him
against the rocks or carrying him safely to shore. Similarly, Robinson's entire fate is up
the capricious "waves" of fortune or providence. Robinson's going to sea is thus
representative both of his desire to seek greatness in spite of danger and of his
willingness to submit himself to the larger forces of fate and divine providence that
determine the course of his life.
. In the beginning of the novel, Robinson disregards Christianity and leads a life that he later
looks back on as wicked. He discounts his father's warning that God will not bless him if he
goes to sea, and does not thank God when he is rescued from the storm on the way to London,
or by the Portuguese captain off the coast of Africa. However, after he dreams one night of a
strange figure scolding him for not repenting, Robinson turns to Christianity on the island and
eagerly studies the Bible. With his newfound Christianity, Robinson is never entirely alone on
his island, because he can converse with God through prayer. Moreover, Christianity offers
Robinson a way to make sense of his life and its various twists and turns. He sees his rebelling
against his father as his original sin, for which he was then punished by being taken as a slave
and then by being shipwrecked. However, he was blessed and saved by God by being saved
from drowning and ending up on the island with enough provisions to survive. After
repenting, Robinson sees himself as further blessed by various miracles, whether the
accidental growing of his first crops or the arrival of Friday and the English captain. In
addition, Robinson comes to see various unpredictable natural disasters like storms,
hurricanes, and the earthquake that damages his island home as signs from God, instruments
of his divine agency.
As Christianity becomes more and more central to Robinson's life (and to Defoe's novel),
one of the most important aspects of it is the idea of divine providence. Closely linked to
ideas of fate, this is the idea that God has foresight of our fortunes and is looking out for us.
Along this understanding, events that seem like coincidences or unexplainable surprises turn
out to be part of God's wise plan. This is how Robinson ends up seeing his being shipwrecked.
What seemed like a disaster at first turns out to be a blessing in disguise: Robinson grows to
love the island, learns much from his experience there, and comes to Christianity as a result of
his life there. When the English captain arrives on the island, Robinson sees this as further
proof of divine providence, as someone has come to rescue him at last, while the captain sees
Robinson as an instrument of God's providence for him: the captain thinks that Robinson was
saved on the island precisely to help save him. These two characters have confidence in their
belief in God's providence, that there is some overarching plan behind the unpredictable
whims of fortune. And Defoe seems to share this conviction, as the fictional editor who
introduces the novel claims that it is an illustration of "the wisdom of Providence in all the
variety of our circumstances." The novel thus urges the reader to have faith in God's divine
plan. Interestingly, the reader must place a similar kind of trust in Defoe, as he or she must
trust that there is some overarching plan or purpose behind the meandering, wandering plot of
the novel, that Defoe will deliver his reader to some kind of satisfactory conclusion or ending.
Society, Individuality, and Isolation

At the center of Robinson Crusoe is a tension between society and individuality. As the
novel begins,Robinson breaks free of his family and the middle-class society in which
they live in order to pursue his own life. If he were to stay at home, he would live a life
already arranged for him by his fatherand by the constraints of English society. By
setting out to sea, Robinson prioritizes his sense of individuality over his family and
society at large. Robinson gets exactly what he asks for (and more than he bargained
for) when he finds himself stranded alone on his island. There, he lives entirely as an
individual apart from society and is forced to struggle against nature to survive. He
becomes self-sufficient and learns how to make and do things himself, discovering
ingenuity he didn't know he had. Thus, one could say that being separated from society
leads to Robinson becoming a better person. Robinson himself seems to come to this
conclusion, as he realizes that his experience brings him closer to God and that living
alone on the island allows for a life largely without sin: he makes, harvests, and hunts
only what he needs, so there is nothing for him to be covetous of or greedy for. And while
he is alone, he does not suffer from lust or pride.
Robinson comes around to liking his individual existence on the island so much that, at times
in the novel, it is unclear whether he even wants to be rescued and returned to society. And
when he finally does return to England, he notes how much worry and stress issues of money
and property caused him. Nonetheless, there are some problems with Robinson's valuing of
individuality over society. For one, while Robinson values his own personal liberty, he doesn't
respect that of others. He hates being a slave, but is quick to sell Xury into the service of the
Portuguese captain. Similarly, he treats Friday as his inferior servant. This maltreatment of
others can be related as well to Robinson's narcissistic style of narration. His narrative is
always about himself, to the degree that he hardly even gives the names of other characters.
We never learn the name of his wife, for example, whose death Robinson describes quickly
and unemotionally at the end of the novel before hastening to tell us more of his own
adventures. And finally, Robinson's intense individualism is inseparable from his painful
isolation. He feels lonely in Brazil, and then is literally isolated (the word comes from the
Latin word for island, insula), when he is stranded on his island all alone. His only
companions are his animals and, while he learns to enjoy life on the island, he still feels a
deep desire for the human companionship that he lacks. Thus, the novel values individuality,
but also shows the dangers of narcissism and isolation that may come with it.
While Defoe presents individuality as important, Robinson does decide to leave his island in
the end. And, as we learn when he returns, he turns his haven of individualism into a society
a thriving colony with a substantial population. Society may curb an individual's
independence, but it also provides valuable companionship. While Robinson rejects the
claims of society in favor of individuality in the beginning of the novel, he ultimately comes
around to trying to balance the two.

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM -the late 18th century

John Keats
S.T.Coleridge The rime of an Ancient Marinar
Jane Austen Pride and prejudice

John Keats

Born

31 October 1795
Moorgate, London,England

Died

23 February 1821(aged 25)

Rome, Papal States

Occupation

Poet

Alma mater

King's College London

Literary movement

Romanticis

a) John Keats,like Byronand Shelley, belongs to the second generation of English

Romantic poets, a literary period which began in the late 18th century
To the first generation were Wordsworth and Coleridge, while Blake is considered by many
critics an early romantic poet.
The historical events which greatly influenced Romanticism were: The American
Revolution (1775-1783), The French Revolution (1789-1799) and The Napoleonic Wars. The
two revolutions affected the way of thinking bringing into Europe the ideals summoned
up in the French slogan Libert, Egalit, Fraternit while the Napoleonic wars affected
the economy and the way of living making business uncertain and closely connected with
the ups and downs of the wars: periods of overproduction and employment were
followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
The Romantics questioned almost every thing of the previous Age of Neo-classicism
theyopposed feelings to reason, imagination to realism, creativity to imitation, search for
the sensation to the domestic pleasure, the unknown to the known, the supernatural to
the conventional, country to town, children and humble people to aristocracy, Celtic Age
and Middle-Age to classical Greece and Rome, the world of the spirit to the world of
things.
Like the other romantic poets, Keats REFUSED REASON AS A SOURCE OF
TRUTH. He believed in the importance of sensation and its pleasure to grasp reality. In
one of his letter he wrote he wished for himself a life of sensation rather than of
thoughts. He considered poetry as the only reason of life and the only means to
overcome and defeat death. Poetry should spring naturally from the soul: if art does not
come spontaneously almost unconsciously as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at
all. Unlike the other romantic poets, Keats thought that poetry didnt have to contain a
message but only reproduce what the poets imagination suggested to him. Poetry had
no other function than that of conveying the sense of Beauty.
SAU
( The poets of the 2nd generation were influenced by the problems coming from the
Napoleonic Wars and were more socially and politically committed. Except Keats, they were
involved in movements to promote the cause of independence and freedom. They did not like
Wordsworth and Coleridge because these latter had revised their poems adopting them to the
orthodox Christianity of the time. They considered Wordsworth simple and dull and distrusted
his role as a patriotic public figure. All the poets of the 2nd generation lived very romantic
lives and all died abroad, Byron inGreece, Shelley and Keats inItaly.)
b) GENERALITATI

Keats* work may be grouped as follows: early minor poems, narrative poems and
lyrical poems. He also wrote many letters which T.S.Eliot described as the most
beautiful personal letters in English literature.
Most of his works express a sense of melancholy, death and mortality. A great influence upon
his poems had been the world of Ancient Greece, whick became a source of poetic inspiration
and a means to express his imagination.
TASK OF THE POET:The poet has to search for beauty and to render it as effectively as
possible in words. With a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other
consideration, or rather obliterates all considerations.The poet has no identity, no self. He is
passive and submissive to things and people as they are, without trying to change or explain
them. He must have the NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, that is the acceptation that we cant
solve everything. It is a great quality in Art. Art must not solve the problems but only explore
them. Great men, above all the poets, possess this quality. He explained it in one of his letters:
I mean negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reading after facts and reason.
THEMES: The main themes of Keatss works were: Beauty, permanence and
transience, art and life, imagination and reality, Love and nature.
NATURE: It was another source of inspiration. He didnt see nature in a pantheistic or neo
platonic way. He simple saw it as another form of beauty. As far as nature, unlike
Wordsworth, Keats did not see any mighty Spirit in nature but only another form of Beauty.
BEAUTY: Keats has been described as the prophet of Beauty. He considered Beautyas
the main source of life and of inspiration and the only consolation he found in life. It was to
him a source of joy, too:A thing of Beauty is a joy for ever (Endymion). He believed that
the purest Beauty was to be found in Ancient Greece. Beauty was the only way to reach
knowledge. In one of his letters he wrote: I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the
hearts affections and the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be
truth. Beauty and truth are closely united: Beauty is truth, truth Beauty.
He considered imagination as a means to reach perfection in beauty because we can
imagine things as we want them to be . Beauty felt trough the imagination has not the limits
imposed by reality: Unheard melodies are more beautiful than heard melodies; so imagined
beauty is more beautiful than the visible one because the real cant reach or overcome the
ideal.
Beauty can be either physical or spiritual. They are not in opposition but
interconnected since physical beauty is also the expressions of spiritual beauty. The only
difference is that spiritual beauty is eternal while the physical one is temporal and decaying.
What makes spiritual beauty eternal is the power of Art which can reach perfection through
the imagination.

b)ANALIZA
ODE TO AN ANCIENT URN
This Ode is contained in the volume of poems published in 1820.
It is centred on the contrast between Reality and Illusion, Life and Art, Art and Beauty.
OCCASION: Keats drew inspiration from a decorated vase from Greece he saw during a visit
to the British Museum. The decoration presented different scenes: musicians,a young man
chasing a maiden,a procession of people following a priest leading a young cow to an altar to
be sacrificed to the gods.
STRUCTURE: It is made up of five stanzas of ten lines each. The rhyme pattern is the same
for the first seven lines of each stanza, that is ABABCDE, while the other three lines vary.
Sometimes there are imperfect rhymes ( second stanza, lines two and four play on/ tone;
fourth stanza lines six and ten, morn/return). The poem is rich in archaism
(thou/you,shalt/shall, wilt/will, thy/your, canst/can, doth/does etc.) and in vocatives both
referred to the Urn (l.1 unravishd bride, l.2 foster-child, l. 3 Sylvan historian, l. 41 Attic
shape, l. 44 silent form, l. 45 cold pastoral) and to other things or people ( l.15 Fair youth, l.
17Bold lover, l. 23 happy melodist). The Urn is personified and the poet addresses to it as to a
living creature.
SETTING: The Ode describes an Ancient Greek urn decorated with classical motifs. There
are two scenes carved on its sides : a Dionysian Festival with dances and music in a pastoral
setting and a procession of townspeople led by a priest going to sacrifice a cow to the Gods.
In the former scene there are people, may be gods or men, and there is a piper under the trees.
There are also some girls, and one of them is trying to escape from a young man who wants to
kiss her. The second scene is set outside a little empty town. The atmospheres of the two
scenes is different: it is idyllic and full of joy in the former and a little sad in the latter.
SYMBOLS: The Urn symbolizes the eternal beauty of Art; it is perfect, unchanging and
always beautiful; it contrasts human life and love which are never perfect and short-lived.
THEME: the striking contrast between the transience of life and the immortality and
perfection of art. Art sublimates life turning the real into the ideal. Art is the only solution
tomortality.
MESSAGE: The message of the urn to mankind is that Beauty is the only permanent
truth in life. Beauty is all that man can know and he has no need to know anything else:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye need know on earth and all ye need to know. The
perception and the creation of beauty gives us consolation.
There is a price to pay for eternity:immobility and lack of vitality. The people on the urn,
frozen in a moment of pure beauty, are cold marble people, the boy will never reach the
girl, the pipers music is a silent unheard melody,the sacrifice will never be completed, the

inhabitants will never return, the village will remain for ever empty and so on . Art may be
eternal but it also means death and silence. Though life is subject to decay, it can at the same
time be enjoyed while it lasts.
STANZA 1: An Ode is usually addressed to someone or something. This Ode is addressed to
a Grecian Urn. The poet addresses to the Urn through a series of vocatives using a technique
of contrast through paradox: unravishd bride of quietness (like a virgin before marriage, it is
perfect and intact and has preserved its original state because it is untouched by the passing
of time).,Foster-child of Silence and slow time ( though it is very old, the process of time
has been much slower with the marble urn than with human beings). ,Sylvan
Historian ( because the scenes carved on it tell a story of ancient Greece in a pastoral
setting). The scene is described indirectly through a series of rhetorical questions and
contrasts: deities and mortals pursuit and escape; men or gods pursuit reluctant girls to submit
them to their sexual demand.
STANZA 2: It starts with an apparently paradox:Heard melodies are sweet, but those
unheard are sweeter . Keats wants to stress out the perfection of Art. Of course, looking at
the urn, no melody can be heard; we can only look at the young lover piping his song to the
girl. The poet does not complain about the fact that he cannot hear the lovers melodies
because he thinks that the melodies he imagines played by the musician on the urn are more
beautiful than real audible music . Whereas the melodies heard through the sensual ear may
convey an idea of physical pleasure, the unheard ditties of no tone, which exist only in our
mind, can be heard through the ear of the mind and convey a spiritual pleasure: the real can
never reach or surpass the ideal. Wordsworth in Daffodils says something like that
maintaining that the natural setting of the daffodils is more beautiful if seen in a vacant and
pensive mood. and recollected in tranquillity through the inward eye of memory. Lines
25-20 stress the idea of art seen as the only thing that can hold a moment of happiness
and make it eternal. The poet addresses to the fair youth and to the bold lover and
invites them not to complain about their situation: yet, do not grieve. The fair youth piping
under the trees will never stop playing and the trees will never be bare; the bold lover will
love the girl for ever even if he never reaches her; the girl will forever be fair. They will
always be happy because Art can stop both a moment of beauty and an emotions. The beauty
of the girl, the passion of the lover and the pleasure of music will never fade:She cannot
fade. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
STANZA 3: This stanza reinforces what said before: the imagined pleasure is sweeter and
lasts more than the consummated one. It also adds some other examples of the immutability
and eternity of Art trough the repetition of for ever and happy. On the contrary the human
passions and love bring pain and sorrow leaving a heart high-sorrowful and cloyd, A
burning forehead, and a parching tongue. This is however the limit of beauty and love found
in the Art: being above the pains and human experience, they lack the sorrow and the warmth
of life.
STANZA 4: It describes the other side of the urn: a procession of people who have left their
town to go uphill and sacrifice a cow to the Gods. Stanza 3 had ended on a bitter reflection on
the short-lived passions of men and women. Stanza 4, after opening in an idyllic serenity,
introduces a note of sadness and desolation . It focuses on an emptied, silent and desolate

town. The scene is described indirectly through a series of some more questions and contrasts:
the procession of people contrasts with the emptied town while the heifer lowing at the
skies contrasts with the streets that for evermore will silent be. The silence of the little
town is different from the silence of the urn, because it is caused by absence of people, while
the silence of the urn is that of peace and art. The poet really sees the priest leading a heifer to
the sacrifice and a procession of people. The sacrifice near an altar, the little town by the river
and the empty town are only imagined.
STANZA 5:In these stanza the urn is no longer personified and becomes a lifeless object. It is
addressed to as Attic formFair attitude( it was made in Ancient Greece), Silent form
and cold pastoral (being of marble, it is cold to the touch). Eventually the urn is personified
again and referred as A friend to man because it helps man by teaching them the lesson of
eternal beauty . Being permanent, compared to the transient presence of man on the earth, it
can offer man the consolation implied in the aesthetic contemplation of beauty, reassuring him
that something permanent exists in a world characterized by transience and decay.
The last two lines, Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth and ye need to
know, have been variously interpreted. According to T.S. Eliot and other critics, these lines
are meaningless in the context of the Ode. Others, instead, think that they mean that aesthetic
beauty is the only permanent value of human life because the other things, physical beauty,
love and life itself pass away.
This Ode is highly romantic because it stresses out the power of the imagination and
declares its supremacy over the other things.

In general, romantic literature can be characterised by its personal nature, its strong use of
feeling, its abundant use of symbolism, and its exploration of nature and the supernatural. In
addition, the writers of the romantics were consedered innovative based on their belief that
literatureshould be spontaneous, imaginative, personal and free.

