British English

The Renaissance Period

How would you define the term Renaissance?

This term refers to a great bourgeois cultural movement in Europe which began in the 14th century and continued to the mid-17th century. It first started from Italy and then spread all over Europe. Originally, the term means “rebirth” or “revival”. And the movement seems to be a rebirth or revival of ancient Greek and Roman culture, caused by a series of historical events, such as the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion.

The renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars tried to get rid of those old feudalistic ideas in Medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that express the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic church.

The historical and cultural background of the English Renaissance.

Because of the war of Rose within the country and its weak and unimportant position in world trade, Renaissance came later in England than in other European countries. But when it did come, it was to produce some towering figures in the English, and world literary heritage– William Shakespeare, Edmund Spencer, Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon and a number of humanist scholars.

The reign of Elizabeth I was a period of political and religious stability on the one hand and economic prosperity on the other. The Church of England was reestablished, ending the long time religious strife; commence and industry forged ahead as a result of the enclosure movement at home and the opening of new sea routes in the world. England began to embark on the road to colonization and foreign control that was to take it onto its heyday of capitalist development.

Shakespeare (P1)

Sonnet 18 p2 十四行诗 18 是否把你比作夏季的美？ 可你比夏季更温和可爱： 狂风会吹落五月的花蕾， 夏季赁期太短结束太快， 天眼的光焰有时会太强， 金面孔上常有阴云出现： 一切美好事物难免消亡，

或因偶然，或因自然变迁； 但你的长夏将永不消逝， 你的美态将会永远存在： 当把你写进了永恒的诗行里， 死神难夸你会在他影下徘徊： 只要人能呼吸，眼能看见， 这诗行就会让你生命重现。

What is the theme of this sonnet? Shakespeare makes his beloved

immortal by means of his poetry. This theme is a conventional one in Elizabethan sonnets. But Shakespeare treats it in an original and individual manner. Shakespeare writes a monologue in the form of an address. It contains a carefully reasoned argument which, as in many of Shakespeare's sonnets, moves in a series of steps.

The first line, a question, proposes a comparison between Shakespeare's beloved and a summer season. Summer is chosen because it is lovely and pleasant. In the second line the comparison is restricted: in outward appearance and character the beloved person is more beautiful and less extreme than summer. The reasons for the restriction are given in the next four lines which describe the less pleasant aspects of summer. In the seventh and eighth lines Shakespeare complains that every beauty will become less one day. The ninth line takes up the comparison with summer again: summer has by now become the summer of life. The comparison turns into a contrast by referring back to the seventh.

The poet's assurance becomes even firmer in lines eleven and twelve, which contain a promise that death will be conquered. 'Eternal lines' refers to lines of poetry but also suggest lines of shape. It points forward to the triumphant couplet which explains and summarizes the theme: poetry is immortal and makes beauty immortal. Because of the step by step arguments Shakespeare's conclusion makes the impression of great certainty. His method is rational and logical Shakespeare wrote a series of sonnets, most of which were probably addressed to a noble person for whom he felt deep love and admiration. In many of them he deals with the problem of time, sometimes optimistically as in the present sonnet, sometimes in a mood of despair

Four tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Ma

cbeth. Best known plays Romeo and Juliet and The Mercha

nt of Venice.

What is the theme of The Merchant of Venice?(p3)

The traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antoniao and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew.

But modern critics tend to view it from another aspect. Many people today regard the play as a satire of the Christians’ hypocrisy and their false standards of friendship and love, their cunning ways of pursuing worldliness and their unreasoning prejudice against Jew, here represented by Shylock.

Shakespeare’s literary achievement

1. Shakespeare is one of the founders of realism in world literature. He maintains that the purpose of dramatic performance is “to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature”. In his works, he paints the decline of the old feudal nobility and the vice of the new Tudor monarch. Besides, his plays have good plots and life-like characters too. His drama is an expression, a monument of the English Renaissance since he wrote about his own people for his own time.

2. Shakespeare is amazingly prolific. Within 22 years, he produced 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 long poems. No two of his play invoke the same feeling or image among the audience. He is a master-hand for every form of drama-comedy, tragedy, and historical plays. He gives us a world of full-blooded people who live and struggle, suffer and rejoice, representing all the complexities and implications of real life.

