American Literature

The Renaissance (1500-1660) = rebirth

Background:
- roots in Italy, later on in the rest of Western Europe
- rediscover the qualities of the classical work from Greek and Roman writers, sculptors and architects (were dismissed in Middle Aged)
- church lose position, classical ideas gained influence
- humanism: school of thought of this period, inspired by classical philosophers as Plato and Socrates

Characteristics:
- importance of the individual

- man as the centre of interest, not God
- importance of independent thinking
- importance op beauty for its own sake
- THIS world is the centre of interset (‘carpe diem’ = pluk de dag)
- classical world as a source of inspiration

Poetry:
- growing importance of the individual and personal feeling resulted in a great deal of poetry
- new and extremely popular form of poetry was sonnet
- a sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, there are two main forms:
- Italian sonnet: two quatrains (four lines) and two tercets (three lines), after the second quatrain there is usually a turning point (‘volta’ / ‘chute’);
- English sonnet: three quatrains and a couplet (two lines), the couplet usually contains a conclusion.
- Petrarch’s poems, about an unreachable beloved, started a tradition: Petrarchism, with platonic love, pure and spiritual
- a simile is a comparison beginning with the words ‘like’ or ‘as’; a metaphor is a direct comparison, without the words ‘like’ or ‘as’

- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) introduced the sonnet in England by his translations of the sonnets of Petrarch; he had an affair with the King’s second wife, Anne Boleyn
- Edmund Spencer (1552-1599) his best-known work is ‘The Faerie Queene, about praising England and its Queen Elizabeth I; another writing is ‘Amoretti’ (a sonnet sequence); he spend his life in Ireland as government official
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in Stratford-on-Avon, by 1590 he was in London as an actor and a playwrith; mid-1590s he wrote poems, among them 154 sonnets adressed to a beautiful young nobleman or to a Dark Lady.

Prose:
- the English prose fallse into three categories:
- polemic prose: centres on theological and political disputes;
- artistic prose: to delight and entertain an often aristocratic audience;
- translations: both of classic and comtemporary authors such as Macchiavelli and Montaigne; very special: ‘Authorized Version’ = translation of the Bible by James I.
- the setting of a story is a combination of the time when and the place where a story takes place; it gives you background about te characters and a general impression of the surroundings, the period and the social class
- the vision of literature is the reason writers hve for writing; example, some want to entertain their readers

- Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) is the son of a famous London lawyer and friends with Erasmus (humanist/Christian); his best-known story is Utopia (Greek for ‘no place’) with the main character Hythlodae (Greek for ‘someona who talks nonsense’)
- Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586) his best-known works are ‘The Arcadia’ and ‘Defence of Poetry’ (both prose); he also wrote poetry (‘Astrophel and Stella’); he was the perfect Renaissance courtier and was governor of Flushing
- Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) his best-known works are ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’ and ‘Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem’; his savage outspokeness of his writing led to trouble with the autorities

Drama:
- plays were very popular on a level with pastimes like watching a bear fight
- not religious plays of the Middle Ages performed by amateurs, but tragedies and comedies performed by professional actors
- first in a yard of an inn, from the 1570s in a playhouse
- Globe Theatre was typical of Elizabethan playhouses, build in the shape of an O, actors could be seen of three sides, partly roofed, no artifical lighting (so only play by daylight, in summer)
- hardly any props were used
- women’s parts were played by boys
- tragedy is a type of drama, that is serious and sad and often ends wothe the death of the main character; in modern tragedies he will be destroyed spiritually in the end; the main character is a good person in heart, but has a very human and understandable weakness (jealousy)
- in 1590 Shakespeare was a member of an acting company, to avoid being arrested for vagrancy; in 1599 he became part-owner of Globe Theatre; in 1610 he seems to have retired from the theatrical world

- Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) his best-known plays are ‘The tragical History of Doctor Faustus’ and ‘The jew of Malta’; he lived a wild and violent life

The early Romantic period (1740-1798)

Background:
- the eigtheenth century started with Enlightenment; free people by having them rely on the intelect, no longer held back by emotions
- in the 1740s emotions and spontaneous feeling began to be more important than intellect

Characteristics:
- importance of spontaneous emotions
- interest in nature
- interest in gloomy places (ruins, graveyards)
- interest in simple life in the country
- interest in distant civilizations (medieval, Greek, Oriental)
- interest in folk literature

Poetry:
- the ideas behind the early Romantic poetry were a reaction against the principles of the Neo-Classicism of the begin of the eighteenth century
- Neo-Classical poets based on theories of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the ideas of the Latin poet Horace; they rejected orginality and in their works they combined pleasure and instruction
- early Romantic poets believed in individualism, imagination and emotion