JANE AUSTEN

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Jane Austen

Portrait of Jane Austen, made by her

sisterCassandra c. 1810
Born

16 December 1775
Steventon Rectory, Hampshire,
England

Died

18 July 1817 (aged 41)

Winchester, Hampshire, England

Resting
place

Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire,

England

Period

1787 to 180911

Genre

Romance

Key Facts about Pride and Prejudice

Full Title: Pride and Prejudice

When Written: 1797-1812

Where Written: Bath, Somerset, England

When Published: 1813

Literary Period: Classicism/Romanticism

Genre: Novel of manners

Setting: Hertfordshire, London, and Pemberley, all in England at some time during
the Napoleonic Wars (17971815)

Climax: The search for Lydia and Wickham

Antagonist: There is no single antagonist. The sins of pride and prejudice function as
the main antagonizing force

a)

Point of View: Third person omniscient

Historical Context of Pride and Prejudice

Austen's novels are famous for the way they seem to exist in a small, self-contained
universe. Austen's depiction of life in the tranquil English countryside takes place at the
same time when England was fighting for its life against the threat of Napoleon, and all
of Europe was embroiled in war and political chaos. No mention is ever made of the
imminence of a French invasion in her novels. Napoleon was finally defeated by the
British at Waterloo in 1815, two years before Austen's death.
Between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, English literature underwent a
dramatic transition. The 18th century had seen the rise of the novel in the works of
writers like Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders) and Samuel Richardson (Pamela). These
novels focused on broad social issues of morality and domestic manners. With the turn
of the century and the rise of Romanticism, however, the novel began to explore human
relationships with a greater degree of emotional complexity. Neither a Classicist nor a
Romantic, Jane Austen is perhaps best thought of as a pioneering figure in the
development of the novel, providing the bridge from the often didactic novels of an

earlier era to the great works of psychological realism of the Victorian period by writer
such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
b)
Austen's initial title for her manuscript was "First Impressions." Though the book
was eventually published as Pride and Prejudice, the initial title hints at the story's
concern for social appearances and the necessity of finding people's true qualities
beneath the surface.
Pride
Pride is a constant presence in the characters' attitudes and treatment of each other,
coloring their judgments and leading them to make rash mistakes. Pride
blinds Elizabeth and Darcy to their true feelings about each other. Darcy's pride about his
social rank makes him look down on anyone not in his immediate circle. Elizabeth, on the
other hand, takes so much pride in her ability to judge others that she refuses to revise her
opinion even in the face of clearly contradictory evidence. This is why she despises the goodhearted Darcy for so long, but initially admires the lying Wickham. Yet whilePride and
Prejudice implies that no one is ever completely free of pride, it makes it clear that with the
proper moral upbringing one may overcome it to lead a life of decency and kindness. In the
end, the two lovers are able to overcome their pride by helping each other see their respective
blind spots. Darcy sheds his snobbery, while Elizabeth learns not to place too much weight on
her own judgments.
Prejudice
Prejudice in Pride and Prejudice refers to the tendency of the characters to judge one
another based on preconceptions, rather than on who they really are and what they
actually do. As the book's title implies, prejudice goes hand in hand with pride, often
leading its heroine and hero into making wrong assumptions about motives and
behavior. Austen's gentle way of mocking Elizabeth's andDarcy's biases gives the
impression that such mistakes could, and indeed do, happen to anyone; that faulting someone
else for prejudice is easy while recognizing it in yourself is hard. Prejudice in the novel is
presented as a stage in a person's moral development, something that can be overcome
through reason and compassion. Austen only condemns those people who refuse to set aside
their prejudices, like the class-obsessed Lady Catherine and the scheming social
climber Caroline.
Pride and Prejudice is a love story, but its author is also concerned with pointing out the
inequality that governs the relationships between men and women and how it affects
women's choices and options regarding marriage.

Though Pride and Prejudice is a social comedy, it offers a powerful illustration of the
damaging effects to people and to society that prejudice can inflict.
Structurally, the first half of the novel traces Darcy*s progression to the point at which
he is able to admit his love in spite of his prejudice.in the second half, Elisabeth realize
Darcy~s true character.
In 'Pride and Prejudice', the author uses a great deal of wit and irony. Sometimes
one hears it in the authorial voice, as in the opening lines of the novel "It is a truth
universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in
want of a wife". Authorial comments intrude very little into the story, but when they do,
they are often ironic and almost always witty.
The literary technique of writing used is the third person omniscient , she knows the
feelings and thoughts of every character in the story. Through omniscient narrative, she
brings an entire world of his characters to life and moves from characters to characters,
allowing different voices to interpret the events, and maintaining omniscient form
that is keeping a distance. The narration stays with Elisabeth, although it ocasionally
offers us information that Elisabeth isn*t aware of.This third person view lens the cold
dimension to the novel, in the sense that dialogue, opinions, ideas and eevents dominate
the story rather thab emotions.
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen displays a masterful use of irony, dialogue, and realism
that support the character development as the narative voice is secondary to the voices
of the characters. Long, unwidely speeches are rare, as are detalied phisical descriptions.
Pride and Prejudice is remarkably free of explicit symbolism, which perhaps has
something to do with the novels reliance on dialogue over description .
Family
The family is the predominant unit of social life in Pride and Prejudice and forms the
emotional center of the novel. Not only does it provide (or fail to provide, as in the case
of Lydia) the Bennet daughters with their education and manners, but the social ranking of
the family determines how successful they may reasonably expect to be in later life. Austen
skillfully reveals how individual character is molded within the family by
presenting Jane and Elizabeth as mature, intelligent adults, and Lydia as a hapless fool. The
friction between Elizabeth and her mother on the one hand and the sympathy she shares
with Mr. Bennet on the other illustrate the emotional spectrum that colors the family's overall
character. The influence of Elizabeth's aunt and uncle shows how the family works in an

extended sense, with the Gardiners acting as substitute parents, providing much needed
emotional support at key moments of stress.

Marriage
Pride and Prejudice is a love story, but its author is also concerned with pointing out the
inequality that governs the relationships between men and women and how it affects women's
choices and options regarding marriage. Austen portrays a world in which choices for
individuals are very limited, based almost exclusively on a family's social rank and
connections. To be born a woman into such a world means having even less choice about
whom to marry or how to determine the shape of one's life. The way that society controls and
weakens women helps to explain in part Mrs. Bennet's hysteria about marrying off her
daughters, and why such marriages must always involve practical, financial considerations.
As members of the upper class, the Bennet sisters are not expected to work or make a career
for themselves. Yet as women they are not allowed to inherit anything. As a result, marriage is
basically their only option for attaining wealth and social standing. Yet Austen is also critical
of women who marry solely for security, like Charlotte. The ideal for her is represented
by Elizabeth, who refuses to trade her independence for financial comfort and in the end
marries for love.
Class
Class is the target of much of the novel's criticism of society in general. Austen makes it clear
that people like Lady Catherine, who are overly invested in their social position, are guilty of
mistreating other people. Other characters, like the suck-up Mr. Collins and the
scheming Caroline, are depicted as thoroughly empty, their opinions and motivations
completely defined by the dictates of the class system. To contrast them, Austen offers more
positive examples in Bingley and theGardiners. Bingley is someone from the upper class
who wears his position lightly and gallantly. The Gardiners represent the honest, generous,
and industrious middle class and are examples of how to be wealthy without being
pretentious.
Austen does seem to respect the class system in a few ways, especially when it operates not as
a dividing power in society, but as a force for virtue and decency. Darcy is the primary
example of Austen's ideal high-class gentleman. Though originally he seems to be an arrogant
and selfish snob, as the novel progresses it becomes clear that he is capable of change.
Eventually, thanks toElizabeth's influence and criticism, he combines his natural generosity
with the integrity that he considers a crucial attribute of all upper-class people. He befriends

the Gardiners and plays a key role in helping the ungrateful Lydia out of her crisis. The
marriage of Darcy and Elizabeth shows that class restrictions, while rigid, do not determine
one's character, and that love can overcome all obstacles, including class.
SAU
a) Jane Austen*s major novels, including Pride and Prejudice, were all compose within a
short period of about twenty years. Those twenty years also mark a period in history when
England was at the highs of its power. England stood as a bulwark against the French
Revolutionary extremism and against Napoleonic imperialism. The dates Austen was writing
almost coincide with the great English military victories over Napoleon and the French: the
Battle of the Nile and the battle of Waterloo.However, so secure in their righteousness were
the English middle and upper classes- the landed gentry featured in Austens works-that these
historical events impact pride and Prejudice
Although she belong to romanticism literature, Jane Austen declared herself an antiromantic. She wrote Novels of Manners or Domestic novels, a kind of fiction quite
conventional as to plots and characters, without any romantic heroes or heroines and
adventures. They dealt with common characters and events taken from everyday routine life.
Her essentially conservative world view had little in common with her Romantic
contemporaries. Her novels Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are considered
literary classics, bringing the gap between romance and realism.
The two great novelists in the fictional field of the Age were Walter Scott and Jane
Austen.

b) Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813.
Set
in England in the late 18th century, the story follows the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as
she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society
of the landed gentry of the British. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country
gentleman, Mr. Bennet, living in Longbourn.
The main themes of the Jane Austen*s Pride and Prejudice are summed up in the title. The
first aspect can be traced in the actions and statements of all the novel*s characters. Pride is
the character flow that causes Elisabeth to dislike Darcy.
Unlike the great Romantic novels of the period, which usually praised youthful passions,
Austen*s work minimizes them. Instead of the wild forces of nature, Austen concentrates on
family life in small English towns. Although the author does consider some of the same
themes as her romantic contemporaries-the importance of the individual, Austen*s society is
altogether more controlled and settled than the world presented in Romantic fiction.
The world she describes is small. In one letter Austen compared herself to a painter of
miniatures. : the little bit of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush. But within this narrow

focus Jane explores an important and universal theme: the adjustements that a person must
make to family and society. For a young woman of this period, marriage was the surest route
to independence and freedom. Marriage to a wealthy man of good birth was the most
desirable position for a woman. Unmarried women living in their parents `s house- as Austen
was- were considered as second class citizens.
Structurally, the first half of the novel traces Darcy*s progression to the point at which he is
able to admit his love in spite of his prejudice.in the second half, Elisabeth realize Darcy~s
true character.
In 'Pride and Prejudice', the author uses a great deal of wit and irony. Sometimes one hears
it in the authorial voice, as in the opening lines of the novel "It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife".
Authorial comments intrude very little into the story, but when they do, they are often ironic
and almost always witty.
The literary technique of writing used is the third person omniscient , she knows the feelings
and thoughts of every character in the story. Through omniscient narrative, she brings an
entire world of his characters to life and moves from characters to characters, allowing
different voices to interpret the events, and maintaining omniscient form that is keeping a
distance. The narration stays with Elisabeth, although it ocasionally offers us information that
Elisabeth isn*t aware of.This third person view lens the cold dimension to the novel, in the
sense that dialogue, opinions, ideas and eevents dominate the story rather thab emotions.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen displays a masterful use of irony, dialogue, and realism that
support the character development as the narative voice is secondary to the voices of the
characters. Long, unwidely speeches are rare, as are detalied phisical descriptions. Pride and
Prejudice is remarkably free of explicit symbolism, which perhaps has something to do with
the novels reliance on dialogue over description .
A major theme is the importance of environment and upbringing on the development of
young people's character and morality.

VICTORIAN AGE 19th century

Charles Dickens : Great expectations
Lewis Caroll: Alices adventures in Wonderland
Thomas Hardy : Tess of DUrbervilles

DICKENS- GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Charles Dickens

Dickens in New York, 1867

Born

Charles John Huffam Dickens

7 February 1812
Landport, Hampshire, England

Died

9 June 1870 (aged 58)

Higham, Kent, England

Resting place

Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey

Occupation

Writer

Nationality

British

The Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist
A Christmas Carol
David Copperfield
Bleak House
Hard Times
Little Dorrit
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Key Facts about Great Expectations
Notable works

Full Title: Great Expectations

When Written: 1860-1861
Where Written: Kent, England
When Published: Serialized from 1860-1861; published in 1861
Literary Period: Victorian Era
Genre: Coming-of-Age Novel (Bildungsroman)
Setting: Kent and London, England
Climax: Pip discovers his patron is the convict
Antagonist: Orlick, Bentley Drummle, and Compeyson
Point of View: First person (Pip is the narrator)
Extra Credit for Great Expectations

Serial Fiction In the Victorian era, books were often published by magazines in serial
installments before they were printed as complete books. Great Expectations was serialized
in All the Year Round, the weekly magazine Dickens' founded and ran.
Alternative Endings Great Expectations has been published with two different endings.
Dickens' rewrote the original ending in response to complaints that it was too sad. Most
contemporary editions of the novel are published with this revised (and happier) ending.

a) During most of Dickens life, the Queen of England was Queen Victoria. Her reign was
so long that the nineteenth century in England is often called the Victorian Age. It was a
period of immense social change. The enourmous expansion of trade as a result of the
Industrial Revolution and the invention of railways was accompanied by political reform,
giving power to the middle classes, and setting up numerous social reforms aimed at
improving working conditions. Dickens played an active part in promoting reforms by
awakening the conscious of the middle classes through his novels.
Until the 1830s novels were expensive and only read by the middle classes, who generally
preferred to read poetry or essays, but when the penny magazines were established, novels
could be serialized and read by everyone.perhaps his greatest contribution to society was in
making people to read novels at prices they could afford, which led to literacy rising in the
population from 50% to 90% by the end of the century. The technique of publishing in weekly
episodes, with the need to keep readers intereted and appeal to the widest audience, explains
the melodramatic features of Dickens novels and their reliance on coincidences.
The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel- realistic, thickly plotted, crowded
with characters and long.
Some of the important writers of the Victorian age include: Charlote Bronte, George Eliot and
Thomas Hardy.
The technological innovations that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century introduced the first capitalist economy, opening social and
financial opportunities to people who had never had the chance to gain status or wealth under
the rigid hereditary class hierarchy of the past. These opportunities enabled people born into
lower classes to raise their standing in society by making money and acquiring education. The
new opportunities in turn inspired ambitions that had not been possible in pre-Industrial
Revolution England, where one's life path was determined strictly by birth. Great
Expectations explores both the dream and the realization of such ambitions, both what is
gained and what is lost, and showcases lives from all classes of nineteenth-century British
society.
b) Charles Dickens is said to have explored a new ground in his novel, Great
Expectations. The theme of self-knowledge explored in the novel expresses in part
Dickens own search for a sense of self. Many readers and historians have suggested that
Pip has a touch of Dickens in him, making the fictional book feel almost
autobiographical.
SETTING
The action of Great Expectations takes place in a limited geography between a small
village at the edge of the North Kent marshes, a market town in which Satis House is
located, and the greater city of London. The major themes in the novel are all related to
ambition, i.e. great expectations.
Some issues explored under this umbrella theme are greed, envy, pride, arrogance,
ingratitude and unkindness. The primary lesson Pip learns is that uncommon-ness on
the inside is more important than uncommon-ness on the outside. He learns contentment

and humility and returns to the kindness and generosity that characterized him when he
was young.
Great Expectations is regarded as Dickens grotesque tragicomic conception, probably
because of the mix of comedy and tragedy that adorns most of his novels. The opening of
the novel is a perfect example of the dual mood. There are moments of touching tragedy
and sadness, such as young Pip in a cemetery surrounded by his dead family, and Pip
being mistreated by his only surviving relative, Mrs. Joe. The unknown and the dreaded
are always present, especially toward the end of the novel, when grave events and
serious complications completely envelop the plot.

Dickens uses first person narration. Pip is narrating the story as grown and matured
and reflects on events that happened years ago. Pip the narrator, therefore, is not the
same as Pip the character.
Dickens has shaped Great Expectations on the lines of the Bildungsroman genre,
which closely follows the inner growth of a protagonist from his childhood to middle age.
Its major character, Pip, learns, through a lot of suffering, a number of lessons: that
love, friendship and loyality are more important than social advancement, frame and
wealth; that an unhappy childhood often leads to a unhappy adulthood; that social
prestige and wealth not always bring happiness.
Structurally, the novel is a narration by a mature and retrospective Pip. It is
divided into three distinct stages, each labeled as a specific stage of Pips
expectations. In chronological fashion, these chapters trace Pips progress from
industrious obscurity as a child through willful idleness as an adolescent and young
adult, to a resigned and modest acceptance of his true place in society. This is an obvious
variation on the picaresque theme and carries with it many of the significant overtones
of earlier picaresque novels.
The first stage introduces all the major characters and sets the plot in motion. Pips
situation is developed fully, including the first seeds of his desire to be uncommon.
The second stage of Pips expectations, therefore, has a change of setting. In this
section, Pips development into a gentleman is explored.
The third stage of Pips expectations explores the complete collapse of Pips great
expectations, which are replaced by a more mature sense of life and respectability. This
section primarily constitutes his transformation, which has been at the heart of the
novel. Such a pattern of growth, development and re-education reflects
the Bildungsroman tradition of Great Expectations.
The novel, though divided into these three stages, is further divided into episodic
chapters due to the publication of the novel serially. Each chapter must necessarily have
a complete movement as well as some sort of trigger that will induce the reader to buy
the magazine the following week in order to see what will happen next.