3. Shakespeare was skilled in many poetic forms: the song, the sonnet, the couplet, and the dramatic blank verse. And he is a great master of the English language. He used a vocabulary larger than any other English writers. Many of his new coinage and turns of expressions have become everyday usage in English life. Shakespeare and the Authorized version of the English Bible are the two great treasures of the English language.

4. Hence, Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged to be the summit of the English Renaissance, and one of the greatest writers the world over.

English Romanticism Time: began in 1798 and ended in 1832. Historical and cultural background features

(77,2) The Romantics were strongly against the

modes of thinking in the 18th century which saw man as a social animal. They emphasized the special qualities of each individual. So Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of human spirit.

They place the individual at the center of art and make literature most valuable as an expression of his or her unique feelings and particular attitudes, and value its accuracy in portraying the individual’s experiences.

Lake poets

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey have often been mentioned as the “Lake Poets” because they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England. The three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and ending up as conservatives.

Wordsworth (p79)

Wordsworth is regarded as a “Worshipper of Nature” because he can penetrate to the core of things and give the readers the very life of nature. He wrote many poems like The Sparrow’s Nest, To a Skylark, To a Butterfly to reveal his genuine love for the natural beauty which can release him out of the solitude and sorrow when he is sad or empty-minded, as is expressed in I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud.

Beyond the pleasures of the picturesqueness with their emphasis on the eye and external aspects of nature, the poems lie a moral awareness as he is aware of his own sublime communion with all things. Nature has become an inspiring force of rapture and a power that reveals the working of the soul. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative and intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their diverse circumstances. It’s nature that gives him “strength and knowledge full of peace.”

Shelley and his Ode to the West Wind (p100, 105)

你怒吼咆哮的雄浑交响乐中， 将有树林和我的深沉的歌唱， 我们将唱出秋声，婉转而忧愁。 精灵呀，让我变成你，猛烈、刚强 !

把我僵死的思想驱散在宇宙， 像一片片的枯叶，以鼓舞新生； 请听从我这个诗篇中的符咒， 把我的话传给全世界的人， 犹如从不灭的炉中吹出火花 ! 如果我是任你吹的落叶一片 ; 如果我是随着你飞翔的云块； 如果是波浪，在你威力下急湍，

　　　　　　　　　　

享受你神力的推动，自由自在， 几乎与你一样，啊，你难制的力 ! 再不然，如果能回返童年时代， 常陪伴着你在太空任意飘飞， 以为要比你更神速也非幻想； 那我就不致处此窘迫的境地， 向你苦苦求告：啊，快使我高扬， 像一片树叶、一朵云、一阵浪涛 ! 我碰上人生的荆棘，鲜血直淌 ! 时光的重负困住我，把我压倒， 我太像你了：难驯、迅速而骄傲 如果冬天来了，春天还会远吗 ?

“Ode to the West Wind” is Shelley’s masterpiece. In the poem, the autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself as he wants to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive potential, its universality. “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” calls Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the monotonous realities of daily life!

The whole poem has a logic of feeling, a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful and convincing conclusion: “ If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” which brought us a hopeful, optimistic attitude to the coming future

Keats’ “Beauty Principle” (p111)

The one artistic aim in Keats’ poetry was to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the sordid reality of his day. His exquisite sensibility as a poet enabled him to perceive readily the beauty of the world at large and his brilliant fancy turned the impressions into palpable images of enduring beauty which he described through verbal music and word-painting.

His leading principle is : “ Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.” That is, “ What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not.”

Jane Austen (p84)

The theme of Pride and Prejudice The title of the novel Pride and Prejudice

reveals the novelist’s concern: if making good relationship is our main task in life, we must first have good judgments. Our first impressions, according to Jane Austen, are usually wrong, as is shown here by that of Elizabeth. In the process of judging others,

Elizabeth finds out absurd about herself: her blindness, partiality, prejudice and absurdity. At the same time, Darcy too learns about other people and himself. In the end, false prejudice is humbled and prejudice dissolved.

Writing style and the significance of Jane Austen’s works

Generally speaking, Jane Austen is a writer of the 18th century though she lived mainly in the 19th century. She holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religion, and moral principles. Her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance of reason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and clear judgments over the romantic tendencies of emotion and individuality. She show her contempt towards snobbery, stupidity, worldliness an vulgarity through subtle satire and irony.