- the characteristics of the early Romantic period are basically those of the Romantic period
- Robert Blair (1699-1746) wrote ‘The Grave’ while he was working as a clergyman in Scotland, just like his father
- ‘The Grave’ belongs to the graveyard poetry, fashionable in the 1740s and 1750s; these are melancholy, reflective works, often set in graveyards, on the theme of human mortality
- William Blake (1757-1827) his best-known works are ‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of experience’; he was a rebel whose writing was not popular during his lifetime

Prose:
- middle class became more and more important and they began to form a large and eager reading public
- in the first half of the eighteenth century they favoured books that would teach them something, particulary about manners and morals
- in the second half of the eighteenth century people came to prefer books that made them shiver and marvel to books that made them think
- an epistolary novel is a story written in the form of an exchange of letters between two or more persons (first half of eighteenth century)
- a gothic novel is a story of the macabre, fantastic and supernatural, usually set amid haunted castles, graveyards, ruins and wild picturesque landscapes (second half of eighteenth century)

- the narrator of a story is the one who is telling the story, he is the perspective or point of view; there are three types:
- the all-knowing narrator knows everything about the characters, not only the past and the present, but also the future
- the I-narrator plays a part in the story as one of the characters, this perspective is subjective, everything described is in the way the I-narrator sees it
- the third-person narrator is one of the characters in a he/she story, the reader is not aware that there is a narrator; it is also subjective
- Samual Richardson (1689-1762) received little education and a series of letters to collegeaus about the problems of everyday life turned into his first and best-known novel ‘Pamela’ (1740); other novels are ‘Clarissa’ and ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ (all epistolary novels)
- Mrs Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) published in twelve years five succesful novels, including ‘The Romance of the Forest’ and ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (both gothic novels); she led a retired life

Drama:
- in the second half of the seventeenth (!) century the theatre were re-opened and a new tradition began:
- the theatres now had covered seating and the distance was greater than in the Renaissanse;
- the introduction of women-players;
- the audience (the Restoration) was much more ‘upper-class’ and they wanted verbal cleverness, humour and sex.
- as a reaction to these immoral plays Steele introduced the sentimental comedy, the main characters combine the highest morality with an overdose of sentiment
- as a reaction to ‘the hypocrisy of this sentimental drama’, the few dramatist of the early Romantic period revived the Restoration-type comedy, with all the cleverness but without the occasional coarseness

- their are two different kinds of irony:
- verbal irony: what is said is the opposite of what is meant;
- dramatic irony: when the reader knows important information that one or more characters don’t know.
- stage directions are the written instructions for the players and the people responsible for the sound, light and the props in a play
- Richard Sheridan (1751-1816) was the son of an actor-manager and when he was married he tried to playwrite to earn some money; its plays were succesfull and he became manager of a London theatre; later he became a member of Parliament; he wrote ‘The school for Scandal’

War and Rumours of War (1914-1940) - British literature

Background:
- World War I put an end on Britain as the most powerful nation of the world
- young men from upper class volunteered for the army out of idealism and patriotism, ended up in a war that dragged on for four years of senseless slaughter
- after the war a better world was promised but didn’t came, English industry had not adapted to new developments and there were no jobs
- there was a great deal of dissatisfaction, among working class
- Wall Street crash of 1929 also affected Britain badly, bringing the numbers of unemployment to one-fifth of the total working population

- the rise of fascism and national socialism in the 1930s contributed to an atmosphere of uncertainty and threat

Characteristics:
a decreasing belief in:
- reason as the guiding principle (due to discoveries in the field of psychology by Freud and others)
- progress as a means to improve the quality of life
- absolute values, such as respectability and decency

Poetry:
- soldiers of World War I began to write poems to communicate their experience to the people back home
- there are three stages with regard to its attitude to war:
- first the writers saw the war as something heroic and glorious (poems of Rupert Brooke);
- then, after the horros of the battles in France, the writers came to see the war as a senseless waste of human life, the stage of pity, wrote to open the eyes of the people in Britain who had no idea;
- the final stage was one of protest and sarcasm (poems of Wilfred Owen).

- if two words rhyme they have a very similar sound; poems and songs often rhyme, that is the lines end in words that sounds like each other
- the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables is called metre
- Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) his famous ‘The Soldier’ was published with four other war sonnets; during world war I he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve
- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) only four of his poems were published during his lifetime; he joined the army in 1915 and stationed at the Somme during the worst winter of the war

Prose:
- in 1911 nearly 80 per cent of the English population lived in the city; with some writer this led to an idealization of the vanishing country life
- the period between the wars was characterized by labour disputes and class struggle, there came Trade Unions and this resulted in the General Strike in 1926, started by miners; after nine days people returned to work with longer hours and lower wages
- some writers turned their attention to the fate of the social working class, they felt that literature should be socially engaged, not a means to escape an unpleasant reality
- a symbol is an image that means not only what it is, but something else as well, and perhaps many things, part of the meaning of a symbol is emotional and subconscious

- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was born in Eastwood, a small mining village and suffered ill health all his life; he wrote poems and his first novel ‘The white peacock’ was published in 1911; during world war I he lived in Cornwall, but he was expelled for spying for the German; autobiographical novels: ‘Sons and lovers’, ‘The rainbow’, ‘Women in Love’ and ‘Lady Chatterley’s lover’
- George Orwell (1903-1950) pseudonym of Eric Blair, born in a middle-class family in colonial India; he had a growing dislike of imperialism and write against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism; most popular works are ‘Animal farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, pessimistic satires about threat of political tyranny

Drama:
- the leading British playwrights used the stage to advertise their political convictions and attack social conditions
- they were following the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen in bringing the discussion of current problems ito drama
- it were realistic plays in which they satirised conventional notions such as patriotism, religion and hero-worship
- other dramatics were influence by expressionism, started by German painters
- expressionism was characterised by the use of non-realistic effects such as symbolism, song, poetry and soliloquy
- a soliloquy is a speech in which an actor addresses himself and the audience rather than another actor
- Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) was born in the slums of Dublin; his enthusiasm for the theatre led him to write plays, which he offered the Abbey Theatre in Dublin for production; ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ and ‘Juno and the Paycock’ staged there, but ‘The Plough and the star’ was supposed anti-Irishness; his next play ‘The silver Tassie’ was a tragi-comedy with a expressionistic second act

War and Rumours of War (1914-1940) - American literature

Background:

- in 1917 America declared war on Germany and helped to stop the war; this succes helped the USA to replace Britain as a world power
- the 1920s were a period of great material prosperity in the USA, people wanted to have a good time and enjoyed the new products
- the frivolity of the roaring twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, which led to the Great Depression of the 30s, at the peak one-third of all Americans were jobless
- blacks were hit particularly hard by unemployment ánd racism
- the government tried to create jobs by the New Deal, but the unemployment solved by the outbreak of World War II
- the overall atmosphere was also one of uncertainly and threat

Characteristics:
a decreasing belief in:
- reason as the guiding principle (due to discoveries in the field of psychology by Freud and others)
- progress as a means to improve the quality of life
- absolute values, such as respectability and decency

Poetry:
- the American poetry was experimental, poets rebelled against the traditions of form and content
- after world war I black writers appeared on the American literary scene
- the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ produced writers who used elements from the African heritage of the American blacks

- a stanza is a group of lines in a poem
- free verse is poetry that not bound by any of the rules of traditional poetry such as length of lines, rhyme, etc.
- T.S. Elliot (1888-1965) left America to continue his studies in Paris and Oxford; encouraged by the American poet Ezra Pound, he published his first collection of poetry in 1917 (‘Prufrock and other observations’); in 1927 he became British citizen and his ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ (humurous verses for children) was later to become the basis of the musical ‘Cats’. He also wrote plays (‘Murder in the Cathedral’, ‘The Cocktail Party’) and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948
- Langston Hughes (1902-1967) a black American who became a prominet member of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’; his first collection of poetry (‘The weary blues’) was published in 1926 and his first novel (‘Not without Laughter’) in 1930; he also involved in radical politics and in his short stories of that period he satires racial prejudice (‘The ways of White Folks’); he wrote one play, ‘The Mulatto’

Prose:
- American fiction in the 1920s and 1930s was concerned with facing reality; young American of this period were ‘the lost generation’, they had lost traditional values and a sense of identity; much works featured this
- after the Wall Street Crash writers wrote novels and short stories about the poor and the unemployed, taking their side
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) became in 1913 an officer in the US army, but saw no action and spent his time writing his first novel, ‘This side of Paradise’, published in 1920; its succes gave him a luxerious life; his best-known novel was ‘The great gatsby’; in the 1930s he suffered a mental and physical collaps by hard-living lifestyle and alcoholism
- Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) is volunteered for service in World War I and started out as an ambulance driver in the Italian Army, soon he transferred to active service on the front; after the war he became a journalist; his novel ‘The sun also rises’ is about the lost generation of young disillusioned expatriates; his next novel ‘A farewell to Arms’ is base on his own war-experiences in Italy and ‘For whom the bell tolls’ is about the Spanish Civil war, which he witnessed as a war reporter; in 1954 he received the Nobel Prize for literature


Drama:
- American authors in the 1920s and 1930s experimented in various ways, wanting to avoid the rules associated with traditional drama
- the new plays were not only characterized by this experimentation, but also by their social and political concern
- Clifford Odets (1906-1963) wrote in 1935 ‘Waiting for Lefty’ as an entry for a contest for modern one-act plays and won; he resigned the Communist Party, because he couldn’t wrote in line with a party programme; he wrote the full-lenght play ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Golden Boy’, the most commercially succesfull play