HARDY

Tess of D`Urberville

Thomas Hardy

Hardy between about 1910 and 1915

Born

2 June 1840
Stinsford, Dorset, England

Died

11 January 1928 (aged 87)

Dorchester, Dorset, England

Resting place

Stinsford parish church

(heart)
Poets'
Corner, Westminster
Abbey (ashes)

Occupation

Novelist, poet, and short story

writer

Alma mater

King's College London

Literary
movement

Naturalism, Victorian literature

Key Facts about Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Full Title: Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented

When Written: 1887-1891
Where Written: Dorchester, England
When Published: 1891
Literary Period: Victorian Realism
Genre: Realist Fiction
Setting: Southwest England, the fictional county of Wessex
Climax: Tess murders Alec and flees with Angel
Antagonist: Alec d'Urberville, society in general
Point of View: Third person omniscient, but generally follows Tess
Extra Credit for Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Wessex. Hardy named his fictional Wessex County after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that
existed in southwest England in medieval times. Since his resurrection of the name, it has
become a popular modern term to describe the region, and there is now even a Wessex
Regionalist political party.
Graphic. Tess of the d'Urbervilles was first published in a serialized, censored version in the
illustrated newspaper The Graphic. No other publishers would take it because of the novel's
sexual themes.
a) During most of Hardys life the Queen of England was Queen Victoria. Her reign was
so long that the nineteenth century in England is often called the Victorian Age. It was a
period of immense social change. The enourmous expansion of trade as a result of the
Industrial Revolution and the invention of railways was accompanied by political
reform, giving power to the middle classes, and setting up numerous social reforms
aimed at improving working conditions.
The aplication of steam-power to machines , the building of new roads transformed
Englandfrom an agricultural society into an industrial one. Many of Hardys novels are
concerned with descibing a way of life in the countryside that was quickly vanishing. By

wtriting about the countryside he was able to express the love he felt towars it, while
preserving it for future generations.
The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel- realistic, thickly plotted,
crowded with characters and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life
and to entertain the middle class.
The body of Victorian literature is tremendous. Hardy's contemporaries included
Charles Dickens, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, E.M. Forester,
and Joseph Conrad.
Hardy had a pessimistic view of life. He was above all affected by DarwinsThe Origin of
The Species and by the quarrel between the Christians and the scientists. He was also
deeply struck by the new geological discoveries which had shown, against the Christian
traditional belief, that the world had existed longer than man. This led him to refuse
Christian doctrine and the Bible and to develop his pessimistic theory according to which
man, because of his HEREDITY, was predestined to failure.
Hardy wrote novels of character and environment .These novels are also known
as Wessex Novels because Wessex was their setting. Among his best novels we may
quote Tess of de DUrbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is set in both a time and place of societal transition from the
agricultural to the industrial. The rural English towns and farm women often represent
Hardy's idea of Nature, while machines and upper class men are associated with the
modernizing forces of industrialization. Many of the descriptions and situations of the
novel focus on the way that the characters and society are being separated from a more
ancient lifestyle, the ache of modernity that Hardy felt as a loss of innocence
b) Even the title of the novel challenges convention. Because it was traditional at the time
to see Tess as an impure woman, the title's addendum A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented immediately reveals the author as his protagonist's defender against
condemnation. By delving so deeply into Tess's sympathetic interior life and the intricate
history of her misfortunes, Hardy makes society's disapproval of her seem that much
more unjust.
There is also a satirical thread running through the novel's social commentary. The
emphasis on ancient names is played to absurdity with John Durbeyfield's sudden
pretensions upon learning of his ancestry, and the newly rich Stoke family adding
d'Urberville to their name just to seem more magnificent.
Important literary elements in Tess of the D'Urbervilles are the pathetic fallacy,
synesthesia, tragic irony, and omniscient narrative.
.Hardy uses a third person narrator with an omniscient point of view to tell the story of
a girl who is seduced and has a child who dies. When she meets another man whom she
wants to marry, she is unable to tell him about her past until the 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.

The novel was considered immoral because her character, who according to the vision of the
woman in the Victorian Age had to be considered a fallen woman, is defined by Hardy as
a pure woman. It is likely that Hardy used this subtitle in ironic way because he wanted to
stress the limited Victorian idea of moral purity.

As far as genre is concerned, Tess can be placed in the category of tragedy and pastoralmeaning that it portraits the country in an idealized or romantic way. Most of the bad
things that happens to Tess are a result of modernization and civilization.
Wessex the imaginary setting of most of his novels. Wessex was a unifying element of
Hardys novels and also a link between past and present. Hardy himself justified the adoption
of the term Wessex with his need to give territorial definition and unity of scene to his
novels because the area of a single county did not affords a canvas large enough.Wessex
also provided the rural landscape and natural environment which he described in detail and
which acted not only as a background but also as an essential part of the story.However when
it comes to Tess we can look at the setting as crucial to all the Happenings. Nature is almost a
main character. Tess as a helpless victim of destiny, doomed to a tragic fate. Like Wessex,
Tess is despoiled by the inevitable forces of history and progress.

Time 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 the fortune of his heroine.

Hardy writing style is characterized by pessimism, simple diction sentences. It reflects

his personal sense of the inevitable tragedy that is human life.
One literary device Hardy uses is metaphors. The book is full of them. One example is
when Alec D'urberville sexually abuses Tess Derbeyfield. When he does this, he kills her
spiritually. Eventually, Tess kills Alec physically because she cannot kill him in the same
way that he killed her.
Another metaphor in this same scene, is the setting Hardy chooses to put the two of them
in.They are sitting in a dark, foggy forest. I believe that the forest is like Alec. This could also
be representation, becaue it does not directly say "Alec is a dark, foggy forest," but I think it
could also be considered a metaphor.Another example of a metaphor is when Hardy mentions
Adam and Eve. Angel Clare and Tess are the two being talked about when these other names
come up.
The last example of metaphors I want to bring up is when the narator compares Tess and her
countenance as "a natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season." *
Another great literary device Hardy uses is foreshadowing. There is a great example of
this when Tess and Alec, again, are in the forest.
When Tess kills the birds, it is foreshadowing her own death; suggesting that she is
killing a part of herself. The part that accepted so many years of pain. After this, Tess

starts to act differently, and it eventually leads to her decision to kill Alec. When she is
hung by her neck in the end of the book, it is just like when she was snapping the necks
of the birds in the forest. **
The constant themes in Hardys novel are: the struggle between man and the indifferent
impersonal forces, inside and outside him, that control his life; the clash of modern man with
mans natural life, his instincts, his landscape and security; the alienation one from the other
of the city and the country; the vision of man trapped in the implacable mechanism of the
Fate that works through a series of coincidences and accidents and the destruction of mans
true nature by the modern world(Lawrence);Love, that quite often ends in disillusion and
failure, either destroyed by Institutions like marriage or by society or even more by the
operation of the Fate.
Because of his last novels, (Jude and Tess ) he was charged with nihilism, lack of religious
belief and immorality.

The plot sets Tess, who is associated with purity, fertility, unfallen Eve (i.e. Eve as she was in
the Garden of Eden), and innocent paganism against the judgmental world of contemporary
society. The farming machines are described with ominous imagery that contrasts sharply
with the Eden-like Froom Valley. Alec and Angel, who are both well-educated and ranked
socially higher than Tess, act as despoiling and condemning influences upon her rural
innocence. Prince the farm horse is gored to death by a modern mail cart, and the dairy
workers have to water down the milk so the townspeople can drink it without getting sick.
The feeling throughout is of nostalgia for an idealized past; a kind of innocence that has been
lost along with the coming of the modern age.
As in many of his other works, Thomas Hardy used Tess of the d'Urbervilles as a vessel for
his criticisms of English Victorian society of the late 19th century. The novel's largest critique
is aimed at the sexual double standard, with all the extremities and misfortunes of Tess's life
highlighting the unfairness of her treatment. Society condemns her as an unclean woman
because she was raped, while Angel's premarital affair is barely mentioned. Angel himself
rejects Tess largely based on what his community and family would think if they discovered
her past. Hardy saw many of the conventions of the Victorian age as oppressive to the
individual, and to women in particular, and in Tess's case the arbitrary rules of society literally
ruin her life.
Paganism and Christianity
Thomas Hardy struggled with his own religious beliefs, and that struggle comes through in his
work. He idealized the paganism of the past but was also attached to his family's Christianity,
and generally he accepted some sort of supernatural being that controlled fate. Tess herself is
usually portrayed as an embodiment of that pagan innocence, a sort of English Nature

goddess. She first appears performing the fertility ritual of May-Day, then bedecked in
flowers from Alec, whistling toMrs. d'Urberville's birds, and mercifully killing the wounded
pheasants. Angel describes her as a new-sprung child of nature and compares her to
mythical women like Eve, Artemis, and Demeter. There is another side of Tess's divinity as
well, however: the role of sacrificial victim, which is a figure associated with both paganism
and Christianity. Like Jesus, Tess is punished for the sins of another, assuming the weight of
guilt for Alec's crime. When the police finally come to arrest her for murder, she is lying
asleep at Stonehenge like a sacrifice on an altar. Stonehenge was thought at Hardy's time to be
a heathen temple.
The Christian end of the spectrum is particularly associated with the Clare family and Alec
d'Urberville. Each character seems to have a different form and expression of faith, and Hardy
critiques them all with empathy from his own religious wrestling. Most of his respect goes to
the intense but charitable Mr. Clare, while Alec's conversion is depicted more as a product of
his fickle thrill-seeking than any deep emotion, and the conformist Clare brothers are
mocked for blindly following every fashionable doctrine. Angel's skepticism and Tess's vague
beliefs take the most prominence, and neither moves much past Hardy's own state of doubt.

EDWARDIAN PERIOD
G.B.SHAW - PYGMALION
George Bernard Shaw

Shaw in 1911, by Alvin Langdon Coburn

Born

26 July 1856
Dublin, Ireland

Died

2 November 1950 (aged 94)

Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire,
United Kingdom

Occupation

Playwright, critic, political activist

Nationality

British (18561950)

Irish (dual nationality 193450)

Notable
awards

Nobel Prize in Literature

1925
Academy Award for Writing
Adapted Screenplay
1938 Pygmalion

Key Facts about Pygmalion

Full Title: Pygmalion

When Written: 1912
Where Written: London
When Published: 1912
Literary Period: Victorian period
Genre: Drama, comedy, comedy of manners
Setting: London
Climax: In act four, after winning the bet concerning Eliza, Higgins says he has been
bored with his experiment, and treats Eliza poorly. Infuriated, Eliza throws Higgins'
slippers at him and argues and fights with him.
Antagonist: While Eliza and Higgins argue with each other, they both cooperate in order
to fool London's high society. The rigid hierarchy of social classes in Victorian England
can be seen as the antagonist against which all the characters struggle, as they deal with
issues of class and wealth.

Double Threat. George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have ever won both the
Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar. He won the Oscar for his work on a film
adaptation of Pygmalion.
Thanks But No Thanks. At first, Shaw declined to accept the Nobel Prize. He later
changed his mind, but still refused the prize money, wanting it instead to fund
translations of Swedish literature into English.

a)GB Shaw wrote during The Edwardian era, named after King Edward VII who
reigned from 1901 to 1910. Some consider the Edwardian period to include 1901 to the start
of the First World War in 1914.
The Edwardian period is noted a time of great social and economic change. In politics,
there is a growing political awareness of the working class, leading to a rise in trade
unions, the Labour movement and demands for better working conditions. The
Edwardian period was the most critical time for the womens suffrage campaign, with
Suffragettes leading a high profile campaign for women to be given the vote.
The Edwardian period is also seen as the high point of the British Empire, with the
Empire stretching across the globe. After the First World War many looked back on the
Edwardian period as a golden age of tranquil summer afternoons and romantic steam
rail journeys to any part of the country. Though this romantic view ignores the deep
social divisions in England, with many still living in poverty.
Written in 1912, Pygmalion is set in the early 20th century, at the end of the Victorian
period in England. Among other things, this period of history was characterized by a
particularly rigid social hierarchybut one that was beginning to decline as social
mobility became increasingly possible. The wealthy, high-class characters of the play are
thus especially concerned with maintaining class distinctions. This means more than a
mere distinction between rich and poor.
b)The title of Shaw's play is taken from the myth of Pygmalion. In this story, Pygmalion
scorns all the women around him and makes a sculpture of his ideal woman. The
sculpture is so beautiful that he falls in love with it and it comes to life. By titling his play
after this story, Shaw calls attention to questions of femininity and gender. As Pygmalion
sculpts his ideal woman, so Higgins and Pickering mold Eliza into an ideal lady. These
two narratives show how unrealistic and even unnatural the expectations that society
often has for women are.Pygmalion's perfect woman can only be attained with an
artificial construct, a sculpture. Similarly, the ideal noble lady of British society in the
world of Shaw's play is a kind of fake, only a role that Eliza must learn to play.
Pygmalion can thus be seen as showing how oppressive unrealistic ideals of femininity
can be: to attain these ideals, Eliza has to be coached, disciplined, and taught. She has to
pretend to be someone other than who she really is.
The play further explores gender roles with its other female characters. As it is set in the
early 20th century, before women gained many basic rights and privileges, the play's
other female charactersMrs. Pearce and Mrs. Higginsare largely confined to their
respective households. Nonetheless, they both play important roles. Mrs. Pearce ensures

the functioning of Higgins' household and reminds him of his own manners. And Mrs.
Higgins takes Eliza in when she leaves Higgins and Pickering, and helps resolve things at the
play's conclusion. These two characters thus demonstrate how women might still exert some
agency within an oppressive Victorian society. But despite any redeeming aspects to women's
roles in the world of the play, they ultimately cannot escape the constraints of their sexist
world. At the end of the play, Eliza must choose between living with Higgins, living with her
father, or marrying Freddy. In any case, her future can only be under the control of a man of
some sort. She tells Higgins that she desires independence, butalthough she is a strong
characterwe never see her actually obtain her independence in the play. Eliza is greatly
transformed over the course of the play, but it would take even greater transformations of
society itself in the 20th century for women like Eliza to have real independence.
Shaw's play explores aspects of language in a varietyofways. Higgins and Pickering study
linguistics and phonetics, taking note of how people from different backgrounds speak
differently. In Act Three, we see the importance of proper small talk in a social situation. And
the play also reveals some of the powers of language: Eliza's transformation is spurred simply
by Pickering calling her by the name Miss Doolittle, while Higgins' insults and coarse
language, which severely hurt Eliza's feelings, show the potential violence of language. The
play is most interested, though, in the connections between a person's speech and his or
her identity. As we see in the beginning of the play, Higgins can easily guess where people
are from based on their accent, dialect, and use of particular slang. How different people
speak the same language thus reveals a surprising amount about their identity. However,
Shaw also exposes how shallow and imprecise this conception of identity is, how it
doesn't actually capture or represent the full person. After all, Eliza's way of speaking
transforms over the course of the play. Eliza is able to change her identity simply by
learning to talk differently.
In particular, Pygmalion continually displays the connections between language and
social class. In the opening scene, we see people from different social strata speaking in
vastly different dialects, and Mrs. Eysnford Hill is confused when Eliza calls her son
Freddy, not realizing that this is merely a kind of lower-class slang. And most
importantly, by changing her habits of speech, Eliza is able to fool people into thinking
that she is from an upper-class background. Upper-class characters in the play lay claim
to proper or correct English. Higgins, for example, shames Eliza for speaking a poor
version of the language of the great writers Shakespeare and Milton. But is there anything
inherently correct about one particular version of English? At Mrs. Higgins' home, Mrs.
Eynsford Hill mistakenly believes that Eliza's lower-class slang is a new, fashionable form of
small talk. There is thus nothing naturally wrong or improper about Eliza's original way of
speaking. Rather, language, accents, and slang are all simply habits that people learn to

associate with different backgrounds and social classes. The wealthier social classes simply
claim that theirs is the right way to speak. While this oppresses and disadvantages lower-class
people, the play shows how this system also opens up possibilities for those clever enough to
exploit this connection between speech and class. Eliza, Pickering, and Higgins are, after all,
able to use this to their advantage, fooling high society and successfully passing Eliza off as a
noble lady.
Pygmalion explores how social identity is formed not only through patterns of speech, but
also through one's general appearance. Much like speech, one's physical appearance signals
social class. In the opening scene, as people from different walks of life are forced to take
shelter under the same portico, characters' social class is discernible through their clothing:
the poor flower-girl (later revealed to be Eliza) and the gentleman, for example, easily know
each other's status through their different attire. As Pickering comments in Act Four, many
noble people believe that one's appearance displays one's natural identity and character,
thinking that "style comes by nature to people in their position." Somewhat similarly, at the
end of the play, Higgins tells Eliza that he cannot change his nature. But the importance of
appearances in the play reveals that identity often is changeable, and does not come naturally
so much as it is performed or put on like a costume. Eliza is the most obvious example of this.
As she wins Higgins' bet for him, she fools people into assuming that she is from a noble
background by changing her appearance. Even before her complete transformation, her own
father fails to recognize her in act two only because she has changed clothes and bathed.
The precise extent to which Eliza really changes, though, is highly ambiguous. By the end of
the play, it is unclear whether she has really changed her nature or whether she has merely
learned to pretend to be someone else. As Eliza tells Higgins and Pickering in Act Five, she
believes that she has entirely forgotten her original way of speaking and behaving: she thinks
that she has really transformed and cannot return to her old life. Higgins, on the other hand, is
skeptical of this. He is confident that Eliza will "relapse" into her old ways. The play thus
raises (but doesn't completely answer) a number of questions about the stability of identity.
Has Eliza really changed, or can she not escape the identity she was born into? Has she
become noble, or is she naturally lower-class? Moreover, is there anything natural about class
identity at all? Shaw's play takes its title from the myth of Pygmalion, famously told in
Ovid's Metamorphoses. (In it, Pygmalion sculpts a beautiful statue that transforms into a real
woman.) Ovid's work is a poem about numerous mythical metamorphoses. But Shaw's play
of transformation asks: however much one changes one's appearance, can anyone really ever
change?
CAESAR AND CLEPATRA

Caesar and Cleopatra,four-act play by George Bernard Shaw, written in 1898, published in
1901, and first produced in 1906. It is considered Shaws first great play. Caesar and
Cleopatra opens as Caesars armies arrive in Egypt to conquer the ancient divided land for
Rome. Caesar meets the young Cleopatra crouching at night between the paws of a sphinx,
wherehaving been driven from Alexandriashe is hiding. He returns her to the palace,
reveals his identity, and compels her to abandon her girlishness and accept her position as
coruler of Egypt (with Ptolemy Dionysus, her brother). Caesar and Cleopatra was
extraordinarily successful, largely because of Shaws talent for characterization.
Caesar and Cleopatra satirizes Shakespeare's use of history and comments wryly on the
politics of Shaw's own time, but the undertone of melancholy makes it one of his most
affecting plays.
In the play Caesar and Cleopatra by Bernard Shaw, we are shown a fictional tracing of
the relationship shared by Caesar and Cleopatra. It is apparent, very early in the play,
that Shaw's details are somewhat off the mark.
In decifering Shaw's historical inaccuracies, we must first examine his portrayal of
Cleopatra. One of the most significant changes made by Shaw was the age of Cleopatra
on her initial meeting with Caesar. In the play, Cleopatra is a young girl of sixteen;
however, history shows that she was older, around the age of twenty or twenty-one.
Another example of the poetic license taken by Shaw was his account of HOW Cleopatra
and Caesar met. In the play, Caesar accidently comes across Cleopatra as he is walking
toward a sphinx and she is purched on one of its paws. Cleopatra, not knowing the true
identity of Caesar, explains that she is very frightened by the approach of Caesar. Caesar
teases her, and Cleopatra is shown as a flighty, somewhat dimwitted little child over
whelmed by her own fears.
A distorted version of the true meeting of Caesar and Cleopatra is shown later in the
play, however it is spoken of as an attempt by an obsessive Cleopatra to see Caesar once
again. With this as her motivation, we see Cleopatra's character in the play as an
overbearing young girl who does little more than get in Caesar's way. This is recognized
upon Caesar's receiving the rug, because he immediately asks for Cleopatra to be taken
back to Egypt.
The play depicts Cleopatra as a stereotypical, spoiled female whose motivations lead her
only to attempt to get the man whom she desires rather than power or respect.
Cleopatra, in the play, is flighty and somewhat dimwitted. Shaw has Cleopatra fall into a
predisposed stereotype of a women in love. Cleopatra, in the play, is unable to
concentrate on little else but Caesar.
Caesar, on the other hand, is shown as a rightoues and good man who helps those in
need rather than a tyrannical and hard handed ruler. Caesar's actions are thought of as
noble and brave. He is a person to be admired and adhered to. In the play, Caesar is
likable, amiable and caring. This is in direct contrast to the historical accounts of Caesar
which have recored his demeanor as being much different!