Austen’s main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships, in her works, she characterizes a human being not at moments of crisis, but in the most trivial incidents of everyday life.

Compared with other writers. Austen defined her stories within a very narrow sphere. The subject matter, the character range, the social setting and plots are all restricted to the late 18the century England. Everything in her novel reminds us of a quiet, uneventful and contented life of the English country. Her characteristic theme is that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions. Faults of character displayed by the people of her novel are corrected when, through tribulation, lessons are learned. All these show a mind of the shrewdest intelligence adapting the available traditions and deepening the resources of art with consummate craftsmanship. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior. Jane Austen has brought the English novel, as an art of form to its maturity, and she has been regarded by many critics as one of the greatest of all novelists.

The Victorian Period(3)

1. Historical Background Chronologically the Victorian period roughly

coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history.

1.1. The Chartist Movement in the Early Period 1.2. Ideological Background 1.3. The Problem of Women

The Chartist Movement in the Early Period From 1836 to 1848, the English workers got

themselves organized in big cities and brought forth the People’s Charter, in which they demanded basic rights and better living and working conditions. The People’s Parliament gathered in 1837 and on the People’s Charter there were over a million signatures of workers. The movement swept over most of the big cities in the country. This was the first mass movement of the English working class and the early sign of the awakening of the poor, oppressed people.

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1.2. Ideological Background On the one hand, the rapid development of

science and technology, new inventions and discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology and anthropology(人类学 ), influences from other countries, especially from German philosophers Feuerbach(费尔巴哈 ) and Comte (孔德 )and a flourish of new philosophical ideas at time, like Herbert Spencer’s positivism(实证主义 ), drastically changed people’s religious convictions.

E.g. Darwin’s Origin of Species 物种起源

On the other hand, there came a strong anti-religious trend of Utilitarianism(功利主义 ) among most of the progressive philosophers, scientists and writers. The ethnical doctrine that virtue is based on utility, and that conduct should be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons.

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1. Sexual inequality in politics, economic life, education and social position still prevailed; women were still regarded as second-class citizens.

In Tennyson’s “ The Princess”, the king voices the traditional view of woman’s position and role:

Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head and woman with the heart; Man to command and woman to obey.

2. On the other hand, the explosive of growth of industry, especially the textile industry, brought hundreds of thousands of women into factory jobs. Women now were able to walk out of the home to share part of the responsibility of men and help support the family.

Some outstanding women appeared: Nightingale; Charlotte and Emily Bronte and George Eliot. But old convention and prejudice remained dominant.

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Victorian Literature

Victorian literature, as a product of its age, naturally took on its quality of magnitude and diversity. It was many-sided and complex, and reflected both romantically and realistically the great changes that were going on in people’s life and thought.

In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. The function of a novelist was extended from mere description and moralization to social criticism.

Famous novelists: Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray; Charlotte Bronte; Emily Bronte etc.

Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represents the reality and spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor and unbounded imagination are all unprecedented. In almost every genre it paved the way for the coming century, where its spirits, values and experiments are to witness their bump harvest.

English Critical Realism(4)

Critical realism is the main trend of the literary thoughts in the 19th century. It reveals the corrupting influence of the rule of cash upon human nature. Critical realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint of bourgeoisie reality.

The English critical realists of the 19th century not only gave a satirical portrayal of the bourgeoisie and all the ruling classes, but also showed profound sympathy for the common people. In their best works, the greed and hypocrisy of the upper-classes are contrasted with the honesty and good-heartedness of the obscure “ simple people” of the lower classes. Hence, humor and satire abound in English realistic novels of the 19th century. The critical realists then did not, and due to their world outlook, could not, find a way to eradicate social evils.

Dickens(p117)

Dickens’ works are characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos. Life is itself a mixture of joy and grief.

Main theme and artistic features of his earlier works.

Early works In his early works, Dickens attacked one or more specific s

ocial evils in each: for example the dehumanizing workhouse system and the dark criminal underworld life in Oliver Twist, the Yorkshire School where children are not taught anything but actually enslaved at the master’s house in Nicholas Nickleby; legal fraud in the Pickwick Papers; the debtor’s prison in David Copperfield; the money-worship that dominates people’s life, corrupt the young and brings tragedy to Mr. Dombey’s family in Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son and etc.