ENGLISH MODERNISM the late 19 the early20th century

James Joyce Ulysses
Virginia Woolf- Mrs Dalloway
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness
T.S Eliot Waste Land

JAMES JOYCE (1882 1941)

.
FEATURES: The trends which greatly influenced his works are: his Irish origin, his
conception on the role of art and of the artist, religion and Catholicism in particular.
Ireland and Dublin: They are his preferred settings: all his works are set in Dublin.
Joyce loved Dublin very much and even if he lived abroad, he was always in touch with
Dubliners who informed him about everything that happened there. He said that if Dublin
were destroyed they could reconstruct it from his books. He wanted to become a European
writer going beyond the narrow limits of the Irish culture, that is why he left Ireland. During
his university career, he had become aware of the various traps presented by the Irish situation
to a man that wanted to become an artist and rejected the Irish excessive nationalism and
Dublin provincialism. Some of these traps came from the Catholic Church that had imposed,
according to Joyce, a stupid and hard provincial way of living in Ireland.
Ireshness: Even if he loved Ireland and Dublin, Joyce was not involved very much in theIrish
Question and criticised the so-called Irish Revival. In a pamphlet (The Day of the

Robblement) he complained about the Irish Literary Theatre because in his own opinion it
had forgotten the artistic aim to privilege the interests of Nationalism. In thePortrait he had
Stephen to declare that loyalty to Art was a higher duty than loyalty to ones country. He had
chosen Art and his exile was necessary to safeguard his independence as an artist and to avoid
falling into the trap of a narrow provincialism and an excessive patriotism.
The role of the artist: Joyces ideas on the role of the artist were rooted in
the Aesthetic Movement. The artist is an isolated figure in his own contemporary society
because he is bound to reject the values and tastes of the man in the street, and, if necessary,
he must alienate himself from the life around him. His emotional self must be submitted to his
intellect. He must be outside society, outside conventions because he needs to be objective; he
mustnt express his own point of view: Art is true to itself when it deals with truth . When
art is submitted to the demands of religion, politics and morality it becomes false to itself. To
this purpose he wrote in a letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepil : The artist must also
alienate from the language of common people; he must be in his work like a God in his
creation: invisible and powerful, felt everywhere but not visible.
The stream of consciousness: As said before, Joyce experimented in some of his works
a new technique of narration: the stream of consciousness and the interior monologue.
Using symbolism, allegory, a new language and rejecting logical sequences and conventional
syntax, he tried to reproduce the ordinary working of the mind, the constant flow of the senseimpressions involuntarily registered in it.
He was a master in using this technique even if it is wrong to maintain that he had
invented it. John Donne, the famous metaphysical poet had already defined something like
that in the 17th century. Donne had complained that his prayers were always disturbed by a
memory of yesterdays pleasure, a fear of tomorrows dangers, a straw under my knees, an
anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain. As we can see these words may explain
well the stream of consciousness.
The epiphany: Joyce developed his idea on the epiphany from Freuds psychoanalytic
theories: there are always hidden motivations in mans behaviour. The original meaning of
this term is the showing of the Christ Child to the Magi, and it is used by Christian
philosophers to signify a manifestation of the presence of God in the world.
In Joyce the moment of the epiphany is a central lightning moment of an action he
describes in a page or novel; it is an instant of self-realization, of insight, of recognition given
by an incident or an object, in itself unimportant, through which the protagonist understands
that he is not behaving in a right way; it is the discovery of intuitive truths in casual
moments of peoples lives.
The epiphany represents the climax of the novel and the turning point in the characters life.
Works: Joyces literary activity may be divided into two periods: a first period marked by a
naturalistic technique, that is linear plot, logical syntax and a simple everyday language, and a
second one in which he experimented with the Stream of Consciousness technique of
narration. To the first period belong The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man; to the second Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

a)All Joyces work is strongly tiedto Irish political and cultural history, and
Ulysses must also be seen as an Irish context. The novel was written during the years of
the Irish bid for independence from Britain. After a bloody civil war, the Irish free State
was oficially formed.-during the same year that Ulysses was published.Ulysses depicts
the Irish citizens of 1904 and the complex relationships with various authorities and
institutions specific to their time and place: the British Impire Irish Nationalism, The
Roman Chatolic Church, and the Irish literary revival.
He lived during a period of great changes in the European culture and nowadays he is
considered one of the greatest novelists in the English literature
Joyce belonged to the novelists referred to as Modernists because they
experimented with new techniques of narration at the beginning of the 20thcentury. He
was an innovator both in style and in contents.
Modernism was a social and artistic movement that influenced the western
society during the years surrounding World War I.Modernists wished to distinguish
themselves from virtually the entire history of art and literature. Ezra Pound captured
the essence of modernism with his famous dictum: Make it new! Therefore, in order to
create something new, they often had to try using new forms of writing. The period
produced many experimental and avant-garde styles. Perhaps best known for such
experimentation are fiction writers Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound
b)Joyces early work reveals the stylistic influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen. Ulysses depicts the Irish citizens of 1904, especially Stephen Dedalus, as involved
in tangled conceptions of their own Irishness, and complex relationships with various
authorities and institutions specific to their time and place: the British empire, Irish
nationalism, the Roman Catholic church, and the Irish Literary Revival.
When he wrote A Portrait, Joyce had already prevented to write a masterpiece that would
have astonished the readers and that would have given evidence that there was nobody like
him: it was Ulysses.
Joyce met some difficulties when he wanted to publish it.The book was banned as obscene in
England and in America and only later the ban was lifted.
Ulysses is a very long and difficult novel dealing with the rather common and even
trivial experiences of three main characters during a single day, June 16th, 1904(the day
when Joyce dated Nora Barnacle out for the first time) in Dublin: Leopold Bloom, his
wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus (the same protagonist of A Portrait seen in his maturity
age.
The novel is conceived as a parallel to Homers The Odyssey: Bloom corresponds to
Ulysses, Molly to Penelope and Stephen to Telemacus. The theme is the same: the son in

search of the father and the father in search of the son..Joyce supplied a schema for
Ulysses that divides and labels the novel's untitled episodes, linking each to the Odyssey
and identifying other structural and thematic elements. The headings provided in this
schema are used in the plot summary below, as is customary in literary analysis of this
work. In the novel itself, there are three sections marked with roman numerals but no
other explicit headings. The first line of each episode in the novel appears in small
capital letters. The schema can be found in a number of works on Joyce; one of these is
Reading Joyce's Ulysses, by Daniel R. Schwarz. For explanations of references and parallels
to Homer's epic, readers will find Don Gifford's exhaustive work, "Ulysses" Annotated,
indispensable. The contrast between the squalid present and the glorious past is called
mythical method and it was largely used by T.S.Eliot,too.
The narration alternates between straight narration and interior monologues using the
stream of consciousness technique. Joyce changes conventional grammar and syntax
alternating the third person narrative with interior monologues without the presence of
a narrator, without punctuation and without verbs like to say, to think, to answer, to
reply, etc. .
Like many of the novels that precede it, Ulysses is written in the third person point of
view. However, this novel is anything but a traditional third-person narrative. Joyces
narrative voice is utterly unlike the omniscient (all-knowing) narrative voice found in
traditional nineteenth-century novels. Earlier novelists such as Charles Dickens and
George Eliot concentrated on exterior detail and attempted to give a broad overview
both of the action that they were depicting and the society in which it took place. Joyce
had no interest in writing this sort of novel. His narrative is narrow and tightly focused;
he does not tell what is happening but rather tries to show what is happening without
explaining the events that he is showing.
In Ulysses many pages are like puzzles and are very difficult to understand immediately
without stopping in analysing them.

Critics have remarked on Joyces unique combination of realism and naturalism on the
one hand and symbolism on the other. Joyces realistic and naturalistic approaches are evident
in his pretense that he is presenting things as they are. At the same time, he uses symbolism
extensively to suggest what things mean.
Ulysses maintains Joyces concern with realism but also introduces stylistic innovations
similar to those of his Mo-dernist contemporaries. Ulyssess multivoiced narration,
textual self-consciousness, mythic framework, and thematic focus on life in a modern
metropolis situate it close to other main texts of the Modernist movement, such as T. S.
Eliots mythic poem The Waste Land (also published in 1922) or Virginia Woolfs streamof-consciousness novel, Mrs. Dalloway(1925).
At the same time that Ulysses presents itself as a realistic novel, it also works on a mythic
level, by way of a series of parallels with Homers Odyssey. Stephen, Bloom, and Molly
correspond respectively to Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope, and each of the eighteen
episodes of the novel corresponds to an adventure from the Odyssey.

There is no plot as such in the novel; the narrative is not continuous but fragmented,
with gaps in the chronology. The focus is exclusively on the central character, Stephen
Dedalus, who is present on virtually every page. Every narrative detail is filtered
through Stephens consciousness. Joyce uses the experimental techniques stream-ofconsciousness and interior monologue to let the reader see, hear, and feel what Stephen
is experiencing as the action unfolds. One result of this focus on Stephen is that most of
the other characters are seen only in relation to him.
Within each chapter there are several distinct, self-contained scenes or episodes.
These episodes are, in effect, portraits. Each episode centers around or culminates in
an epiphanya moment of euphoric insight and understanding that significantly
contributes to Stephens personal education. The epiphany often occurs during an
otherwise trivial incident, and is the central organizing feature in Joyces work.
However, these epiphanies are undercut by anti-epiphaniesmoments of disillusion
or disappointment that bring Stephen back to earth. Each shift between epiphany and
antiepiphany is accompanied by a shift in the tone of Joyces language. The epiphany
scenes are generally written in a poetic and lofty language. By contrast, the language in
the anti-epiphany scenes emphasizes less noble aspects of life. Taken together, Joyce uses
the give-and-take shift between epiphany and anti-epiphany to show the paradoxes of
life.
The authors punctuation is not normally an issue in a discussion of a work of fiction.
Up until Joyce, most English-language novelists used standard punctuation. As part of
his effort to create an entirely new type of novel, however, Joyce employed unusual
punctuation.

.T.S. Eliot Waste Land

T. S. Eliot

Eliot in 1934
Born

Thomas Stearns Eliot

26 September 1888
St. Louis, Missouri, United States

Died

4 January 1965 (aged 76)

Kensington, London, England

Occupation

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and

editor

Nationality

US

Citizenship

American by birth; British from

1927

Education

AB in philosophy (Harvard, 1909)

PhD (cand) in philosophy (Harvard,

191516)[1]
Alma mater

Merton College, Oxford

Harvard University
University of Athens

Period

19051965

Literary
movement

Modernism

Notable
works

The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock (1915), The Waste
Land (1922), Four Quartets(1944)

Notable
awards

Nobel Prize in
Literature (1948),Order of
Merit (1948)

a) Waste Land belongs to Modernism, a social and artistic movement that influenced
the western society during the years surrounding World War I. Modernist writers
wished to distinguish themselves from virtually the entire history of art and literature.
Ezra Pound captured the essence of modernism with his famous dictum: Make it new!
Therefore, in order to create something new, they often had to try using new forms of
writing. The period produced many experimental and avant-garde styles. Perhaps best
known for such experimentation are fiction writers James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and
Ezra Pound.
The connection between the poem and the historical context of the modern era reveals
that the poem metaphorically illustrates the actual condition of the modern Europe after
the World WarI. New technologies and the horrifying events of The Great War made
Eliot disilusioned and confused.
Eliot was a man of vast erudition. He was familiar with varied cultural traditions:
The Bible, Buddhism, the teaching of Zarathrusta*, the Lao-Ts**, Dante and The Stil
Novo, the Metaphysical poets of the 17thcent. and John Donne.
The Metaphysicals influenced him with their use of wit, their striking association of images
and the complexity of their poetry. Dante, instead, was considered the model of all poetic art
and his influence has been described by Eliot as the most persistent and deepest influence.
He also wrote that he had borrowed lines from him in the attempt to reproduce. the
memory of some Dantesque scene and thus establish a relationship between the medieval
inferno and modern life. According to Eliot, Dante was one of those few people who
could answer the question about the meaning of life because he had been to hell and

back and he had seen what there was beyond life. Returning to life he had brought back
with him the eternal secrets of death.
b)The Waste Land made use of allusion, quotation, a variety of verse forms, and a
collage of poetic fragments to create the sense of speaking for an entire culture in crisis.
Eliots ideas on poetry were mostly influenced byErza Pound, the French poets Laforgue and
Baudelaire and the French Symbolist and Imagist Movements.
From Pound and the Imagists he learnt how to avoid decorative rhetoric and replace it
with clear, precise images, using the minimum number of words.
From the French symbolists he took the way they looked at life and appreciated their
use of the free verse. Baudelaire made him discover the poetic possibilities of the ugliness
and sterility of a modern metropolis.
The Waste Land is a long narrative poem published in 1922. It belongs to the first phase of
Eliots poetic production, the phase in which the poets overcomes the vision of the material
death of society and urban life to reach the vision of the spiritual death of the world. This
phase will end with Eliots conversion to the Anglo-Catholicism (1927). IN The Waste
Land we find the background: strerile,arid and lifeless; man is hollow, stuffed with straw
rather than with a brain: we are the stuffed men/leaning together/Headpiece filled with
straw. Here are the last lines:This is how the world ends/This is how the world
ends/This is how the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.
GENERAL VIEW: The Waste Land was written in fragments over a long period of time and it
was put together with the help of Erza Pound who revised and shortened it. When it appeared,
it made an enormous impact on readers because it was a powerful presentation of the sterility
and decay of post-war Europe, peopled by spiritually dead persons, whose power of feeling
was disintegrated by a kind of apathy.
The Waste Land is Eliots representation of a journey through this devastated world and
the attempt to find a solution to save it. Eliot finds the solution of mans salvation in
the Holy Grail because he believed in the legend of The Fisher King: the Fisher King,
wounded by a spear of thrust, had become sexually maimed and his land had become arid. A
young knight had gone in quest of the Holy Grail, had found it in a Chapel and taken it to the
king who was healed. As a consequence his land had returned to fertility again.
PLOT: in The Waste Land there is neither plot nor logical development. If we have to
find a plot it might be the following: a character goes to Madame Sosostris, a fortuneteller, asks for a solution, receives a response and goes in quest of the Holy Grail.
STRUCTURE: The Waste Land is divided in five sections: The Burial of Death, A game of
Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder Said.
The first section,The Burial of Death, deals with the cruel coming of spring in a sterile
land( then no spring), A Game of Chess contrasts past splendour to the present squalor,The
fire Sermon reinforces the theme of squalor, Death by water deals with the theme of
purification telling the story of Phlebas, a drowned Phoenician sailor, What the Thunder
Said, taken from an Indian legend in which the Lord speaks through the thunder, conveys the
image of the disintegration of western civilization and suggests its possible salvation.

The poem isnt a series of detached scenes but there is a certain unity from the beginning
to the end. Every section deals with the same unifying theme of the aridity and revolves
around the same vision of a nightmarish world inhabited by spiritually dead people
without God; each section has got the same setting, which is the dead land of April
which is waiting for rain to bring it life. Unity is also achieved through the use of the
association of ideas narrative technique which links the sequences of images to each other
and through the figure of Tiresias*. Eliot wrote about Tiresias: Tiresias is the most
important personage in the poem uniting all the rest. The two sexes meet in Tiresias.
What Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem. Then Tiresias represents the continuity
of history; he has seen and known every thing, yet he cannot do anything to guide the
future. He is only an observer of what he has foreseen as a prophet.

THEMES: the poem deals with two main themes: the emptiness and sterility of modern
life and the meaningful link with the past.
The tone is pessimistic but, like in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or in Waiting for
Godot, there is in the end some hope of salvation. The sense of collapse in the values of
the western civilization is balanced by the possibility of regeneration contained in the
reference to the Holy Grail, to ancient fertility myths and to vegetation ceremonies. All
that develops with the passing of time and is explained in the cyclical recurrence of
history.
Eliot uses what he calls The Mythical method, a method by which different experiences in
different periods of time can express both the contemporary world and the human
conditions because of the simultaneous existence of the changing and the permanent.
CRITICISM: When it appeared, The Waste Land was accused of obscenity. Eliot was aware
of it and provided it with notes on it to be read while reading the poem which was very
complex and difficult to be understood by a common reader (Coleridge/the Rime of). It is
necessary for a reader to have a vast and literary knowledge in order to grasp its meaning.
The difficulties come from the frequent use Eliot makes of quotations from a lot of
authors and brief allusions to their works, but also from the languagebecause he quotes from
six languages, including Sanskrit. In addition he often makes use of symbolism, both religious
and surrealistic, hard to be understood and of interior monologues in the tradition of the
Stream of Consciousness technique mingling past, present and future.He often deals
with painful states of mind and experiences which are almost difficult to formulate precisely
and to communicate.
As far as the contribution of Erza Pound to the reduction of the poem from the
original one thousand lines to the present 433 lines there is no doubt because in 1971 the
original with Pounds corrections was published.

POSTMODERNISM late 20th

William Golding -The lord of flies

Sir William Golding

Golding in 1983
Born

William Gerald Golding

19 September 1911
Newquay, Cornwall,
England

Died

19 June 1993 (aged 81)

Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England

Occupation

Schoolteacher Novelist
Playwright Poet

Nationality

British

Alma mater

Oxford University

Genre

Survivalist fiction Robinsonade

Adventure Sea story Science
fiction Essay Historical fiction
Stageplay Poetry

Notable
works

Lord of the Flies

Notable
awards

1983 Nobel Prize in Literature

1980 Booker Prize

Key Facts about Lord of the Flies

Full Title: Lord of the Flies

Where Written: England
When Published: 1954
Literary Period: Post-war fiction
Genre: Allegorical novel / Adventure novel
Setting: A deserted tropical island in the middle of a nuclear world war
Climax: Piggy's death
Point of View: Third person omniscient

a)The text belongs to postmodernism, a postwar cultural movement, started around 1950, that
reacted against tendencies in modernism, and was typically marked by revival of historical
elements and techniques. Postmodernist society is characterized by changes to institutions and
creations and with social and political results and innovations, globally but especially in the
West.
Postmodern authors tend to depict the world as having already undergone countless
disasters and being beyond redemption or understanding. Postmodern literature reflects late
modern society by showing the individuals inability to establish a personal identity based on
a historical or social background, let alone family and work. Postmodern literature is, to a
great extent, a play on words which reflects the meaninglessness of the late modern world,
which is seen as fragmented, disoriented, chaotic, but this leads neither to despair nor to any
wish to re-establish order. The binary contrasts of good/evil, true/false, real/unreal and
order/chaos have been abolished. The world is pure surface, it is what it appears to be. Hence
each individual creates his or her own world and identity through the pictures which he or she
sees in literature and other art forms or in the so-called world. The Great Narratives, which

began to be questioned in Modernism, are rejected in Postmodernism. There is no

acknowledgment of a universal truth.
a)World War II influenced the themes and setting of Lord of the Flies. The war changed
the way people in general and William Golding in particular viewed the world. World
War I was for many years called the War to End All Wars. World War II proved that
idea wrong and created a new sense that people are inherently warlike, power hungry,
and savage. While the world war raging in Lord of the Flies is not World War II, it can
be viewed as Golding's version of World War III. Only a few brief references to the war
outside the boys' island appear in the novel, but references to an atom bomb blowing up
an airport and the "Reds" make it clear that the war involves nuclear weapons and
places capitalist allies including the British against the communist "Reds."
Adventure stories such as Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson depict people
who are stranded on deserted islands transforming and civilizing nature. Lord of the
Flies subverts the genre. It shows boys stranded on an island who try to civilize nature,
but instead descend into savagery. While other adventure novels support the idea that
man is inherently civilized, Lord of the Flies uses the genre to suggest exactly the
opposite.
Lord of the Flies is firmly rooted in the sociopolitical concerns of its era. Published during
the first decade of the Cold War, the novel contains obvious parallels to the struggle
between liberal democracy and totalitarianism. Ralph represents the liberal tradition, while
Jack, before he succumbs to total anarchism, can be interpreted as representing military
dictatorship
Golding's novel remains significant for its depiction of the nature of human society
and its musings on the nature of evil. Influenced by scientific teaching, Freudian
psychology, religion and sociopolitical concerns, Lord of the Flies, like much of Golding's
work, attempts to account for the evil inherent in human nature.
b) The novel is writen from the third person point of view. It is told through the
eyes of several of the lead characters, includind Jack, Ralph and Piggy. The author
moves from character to character to tell the story, making the point of view omniscient.
By doing this, the author is able to show his story from multiple poins of view.
The key idea that William Golding focuses on in The Lord of the Flies is when
removed from civilised society, people will devolve and return back to being primitive
creatures. Golding portrays this idea throughout the whole book by using different
characters. The book is about a group of boys who are stranded on a tropical island without
any adults. At first they seem very excited about the situation and votes for one of the boys,
Ralph, as a leader. Another one of the boys, Jack, leaves the group to form his own tribe who
become more and more violent and obsessed with hunting pigs and the so-called beast, that
they believe lives on the island. At the end of the book, they try to kill Ralph before all being
rescued by a naval officer. The title of the book comes from Simon, who is described by
the others as batty and shy, imagines that the dead pigs head is talking to him. The pigs
head is surrounded by flies, so Simon calls it the Lord of the Flies.
In its structure as an adventure the novel further resembles the science-fiction genre that
reemerged as a popular form of literature during the fifties. Although taking place

among ostensibly realistic events, Lord of the Flies is an adventure story whose plot,
which finds a small group of humans isolated on an alien landscape, correlates to this
popular genre. Golding's next novel was a further step toward this genre. The
Inheritors, heavily influenced by H.G. Wells' Outline of History, imagines life during the
dawn of man.
Golding employs a relatively straightforward writing style in Lord of the Flies,
one that avoids highly poetic language, lengthy description, and philosophical interludes.
Much of the novel is allegorical, meaning that the characters and objects in the novel are
infused with symbolic significance that conveys the novels central themes and ideas. In
portraying the various ways in which the boys on the island adapt to their new
surroundings and react to their new freedom, Golding explores the broad spectrum of
ways in which humans respond to stress, change, and tension. In his portrayal of the
small world of the island, Golding paints a broader portrait of the fundamental human
struggle between the civilizing instinctthe impulse to obey rules, behave morally, and
act lawfullyand the savage instinctthe impulse to seek brute power over others, act
selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in violence.
Golding's often allegoricalfiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature,
mythology, and Christiansymbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject
matter and technique vary. However his novels are often set in closed communities such as
islands, villages, monasteries, groups of hunter-gatherers, ships at sea or a pharaoh's court.
His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990, play, adapted by Nigel Williams,
1995), dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the
ambiguity and fragility of civilization. It has also been said that it is allegorical of World War
II. Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the
comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth

AMERICAN LITERATURE

ROMANTICISM / AMERICAN RENAISSANCE / TRANSCENDENTALIM

1876 to 1917
Nathaniel Hawthorne- The Scarlet Letter
Heman Melville- Moby Dick
Emily DickinsonWalt Whitman
Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman, 1887

Born

Walter Whitman
May 31, 1819
West Hills, Huntington, Long Island, New
York, United States

Died

March 26, 1892 (aged 72)

Camden, New Jersey, United States

a) Whitmans lifetime saw both the Civil War and the rise of the United States as a
commercial and political power. He witnessed both the apex and the abolition of slavery. His

poetry is thus centered on ideas of democracy, equality, and brotherhood. In response to

Americas new position in the world, Whitman also tried to develop a poetry that was
uniquely American, that both surpassed and broke the mold of its predecessors. Leaves of
Grass, with its multiple editions and public controversies, set the pattern for the modern,
public artist, and Whitman, with his journalistic endeavors on the side, made the most of his
role as celebrity and artist.
.The mid-nineteenth century was a period of astonishing literary creativity in
American literature. This period witnessed the highest literary expression of Puritan
tradition and the emergence of a new cultural and philosophical movement
Transcendentalism. The Puritan heritage is clearly evident in the work of Nathaniel
Hawthorne - a mixture of fantasy and realism - to explore one of constant themes : the
relationship between the individual and society. Melville - metaphysical and symbolic
style. The Transcendentalists exalted feelings and intuition over reason; the man was
good and should be allowed to develop free from rules and restrictions.
Transcendentalism was represented in poetry by the work of Walt Whitman - he
admired Emerson. E. Dickinson - the subjects of her poems are traditional - love, nature,
religion and mortality, but the treatment of these subjects is highly original. She was
influenced of seventeenth century Metaphysical poets - in the intensity of the emotions
she expressed; her poetry reveals a painful inner struggle that may be caused by
religious doubt.
TRANSCENDENTALISM
Reaction against puritanism, natural way of behaviour. believed in diversity of individual
soul, based on nature, individual connection w/god (unitarians). sources from german phil:
kant (god, free-dom, immortality), english romantic writers: coleridge, wordsworth, oriental
phil: emphasis on the unity of the universe. r w. emerson: phil, theoretician, henry thoreau:
emersons principle in practice, went to prison for anti-war activism. r. w. emerson - nature .
Established free verse in america, rhythm is diff then in prose. usage of and to connect longer
lines, verse is extended, wanted to express everything. urban life as new topic, introduction of
human soc in poetry, forbidden topics (sex, war, religion, homosexuality). considered himself
to be a representative of the human race. he was a pantheist, transcendental influence. life vs
death, enjoying everything, even death which is part of his life - beginning of a new circle incarnation.great passion for democracy.use of germanic expressions, roman words
(intellectual).

b) When, Walt Whitman`s Leaves of grass was published, it was unlike any collections of
poems ever published by the American in the hystory of the nation.
Leaves of grass with its multiple editions and public controversies, set the pattern for the
modern, public artist, and Whitman, with his journalistic endeavour on the side, made the
most of his role as celebrity and artist.
The title reveals the central metaphor of the collection: that something as small as a
asingle blade of grass contains the divinity of God and the same time is a small part of

the world at large. The title also refers to the pages of the book itself, making the grass
bladed equivalent to the poems collected in it.
Characterized by long, twisted sentences combined in a free, deliberated poetic form, the
poems included here, are bold statements above love, desire, nature and poetics,
marking it perfect candidate for its literary movement.
Whitman`s petry is democratic both its subject matter and in its language. His preferece
for quotidian links him both with Dante who was the first to write poetry in a
vernacular language- and with Wordsworthe. Whitman fiiled his poety with long lists.
These lists create a sense of expansiveness in the poem, as they mirror the growth of the
United States.
Whitman prefers spaces and situations-like journeys, the out of doors,, cities that allow
for ambiguity in these respects. Exploration becomes a mode of existence. The body is
the vessel that enables the soul to experience the world.
He uses obscure, foreign or invented words. He avoids rhyme schemes and other
traditional poetic devices. He does use meter in masteful and innovative ways, often to
mimic natural speech. He uses poetic diction including slang, and regional dialects
rather thanerudit language.

The language is openly sexual in places. For example, in poems such as Song for myself,
and I sing the body electric, the poet takes transcendentalism to an extreme in his
discussin of the body and sexuality, in Song for myself he proclaims: I am the poet of the
body/ I am the poet of the soul.
Whalt~s language physical, earthy, explicit and expressing heterosexual and homosexual
desire. His Audicy in exploring metaphors and other tropes earnen him the contempt of
many reviewers in his own time but also made him a hero among less conventional
contemporaries amonf later critics. Emaerson and Thoreau were fans of Whitman . a
poetic pioneer, Walt inspired many modern poets, especially in the 1960s.
In these poems, Walt Whitman offers a celebratiuon of nature and of soul and the
soul`s innate connection to God through nature.

SONG OF MYSELF
Whitman begins this poem by naming its subject himself. He says that he celebrates himself
and that all parts of him are also parts of the reader. He is thirty-seven years old and in
perfect health and begins his journey Hoping to cease not till death. He puts all Creeds
and schools in abeyance hoping to set out on his own, though he admits he will not forget
these things. Whitman then describes a house in which the shelves are / crowded with
perfumes and he breathes in the fragrance though he refuses to let himself become
intoxicated with it. Instead, he seeks to go to the bank by the wood and become naked and
undisguised where he can hear all of nature around him.

Whitman says that he has heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the / beginning and
the end, but he refuses to talk of either. Instead, he rejects talk of the past or future for an
experience in the now. This is the urge of the world which calls to him. Whitman sees all
the things around him The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old / and
new, but he knows that they are not the Me myself. He remembers in his own past that he
once sweated through fog with fashionable arguments. He no longer holds these
pretensions, however.

Whitman then describes an encounter between his body and soul. He invites his soul to loafe
with me on the grass and to lull him with its valved voice. He tells his soul to settle upon
him, your head athwart my hips and gently turnd / over upon me.. He invites his soul to
undress him and reach inside him until the soul feels his feet. This will bring him perfect
peace that pass all the argument of the earth. This peace is the promise of God and is
what allows all people to become his brothers and sisters.

Whitman recalls a scene in which a child came to him with a handful of grass and asked him
what it was. Whitman has no answer for the child. The grass is the flag of my disposition
and it is the handkerchief of the Lord. It is also the child or a symbol for all of humanity.
Whitman sees the grass sprouting from the chests of young men, the heads of old women, and
the beards of old men. He remembers all those that have died and recalls that each sprout of
grass is a memorial to those that have come before. Whitman reflects that to die is
different from what any one supposed, and / luckier.

Whitman then writes a parable. Twenty-eight young men bathe on a sea shore while a young
woman, richly drest hides behind the blinds of her house on the waters bank. She observes
the men and finds that she loves the homeliest of them. She then goes down to the beach to
bathe with them, though the men do not see her. An unseen hand also passes over the bodies
of the young men but the young men do not think of who holds onto them or whom they
souse with spray.

Whitman describes groups of people that he stops to observe. The first is a butcher-boy
sharpening his knife and dancing. He sees the blacksmiths taking on their grimy work with
precision. Whitman then observes a negro as he works a team of horses at a construction
site. Whitman admires his chiseled body and his polishd and perfect limbs. He sees and
loves this picturesque giant. He admits in the next poem that he is enamourdOf men
that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, / Of the builders and steerers of ships
and the wielders of axes / and mauls / I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.
In a lengthy section, Whitman describes the work of all people of the land the carpenter, the
duck-shooter, the deacons of the church, the farmers, the machinist, and many more. They
often have hard, ordinary lives, yet Whitman proclaims that these people tend inward to me,
and I tend outward to them and they all weave the song of myself.

Whitman describes himself as old and young and foolish as much aswise. He is
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man. He is of all the land of North
America from the South even into Canada. He notes that these are not his own original
thoughts, however. These thoughts have been a part of the human condition for all of time.
These thoughts are the grass that grows wherever the land isthe common air that bathes
the globe. His thoughts are for all people, even those that society has considered outcasts.

Whitman wonders why he should adhere to the old ways prayer or ceremony. He claims that
he has pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair and found that nothing is as true and
sweet as my own bones. Whitman understands himself. He is august and vindicated by
his own nature. I exist as I am, that is, enough. He does not have to explain his
inconsistencies. Those are only to be accepted. Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I
contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.) All pleasure and all pain are found
within his own self. Whitman describes himself in the basest terms: Turbulent, fleshy,
sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, he does not feign interest in manners. He hears the
primeval voices of democracy and mankind and gives himself over to these forbidden lusts.
Above all, Whitman says, I believe in the flesh and the appetites.
Analysis

The first thing to note is that Whitman calls his poems songs. This insinuates that
Whitman feels there is an audible quality to his work; that the true meanings of his
poems will not be understood if they are not heard by a listener. Thus, Whitman feels as
though he will not be understood as an individual if he is not heard by the world. Song
of Myself, as the linchpin of this first half of Leaves of Grass, is his attempt to make
himself heard.

Whitmans subject is himself, but it is clear that Whitman means more than just his
physical self. Whitman calls himself a universe of meanings. He uses the symbol of his
naked self in nature to symbolize his own fusion with the world around him. Whitmans
self is the whole of America and the whole of nature. This is best seen in Whitmans use
of the catalog. A catalog is a literary device used in epic poetry as a rhetorical naming or
inventory. Whitman uses a catalog in Song of Myself to name a variety of professions
and people that he meets on his journey across the States. He says that he becomes part
of these people and these people come to compose his own self.

In this section, Whitman first engages the idea of individuality and collectivity. The
catalog is Whitmans example of the collective. This refers back to his opening
inscription in which Whitman proclaimed that his work is of the self, both the individual
self and the democratic self. The collection of all people in the land forms a self that is
distinct from the individual self, yet is similar in that it has its own soul and being.

Whitman uses the metaphor of grass in the sixth section of Songs of Myself to try and
explain the democratic self. His explanation, he admits, is incomplete. Whitman
describes a child coming to him and asking him what is the grass. He has no real answer,
meaning that he cannot fully describe the democratic self to those that do not inherently
understand it. Whitman can only tell the child that he sees the democratic self in young
men and old women, meaning that he sees it in all people. Whitman then takes the
metaphor one step farther, telling the child that even the grass that has died and has
gone back to the earth is a part of the whole. Song of Myself balances the themes of
individuality and collectivity as two important ingredients for the democratic
experiment of America. This is Whitmans political argument.

Whitman breaks up Song of Myself with a kind of parable. A parable is a short,

succinct story that offers a moral or instructive lesson for its hearers. Whitmans lesson
is an erotic one and it is instructive to see how Whitmans passion for democracy is
equated with a sexual and erotic passion. A woman sees twenty-eight men bathing and
lusts to be with them. When she joins them, they are together through the power of an
unseen hand. Whitman uses shocking erotic images of the men and spraying water, a
reference to male ejaculation, to arouse the reader. Whitman is telling his readers that
they must not only observe the democratic life but they must become one with it. This
joining is both mysterious and erotic for those that take part.

Whitman closes Song of Myself by trying to name this large, democratic collectivity,
yet he finds it impossible. He makes a point to let the reader know that he contradicts
himself and that this democratic self is full of inconsistencies. Whitman understands
very well that the democracy of America is imperfect, filled with injustice, self-serving,
and undermined by the tyranny of the individual. He pares this democratic self down to
its essentials: it is primal, the flesh and the appetites. Whitman continues Leaves of
Grass with this carnal vision in the next sections.