In those novels, the techniques, both of the fiction itself and of the social criticism embodied within it, are relatively straightforward and the objects of his attack are easily recognizable and once the abuse had been overcome, the way is open to a happy conclusion. This youthful brightness and optimism is also manifested in the constant jokes and laughter.

Later works The later works of Dickens’ show the

development of him towards a highly conscious artist of the modern type. The physical setting in his works are sometimes a mixture of the contemporary and the recollected past, the stories, though usually double or multiple-plotted, are much better structured, and the institutions are important not only in themselves but as metaphors for a repressive social psychology.

All of the works, with the exception of A Tale of Two Cities, present a criticism of the more complicated and yet most fundamental social institutions and morals of the Victorian Age. His attack now become more urgent and passionate, and this urgency creates novels of great compactness and concentration. As Dickens “explores more bleakly a bleak world”, there are fewer jokes and the comedy become hasher. His laughter ceases to be free or rather carefree; it becomes constantly inhibited by the consciousness of the unfunny side of life. The happy ending is there no more.

William Makepeace Thackeray(P136) 5

Thackeray's Point of view Thackeray was naturally a man of gracious

and lovable personality. Politically Thackeray was a radical,

advocating social reform and democracy. But what he found wrong with the social life was not the social institutions or the political system of the society.

From his personal experience and sharp observation of the society he came to conclude that the existing society was corrupted as well as corrupting and that it could never be any healthier if people valued wealth, comfort, and prestige more than kindness, diligence, humor and love. He took it as his duty to expose the vices of his age, especially those popular in the upper-middle class. And he regarded snobbery and the money-bribing with all possible means as the chief vice in his society.

Vanity Fair (p137)

Emily Bronte(p155)

Wuthering Heights(p156)

Main theme: It is a riddle that means different things to different people. From the social point of view, it is a story about a poor man abused, betrayed and distorted by his social betters because he is a poor nobody. As a love story, this is the most moving the passion between Heathcliff and Catherine proves the most intense, the most beautiful and at the same time the most horrible passion ever to be found possible in human beings.

Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre Social significance It is one of the most popular and important novels of the

Victorian Age. It is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society, that is, the religious hypocrisy of charity instinction such as Lowool School where poor children are trained through constant starvation and humiliation, to be humble slaves; the social discrimination Jane experiences first as a dependent at her aunt’s house and later as a governess at Thorn field, and the false social convention as concerning love and marriage. At the same time, it is an intense moral fable, Jane, like Mr. Rochester, has to undergo a series of physical and moral tests to grow up and achieve her final happiness.

Main theme of Charlotte’s works Her works are all about the struggle of an

individual consciousness towards self-realization, about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, understanding and a full, happy life. But brought up with strict orthodoxy, Charlotte would usually stick to the Puritanical code. She loves the beauty of nature but despises worldly ambition and success. In her mind, man’s life is composed of perpetual battle between sin and virtue, good and evil. All her heroines’ highest joy arises from some sacrifice of self or some human weakness overcome.

Thomas Hardy(p168)

His best novels include The return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of D’Urbervilles and Jude Obscure. In most of his novels, most of which are set in a fictional and crude rural region- Wessex, which is really the home place he both loves and hates.

Wessex became so famous that people usually called Hardy’s novels which were set in here and have a vivid description of the vicissitudes of people who live in an agricultural setting menaced by the force in invading capitalism, “Wessex novels”.

In Hardy’s works, his pessimistic philosophy seems to show that mankind is subjected to the rule of some hostile and mysterious fate, which brings misfortune to human life. The outside nature- the natural environment or Nature herself-is shown as some mysterious supernatural force, very powerful but half-blind, impulsive and uncaring to the individual’s will, hope, passion or suffering.

It likes to play practical jokes upon human beings by producing a series of mistimed actions and unfortunate coincidences. Man proves impotent before Fate, however he tries, and he seldom escapes his ordained destiny.

Tess of D’Urbervilles (p169)

Main theme and social significance It is one of the most popular works by

Hardy. It is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society and the capitalist invasion into the country and destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century. Tess, as a pure women brought up with the traditional idea of womanly virtues, is abused and destroyed by both Alec and Angel, agents of the destructive force of the society.