EMILY DICKINSON Emily Dickinson

This daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke,

December 1846 or early 1847 is the only
authenticated portrait of Emily Dickinson later than
childhood. The original is held by the Archives and
Special Collections at Amherst College.[1]
Born

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

December 10, 1830
Amherst, Massachusetts

Died

May 15, 1886 (aged 55)

Amherst, Massachusetts

Occupation

Poet

Alma mater

Mount Holyoke Female

Seminary
(no degree)

Notable works

List of Emily Dickinson

poems

a) Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), The Belle of Amherst, American poet, wrote hundreds of
poems including Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Heart, we will forget him!, I'm
Nobody! Who are You?, and Wild Nights! Wild Nights!;
Among the ranks of other such acclaimed poets as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson is
considered one of the most original 19th Century American poets. She is noted for her
unconventional broken rhyming meter and use of dashes and random capitalisation as well as
her creative use of metaphor and overall innovative style. She was a deeply sensitive woman
who questioned the puritanical background of her Calvinist family and soulfully explored her
own spirituality, often in poignant, deeply personal poetry. She admired the works of John
Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but avoided the florid and romantic style of her time,
creating poems of pure and concise imagery, at times witty and sardonic, often boldly frank
and illuminating the keen insight she had into the human condition. At times characterised as
a semi-invalid, a hermit, a heartbroken introvert, or a neurotic agoraphobic, her poetry is
sometimes brooding and sometimes joyous and celebratory. Her sophistication and profound
intellect has been lauded by laymen and scholars alike and influenced many other authors and
poets into the 21st Century.
Dickinson - poetry was the only important activity in her life, her vision was eccentric,
variety of imagery. expressing psych state of mind, special lang. unconventional punctuation,
unfinished sentences, clashes. characteristic figure metaphor, subjective mood, uncertainty,
unfinished action, her doubt. her poems are built on paradox. more concerned w/words and
mood than w/technique. she never travelled anywhere. spiritualism, tried to reach spiritual
unity, transcendentalism. metaphysical aspects: love, life, death. nature was a part from her.
lot of doubt, about immortality. writing from the perspective of death. topics: nature, despair,
fear, unconventional concept of time.

b) Dickinson poems use largely simple language, many off-rhyme, and unconventional
punctuation to deal with a small set of themes that she returned to again and again.
Death, grief, passion, faith truth and fame and success are the most predominent of these
themes. Each time she revisits one of the threats, she comes at it differently, never allowing
her interpretation of truth to become oversimplified.
Almost all of Dickinson`s poems have a fiisrt-person speaker, who is often closely paralleled
to Dickinson herself. Although the speaker varies in tone, and sometimes philosophically, she
ussually seems to be different manifestatin of the same voice, seeing a familiar theme from a
new perspective. The problem of identifying a first person speaker with the poet is common
one, and making assumptions about the poet because of the speaker should not done without
trepidation.
In Dickinson`s poetry, however, there are certainly many hints that, if the speaker is not her,
it is at least someone she closely identifies with. Some poems seem to serve as her devotion to
poetry and some seem to be a reaction to events in her life, her failure to be published, the loss
of loved ones.

A great majority of Dickinson poems use traditionally relious stanza forms, although
her other formal choices, like her rhyme schemes and her punctuation, are very
unconventional. This is likely an embodiment in the form of her poems of what she does in so
many of them-finds her own path to God, to spirituality and faith, and doesn~t follow the
conventional. Relion and faith are very essentioal to her poetry, but she is not going to follow
conventions without judging them first. By using traditional hymn forms, she has the structure
of religious poetry, while rewriting what that means.
Dickinson`s imagistic style is even modern and innovative tahn Whitman`s. She never
uses two words when one will do, and combines concrete things with abstract ideas in an
almost proverbial, compressed style.
Like Pope, she explores the dark and hidden part of mind, dramatizing death and
grave. Yet she also celebrated simple objects- a flower, a bee.

HERMAN MELVILLE MOBY DICK

Herman Melville

Herman Melville, 1870. Oil painting by Joseph Oriel

Eaton.
Born

Herman Melvill
August 1, 1819
New York City, New York, U.S.

Died

September 28, 1891 (aged 72)

New York City, New York, U.S.

Occupation

Novelist, short story writer, teacher,

sailor, lecturer, poet,customs
inspector

Genre

Travelogue, Captivity narrative,Sea

story, Gothic
Romanticism,Allegory, Tall tale

Literary
movement

Romanticism

Key Facts about Moby-Dick

Full Title: Moby Dick; or, The Whale

When Written: 1850-1851
Where Written: Pittsfield, Massachusetts
When Published: 1851
Literary Period: Pre-Civil War American fiction; the transcendentalist and posttranscendentalist eras
Genre: Novel of the sea; whaling novel; episodic novel; novel of ideas; precursor to the
modernist novel
Setting: Primarily on the Pequod, a whaling vessel, throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans,
in the late 1840s
Climax: On the third day of the chase, Moby Dick causes Ahab to kill himself, by snagging
himself in his own harpoon-line; Moby Dick then smashes into the Pequod, drowning all
aboard except Ishmael, who lives to report the story of the whale.
Antagonist: Moby Dick, the White Whale
Point of View: Mostly first person from Ishmaels point of view, although a number of
sections appear to be narrated by a third-person-like presence, since Ishmael cannot have seen
the events being reported in the narrative
Extra Credit for Moby-Dick

Short chapters. Although Moby Dick is often regarded, in the popular imagination, as a novel
of interminable length, it is actually divided into 136 rather short chapterssome of which
are no longer than a couple paragraphs. This style of writing, in which a larger narrative is
broken into much smaller chunks, is known as episodic writing.
Alternate title. Perhaps as a way of emphasizing the novels concern with whales and whaling,
Moby Dick was initially titled The Whale when it was released in England in 1851.
a)America was in a tumultuous period, establishing its national and international
identity at the time Moby-dick was being written .Often considered the embodiment of
AmericanRomanticism, Moby-Dick was first published by Richard Bentley in London on
October 18, 1851 in an expurgated three-volume edition titled The Whale, and later as one
massive volume, by New York City publisher Harper and Brothers as Moby-Dick; or, The
Whale on November 14, 1851. The first line of Chapter One"Call me Ishmael."is one of
the most famous in literature. Although the book initially received mixed reviews, Moby-Dick
is now considered one of the greatest novels in the English language and has secured
Melville's place among America's greatest writers
Moby Dick appeared in 1851, during an important period in American literature. The
year before, Melville's good friend and neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne published his
bestseller The Scarlet Letter. The year after, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's

Cabin, which would become the second best-selling book in America in the 19th century after
the Bible..
When the novel was being written, Transcendentalism was becoming the predominant philosophical and religious viewpoint. This view propounded most cogently by Ralph Waldo
Emerson in his essay Self-Reliance-held that God was present in the world, as well as in every
individual soul. In this way, the souls intuitions were divine and should be followed
regardless of authority, tradition, or public opinion. This view (it never developed into a
rigorous system of thought) was essentially a reaction against New England Puritanism. Like
English Romanticism, it was heavily influenced by German philosophers, principally
Immanuel Kant.
Although Melville fits the descriptions of the self-reliant individual in Emersons essayto
be great is to be misunderstood, who so would be a man must be a nonconformisthe,
like Hawthorne, remained acutely aware that by taking selfreliance to extremes, as in the case
of the monomaniacal Ahab, virtue could quickly turn to vice.
It is this recognition of and sense of sin which separates Melville from Transcendentalism, the
predominant movement of his period.
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..
a)The 1850s were a time of political upheaval in the United States, which led, ultimately,
to the breakout of the American Civil War in 1861. They were also a period of rapid
industrialization, or the transition from a local, cottage economy of artisanal
production, to large-scale production of goods in urban centers, like New York,
Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. Industrialization took place largely in the more
densely-populated north, and resulted in the linking of northern cities with efficient rail lines,
used to transport goods, and, later, materiel for the Civil War. In addition, the 1850s
reflected a high point in the sailing and whaling industries, as large sailing vessels were
used to transport items across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, and across the Pacific and
Indian Oceans to reach parts of Asia. These voyages were dangerous, but American
sailing fleetslocated in port towns along the northeast of the US, including New
Bedford, Massachusetts, as described in Moby Dickwere large, and many boats
offered positions to young men who wished to leave home. Thus Moby Dick treats many
of the scientific advances being made at this timeadvances in biology that allowed for
a more detailed understanding of whale anatomy, for examplewithout abandoning the
philosophical and religious investigations so prominent in a country that, 80 years after
its founding, was still dominated by Protestant Christian denominations in New England
and parts of the Mid-Atlantic. In this sense, Moby Dick uses the trappings of a whaling
and adventure novel as an excuse, or a platform, for a much broader-ranging
examination of American life in the middle of the 19th century.

Melvilles Moby Dick might be compared, most immediately, to the works of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, with whom Melville struck up a friendship during the composition of the
novel. Hawthorne was perhaps the most famous prose writer in the United States at the time,

the author of poems and short stories like Young Goodman Brown, and his The Scarlet
Letter came out in 1850, not long before Moby Dick. The Scarlet Lettera fixture on many
American high school literature syllabitells the story of Hester Prynne, and the shame
resulting from a pregnancy occurring outside the bounds of marriage. Hawthornes
examination of Prynnes psychological response to these events, as well as the feelings of
those in her small New England town, show a complex understanding of the interaction of
doubt, grief, and contentment. In some sense, then, the psychological inquiries made by
Melville and by Hawthorne are a broad response to the primary literary currents in American
life in the generation preceding them.
That period, in the early 1800s, was dominated by the transcendentalist writings of
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson, drawing widely from the
religious traditions of the East and West, wrote poems and essays investigating the particular
American spirit he had encountered during his life in the new world. And Thoreau, whose
Walden is one of the most famous collections of memoir and philosophical reflection ever
published, seeks to determine mans relation to nature, to his fellow man, and to friendship, all
during a period of relative seclusion near the now-famous Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
Thus Melville and Hawthorne wrote on similar themesmans relationship to God, fate,
and naturebut from the perspective of a more industrialized, more populous society in
the middle of the 1800s. Melville, in particular, set several of his writings in New York
City, which was emerging at that time as one of the great urban centers in the new
b)The novel is named after Moby Dick because he is the center of Ahab's
obsession and a key figure in his own right. The White Whale's appearance is unique. He
is an exceptionally large sperm whale with a snow-white head, wrinkled brow, crooked jaw,
and an especially bushy spout. His hump is also white and shaped like a pyramid; the rest of
his body is marbled with white. He has three holes in the right fluke of his tail, and he fantails
oddly before he submerges.
The White Whale seems to have an almost human personality, featuring the
battle savvy of a bold general. One of his favorite tricks is to seem to be fleeing from
hunters but suddenly turn to attack and destroy their open boats. When engaged with the
crew of thePequod, he sounds (dives) and then reappears in their midst before they can escape
or counter his attack. When they lodge harpoons in him, he uses the attaching ropes to
whiplash and destroy their boats. In a final show of timely brute force, he crashes into the bow
of thePequod itself and quickly sinks her.Melvilles earlier novels are mainly first- person
accounts of romanticized sailing voyages presented as actual experience.
After the initial, episodic beginning to Moby- Dick, Melville takes liberties with the
structure of the novel. 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, rather than in a nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Moby-Dick with other stalwart
nineteenth-century texts, such as those by Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope, it is easy to
exaggerate Melvilles eccentricities
Moby-Dick is narratedor, more accurately, writtenby a sailor who calls
himself Ishmael, after the biblical outcast and son of Abraham.When, after the
introductory Etymology and Extracts, he opens Moby-Dick with the words Call me
Ishmael, it is as if he is giving notice that the narrative voice in this novel is to be more

obviously fictional. There are periods, particularly in the first quarter of the book, when
Ishmael is an active character, telling the story as an involved first-person narrator. But
often during the middle section of the voyage Ish- maels voice recedes and the reader is
presented with a traditional, omniscient narrators view of events, with the consequence
that the author, Melville, and the character Ishmael become identified as one and the
same in many readers minds. Shakespearean soliloquies and learned discourses on
whaling history and anatomy are used to break up the narrative thread.
As a young man not fully initiated into the mysteries of life, he undergoes a type
of spiritual and philosophical education during the course of the novel. Initially hostile
and potentially suicidal, he heads for the whaling fleet, hoping to exorcise some of his
anger at the world. Before he can find a ship, however, his poverty forces him to share a
bed in a seedy inn with a bizarre and frightening cannibal named Queequeg. Carrying
a shrunken head and a tomahawk that doubles as a peace pipe, Queequeg suggests both
death and life. Indeed, after sharing a bed with this harpooner, Ishmael is a changed man.
He has experienced the first of a series of encounters with the mysterious otherness
or strangeness of nature. In symbolic terms, he has embraced death in the form of Queequeg,
and when he wakes the following morning he sees the world from a different perspective.
Ishmael understands the mixture of life and death that Queequegs tom- ahawk/pipe suggests
and realizes, at least at that moment, that experience can lead to renewal.
The central dramatic event of the novel, Ahabs hunt for the whale, thus
describes the consequences of conceiving of the world as a mask that hides unknowable
truth. Ahabs frustration with the limits of human knowledge leads him to reject both
science and logic and embrace instead violence and the dark magic of Fedallah, his demonic advisor. Like Christopher Marlowes Doctor Faustus, he has made a pact with the
devil, selling his soul for the secrets of the universe, only to find himself caught in the
snares of his prophets deception. Thinking himself immortal, Ahab attacks Moby-Dick,
striking at the mask of appearance that supposedly hides ultimate truth. What he fails to
realize, however, is that such truth exists only beyond the limits of the physical world;
only in death will Ahab be able to reach the unknown but still reasoning thing and
learn what cannot be known in this world. Accordingly, his attempt to kill Moby-Dick
brings about his own death. His devotion to the idea that truth exists behind or beyond
the physical world forces him to destroy himself in the attempt to reach it.
Ishmael, on the other hand, escapes destruction in large part because of his
different attitude toward the physical world. While Ahab sees nature as deceptive,
Ishmael learns to concentrate on the complexities and beauties of what he sees. Rather
than imagine a truer world beyond that of the senses, Ishmael revels in the details of the
world around him, compiling information and observations on the business of whaling,
on the Pequods crew, and on the inexhaustible wonders of the whale itself. Indeed, for
Ishmael the whale becomes the overwhelming symbol of life itself and of the search for
knowledge represented by the book that bears its name.

REALISM- the beginning of the 20th century

Henry James- The portrait of a lady

Henry James

James in 1910
Born

15 April 1843
2 Washington Place, New York City,
United States

Died

28 February 1916 (aged 72)

Cheyne Walk, Chelsea,London,
England

Occupation

Writer

Nationality

Born American; acquired British

citizenship in July 1915

Citizenship

American:1843-1915, British:19151916

Alma mater

Harvard Law School

Notable
works

The American
The Turn of the Screw
The Portrait of a Lady
What Maisie Knew
The Wings of the Dove
Daisy Miller
The Ambassadors

a)Henry James was a true cosmopolite. He was a citizen of the world and moved freely in and
out of drawing rooms in Europe, England, and America. He was perhaps more at home in
Europe than he was in America, but the roots of his life belong to the American continent.
Thus, with few exceptions, most of his works deal with some type of confrontation between
an American and a European.

In spite of his decision to live abroad, James remained essentially American in his
sympathies. His greatest characters (or central characters) are almost always Americans. But
at the same time, some of his most unpleasant characters are also Americans. But the
important thing is that the characters who change, mature, and achieve an element of
greatness are almost always Americans. He died on February 28, 1916, shortly after receiving
the English Order of Merit for his dedication to the British cause in World War I.
James settled in England in 1875 and became an English subject in 1915, during the Georgian
period (reign of king George V) and during the 1st World War but he published The Portrait of
a lady in 1881 during his first literary period and the Ambassadors in 1903 - the climax of his
career.
The Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War. It is as a
reaction against the romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the
strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It
expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an
idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realist literature finds the drama and
the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. Hanry James had, as his aim of writing, the
soul, the life, and the speech of the people in mind.
The last thirty years or so of the nineteenth century in the United States are known as
the Golden Age, a term coined by Mark Twain, who was referring to the thin sheen of
wealth and extravagance covering a reality of corruption and desperation. During this
time, industrialization increased rapidly in the country, along with the expansion of
railroads, corporations, and American imperial ventures.
Henry James is considered the father of the realistic psychological novel. His characters
are defined by the world in which they live and the social requirements of their society.
Jamess brand of realism explores the psyches of characters grappling with complex
social and ethical situations. While many early realists avoided tragic situations, James
placed his characters in circumstances that did not always end happily Jamess
portrayal of characters and situations departed from the romantic fiction of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which had centered on characters whose difficult
lives were corrected through perseverance, hard work, and love. James reacted against
the predictable plotlines in which virtue was rewarded and evil punished by novels end.
As one of the pioneers of literary realism, he believed characters should be created
without idealization and that settings and situations must be portrayed as faithfully to
real life as possible..

Jamesian characters act according to their true natures, which remain consistent throughout
the story. Physical description underscores a characters essential personality and provides the
reader with clues about his or her temperament. The reader can always expect actions and
responses that are understandable in terms of that characters unique perspective.

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 wars end, 1865, marks the
end of the Romantic period and the beginning of American realism.
Realism got its name from the fact that its stories depicted realistic characters in
believable, lifelike situations. Heroes and heroines were not larger than life; they were often
just plain folks that readers could identify with. And these characters faced problems similar
to those that real people faced neither melodramatic and overblown nor magically solved
by some unexpected and incredible twist of the plot. These stories were told in
straightforward, objective prose that sought to engage readers minds more than their
emotions.
James was one of the leading authors of American realism, along with Mark Twain (who is
sometimes classified as a regionalist) and William Dean Howells.
In addition to limiting his subject matter to the lives of the wealthy, James also built his
stories on the psychology of his characters. The stories are about what goes on inside
characters minds, how they experience and think about the things that happen to them, and
how these inner experiences change them as people. The events that happen in Jamess stories
are included not primarily for their own importance but because they shed light on the minds
and personalities of the characters. The Portrait of a Lady is the story of Isabels mind and
how it shapes her destiny and her character. For this and other masterful tales of human
psychology, James is considered the father of psychological realism.
Although the period known as the Enlightenment took place a century before The Portrait of a
Lady was written, the Enlightenment is the historical period that most influences the novels
characters and its story. Isabel, especially, is a product of Enlightenment ideas.
The Enlightenment was a philosophical, political, and literary movement that swept Europe
and the United States throughout the 1700s. Its major feature was the elevation of reason and
scientific observation above the mysticism and superstition of the Middle Ages. All traditions
and conventions, from the religious to the political and social, were reevaluated. No idea or
authority was to be accepted blindly or merely because it had been accepted in the past;
only those ideas that could be supported by reason or proven scientifically were considered
valid.
The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel and the other American characters are products of the
Enlighten-ment whose lives show how completely these ideas were adopted in the United
States and how strong their influence still was a century later. It was the big ideas of the
Enlightenment that fueled the American Revolution and forever shaped what it meant to
be an American. Hence, Isabel takes for granted that she should be able to make her
own decisions in life and to do what she feels is best, regardless of social conventions or
other peoples opinions.
b)The Portrait of a Lady 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, and sustained for five-hundred pages, reveal James at a new level of
achievement as a prose stylist; and the richness of his character portraits and intensity
of his engagement with his subject are of a kind that belong to history-making novels.

As the title of the novel indicates, Isabel is the principal character of the book, and the
main focus of the novel is on presenting, explaining, and developing her character.
James is one of America's great psychological realists, and he uses all his creative powers
to ensure that Isabel's conflict is the natural product of a believable mind, and not
merely an abstract philosophical consideration. In brief, Isabel's independence of spirit
is largely a result of her childhood, when she was generally neglected by her father and
allowed to read any book in her grandmother's library; in this way, she supervised her
own haphazard education and allowed her mind to develop without discipline or order.
Her natural intelligence has always ensured that she is at least as quick as anyone
around her, and in Albany, New York, she has the reputation of being a formidable
intellect.
James wanted readers to observe his characters directly and to interpret characters
actions themselves, just as they would observe people around them in life. This meant
that he had to get himself as author out of the picture. So, while The Portrait of a Lady
does have a third- person narrator, that narrator is not James and does not intrude into
the story. Instead of readers learning about Isabel through a narrators comments and
interpretations, readers learn about Isabel directly by observing Isabels actions.James
was influenced by George Eliot, who was a pioneer in minimizing the authors role in
thestory, but he developed the new point of view into the form that is common today
The Portrait of a Lady is history-making literally. The opening account of Gardencourt,
in which a densely solid actuality has begun to dissolve into psychological atmosphere,
shows literary impressionism at a high stage of development. And Isabels chapterlength meditative vigil, projected in a long, dramatic interior monologue, lays the
foundations of the stream-of-consciousness novel of Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and
Virginia Woolf.
In the same way that James unites his psychological and thematic subjects, he also
intertwines the novel's settings with its themes. Set almost entirely among a group of
American expatriates living in Europe in the 1860s and 70s, the book relies on a kind of
moral geography, in which America represents innocence, individualism, and capability;
Europe represents decadence, sophistication, and social convention; and England
represents the best mix of the two. Isabel moves from America to England to continental
Europe, and at each stage she comes to mirror her surroundings, gradually losing a bit
of independence with each move. Eventually she lives in Rome, the historic heart of
continental Europe, and it is here that she endures her greatest hardship with Gilbert
Osmond.
The mood of the novel is usually a distanced one of social observation. The novel
contains a few intensely emotional scenes, but, for the most part, it is dominated by a
tone of speculation. The dominant question concerns what its heroine will do in the new
situations she encounters. The viewpoint that most expresses this mood is Ralph
Touchetts. Ralph is a spectator, but a loving one. He stands back and watches Isabel
Archer go through life, at points with hopeful anticipation and at points with saddened
resignation, but he always stands back speculatively and watches.
Narratively, James uses many of his most characteristic techniques in Portrait of a Lady.
In addition to his polished, elegant prose and his sedate, slow pacing, he utilizes a

favorite technique of skipping over some of the novel's main events in telling the story.
Instead of narrating moments such as Isabel's wedding with Osmond, James skips over
them, relating that they have happened only after the fact, in peripheral conversations.
This literary technique is known asellipses. In the novel, James most often uses his
elliptical technique in scenes when Isabel chooses to value social custom over her
independenceher acceptance of Gilbert's proposal, their wedding, her decision to
return to Rome after briefly leaving for Ralph's funeral at the end of the novel. James
uses this method to create the sense that, in these moments, Isabel is no longer accessible
to the reader; in a sense, by choosing to be with Gilbert Osmond, Isabel is lost.
This is the thematic background of Portrait of a Lady, and James skillfully intertwines the
novel's psychological and thematic elements. Isabel's downfall with Osmond, for instance,
enables the book's most trenchant exploration of the conflict between her desire to conform to
social convention and her fiercely independent mind. It is also perfectly explained by the
elements of Isabel's character: her haphazard upbringing has led her to long for stability and
safety, even if they mean a loss of independence, and her active imagination enables her to
create an illusory picture of Osmond, which she believes in more than the real thing, at least
until she is married to him. Once she marries Osmond, Isabel's pride in her moral strength
makes it impossible for her to consider leaving him: she once longed for hardship, and now
that she has found it, it would be hypocritical for her to surrender to it by violating social
custom and abandoning her husband.

Mark Twain The adventures of Hucklenberry Finn

Mark Twain, detail of photo by Mathew Brady,

February 7, 1871
Born

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

November 30, 1835
Florida, Missouri, U.S.

Died

April 21, 1910 (aged 74)

Redding, Connecticut, U.S.

Pen name

Mark Twain

Occupation

Writer, lecturer

Nationality

American

Notable
works

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,The

Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Key Facts about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Full Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Where Written: Hartford, Connecticut, and Quarry Farm, located in Elmira, New York
When Published: 1884 in England; 1885 in the United States of America
Literary Period: Social realism (Reconstruction Era in United States)
Genre: Childrens novel / satirical novel

Setting: On and around the Mississippi River in the American South

Climax: Jim is sold back into bondage by the duke and king
Antagonist: Pap, the duke and king, society in general
Point of View: First person limited, from Huck Finns perspective
Extra Credit for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Dialect.Mark Twain composed Huckleberry using not a high literary style but local dialects
that he took great pains to reproduce with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar.
Reception. A very important 20th-century novelist, Ernest Hemingway, considered
Huckleberry Finn to be the best and most influential American novel ever written.
a)Twain began writing the novel in the Reconstruction Era, after the Civil War had
ended in 1865 and slavery was abolished in the United States. But even though slavery
was abolished, the white majority nonetheless systematically oppressed the black
minority, as with the Jim Crow Laws of 1876, which institutionalized racial segregation.
Mark Twain, a stalwart abolitionist and advocate for emancipation, seems to be
critiquing the racial segregation and oppression of his day by exploring the theme of
slavery in Huckleberry Finn. Also significant to the novel is the Second Great
Awakening, a religious revival that occurred in the Unties States from the late eighteenth
to the middle of the nineteenth century. Twain was critical of religious revivalism on the
grounds that Christians didnt necessarily act morally and were so zealous as to be easily
fooled, a critique articulated in Huckleberry Finn.

The great precursor to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Miguel de Cervantes Don

Quixote. Both books are picaresque novels. That is, both are episodic in form, and both
satirically enact social critiques. Also, both books are rooted in the tradition of realism;
just as Don Quixote apes the heroes of chivalric romances, so does Tom Sawyer ape the
heroes of the romances he reads, though the books of which these characters are part
altogether subvert the romance tradition. It could also be said that with its realism and
local color, Huckleberry Finn is a challenge to romantic epics like Herman Melvilles
Moby-Dick, which Huck might dismiss as impractical. Compare also Harriet Beecher
Sotwes Uncle Toms Cabin, a novel that also treats the injustices and cruelty of
American slavery but which, unlike Huckleberry Finn, might be considered less a
literary and more a propagandistic achievement.

a)WritingThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took Mark Twain several years. He began the
project as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as another childrens book.. Twain
locates the action in the past, before the civil war, and before the legal abolition of slavery.
But much of the novel speaks to Twains contemporary audience, who lived during

Reconstruction, a time when the South especially was trying to deal with the effects of the
Civil War.
Mark Twain was a major contributor to the interconnected Realist and Regionalist
movements, which flourished from the 1870s to the 1920s. 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 these principles as
they explored the distinct and diverse regions of post-Civil War America that they feared were
being swallowed up by a national culture and economy. Realist and Regionalist techniques are
exemplified in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by the specific and richly detailed setting
and the novels insistence on dialect which attempts to reproduce the natural speech of a
variety of characters unique to the Mississippi Valley region.
Although Twain wrote the novel after slavery was abolished, he set it several decades earlier,
when slavery was still a fact of life. In this light, we might read Twains depiction of slavery
as an allegorical representation of the condition of blacks in the United States even after the
abolition of slavery.In Huckleberry Finn,Twain, by exposing the hypocrisy of slavery,
demonstrates how racism distorts the oppressors as much as it does those who are oppressed.
b). Inspired by many of the author's own experiences as a river- boat pilot, the book tells
of two runaways-a white boy and a black man-and their journey down the mighty
Mississippi River .The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 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 was one of the first in America to employ the childs
perspective and employ the vernaculara language specific to a region or group of
people throughout the book. Many critics have characterized the smoothness of
Hucks language as the most unique feature of the book.
By focusing on Hucks education, Huckleberry Finn fits into the tradition of the
bildungsroman: a novel depicting an individuals maturation and development. As a
poor, uneducated boy, for all intents and purposes an orphan, Huck distrusts the morals
and precepts of the society that treats him as an outcast and fails to protect him from
abuse. This apprehension about society, and his growing relationship with Jim, lead
Huck to question many of the teachings that he has received, especially regarding race
and slavery.

The narrator and hero of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the title character, the
fourteen- year-old son of the town drunk who was introduced in The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer. At the end of that book, Huck was adopted by the Widow Douglas and her sister Miss
Watson, who brought him to live in town where he could attend church and school. But at the
beginning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we leant that their attempts to sivi- lize him
have been only partially successful. Huck learns to read and write, but he continues to climb
out of his window at night to meet up with Tom Sawyers gang.

Another distinctive aspect of the novel is its setting. The physical setting of the novel,
most specifically the river and the raft, has also drawn the attention of critics. The
Mississippi River itself serves as a kind of no-mans land in the text, a place outside of
society that is governed by different rules.
For Huck and Jim, the Mississippi River is the ultimate symbol of freedom. Alone on
their raft, they do not have to answer to anyone. The river carries them toward freedom:
for Jim, toward the free states; for Huck, away from his abusive father and the
restrictive sivilizing of St. Petersburg. Much like the river itself, Huck and Jim are in
flux, willing to change their attitudes about each other with little prompting. Despite
their freedom, however, they soon find that they are not completely free from the evils
and influences of the towns on the rivers banks. Even early on, the real world intrudes
on the paradise of the raft: the river floods, bringing Huck and Jim into contact with
criminals, wrecks, and stolen goods. Then, a thick fog causes them to miss the mouth of
the Ohio River, which was to be their route to freedom.
As the novel progresses, then, the river becomes something other than the inherently
benevolent place Huck originally thought it was. As Huck and Jim move further south, the
duke and the dauphin invade the raft, and Huck and Jim must spend more time ashore.
Though the river continues to offer a refuge from trouble, it often merely effects the exchange
of one bad situation for another. Each escape exists in the larger context of a continual drift
southward, toward the Deep South and entrenched slavery. In this transition from idyllic
retreat to source of peril, the river mirrors the complicated state of the South. As Huck and
Jims journey progresses, the river, which once seemed a paradise and a source of freedom,
becomes merely a short-term means of escape that nonetheless pushes Huck and Jim ever
further toward danger and destruction.

MODERNISM THE 20TH CENTURY

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway working at his book For Whom

the Bell Tolls at Sun Valley, Idaho in December 1939
Born

July 21, 1899

Oak Park, Illinois, United States

Died

July 2, 1961 (aged 61)

Ketchum, Idaho, U.S.

Notable awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1953)

Nobel Prize in Literature (1954)

Spouses

Elizabeth Hadley Richardson

(19211927, div.)
Pauline Pfeiffer
(19271940, div.)
Martha Gellhorn
(19401945, div.)
Mary Welsh Hemingway

Writer of the lost generation, journalist, expatriot living in paris, bullfighting in spain,
war in italy, spanish civil war, game hunting in africa, fishing in cuba, red cross volunteer
ambulance driver, wounded in the war. for him the writer was a performing self who
discovered thru action areas of personal being and crisis he could use to challenge the truth of
lang and form. controlled use of words, refusal of romantic illusions, precision. limited
awareness of the narrator, imagist. keeps sentimentality and romanticism away. simple and
transparent style is an illusion - iceberg theory. for whom the bell tolls, to have and to have
not, a movable feast.

a) In Paris, Hemingway became part ofthe Lost Generation of American writers who had
relocatedto Europe after World War I. In the company of writers like Ezra Pound, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, Hemingwayinfused his work with a sense of
emptiness, disillusionment,and rebellion against patriotic ideals. In this way, hiswork
canbe considered related to novels like Ulysses and The Great Gatsby, which describe
the sadness and hardship of the human condition.
Related Historical Events: Living in Cuba in the late 1940s, one of Hemingways
favorite pastimes was fishing in his boat, The Pilar. This simple pastime contrasted
greatly with the turbulent events of his life that preceded his time in Cuba. Hemingway
served in World War I and World War II and witnessed the liberation of Paris and the
1945 schism within the Cuban Communist party. Having viewed death and hardship
inmany forms, Hemingways feeling of disillusionment was only magnified by his 10year struggle with writing that precededthe publication of The Old Man and the Sea.
Historical Context of Hills Like White Elephants
The two wars Hemingway directly participated in, as an ambulance driver in World War I
and a foreign correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, were formative periods of the
writers life, the crucible in which his famous writing style was forged. As a World War I
ambulance driver at only 18 years old, Hemingway was seriously wounded by shrapnel and
forced to recuperate for several months in Italy before returning to his family in the United
States. Upon his return, however, Hemingway struggled to adapt to civilian life after the
horrors of war, part of the inspiration for his short story Soldiers Home. The effects of
these early traumatizing exposures to war, followed by his subsequent and equally painful
experiences in the Spanish Civil War, molded Hemingways bleak and often cruel depiction
of human relationships in his prose. Notably, he was present at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938,
the most protracted battle of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted months and left tens of
thousands dead.
Hills Like White Elephants
Hemingway was a prolific writer, publishing poems, stories, memoirs, and novels. His most
famous works are the novels The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms, and the novella The
Old Man and the Sea, which exemplify his minimalist, grace under pressure writing style.
As a member of the Lost Generation of American writers and artists who spent their time
in Europe after World War I, Hemingway was a friend (and sometimes frenemy) of many
of the significant writers of the period, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great
Gatsby, Tender is the Night), and his work often played with themes common in the work of
other Lost Generation writers. Many writers have been inspired by Hemingways stark,
minimalist prose, including novelist Cormac McCarthy (author ofThe Road and No Country

for Old Men), short story writer Raymond Carver (author of Will You Please Be Quiet,
Please? and Cathedral), and fiction writer Denis Johnson (author of Jesus Son).
Key Facts about Hills Like White Elephants

Full Title: Hills Like White Elephants

When Written: Approximately 1926

Where Written: August 1927

When Published: The literary magazine Transition

Literary Period: Early modernism

Genre: In the larger sense, this story belongs to the 20th century short story modernist
fiction genre. Hemingway was famous for his Iceberg Theory of fiction writing,
which holds that powerful writing relies most on what it omits, what is concealed out
of the readers sight. The theorys name stems from its analogy with icebergs; just as
one can only see the small sliver of an iceberg exposed above the water, so should the
minimalist style of fiction allude to but not reveal its implied and deeper meaning.
Beginning his writing career as a journalist, Hemingway favored clipped, impersonal
statements over subtle, emotional, or poetic styles of writing. His fiction style
followed this model of objective reporting, hinting obliquely at characters feelings
and motives.

Setting: Train station near the river Ebro in Spain.

Climax: In such a compressed scene with such stripped down prose, it is difficult to
determine an exact climax. However, tensions between the man and girl boil to the
point where she threatens to scream if he keeps talking about getting an abortion. In a
moment of desperation, faced with the impossibility of their talking, the man moves
the luggage to the other side of the station. This moment signifies the first physical
separation between the man and the girl in the story.

Point of View: This story engages in delicate shifts of free indirect discourse, in
which the reader slips into both the man and the girls points of view. However, in line
with Hemingways distinctive style, the story avoids explicit expressions of
perspective in favor of journalistic precision and impersonal objectivity.

As in most of his fiction, Hemingway is interested in where language breaks down

between individuals and how what is unsaid or what is unspeakable can define and
divide individuals. At a purely stylistic level, Hemingway exposes the inadequacy of
language through his use of unnamed characters and minimalist, stripped down
sentences. Without using details to describe how the man or the girl look or
sound, Hemingway instead chooses to focus almost exclusively on the dialogue
between the two charactersto suggest the growing alienation between them. The
storys very title of Hills Like White Elephants, with its use of simile to gesture at
the storys underlying tension of a pregnancy neither character feels able to directly
mention, reflects the characters critical loss for words.

Beyond narrative style, the conversation between the man and the girl hinges on
the inadequacy of what they can say or not say to one another. The man continually
misunderstands or contradicts the girl, to the point that the girl begs him to stop
talking at all. Though they mirror each others language, repeating the same words, the
effect is as of an echo chamberwords repeated meaninglessly without actual
communication. Finally, the looming decision that drives the whole storywhether or
not the girl will get an abortiongoes unnamed by either character. They both allude
to it but seem unable to discuss it directly, allowing the conversation to lapse into
silences or angry outbursts instead.