And the misery, the poverty and the heartfelt pain she suffers and her final tragedy give rise to a most bitter cry of protest and denunciation of the society. The whole story is filled with a feeling of dismal foreboding and doom. Fateful circumstances and tragic coincidences abound in the book. In a way Tess seems to be led to her final destruction step by step by Fate.

The Modern Period (6)

Influences of the two World Wars on British literature

The appalling shock of the First World War severely destroyed people’s faith in the Victorian values and people came to see the wretchedness in capitalism; and the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited writers to make new explorations on human nature and human relationships. Therefore, after the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: expressionism, surrealism, futurism, Dadaism and stream of consciousness.

Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America.

The Second World War marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire. After it, people were in economic, cultural and belief crises. Thus, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that “ the world was absurd and the human life was an agony.”

Characteristics of the British Modern literature

1. The dehumanization of art: the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself.

2. Concentrate more on private than on the public, more on subjective than on the objective: pay more attention the psychic time than the chronological one, so in their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.

3. Conscious rejection of established rules, traditions and conventions. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.

Lawrence(P207)

Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century.

The major characteristics of his novel is that he combined social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing.

He was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lays in the tracing of psychological development of his character and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. Lawrence made a bold psychological exploration of various human relations, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness.

George Bernard Show(p228) 7

Virginia Woolf(p263)

T. S. Eliot. (282)

American Literature(8)

Romantic Period in America Historical and social-cultural background

The development of the American society nurtured “the literature of a great nation.” The young Republic, devoid of a heavy burden of the inherited past and history, was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country. Historically, it was the time of west expansion. Economically, the whole nation was experiencing an industrial transformation, which affected the rural as well as the urban life.

Politically, democracy and equality became the ideal of the new nation. With the founding of the American Independent Government, the nation felt an urge to have its own literary expression, to make known its new experience that other nation did not have. Besides, the nation’s literary milieu was ready for the movement of romantic feeling was brought about in the first half of the 19th century.

Literary characteristicsRomanticism was spread to America in

the early nineteenth century. Its manifestations were varied yet romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption. Romanticism influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (p366)

Edgar Allan Poe (p374)

Artistic achievement Edgar Allan Poe is known as a poet and

critic but most famous as the first master of the short story form, especially tales of the mysterious and macabre. Whether or not Poe invented the short story, it is certain that he originated the novel of detection. Perhaps his best known tale in this genre is The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Many of Poe’s tales are distinguished by the author’s unique grotesque inventiveness in addition to his superb plot construction. Such stories include The Fall of the House of Usher, in which the penetrating gloominess of the atmosphere is accented equally with plot and characterization. Poe’s poems are remarkable for their flawless literary construction and for their haunting themes and meters as in the poems “ The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”

Annabel Lee (p375)

Transcendentalism　超验主义 In New England, an intellectual movement kno

wn as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. Ralph Waldo Emerson is the leader. Like Romanticism, Transcendentalism rejected both 18th – century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature.

Emily Dickinson (p387) 9 Emily Dickenson is America’s best-

known female poet. Her poetry covers the issues vital to humanity, which include religion, death, immortality, love and nature. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry, there is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis.

Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form: She used imperfect rhymes, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating word puzzles, which have

produced greatly divergent interpretations over the years. Due to her deliberate seclusion, her poems tend to be very personal and meditative. She frequently personification to vivify some abstract ideas. Dickinson’s poetry, despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness; and her limited private world have never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination.

The Realistic Period(9)

Historical and socio-cultural background The period ranging from 1865 to 1941 is

the Age of Realism in the literary history of the US.

The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and development of realism. The fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World War is one of the period in the American history characterized with changes, in relation to every aspects of American life, politically, economically, culturally, and religiously.

The Civil War affected both the social and value system of the country. American had transformed itself from a Jeffersonian agrarian community into an industrialized and commercialized society.

Polarization of the well-being between the poor and the rich started to show up. People became dubious about the human nature and the benevolence of God, which the Transcendentalists cared most. A new generation of writers came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life.

Literary characteristics Guided by the principle of adhering to the

truthful treatment of life, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. In their works, instead of writing about the polite, well-dressed, grammatically correct middle-class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times, they introduced people from all walks of life. They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the Post-Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, class stratification and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man’s sub-consciousness.