An added layer to the issue of the failure of language in this story is the fact that the
events are unfolding between two English-speaking tourists in Spain. Throughout the
story as the charactersdrink,the waitress intermittently enters the scene, speaking in
Spanish, which the man must translate for the girl. This situation draws attention to the
idea of translation, and yet also underscores how, ironically, even though they speak
the same language, it is the man and girl who are in the most need of a translator.

b)Analysis of The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Ernest Hemingways Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is a double statement
about manhood. The storys plot revolves around a rich thirty-five year old Americans
sudden transformation from a boy to a man during an African safari. Underneath the surface,
however, is a scathing criticism of the American upper class of the 1920s and 30s.
Hemingways distinct style and universal theme make this story a classic.
The narrator of The Short Happy Life, Robert Wilson, is a gruff, tough British
hunter-turned-tour guide. He is a realistic and static character whose insight, thoughtful nature
and neutrality to those around him greatly aid his telling of the story. His current charges are

Francis Macomber, the very tall, very well built realistic main character and Margot, his
extremely handsome and well-kept, static, realistic wife (122). The two despise each other
but are inseparable; Margot is too old and dependent on Franciss wealth and Francis lacks the
confidence necessary to get another woman.
Francis and Margots marriage completely disintegrates after Francis runs away from a
lion instead of killing it on the safari; that night, Margot leaves Franciss side to lie with
Robert Wilson. Francis is enraged by Margots infidelity and the next day shoots three
buffalo, killing one. After the encounter, he is a changed man; Macomber felt a wild
unreasonable happiness that he had never known before and no longer fears anything (149).
Wilson is surprised but pleased by the change; Margot, however, feels sickened and dreaded
by her loss of power. When Macomber and Wilson hunt down and try to kill a wounded
buffalo, she accidentally kills her husband with a pistol while shooting at the buffalo.
Francis matured as a person and Margot could not handle it.
According to Hemingway, the problems between Francis and his wife never would
have occurred if not for the weakness of American society. Wilson regards Francis as one of
the great American boy-men, damned strange people who look and act like boys well into
their fifties (150). He is even more wary about the wife, he considers American women the
hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened
or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened (126). He finds Franciss wife and other
American women very attractive and has sexual intercourse with them frequently, but has still
seen enough of their damn terrorism (128). Hemingway, clearly, has had enough with the
wealthy of America.
Though the setting of The Short Happy Life is essential to the events that take place
therein, mans coming of age is one of the most popular themes of world literature.
Hemingway agrees with many thinkers that a man is created through challenge and suffering;
his main characters sudden transformation through the killing of wild beasts is a different
interpretation of the nature challenge and suffering. Hemingway is also unique in the different
reactions of his supporting characters; Robert Wilson, a man, is pleased and intrigued by
Franciss change while Franciss wife, Margot, is mortified. Misogyny happens to be another
common theme in Hemingway stories.
Hemingways style is one of the most distinctive in the English-speaking world. It is
brief and heavy on dialogue and descriptions of places. His vocabulary and sentence structure
are both very simple. Though its originality can make it somewhat difficult to read,
Hemingways style is lively and refreshing.
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber is hardly inspiring, but it is a very realistic and
captivating portrayal of human nature. This is a story for people who want to learn about
people; it may shatter some illusions of our greatness. Due to its depressing content, the story
is hard to like, but it is definitely worthwhile and a work of art.
The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway is a story about both
coming of age and the flaws of the upper class of his society. In this story, the author seems to
make a wish for an increased pursuit of manhood in his society and decreased reliance on
wealth and power. A mans power lies within his soul, not his wallet, and Francis Macomber
learns these lessons the hard way.

F. S. Fitzgerald The great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald c. 1921, appearing

in "The World's Work" (June 1921 issue)
Born

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald

September 24, 1896
St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.

Died

December 21, 1940 (aged 44)

Hollywood, California, U.S.

Resting place

Saint Mary's Cemetery

Occupation

Novelist, short story writer

Nationality

American

Education

Princeton University (no degree)

Key Facts about The Great Gatsby

Full Title: The Great Gatsby
Where Written: Paris and the US, in 1924
When Published: 1925
Literary Period: Modernism
Genre: Novel
Setting: Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan, New York in the summer of 1922
Climax: The showdown between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy
Point of View: First person
Extra Credit for The Great Gatsby
Puttin' on the Fitz. Fitzgerald spent most of his adult life in debt, often relying on loans from
his publisher, and even his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in order to pay the bills. The money he
made from his novels could not support the high-flying cosmopolitan life his wife desired, so
Fitzgerald turned to more lucrative short story writing for magazines like Esquire. Fitzgerald
spent his final three years writing screenplays in Hollywood.
Another Failed Screenwriter. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic and his wife Zelda suffered from
serious mental illness. In the final years of their marriage as their debts piled up, Zelda
stayed in a series of mental institutions on the East coast while Fitzgerald tried, and largely
failed, to make money writing movie scripts in Hollywood.
Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" to refer to the period more commonly known as the
Roaring Twenties. Jazz is an American style of music marked by its complex and exuberant
mix of rhythms and tonalities. The Great Gatsby portrays a similarly complex mix of
emotions and themes that reflect the turbulence of the times. Fresh off the nightmare of
World War I, Americans were enjoying the fruits of an economic boom and a renewed sense
of possibility. But in The Great Gatsby,Fitzgerald's stresses the darker side of the Roaring
Twenties, its undercurrent of corruption and its desperate, empty decadence.
a) Published in 1925 the novel captured the spirit of the Jazz Age, a post-World War
I era in upper-class America that Fitzgerald himself gave this name to, and the flamboyance of
the author and his wife Zelda as they moved about Europe with other American expatriate
writers (such as Ernest Hemingway). However, Gatsby expresses more than the exuberance of
the times. It depicts the restlessness of what Gertrude Stein (another expatriate modernist

writer) called a lost generation. Recalling T. S. Eliots landmark poem The Wasteland
(1922), then, Gatsby also has its own valley of ashes or wasteland where men move about
obscurely in the dust, and this imagery of decay, death, and corruption pervades the novel and
infects the story and its hero too. Because the novel is not just about one man, James Gatz
or Jay Gatsby, but about aspects of the human condition of an era, and themes that transcend
time
Modernist fiction attempted to represent the sense of emptiness and
disillusionment that dominated Europe and the United States after World War I. In this
way, Gatsby can be considered as related to such modernist works as James Joyce's
Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). But The Great Gatsby and all
of Fitzgerald's works are best compared to those written by other Americans such as
Ernest Hemingway, members of the "Lost Generation" of American writers who moved
to Europe after World War I. All these writers depicted the reality, corruption, and
sadness of the human condition, but Fitzgerald most effectively portrayed the American
cultural moment he called the "Jazz Age."
Critics found similarities between Fitzgerald and English poet John Keats and
novelist Joseph Conrad. Joseph N. Riddel and James Tut- tleton analyzed Americanborn novelist Henry Jamess impact on Fitzgerald, since both men wrote about the
manners of a particular culture. Gatsby was compared to T. S. Eliots poem The Waste
Land and to Ernest Hemingways novel The Sun Also Rises. The mythic elements of the
novel have been studied by Douglas Taylor, Robert Stallman, and briefly by Richard
Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition

b)Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby 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. Satire
originated in the Roman times, and similarly criticized the rich thugs with no values,
tapped into cultural pessimism, and gave readers a glimpse into chaos. The Great Gatsby
is the tale of the irresponsible rich. Originally, the title of the book was Trimal- chio,
based on an ancient satire of a man called Trimalchio who dresses up to be rich-As in all
of Fitzgeralds stories, the setting is a crucial part of The Great Gatsby. West and East
are two opposing poles of values: one is pure and idealistic, and the other is corrupt and
materialistic. The Western states, including the Midwest, represent decency and the
basic ethical principles of honesty, while the East is full of deceit. The difference between
East and West Egg is a similar contrast in culturesNick is the moral center of the book.
From his perspective, we see the characters misbehave or behave admirably Gatsby
represents the American dream of selfmade wealth and happiness, the spirit of youth
and resourcefulness, and the ability to make something of ones self despite ones origins.
He achieved more than his parents had and felt he was pursuing a perfect dream, Daisy, who
for him embodied the elements of success.
In The Great Gatsby, the author uses light imagery to point out idealism and
illusion. The green light that shines off Daisys dock is one example. Gatsby sees it as his

dream, away from his humble beginnings, towards a successful future with the girl of his
desire.
The novel is narrated in retrospect; Nick is writing the account two years after
the events of the summer he describes, and this introduces a critical distance and
perspective which is conveyed through occasional comments about the story he is telling
and how it must appear to a reader. The time scheme of the novel is further complicated
as the history of that summer of 1922 contains within it the story of another summer,
five years before this one, when Gatsby and Daisy first courted.
The Great Gatsby portrays three different social classes: "old money" (Tom and Daisy
Buchanan); "new money" (Gatsby); and a class that might be called "no money" (George and
Myrtle Wilson). "Old money" families have fortunes dating from the 19th century or before,
have built up powerful and influential social connections, and tend to hide their wealth and
superiority behind a veneer of civility. The "new money" class made their fortunes in the
1920s boom and therefore have no social connections and tend to overcompensate for this
lack with lavish displays of wealth.

The Great Gatsby shows the newly developing class rivalry between "old" and "new"
money in the struggle between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy. As usual, the "no money"
class gets overlooked by the struggle at the top, leaving middle and lower class people
like George Wilson forgotten or ignored.

Symbolism in Gatsby focuses on Dr. T. J. Eck- leburgs eyes, the Wasteland motif, and
the color symbolism. Gatsby has ironically been likened to Christ, and Nick Carraway,
the storyteller, to Nicodemus, in a Christian interpretation of the novel
Other motifs in the book include Gatsbys quest for the American Dream; class conflict
(the Wilsons vs. the Buchanans and the underworld lowbrows vs. Gatsby); the cultural
rift between East and West; and the contrast between innocence and experience in the
narrators life. A rich aesthetic experience with many subtleties in tone and content, this
novel can be read over and over again for new revelations and continued pleasure.

William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner

Faulkner in 1954
Born

William Cuthbert Falkner

September 25, 1897
New Albany, Mississippi, U.S.

Died

July 6, 1962 (aged 64)

Byhalia, Mississippi, U.S.

Language

English

Nationality

American

Alma mater

University of Mississippi
(no degree)

Period

19191962

Notable works

The Sound and the Fury

As I Lay Dying
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom!
A Rose for Emily
Notable awards

Nobel Prize in Literature

1949
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1955, 1963
National Book Award
1951, 1955

a)
After World War I came the emergence of the Lost Generation, a group of
writers disillusioned by American idealism. These writers longed for something new and
innovative and found it in French symbolists like James Joyce and Marcel Proust. They
rejected many aspects of American culture, in some cases creating a new polished style
of writing, in other cases writing satire, and in still other cases recalling simpler times in
American history when society was more structured and had a sense of tradition. In this
last group were many prominent southern writers, including Faulkner.
Faulkners novels and short stories often relate to one another. Absalom, Absalom! draws
characters from The Sound and the Fury, and it anticipates the action and themes of
Intruder in the Dust. Further, Absalom, Absalom! is one of Faulkners fifteen novels.
The property of a great work, as T. S. Eliot remarked long ago, is to communicate before
it is understood; and Absalom, Absalom!passes this test triumphantly.
b) In his character portrayals, 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. Rosa finds the past to be a
source of bitterness and disappointment, yet she is unable to live in the present. Mr.
Compson finds in the past evidence that his fatalistic view of the world is correct. He
also believes that past generations were greater than the present generation, so while he
may draw inspiration from the past, he must live in the present, which is discouraging
for him.Absalom, Absalom! is considered to be one of Faulkners most difficult novels
because of its complex narrative structure.
In a sense, the story becomes part of an oral tradition among the residents of Jefferson
and, as Shreve becomes involved, people living beyond Jefferson.
Many of Faulkners characteristic structural innovations are employed in
Absalom, Absalom!, such as long sentences, flashbacks, and multiple points-of- view
describing the same events. Because the narrative structure is so unusual, the reader is

kept off balance from the opening pages to the end of the novel and must learn how to
read it as the book unfolds.
There are four characters narrating the story, and a fifth omniscient narrator
also occasionally speaks to the reader. The challenge is often determining who is
speaking at any given time because Faulkner switches from narrator to narrator without
always signifying the changeFaulkner employs a variety of literary techniques
throughout Absalom, Absalom!, notably several significant instances of irony. He uses
irony when Rosa speaks of Henrys murder of Charles as being almost fratricide. (She is
not aware that the two men were half-brothers.) Another instance of irony is when, after
all his failed efforts to be accepted by Sutpen as his son, Charles is buried in the family
graveyard. Another even more disturbing example of irony is the fact that Charles, who
has black ancestry, fights as an officer for the Confederacy.
A simile appears near the beginning of the novel where Faulkner writes that
Sutpen came upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color. And,
describing Quentin, Faulkner employs a metaphor, noting that his very body was an
empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was
a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering.
Through various literary techniques, Faulkner creates a mythic atmosphere for
Sutpens saga. The reiteration of the story is reminiscent of the legends and folktales
kept alive by oral tradition. Rosa describes Sutpen in supernatural terms including ogre,
djinn, fiend, and demon. In fact, she believes that his evil is so intense that he brings
curses on those with whom he comes in contact. In this way, Sutpen becomes almost a
supernatural figure. Further, the grand scale and headstrong ambition of Sutpens plans
align him with mythical and heroic figures.
Biblical and classical allusions appear throughout the novel. Ellen is likened to
Niobe, a character in Greek mythology who is turned to stone while weeping for her
children. Rosa is compared to Cassandra, the daughter of the King of Troy who possessed prophetic powers, according to Greek mythology. The books title is a biblical
reference to Davids mournful cry at the death of his son Absalom.

Eugene O`Neil- Mourning becomes Electra

Eugene O'Neill

Portrait of O'Neill by Alice Boughton

Born

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

October 16, 1888
New York City, New York, U.S.

Died

November 27, 1953 (aged 65)

Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

Occupation

Playwright

Nationality

American

Notable
awards

Nobel Prize in Literature (1936)

Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1920,
1922, 1928, 1957)

Spouse

Kathleen Jenkins

(m. 190912)
Agnes Boulton
(m. 1918; div. 1929)
Carlotta Monterey
(m. 1929)

b)As the title acknowledges, "Mourning Becomes Electra," follows the scheme of the
Orestes- Electra legend which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes translated into drama in
the days of Greek classicism. Like the doomed house of Atreus, this New England family of
Civil War time is dripping with foul and unnatural murder. The mother murders the father.
The son murders his mother's lover. The mother mercifully commits suicide. The daughter's
malefic importunities drive the son to suicide. It is a family that simmers with hatred,
suspicion, jealousy and greed, and that is twisted by unnatural loves. Although Mr. O'Neill
uses the Orestes legend as the scheme of his trilogy, it is his ambition to abandon the gods,
whom the Greeks humbly invoked at the crises of drama, and to interpret the whole legend in
terms of modern psychology. From royalty this story of vengeance comes down to the level of
solid New England burghers. From divinity it comes into the sphere of truths that are known.
There are no mysteries about the inverted relationships that set all these gaunt-minded people
against one another, aside from the primary mystery of the ferocity of life. Students of the
new psychology will find convenient labels to explain why the mother betrays her husband,
why the daughter instinctively takes the father's side, why the sons fears his father and clings
to his mother, why the daughter gradually inherits the characteristics of her mother after the
deaths of the parents, and why the son transfers his passion to his sister. As for Mr. O'Neill, he
has been chiefly concerned with the prodigious task of writing these modern plays.
And through three plays and fifteen scenes he has kept the rhythm of his story
sculptural in its stark outline. The Mannon curse is inherited. For this fine New England
mansion was built in hatred when the Mannons cast off the brother who had sinned with a
French-Canadian servant. Her son, Captain Brant, comes back into their lives to avenge his
mother's dishonor and he becomes the lover of Ezra Mannon's wife. From that point on
"Mourning Becomes Electra" stretches out as a strong chain of murders and revenge and the
house of Mannon is a little island walled round with the dead.
There are big scenes all the way through. Before the first play is fairly started the
dance of death begins with Lavinia upbraiding Christine, her mother, with secret adultery.
Christine plotting with Captain Brant to poison her husband on the night when he returns from
the Civil War; Christine poisoning her husband and being discovered with the tablets by
Lavinia as the climax to the first play; Lavinia proving her mother's guilt to Orin, her brother,
by planting the box of poison tablets on the breast of her dead father and admitting her
terrified mother to the chamber of death; Lavinia and Orin following their mother to a
rendezvous with the captain on his ship and murdering him in his cabin; Lavinia forcing her
brother to suicide and waiting panic-stricken for the report of his pistol; Lavinia in the last
scene of the last play sealing herself up with this haunted house to live with the spectres of her
dead--all these are scenes of foreboding and horror.

Yet "Mourning Becomes Electra" is no parade of bravura scenes. For this is an organic
play in which story rises out of character and character rises out of story, and each episode is
foreshadowed by what precedes it. Although Mr. O'Neill has been no slave to the classic
origins of his tragedy, he has transmuted the same impersonal forces into the modern idiom,
and the production, which has been brilliantly directed by Phillip Moeller, gives you some of
the stately spectacle of Greek classicism. Lavinia in a flowing black dress sitting majestically
on the steps of Robert Edmond Jones's set of a New England mansion in an unforgettable and
portentous picture. Captain Brant pacing the deck of his ship in the ringing silence of the
night, the murdered Mannon lying on his bier in the deep shadows of his study, the entrances
and exits of Christine and Lavinia through doors that open and close on death are scenes full
of dramatic beauty. To give you perspective on this tragedy Mr. O'Neill has a sort of Greek
chorus in Seth, the hired man, and the frightened town folk, who gather outside the house,
laughing and muttering. Mr. O'Neill has viewed his tragedy from every side, thought it
through to the last detail and composed it in a straightforward dialogue that tells its story
without hysteria.