Mark Twain(P394)

An American writer and humorist. Twain’s work was inspired by the unconventional West, and the popularity of his work marked the end of the domination of American Literature by New England writers. His adherence to American themes, settings, and language set him apart from many other novelists of his time.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(p395) It is considered a masterpiece of Mark

Twain. The book is the story of the title character, known as Huck, a boy who flees his father by rafting down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. The climax arises with Huck’s inner struggle in the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape.

With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows, Huckleberry Finn ,which is almost entirely narrated from Huck’s point of view, is noted for its authentic language and for its deep commitment to freedom. Huck’s adventures also provide the reader with a panorama of American life along the Mississippi before the Civil War. The readers are impressed by Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

Naturalism 10 It refers to the theory that literary

composition should aim at a detached, scientific objectivity in the treatment of natural man. The movement is an outgrowth of 19th-century scientific thought, following in general the biological determinism of Darwin’s theory, or the economic determinism of Karl Marx. Artistically, naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language, lacking in academic skills and unwieldy in structure.

Philosophically, the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden from the eyes of the individual, or beyond his control. Notable writers of naturalistic fiction were Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser.

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie(p415)

It is one of Dreiser’s masterpieces. The novel tells the story of a small-town girl who moves to Chicago and eventually becomes a Broad-way star in New York City. It also traces the decline and eventual suicide of her lover. The novel best embodies Dreiser’s naturalistic belief that while man are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate and instead, strive unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose in their existence.

Some critics regarded Dreiser’s style as clumsy and plodding, lack of concision. Though the time sequence is clear and the plot straightforward, he has been always accused of being awkward in sentence structure, mixed and disorganized in voice and tone. His style is not polished but very serious and well calculated to achieve the thematic ends he sought. For him, language is a means of communication rather than art form. He broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way. There is no comment, no judgment but facts of life in the stories.

Jack London(P443)

Jack London is an American writer, whose work combined powerful realism and humanitarian sentiment. London was most convincing in his depiction of individualistic struggle and primitive violence. London’s style is brutal, vivid, and exciting. His major works include The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden etc.

The Modern Period The Lost Generation The Lost Generation refers to the disillusioned

intellectuals and artists of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein, “ You are all a lost generation,” addressed to Hemingway, was used as a Preface to the latter’s novel The Sun Also Rises, which brilliantly describes those expatriates who had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing.

Hemingway(p493) 11

Stylistic features of Hemingway’s novels

Hemingway’s novels are mainly concerned with tough people, known for the Hemingway hero of athletic prowess and masculinity and unyielding heroism, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society.

He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as “ grace under pressure,” which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works.

In the general situation of his novels, life is but a losing battle; however, it is also a struggle man can demonstrate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.

Hemingway once said, “ The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” typical of this “ iceberg” analogy is Hemingway’s style: Hemingway’s economical writing style often seems simple, but his method is calculated. In his writing, Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely.

By doing so he avoided describing his characters’ emotions and thoughts directly. Hemingway was deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. Besides, Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are well presented, and the use of short, simple words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.

A Farewell to Arms (p494)

Stream of Consciousness

It is a term coined by William James in his The Principles of Psychology to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind. Now it is widely used in a literary context to describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the characters, without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue.

It was adapted and developed by Joyce, V. Woolf, and others. The ability to represent the flux of a character’s thought, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the form of novel at that time.

William Faulkner(p525) William Faulkner is an American novelist

known for his epic portrayal of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Faulkner’s complex plots and narrative style alienated many readers of his early works, but he was recognized later as one of the greatest American writers. His major works include Go Down Moses, a collection of Yoknapatawpha County stories, and The Sound and Fury, his acclaimed masterpiece.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949. Faulkner especially was interested in multigenerational family chronicles, and many characters appear in more than one book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County saga a sense of continuity that makes the area and its inhabitants seem real.

A Rose for Emily

It is Faulkner’s first short story published in 1930. set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha, the story focuses on Emily, an eccentric spinster who refused to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy,

Emily is typical of those in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories that are the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past. The deformed personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates Faulkner’s point of view that by alienating oneself from reality, a person is bound to be a tragedy. Emily is regarded as the symbol of tradition and the old way of life. Thus her death parallel with the decline of the Old South.

The Beat Generation It is a group of American writers of the

1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. They rejected traditional forms and sought expression in the beatific illumination. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers.

The Beat Generation’s best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack Kerouac.

Allen Ginsberg (p569) +Review (12)